Pussy Riot Activists Sentenced to Two Years in Prison for Singing Stupid Song in Church [Pussy Riot]

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina, three members of the punk activist collective Pussy Riot, were sentenced to two years in prison on charges of hooliganism today. The women had staged a brief performance of an anti-Putin “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral; their subsequent arrest and drawn-out imprisonment (which saw the women, two of whom are mothers of young children, locked up awaiting trial for some seven months and denied adequate food or rest) seemed to represent an attempt by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s autocratic ruling party to ally itself with the once-banned Russian Orthodox Church — which had itself been a locus of resistance under the old Soviet regime. More »