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Political Girl
  • Published: 10 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241670118
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

Political Girl

Life and Fate in Russia

Formats & editions
Hardback
10 Feb 2025
EBook
6 Nov 2025
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What do you do when your country becomes a repressive authoritarian state?

2014: Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics. Russia invades Crimea. Putin is re-elected president. Several political prisoners are amnestied and released early from prison.

Maria Alyokhina is among them. She had spent two years in a penal colony after performing the punk prayer ‘Virgin Mary, Banish Putin’ with her friends in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They had warned the rest of the world of the dangers of authoritarianism but the Russia she finds when she gets out of prison is even more oppressive.

What can you do, she asks, when your country has been seized by all-powerful men who are waging war against another country and their own citizens?

As Maria recounts her brave and colourful protests, we are drawn straight into the world of grassroots opposition and witness the absurd measures the Russian state takes to contain protest. And when the full-scale war against Ukraine starts and the Russian opposition is repeatedly silenced, Maria and her activist friends continue to resist despite the high stakes. They fight increasingly absurd cycles of detention and house arrest: sometimes with the smallest acts such as going for a walk or having a rainbow ice cream, until, faced with a new prison sentence, she escapes Russia in May 2022 dressed as a delivery food courier. Her story, like her life, is fiercely courageous, darkly funny and highly inspiring to anyone who wants to stand up for the truth.
  • Published: 10 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241670118
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

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Praise for Political Girl

Witty, urgent, and unflinching, Political Girl is a visceral journey into the heart of authoritarianism and an enduring cry for justice. From the cold concrete of prison cells to the surreal act of eating "enemy" cheese, from moments of quiet resistance to the front lines of protest, Maria Alyokhina offers a raw, fearless testament to the power—and price—of defiance. Though rooted in Russia, her story speaks far beyond its borders, to anyone who believes that protest can be art, and that art can confront, disrupt, and even destabilize authoritarian power. Political Girl is a fierce, inspiring portrait of a true star of conscience

Alpa Shah

Maria Alyokhina doesn’t surrender, and her new book glows with the revolutionary power of hope, art and solidarity

Oliver Bullough

Political Girl reads like a mash up between a diary, a news bulletin and a Kafkaesque novel. Alyokhina’s caustic wit stands alongside her steadfast faith — a striking contrast to Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church and Pussy Riot's first enemy — whom she dismisses as "a bearded KGB agent in a cassock." With an array of deftly drawn Kremlin stooges, cops, judges and prison guards, this is a brilliant account of what it takes to be an activist in Putin’s Russia

Lucy Ash