oh russia

Pussy Riot Not Done Protesting, Getting Arrested

Again.

The Olympics may be over, but it’s still Russia. In what has now become a dispiritingly common image, Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda “Nadya” Tolokonnikova and Maria “Masha” Alyokhina were once again violently detained at a demonstration on Monday. This time, they were part of a large group protesting outside a Moscow court where a group of protesters from a 2012 demonstration were being sentenced. And the cycle continues.

The two most visible members of the punk protest collective, Nadya and Masha have spent most of the time since their pre-Olympic amnesty making more trouble for Vladimir Putin and Co. Last week in Sochi, they were whipped by Cossacks in front of cameras — for the whole world to see — after being repeatedly detained for days in a row. As David Remnick writes in this week’s New Yorker, their presence at the Games was greatly anticipated:

Finally, in the second week of compe­tition, women from Pussy Riot showed up in town to scrape at the Potemkin vil­lage’s wet paint and plaster. About twenty miles from the Olympic Park, they came out onto the street in their fluorescent balaclavas and tried to per­ form a song called “Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland.” Cossacks, once known in Russia for their taste for pogroms and now empowered as law en­forcement, put a rough stop to the per­formance. They set upon the women with horsewhips. In a pure expression of Putinism, a Cossack smashed Pussy Riot’s guitar.

But even now that the rest of the world has gone home, fighting for human rights remains a full-time job and the women from Pussy Riot are still at it. Even before detailed information about this particular run-in becomes available, images are circulating on social media and they are not pretty:

Pussy Riot Not Done Protesting, Getting Arrested