Do we like Nadya Tolokonnikova?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Years of risking prison for her protest, a clear record of backing others, and nothing harmful of her own found; only the Ukraine fundraising mess keeps it off a 10.
Tolokonnikova co-founded Pussy Riot, the feminist punk collective. She and Maria Alyokhina were jailed for nearly two years after the 2012 Punk Prayer performance in a Moscow cathedral. That performance targeted the church and the Kremlin, and she has been at odds with Putin's government ever since.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine she has lived outside Russia, and Russia has kept escalating against her. A Moscow court ordered her arrest in absentia in 2023 on a charge of insulting believers' religious feelings. In April this year she was indicted under the foreign agent law, which carries up to two years, and added to the federal wanted list. A Russian court also ruled Pussy Riot an extremist organisation last December. She says the ruling is meant to erase the group from Russians' minds.
On the harm check she comes up clean on what we found. Her work and fundraising go to Ukraine, Russian political prisoners and women and non-binary artists through UnicornDAO. We found no slide into conspiracy theories and no attacks on any group. One caveat: most of what turned up on LGBTQ+ and trans issues was event bios and profiles, not her own recent statements, so that part of the record is thinner than we would like.
Her recent move was Venice. About 50 activists from Pussy Riot and FEMEN swarmed the Russian pavilion in pink balaclavas and coloured smoke, blocking it for at least half an hour while police kept them out. She told the AP the Biennale had “opened the door” to Russian soft power. Her answer was to show only art by jailed dissidents. Where you land on that depends on whether you see a stunt or a stand, but nobody was hurt and it was loud.
The good stuff is long and mostly costly to her. She shared the 2014 Hannah Arendt Prize for informing the public about Russia's penal camps and organising solidarity for prisoners. After the invasion she helped launch UkraineDAO, which raised almost US$7 million in crypto in under a week for Ukrainian aid. She says plainly that she wants Ukraine to win, and she has pushed fellow exiles to say so too.
The honest smudge is the crypto side. UkraineDAO was a loose, fast-built group, and some of the outside reporting on how it ran was critical. We could not pin a date or a clear finding on that reporting, so we are not hanging anything on it. Nothing we read shows her taking money for herself, and she is on record as using the project to raise money for Ukraine.