The Girlfriends: Spotlight, E8: Nadya & Pussy Riot Punk the President

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Speaker 12 Hey girlfriends, I just wanted to give you a heads up that this episode includes conversations about state violence and incarceration.

Speaker 12 But around those, you'll hear the twisty tale of how a group of artists protest against the Russian government. Oh, and also there's going to be some swearing, but you knew that already, didn't you?

Speaker 12 Nadia is sitting in her Moscow flat playing the piano.

Speaker 13 I'm a piano player. It's a typical thing for Russian kids.
You either have to go to ballet

Speaker 13 or do piano.

Speaker 12 She stuck playing this little tune over and over.

Speaker 13 It was beautiful and

Speaker 13 really mystique. I wrote a little draft and wrote it to my friends and we quickly made a track in a couple of hours and there's the punk prayer:

Speaker 12 Punk Prayer, a song of hope, anger, and dreams of a better Russia. And the friends she wrote that song for, they're the ski mask-wearing protest collective, Pussy Riot, created by Nadia.

Speaker 13 The chorus goes, Virgin Mary, please become feminist. And in the verses, we talk about reproductive justice, we talk about the corruption in the church.

Speaker 13 And one of my favorite lines, gay pride is sent to Siberia in shackles.

Speaker 12 Nadia doesn't know it yet, but punk prayer will be heard all around the world, with some pretty damning consequences.

Speaker 13 Eventually it brought me to prison.

Speaker 12 She'll spend almost two years in a prison labor camp, sewing police uniforms from dawn till dusk.

Speaker 12 That's the price Nadia and her pussyright sisters will pay for challenging Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, one of the most powerful, wealthy, and dangerous men on earth.

Speaker 13 We're not professional criminals or anything like that. We're just a bunch of artists who were doing our best.

Speaker 12 But Punk Prayer will also launch Pussyright as the moral conscience of Putin's Russia. the frontrunners of a global feminist movement rallying together against Russian authoritarian power.

Speaker 12 And their weapon?

Speaker 12 Art.

Speaker 12 I'm Anna Sinfield, and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend Spotlight, where we tell stories of women winning.

Speaker 12 Today, Nadia punks the president.

Speaker 12 The first time I saw Nadia Tolaka Nikova and Pussy Riot was on my very 2012 Tumblr feed. I thought it was a cool statement, art, funny hats, but it came and went like everything else on Tumblr.

Speaker 12 And then there were the arrests, the courtroom dramas, political interference, and prison time.

Speaker 12 Now Pussy Riot were making headlines and I was gripped. But I never really learnt how Nadia and the other women got there.

Speaker 12 So let's start this story somewhere nice and picturesque, like Siberia in 1989. the year Nadia was born.

Speaker 13 Siberia is a wonderful place and it has a shape of a huge penis. I'm from Herbot and my grandmother, who I would visit every summer vacation, lives between the walls.

Speaker 13 And to get from one part of the dick to another, you need to spend four hours in a plane.

Speaker 12 Wow, that is a big dick.

Speaker 13 I know.

Speaker 13 No one can really impress me with the size of their thing after that.

Speaker 12 It's not just Siberia's size that it's known for. It's also defined by its weather.

Speaker 13 It's a place where you have winter for nine months out of year.

Speaker 13 It's minus 40 degrees Celsius plus really, really heavy wind.

Speaker 13 Polar winter brings its own heaviness on everyone's lives. So people find all sorts of escapes.
It could be drugs and sometimes hard drugs, or it could be computer games.

Speaker 13 And for me, it was mostly books. And my house was filled with art books on Potticelli and early Greek art and I think it gave me radicalism that probably otherwise would not emerge.
Wow.

Speaker 12 You had like a really kind of highbrow early education in art.

Speaker 12 You weren't reading normal kids books.

Speaker 13 Art came with my family in a package. My dad and my mom are both very artistic people.
My mom and dad split when I was five and she was responsible for feeding me and paying the bills.

Speaker 13 My dad, with whom I stayed connected and really close, he was a multimedia artist in the Soviet era, which also pushed him to the edge of society. But he gave me this passion to art.

Speaker 12 By the early 2000s, Nadia had basically learned everything she needed from the grand masters of art. It was time to look to the future.

Speaker 13 It was a magical coincidence that this festival of contemporary art came to my home city.

Speaker 13 I was around 13 and I was lucky enough to witness a series of talks and exhibitions and performances of a few contemporary artists who became my guiding stars and I started to model my life after them.

