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 Filmed in Sochi, where the February 7-23 Winter Games are being
held, the video shows five group members being beaten by Cossacks
with a whip as they try to perform a song beside a wall covered in
the Sochi Games logos.
Cossacks, once the patrolmen of the Russian borderlands, are being
used to reinforce security around the Olympic Games.
Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who spent nearly two
years in prison for protesting against Putin in a church, performed
in the video released on Thursday, titled "Putin will teach you how
to love the motherland."
"Sochi is blocked — Olympic surveillance / Special forces, weapons,
crowds of cops," read the song's lyrics.
One verse refers to Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina's release from
prison on December 23 under an amnesty they say was aimed at
improving Russia's image before the Games.
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina said they had been detained three times
while trying to film the video since they arrived in Sochi on
Sunday.
"The Olympics have turned ... an authoritarian regime into a
totalitarian regime with preventative arrests," Tolokonnikova said
at a news conference that had to be held on the street in the town
of Adler, near Sochi, after the group could not find a venue that
would host it.
"The Olympics creates a space for the complete destruction of human
rights in Russia. Here we are banned from speaking out. Here
everyone's rights are banned, including political activist, LGBT
representatives, ecologists," she said.
The Kremlin denies cracking down on opponents and dismisses
suggestions it uses the courts for political purposes.
A group of men tried to disrupt the news conference, one of them
dressed as a giant chicken and the others holding aloft raw poultry — recalling a performance by radical art group Voina, which
Tolokonnikova was once a member of.
Singer Madonna, one of many international performers who have spoken
out in support of Pussy Riot, expressed her admiration for the
group.
"Are you kidding me? Are the police in Russia actually whipping
Pussy Riot for making music on the streets? Is this the dark ages?
GOD bless P.R. They are fearless!" she wrote on Twitter. OLYMPICS
"NOT A POLITICAL PLATFORM"
Pussy Riot members usually keep their identity a secret but
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are now well known and did not hide
their faces on Thursday. Two other group members dressed in Pussy
Riot's trademark gear kept their masks on.
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The two were founding members of the protest art group formed in
2011 that staged a series of unsanctioned performances, including on
the edge of Red Square, using shock tactics to draw attention to
political issues.
They were arrested along with another member, Yekaterina
Samutsevich, after Pussy Riot performed a profanity-laced "protest
prayer" against Putin's ties to the Orthodox Church in Moscow's main
cathedral two years ago.
They were handed two-year jail terms for hooliganism motivated by
religious hatred, a sentence criticized by Western governments as
disproportionate.
Samutsevich was freed in 2012 when a judge suspended her sentence on
appeal.
Pussy Riot said one of the main aims in the video was to draw
attention to the trial of Russians charged with organizing violent
mass disorder, following protests on the eve of Putin's inauguration
for a third term as president in May 2012.
The protesters, who are on trial and are due to be sentenced in
Moscow on Friday, could face up to 10 years in prison.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said it was concerned
about the Games being used for political purposes.
"Like many people, I found the (Pussy Riot) video very unsettling,"
IOC spokesman Mark Adams said in Sochi.
"It's a shame the Olympics are used as a political platform. We ask
that the Olympics are not used as a platform to express political
views, and we continue to say that."
(Additional reporting by Karolos Grohmann and Mike Collett-White;
writing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Mike Collett-White; editing by
Timothy Heritage and Sonya Hepinstall)
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