Robyn Doreian
Maria Alyokhina is best known for being a founding member of the activist punk band Pussy Riot. Here, the 38-year-old talks about meeting her father as an adult, her 19-year-old son, and how she once found herself dating a “dangerous enemy”.
I met my father, Vladimir, a university professor, for the first time when I was 21. We met on the outskirts of Moscow, where we sat and drank tea. He told me about his life and apologised for leaving my mum, Natalia, before I was born. He asked for my forgiveness.
He supported me when I was in the penal colony [Alyokhina was sentenced to two years in 2012 for staging a protest against the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for Vladimir Putin]. When I phoned and told him I was in solitary confinement and on a hunger strike, he told me to keep going, that he was with me and I was not alone.
My father died last year. He had Parkinson’s disease. During my third criminal case, in 2025, the riot police searched his apartment at 6am. They did this to a man who could no longer walk after several back operations. He died two months later. The last time my father and I spoke he said he was super proud of me.
I was a pain-in-the-arse teenager. I changed schools six times. My school was connected to Moscow State University and students there wanted to become oil explorers or lawyers. I didn’t want that – I wanted to be alive in my life – so I went hitchhiking to the south of Russia and lived in the forest for a summer. Two years later, I studied literature and creative writing.
We were not in a romantic relationship for long, but he didn’t run away when he knew I was pregnant at 18.
My first job was handing out leaflets for a video rental store. The store gave me access to its VHS archive, which was amazing. I met street musicians in the centre of Moscow, which is how I met Nikita Demidov. We were not in a romantic relationship for long, but he didn’t run away when he knew I was pregnant at 18 with my son Filipp, who is 19 now. Along with my mother, Nikita cared for Filipp while I was in prison. We are still in contact. My father also helped a lot with his grandson.
When a friend suggested I meet Dmitry Enteo, an ultra-right-wing Orthodox activist, I thought she was crazy. I thought he was a dangerous enemy who would record me and sell me out. But when we met he left everything, including his phone, in his apartment when he ran out to get a second bottle of wine.
During our relationship he served time in a detention centre for his actions supporting Russian political prisoners. He was definitely not the most easy person, but neither am I. I have a loud voice and cannot shut up. It’s just the situation I am in. I am a fighter.
I met [the late Russian opposition leader] Alexei Navalny many times. Two weeks after Pussy Riot’s 2012 Punk Prayer performance at a Moscow cathedral, [my bandmate] Nadya Tolokonnikova and I were arrested. Alexei and [politician] Boris Nemtsov stood outside the detention centre and called for our freedom.
Alexei wrote to me in prison. He was brave and optimistic. That came from his mother, Lyudmila, because when he was killed [in prison] in 2024, she flew to the Arctic Circle and refused to leave without his body.
Men become dictators because of their obsession with control. For them, it is not enough that they have control in their homes, they need more. Irrespective of their skin colour, religion or territory, it starts with the oppression of women. These men don’t like women to have loud, independent voices.
I moved my son out of Russia in 2022 and, like me, Iceland granted him citizenship. If Filipp were in Russia, at 18 he would have received a letter to go to the army recruiting point, where he would have been turned into a soldier and sent to Ukraine to possibly die.
I was in a relationship with [fellow Pussy Riot activist] Lucy Shtein, but I am not now. My “type” is probably unhinged, kind of gloriously crazy. Gender and nationality mean nothing to me. I fall for people who refuse to fit the mould – maybe because I never really did, either.
Maria Alyokhina will appear at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas, August 22-23.
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