Speaker 12 At 16, hungry to learn more, Nadia moved to the big city, Moscow. And there she started studying philosophy, but she was unimpressed by the art world.

Speaker 13 What I saw around me was mostly commercial art, which is way too boring. Commercial art is by definition something that is toothless.

Speaker 13 But for me, my idea was to provide an alternative to the commercial art scene and hopefully start a movement.

Speaker 12 And were you always interested in the sort of political sides of philosophy and art at that stage.

Speaker 13 I think I arrived to my interest in politics through my interest in avant-garde art and their world-building ambitions, which was political in a way that they wanted to build new society.

Speaker 13 And that sort of totality of art that wants to change life once and for all was really speaking to me. And I wanted to see something like that around me among young, hungry artists.

Speaker 13 I wanted them to change the world. I wanted them to change, well, at least our government, which was at the time moving towards authoritarianism.

Speaker 12 Nadia was only 10 when Putin first became president and started centralizing power. Regional autonomy was reduced.
Media outlets were brought under state control.

Speaker 12 And over the years, critics of the regime died under suspicious circumstances. Slowly but surely, Russia became more authoritarian and more nationalist.

Speaker 12 Two things that, understandably, have never sat comfortably with Nadia.

Speaker 13 It's dangerous not just for Russian people, but also for people abroad, for neighboring countries.

Speaker 12 Nadia believed in Russia, but not Putin's Russia. She believed in culture and education, art, freedom.
She had to do something.

Speaker 12 So in 2007, Nadia, together with the man who had become her husband and another couple, started a collective. They planned to arrange protests all over Moscow.
So the choice of name was clear, Vina.

Speaker 13 Vina means war in Russian. It meant war against conservative art institutions and the political order.

Speaker 12 Vina did things like storming the Russian White House, which is the heavily guarded government headquarters in central Moscow, by jumping over the six-meter fence and running for their lives through the grounds.

Speaker 13 We were debating if we are going to be electrocuted once we reach the top

Speaker 13 or shot.

Speaker 13 That would not be fun, but it didn't happen, so all good. And the idea was to show that resisting is indeed an option.

Speaker 13 Imagine if a group of anarchists can freely do this very radical accident without ever getting caught, without going to jail, without getting arrested, then imagine what would happen if a million of people tried to do the same.

Speaker 13 And eventually we'll have real democracy.

Speaker 12 Okay, a small goal.

Speaker 12 Life for women and queer people in Putin's Russia had arguably gotten worse. Rights were rolled back and patriarchal rhetoric seemed to dominate politics and culture.

Speaker 13 And so eventually four years in Vienna brought me to the need of starting something that will be feminist-oriented, that will focus

Speaker 13 not just on achieving democracy, but also on protecting the rights of queer people, on making sure that gender equality is achieved in my country.

Speaker 13 And that's how Pussyright was born. Wow.

Speaker 12 And how did you come up with the name? It's a great name.

Speaker 13 This started from me and Kat sitting in her apartment.

Speaker 12 Kat is Yekaterina Samutsevich, who had also been part of Viner and had a pretty messy flat.

Speaker 13 Neither Kat nor her dad cared about cleaning stuff up. If you open the fridge, you die from the smell.

Speaker 12 It's September 2011, six months before Putin, then Prime Minister, is set to return for a third term as Russia's president.

Speaker 12 Nadia, who's now in her early 20s, knows what this means. More power for one, less democratic freedoms, agency, and rights for everyone else.

Speaker 12 So she and Kat are into something they're calling punk feminism.

Speaker 13 And we looked at this term broadly and not just

Speaker 13 punk as music, but also like really bold and groundbreaking artistic moves. So

Speaker 13 we got really inspired by the Riot Girl movement.

Speaker 12 The Riot Girl movement was actually a pretty big inspiration for me too when I was in my early 20s. It was this DIY feminist music scene that was started in the Pacific Northwest in the early 90s.

Speaker 12 And I actually wrote one of my final music school essays about them after I was the only one who put my hand up when the lecturer asked if anyone would call themselves a feminist.

Speaker 12 He said, watch out for this one, and everyone laughed at me. I obviously had to go on a feminist rampage after that, and the Riot Girl movement was the perfect outlet.

Speaker 12 The people at the heart of it were angry, but also playful. They made zines and sang punk songs about politics and sex and misogyny.

Speaker 12 The genre's high priestess, Kathleen Hanna, from the Bambikini Kill, had this famous slogan, girls to the front, meaning the girls stood at the front of shows while the dudes had to move to the back.

