Pussy Riot Not Done Protesting, Getting Arrested

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 repeately 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: