Maria Aljochina’s (Pussy Riot) shoes have become a symbol of her fight against Putin

Maria Aljochina’s shoes, with disposable towels instead of laces, which were banned in prison.Image The New York Times Syndication / ANP

She turned up on Tuesday in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. Maria Alyochina, 33, is a prominent member of the notorious Russian anti-Putin punk band Pussy Riot. She recently escaped house arrest in a spectacular and, given her disguise, contemporary way. And so she avoided detention in a penal colony. Dressing up as a meal delivery boy, an insulated backpack on her shoulders, a hood of the company uniform on, she managed to sneak out of her boyfriend’s Moscow home. She left her smartphone behind to prevent authorities from tracing her. A friend drove her, she told in a interview in The New York Timesto Belarus, from where she managed to escape to Vilnius.

Ten years after the Big Bang that saw Pussy Riot see the light of day, the most famous face of the feminist band has now also left. The female band that did not excel because of its musical qualities, but nevertheless gained fame in 2012 with a blasphemous concert the length of a short prayer (“Holy Mother Mary, send Putin away!”) in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow.

The band danced the pogo in front of the altar, desecrating the Russian Mother Church and Putin himself. The musicians were taken to court for their “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” as the charges went. Aljochina was sentenced to two years in prison, but released after nine months. That amnesty did not make her yield to Putin’s tyranny. In the years that followed, she protested against him in Sochi (during the 2014 Olympics) and, despite increasing repression, at numerous civil rights demonstrations across Russia.

View the hundreds of photos with Aljochina and her fellow activists and you will notice how good-humored she usually confronted the authorities. Laughing at arrests, with an open mind in the glass cage or behind bars where she underwent her trial. Nonviolent and disarming, at most masked with a balaclava that was so loose that she was immediately recognisable. Not afraid of the devil, in all those ten years. A pebble in Putin’s boot.

Now the oppression Aljochina has apparently become too much. In mid-March, the president held a by Bert Lanting de Volkskrant speech, which he called ‘horrifying’, in which he proclaimed that the people can very well distinguish between patriots and rabble and traitors: ‘They spit them out like a fly that they got in their mouth.’ The “rabble” he undoubtedly counted as Alyochina got the message. After she had been sentenced six times to 15 days in prison for her activism since last summer, authorities announced her incarceration in a penal colony. Time to go.

Aljochina’s apparent relaxation seems to have disappeared, as witnessed by the NYTreporter that she has gnawed her nails and is sucking on a vaporizer or smoking cigarettes almost continuously. But her activism has not been affected in any way, as can be seen from the soldierly footwear with which she confronts the dictatorship. The robust black platform shoes are not only a style tool that betrays her punky roots, they are also a symbol of the struggle she is now waging outside of Russia.

The shoes have been provisionally buttoned with disposable towels that were apparently stocked in the prison, and which the inmates use as an alternative to the laces banned in the cell. Alyochina already wore the shoes referring to her imprisonment at the National Theater in the Icelandic capital Reykjavik and during a demonstration at the Russian consulate in that city. Also during the Pussy Riot concert tour – other band members fled their country before – those shoes will also belong to her outfit, she said. The New York Times

Wipes for the bleeding, for all those lost months in prison, those fluttering laces? We can also regard them as a poetic culmination of Aljochina’s stubbornness. Nancy Sinatra once sang: These boots are made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do. One of these days these boots are going to walk all over you.

Putin has been warned. As an elusive opponent in Russia, or as an exile in Lithuania: Alyochina continues on.

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