Speaker 12 In short, Riot Girl was the antithesis to my old lecturer and to Putin's Russia.

Speaker 13 We

Speaker 13 started to joke around what would happen if Russia had their own riot girl moment. We thought that it would be cool to record a song of a Russian version of Riot Girls, but we were visual artists.

Speaker 13 So me and Kat wanted to start a fake band and convince everyone that it's an actual band.

Speaker 12 This fake band would put on guerrilla gigs to draw attention to the government's human rights violations and hypocrisy.

Speaker 13 We decided to call it pussy rad to bring a derogatory term for a woman, for a girl, that we are going to reclaim in the same way that word bitch, queer, punk was reclaimed.

Speaker 12 Name sorted, great.

Speaker 12 And now,

Speaker 12 everything else.

Speaker 13 So, what do we need? What do bands do? And we just

Speaker 13 watched some videos and we went on website where people sell used stuff in Russia.

Speaker 13 We didn't have money at all, but we bought a guitar that didn't didn't play an electric guitar that we used as props to create an image of a band.

Speaker 12 They record their first song in Cat's Bathroom.

Speaker 13 We didn't have smartphones at the time, so it was just a very cheap Olympus recorder. And we

Speaker 13 didn't have any knowledge on how to put songs together, so it was very ugly.

Speaker 12 That's punk. That's DIY.

Speaker 12 You're doing it exactly how you should be.

Speaker 13 We weren't even able to put together a loop in a continuous fashion. So there was this little pause in between of the loop.
So it would be like

Speaker 12 and that's syncopation. Sounds like you're in jazz now.
What's going on?

Speaker 12 That's very cool. But also, I mean, the sad fact is there's like nothing more punk band than being like a punk band who insists they're not a punk band, even if you weren't one.

Speaker 12 Which is so cool. You've gone through the looking glass.
Thank you.

Speaker 12 On October 1st, 2011, Nadia and Kat play the song they recorded during a presentation on punk feminism.

Speaker 12 They say it's by a new Russian punk band called Pussy Riot, and they call the song Kill the Sexist.

Speaker 12 The sexist that they're referring to is not explicitly Putin, but it is a comment on his ideology.

Speaker 12 And Pussy Riot wants to start making a noise about the imminent return to presidency that he's planning. But they are just two people.
This fake punk band needs more members and fast.

Speaker 12 We didn't have a lot of time.

Speaker 13 Just felt like we have to work every single day and try to at least fake that we have an actual movement because we didn't have any money, so we were mostly stealing stuff from supermarkets here.

Speaker 13 We lived by shoplifting.

Speaker 13 Then we started to work actually with our friends, punk musicians, and we told them just write something shitty, like really quick in an hour, and we'll screen something on top.

Speaker 13 It was mostly me and Kat as the core, but we were good at art propaganda.

Speaker 13 We knew how to write press releases, how to contact journalists, like work with professional photographers and videographers and put together videos. So it's like unheard of

Speaker 13 speed of production.

Speaker 12 Would you be able to tell me about your very first protests that you guys did together?

Speaker 13 The first batch of protest actions was called Free the Cobblestones. It was the end of October in Moscow and it was already freezing cold, raining.

Speaker 13 Not fun to be outside so we decided to invade Moscow subway and we found places with this scaffolding being in the middle of the station and it looked just like the stage.

Speaker 13 So we would climb on that little platform, unpack our guitar that didn't play,

Speaker 13 and connect the microphone that did work and make the action.

Speaker 12 Wearing brightly coloured mini dresses and ski masks to conceal their identities, Pussy Riots shout and dance on subway scaffolding and in crowded subway cars.

Speaker 12 They warn that ballots will be used as toilet paper in the approaching elections.

Speaker 13 And we did dozens of those in the subway and then compiled it all together in one video.

Speaker 12 Pussy Riots actions aren't designed to scare people. They're tricksters, inspiring hope.
What they're doing is fun, but also dangerous.

Speaker 12 Because almost every single time they perform, they get arrested.

Speaker 13 Imagine cops run to the base of this scaffolding and there's unless you learn how to fly, there is no way to escape.

Speaker 13 Some cops are nice, some cops are not, some cops are, you know, punching you and dragging you around by your hair. And I was used to it.

Speaker 12 I mean, did you not, after you realized that happened the first couple times, did you not decide to like perform on the floor where you could make a run for it?

Speaker 13 That would not be beautiful.

Speaker 12 I can't argue with arts, but Putin did.

Speaker 12 After the break, a punk prayer.

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Speaker 2 Hey, audiobook lovers.

Speaker 24 This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with musician, producer, and walking encyclopedia, Questlove. We're talking about Mark Ronson's memoir, Night People, How to Be a DJ in 90s New York City.

Speaker 24 All right, like we talked about before, Mark Ronson found sanctuary in the DJ booth. What's a tool or piece of equipment in the studio or on stage that gives you the most control?

Speaker 26 So I have two microphones on stage.

Speaker 26 We have the microphone that you hear as the audience.

Speaker 8 Then we have a second microphone in which we communicate with each other.

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Speaker 12 In December 2011, Putin's party, United Russia, won the parliamentary elections.

Speaker 12 Amid allegations of electoral fraud and a pre-arranged role swap with the sitting president, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest.

Speaker 12 They were the largest protests in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s. Pussyriot was there too.
They shouted lyrics like, Riot in Russia, Putin chickened out.

Speaker 12 You could find them screaming their protest songs in luxury boutiques and fashion shows, atop expensive cars.

Speaker 13 And the idea behind it was, Putin was throwing a lot of money to make people compliant to everything he does.

Speaker 13 And we went to these places where rich people in Moscow were hanging out at the time to warn them that one day their lives are going to get complicated because of Putin.

Speaker 12 Next on their target list was the Russian Orthodox Church. Nadia and Pussywright believe that the church's support of Putin created an unhealthy, authoritarian relationship between church and state.

Speaker 12 It lent a sort of moral and spiritual legitimacy to Putin as a divinely sanctioned leader. So Pussywright came up with a way to draw attention to it.
It would be dangerous.

Speaker 12 Lots of people would be appalled.

Speaker 12 But no one would be able to ignore it.

Speaker 13 On the day of the performance, it was really cold, not cozy, windy, grey.

Speaker 13 A lot of participants said the day of the action that they aren't going to be able to join.

Speaker 13 People felt uneasy.

Speaker 12 It's February 21st, 2012, and Pussy Rice are about to do a flash mob performance inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Speaker 12 Right in front of the altar, they're going to sing Punk Prayer, which is the song you heard Nadia describe at the start of the episode.

Speaker 12 The song that calls on the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and banish Putin.

Speaker 13 We knew that we were touching a topic that is potentially radioactive, but we believed that because we do a symbolic artistic protest, we don't punch anyone, we don't destroy anything, we should be fine.

Speaker 12 As a priest is literally offering sacraments to worshipers, five pussy riot members in their signature ski masks and colorful dresses sing, kick, and punch the air before the altar.

Speaker 13 It happened all very quickly, 40 seconds of performance. We got pushed away by the guards really quickly.

Speaker 13 They didn't make any attempt to arrest us because I think it was like more like just a minor annoyance. Who are these crazy girls jumping up and down? Why did they do that?

Speaker 13 They took our piece of equipment, like our little audio system that we were very proud of.

Speaker 13 We were arguing with church security.

Speaker 13 The motherfuckers give us back our equipment.

Speaker 12 Pussy Riot don't get their equipment back. And despite no arrests in the cathedral, Nadia knows things are about to get serious.
She goes on the run, changing her location every day.

Speaker 13 But didn't use our phones, didn't use the internet. We were anxious.

Speaker 12 And they're right to be. The news of their protest was making its way to the president himself.

Speaker 13 Putin personally gave an order to arrest us, and Putin gives an order instead. The entire police system of Russia is looking for you.
You don't know when the arrest is going to happen.

Speaker 13 You almost wanted it to happen, because at least it's some sort of clarity.

Speaker 12 Notice the use of when,

Speaker 12 not if.

Speaker 12 Because after a week of trying to outrun the authorities, the arrest does happen.

Speaker 13 It was me and my husband at the time. We went to buy presents for our daughter, who was about to turn four years old next day.

Speaker 13 And we got surrounded by around 20 people

Speaker 13 in plain clothes. They yelled at us, they said hands against the wall.
They were very verbally abusive to me. And I think it came from

Speaker 13 the fact that they were not able to find us for a week. So it was relief.
It was a relief for me and it was relief for them.

Speaker 12 Nadia and fellow Pussy Riot members, Kat Samutsevich and Maria Alyokina, are all sent to a detention facility to await trial.

