From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/25/pussy-riot-olympics-russia_n_3813654.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay%20Voices
Freedom is only the first battle for Pussy Riot’s Yekaterina Samutsevich.
The Russian punk pioneer, radical artist and gay rights campaigner is the only member of Pussy Riot on Russian soil who has her freedom, since three of the band were jailed a year ago.
The oldest of the Pussy Riot three, aged 30, Samutsevich was released in October, her two year sentence suspended.
The reason was she had never made it to the altar of Moscow’s cathedral to perform a ‘punk prayer’ against President Vladimir Putin – she was kicked out the church before she could get there.
Her two bandmates, Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina remain behind bars, staging hunger strikes and so-far unsuccessful appeals.
Her freedom, Samutsevich tells Huffington Post UK in a Skype interview, was nothing more than “a small victory”. In person, she is far from her characterisation as a ferocious, leaden-faced campaigner, speaking not in absolutisms, but softly, of moral dilemmas.
“I do try to be pleased about gaining that freedom, but Nadia and Masha are not free. Justice was not done, so the battle continues,” she says, from the offices of Amnesty International in Moscow.
Now, 12 months later, the images of Russia dominating TV news in Europe and the US are not of three young women caged inside a courtroom, or a rainbow of balaclavas outside Russian embassies.
Instead, the pictures are of bloodied gay rights demonstrators in St Petersburg and Swedish athletes with multi-coloured nail varnish to protest the new Russian laws against “gay propaganda to minors”.
The law, in practice, makes it near impossible to hold gay pride marches or demonstrations for equal rights.
Continue reading at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/25/pussy-riot-olympics-russia_n_3813654.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay%20Voices
