By the time you read these lines, the Pussy Riot saga will have seen its happy ending: the members of the art collective that has become the face of Russian protest since they were arrested for performing a ‘punk prayer’ in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral (an act of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” in the words of the prosecution) had their sentences commuted by president Putin as part of a PR spin before the Sochi Olympics. Perhaps the time has come to make better sense of Pussy Riot’s role in the recent dynamics of other ‘shock tactics’ protests from the region - from Femen to Pavlensky. And what better way to do that than through a rare insider’s look into Pussy Riot’s beginnings, as captured by the Russian film collective ‘Gogol’s Wives!’

While the West easily adopted the group as honorary girl rioters ready to fuel pre-existing feminist narratives, many of their co-nationals misunderstood their protest song about the repressive alliance between president Putin and the Orthodox Church, and vascillated between blaming the girls and standing up for them. The group often called the public’s attention to their place in a tradition of Russian artistic dissent – something that has remained largely unaccounted for, as have the dramatic parallels constantly made between the Soviet era and the Putin regime. Says Masha Alyokhina: “Even though it hasn’t been very long, our people are acting today as if there was never any Great Terror nor any attempts to resist it. We are being accused by people without memory.”