Speaker 13 Once you're transported there,

Speaker 13 it's not a joke anymore.

Speaker 13 That's how it started.

Speaker 12 Protests ripple out from Moscow. A YouTube video of punk prayer goes viral.
At her Moscow concert, Madonna even dons a ski mask and dedicates her song Like a Virgin to Pussy Riot.

Speaker 12 And in late July, the trial starts.

Speaker 13 When it started it became obvious that

Speaker 13 it's very accusatory and the tone of the judge and the tone

Speaker 13 of all the participants from the government side was just so rude and so discriminatory to us.

Speaker 13 They told us that feminism is by definition hostile to the Orthodox religion and Orthodox religion is a key ideological system for Russia so hence we are hostile not just to the religion but to the entirety of Russia and Russian people.

Speaker 13 We were told that we are paid by Hillary Clinton to destroy Russia. They said that we accursed the entire country and thus we need to be burned at the stake.

Speaker 13 Some people say that we need to be whipped. publicly on the Red Square.

Speaker 12 Oh my god.

Speaker 13 I realize that there is nothing really here to

Speaker 13 lose.

Speaker 13 I'm already going to jail, that's for sure.

Speaker 13 And so

Speaker 13 we just turned it into a circus.

Speaker 12 They're in a glass case being infuriatingly positive and doing some devilish twitching, of course.

Speaker 13 It was a lot of fun, seriously.

Speaker 12 In Nadia's closing statement, she describes Pussy Riot as freer than the prosecution because, quote, we can say what we want, while they can only say what political censorship allows Nadia Kat and Maria are convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred and sentenced to two years in prison and despite her tough exterior nadia is scared two years in jail seemed like a lot because by that time I was in jail only for six months and it felt like eternity and imagine that I have to stay locked up three times more and then i'm going to be moved from moscow to penal colony which basically gulag labor camp that was terrifying yeah well tell me about that tell me about your time in prison i went through 12 different facilities i was not an easy prisoner and just

Speaker 13 demoralized i didn't feel like myself i forgot what I was before and I think it was just deep, deep trauma that really destroys your

Speaker 13 image of yourself, your identity. And I was forced to work all the time that I wasn't sleeping.
I was performing different tasks.

Speaker 13 Like I was sewing police uniforms, then I was digging trenches, then I was moving heavy giant stones around penal colony. That's how the Russian prison authorities are controlling the prisoner.

Speaker 13 They make sure that they are exhausted physically and emotionally to the point of turning into walking corpses. And that's who I became in a labor camp.

Speaker 13 It took me a year or two to realize that I'm still the same person who I was before jail, that I still have a voice to protest against the prison system.

Speaker 13 I've started a hunger strike, wrote an open letter protesting against the prison conditions.

Speaker 13 A couple of weeks after I started my hunger strikes, I spent a month in different prison facilities and prison cars.

Speaker 13 It was a long time, one month without any connection with my relatives or lawyers. They thought by then that I'm probably dead.
And I thought, who knows what's happening with me.

Speaker 13 But I ended up in Siberia, which was awesome. I ended up in Krasnoyarsk, which is the city that I visit every single summer.
This is the city where my grandmother lived, the city between the balls.

Speaker 12 Just like the gay pride parade Nadia sang about in church, she too had been sent to Siberia in shackles.

Speaker 13 I was delighted. Well, that's the kind of the best thing that could ever happen to me.
I came back home.

Speaker 12 Yeah, in a way I'm sure you never expected.

Speaker 13 No, you only get to know where you are once you're there. They transport you pretty much as a sack of potato.

Speaker 12 But outside of the prison walls, Nadia is no sack of potatoes. She's become a powerful symbol.
Amnesty International names her a prisoner of conscience.

Speaker 12 Calls to free pussy riot echo around the world, along with a furious international debate about freedom of expression.

Speaker 12 Then, finally, after 18 grueling months in prison, on December 23, 2013, Nadia and Maria are released early.

Speaker 13 Two months before the end of my term,

Speaker 13 Putin decided to sign an amnesty to release not all political prisoners, but just a few of them. And I think he targeted specifically those who have been talked about the most.

Speaker 12 Some people believe that Putin's amnesty is just some big propaganda stunt designed to bolster Russia's image before they host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Speaker 12 But Putin isn't the only one planning for the Games.

Speaker 13 We got out and went right back into action. We wrote a song, Putin Will Teach You How to Love the Motherland,

Speaker 13 and it was dedicated to political prisoners, those who remained jailed, and to corruption, to

Speaker 13 increasing authoritarianism in Russia.

