It says Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the Pussy Riot band: "You can't play nice with Putin." He is crazy. He might fire at his own people.
Nadya Tolokonnikova is in an unknown location, talking to me on Zoom in a Pussy Riot T-shirt. She looks purposeful, driven, and single-minded. Her feminist protest art has been dead serious from the start, when she started Pussy Riot in 2011 and started making it. Punk Prayer: Mother, God, Drive Putin Away: Punk Prayer: Mother, God, Drive Putin Away: Punk Prayer: Mother, God, Drive Putin Away was the song she sang in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior that led to her being charged.
But the consequences have always been big and bad. She and two other members of the Pussy Riot band were sentenced to two years in prison for hooliganism in 2012. They were separated from their very young children, went on a hunger strike, and were named prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International.
When she talks, Tolokonnikova says she is "naturally" a traveler. The world I live on is my home. As a child, I was always an anarchist, and I've always been one. In general, I don't like borders or country states very much." But beneath those abstracts, there are real risks. He called her a "foreign agent" in December, as did the independent news outlet she started after being released from prison.
"Putin just signed a law that says you can go to prison for 15 years if you even talk about the war in Ukraine." In this case, you can't even call it a war. You have to call it a special military operation. People who are known as Russian dissidents now face more risk than they have in years. Tolokonnikova, who was born in 1989 and didn't know about Perestroika, knows this better than anyone.
Yet, her main goal is not to protect herself. The Ukraine DAO was created when Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24. She and other people from the world of cryptocurrency worked together to make the Ukraine DAO happen (decentralised autonomous organisation). When the group asked people to bid for collective ownership of the image, they raised $7.1 million in just five days. It was a 1/1 non-fungible token (NFT) of the Ukrainian flag.
"I and my crypto friends felt that we had to act in some way." Activism is the only thing that can keep you sane when things get bad. Seeing disasters and tragedies and not doing anything about them is bad for the world, but it also slowly kills you and makes you feel helpless. To Come Back Alive, which has helped the Ukrainian army since 2014 with medical care, ammunition, training, and defense analysis. The money has already been given to Come Back Alive.
A woman named Tolokonnikova is heartbroken because of the attack on Ukraine. "I'm in a panic, and I cry every day." There was no reason to do this, and it wasn't logical in any way at all. It wasn't something that had to happen. It's a disaster that will end the lives of a lot of people. In other words, I'm in shock. Yet, she didn't have the luxury of not being afraid of what Putin could do. There were two main reasons why the world was very relaxed: hypocrisy, and greed. People would say that they didn't like Putin's politics, how he abused the political opposition, and how he started a lot of wars. This isn't the first war by any means. Even though they'd keep doing business with him, at the same time Everyone didn't want to know how the oligarchs who came out of Russia and ended up in Europe and Miami made so much money, so no one asked.
In a blunt voice, she adds: "Stupidity." Another reason: "This is number two." People think dictators aren't as bad as they are. Many people asked us how they should talk to Putin. I always told them to be as strict as they could. You can't be nice to Putin. Not so much because she was arrested for offending the thin-skinned leader, but because she was in prison for a long time. They act a lot like prison guards. They think kindness is weak.
During her time in prison and after she was released in 2014, Tolokonnikova pushed for change in ways that other political prisoners would recognize. A hunger strike was the first thing. "At that point, I was ready to die." To show a dictator that you will fight until the end, show them that you are ready to fight. I think this is why Ukraine is winning: even though they might lose some cities, they are willing to fight to the end, and the Russian army isn't like that.
She got support from all over the world, and from people like Madonna and Hillary Clinton. She started writing to the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj iek, and they started to write back and forth. The letters were turned into a book called "Comradely Greetings." What she remembers now, though, was how it made prison conditions better. He called her in prison, where she was being held, a week into her hunger strike, to talk about the harsh conditions she was protesting against: There were 18-hour days of work with only one day off every six weeks; very little sleep; guards and other inmates abused each other and each other.
"This was a little crazy." I was at the bottom of the social ladder, so he had to call me to talk to me. Later, Yury Kupriyanov, the prison director and the person who came up with this system of forced labor, was sentenced to two years in prison. The Russian correctional headquarters "had to make a statement." They called me and said I was correct.
Tolokonnikova's sentence: "I was traumatized by prison. I will never forget." I was barely able to do anything when I was released. In 2014, I was in a really bad mood. PTSD has made me depressed, so I'm still taking medicine for that. In prison, she was separated from her daughter for a long time. She is now 14. "She's a social democrat," Tolokonnikova says with a smile. There are a lot of people in her generation who want to be more equal.
Her experience hasn't slowed down her activism, which is now focused on the cutting edge of technology. She thought that cryptocurrencies were just a fun thing for rich techies to play with, but in early 2021, she realized that they could be useful for activists because they aren't controlled by governments or central banks and can't be taken over by corporations. Since then, she has raised "quite substantial sums for different charitable causes." We raised money for a shelter for people who have been abused by their partners. We were able to move a lot of women from a dangerous place in Russia to another country. We raised money for political prisoners in Russia in August of last year, and we want to do the same thing this year.
As a side note, today she is helping to launch the UnicornDAO, a crypto fund that wants to buy art from female and LGBTQ+ artists. "We're not just going to buy their art; we're going to work with them and help them in many ways to have stable and long-term careers." It was bought by the Russian-born, New York-based artist Olive Allen.
When Tolokonnikova talks about the NFT world, she thinks it's a good way to redistribute money, but we see the same old things happen. Misogyny doesn't go away, it just moves over to digital art. All NFT sales are only made by women. As a woman, it's hard to show that your words have value.
If you think about it, these crypto projects sound a little erratic. One minute they're driving cultural change, the next they're raising money, and the next they're trying to create a democratic agency that doesn't have to be tied to a country. Tolokonnikova's understanding of Russian politics, and what it would take to force change, is entirely practical. It would take "a mass uprising, with millions of people taking to the streets and not leaving until Putin is gone." That is obviously very dangerous. Putin is crazy, so he might shoot his own people. I can see why no one is already on the streets.
A second force of change could come from Putin's close friends. I think Putin is digging his own grave right now, and I don't think he knows it. "The number of oligarchs who are close to him, who have spoken out in favor of Ukraine, and who are against the wa hasn't happened in 20 years."
She thinks Alexei Navalny, a leader of the opposition, is a good successor to Putin. "Better social programs, and more money for everyone, that's all part of his plan." There has been a lot of interesting changes in his platform, even though he doesn't call himself that way. I've known him since 2007. His name isn't on it. Think it's wise. He doesn't want to separate people. During her own time in prison, Tolokonnikova wants the world to remember that Navalny is still in prison. She wants people not to forget that. Her own work, such as the UnicornDAO, is not connected to Putin in any way. "But everything I'm doing is meant to be even more of a pain in the ass for Putin because it's so personal to me."