Pussy Riot Group Severs Ties With Freed Activists

Two Russian women who served jail time for performing an anti-Kremlin song in a Moscow cathedral are “on the other side of the barricades” from their ex-group Pussy Riot, the feminist punk collective said. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova have abandoned radical feminist art actionism to campaign for prisoners’ rights, the group said in an online statement, available in English and Russian. “They completely forgot about the aspirations and ideals of our group – feminism, separatist resistance, fight against authoritarianism and personality cult,” the group said on Thursday. Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova’s change of career has produced “two brave, interesting, controversial human rights defenders,” the statement said. But “they are no longer Pussy Riot,” which is an anonymous, feminist, leftist radical art collective, the group said.

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20140207/187295497/Pussy-Riot-Group-Severs-Ties-With-Freed-Activists.html