Speaker 12 Pussy Riot will be there at the games in Sochi with the newly released Nadia. She's an international symbol of radical resistance now, and everyone's waiting to see what she'll do next.

Speaker 12 After the break, all eyes on Nadia.

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Speaker 20 I'm 30 years old. I'm a toddler mom expecting twins, and I was diagnosed with MS in 2020.

Speaker 23 Every week in the U.S., approximately 200 people are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, or MS.

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Speaker 20 Well, first, I will say the doctor that diagnosed me told told me on a voicemail. And then, when I saw her, she still kind of dismissed all the symptoms that I had.

Speaker 23 We'll also address the deeper challenges patients face, like health disparities that delay diagnosis in underserved communities, the stigmas that may prevent women from seeking care, and the very real barriers that many patients deal with.

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Speaker 8 Hey, everyone, Ed Helms here.

Speaker 7 And hi, I'm Cal Penn, and we're the hosts of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.

Speaker 8 This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Jenny Garth, host of the iHeart podcast, I choose me, to discuss the new audible adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen classic, Pride and Prejudice.

Speaker 8 This is not a trick question.

Speaker 3 There's no wrong answer. What role would I play?

Speaker 5 You know what?

Speaker 19 I can see you as Mr. Darcy.

Speaker 18 You got a little call in first.

Speaker 8 Okay, that's really sweet.

Speaker 8 I appreciate that, but are you sure I'm not the dad? I'm not Mr. Bennett here.

Speaker 3 Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 12 In February 2014, only two months after Nadia was released from prison, Pussy Riot traveled to Sochi to protest the Olympic Games there.

Speaker 13 Even before we jumped on the plane to go to Sochi, starting from Moscow, we got followed by the cops constantly and we were there targets number one at a time when we got released.

Speaker 13 So every move, every step is being watched. Every word is being listened.

Speaker 12 I mean after spending all of that time in the penal colonies, like having a really tough ride of it, you know, it sounds like it was awful.

Speaker 12 Were you not afraid to be back out protesting, doing more actions i was terrified

Speaker 13 i was shaking

Speaker 12 it was so scary for me to go back to jail but it felt like we had to make this the statement under an olympic banner armed with a plastic guitar pussy right sing their newest protest song putin will teach you how to love the motherland But mid-song, they're attacked, beaten, and dragged by militiamen, wielding whips and pepper spray, bloodied yet defiant.

Speaker 12 They keep going.

Speaker 13 We're getting arrested

Speaker 13 five times a day, but we've realized it was almost impossible to do actions in the same style we've done before because we became so high-profile as activists. Wow.

Speaker 12 What was that like staying there when, I mean, it just seems like you're being completely haunted by the police?

Speaker 13 Pretty surreal, and

Speaker 13 you feel yourself like a paranoid, but with one important note that you are actually being followed,

Speaker 13 it's weird.

Speaker 12 But Nadia is not going to admit defeat.

Speaker 13 There was a lot of stuff to be done in Russia. We started a media project that's called MediaZona, and the idea behind it was to tell the people of Russia what's happening.

Speaker 13 in prisons, in police departments, and tell about the most important political trials of that time. Now it's the number one

Speaker 13 independent media outlet in Russia, which is truly incredible given that it is started by a bunch of punks.

Speaker 12 But eventually you left Russia. Could you tell me why and how that happened?

Speaker 13 I think I would never leave it if I had to make a conscious decision to leave.

Speaker 13 It was just a series of circumstances, a series of arrests, me and people who I cared about, who got in the mix just because of me, just because they were working with me.

Speaker 13 And I felt like I'm responsible for that. I felt very guilty.
So I felt like I need to move away, just to take a step back to protect people I love.

Speaker 13 And that pushed me to stay for some time out of Russia because I still wanted to create or just didn't want to put people in dangerous situation by associating with me.

Speaker 12 Outside of Russia, Nadia could use her reputation to be even louder and without the police literally breathing down her neck.

Speaker 12 In 2023, she put on her first solo gallery exhibition in LA, an immersive installation, which she called Putin's Ashes.

Speaker 13 Putin's Ashes is a response to Putin's full-scale invasion to Ukraine. For the first two months of the invasion, I could not think about making art.
I was doing everything I can

Speaker 13 to help with resources or to do actual help and then after a few months I felt like I need to make an artistic statement. And it was a group of women from Belarus,

Speaker 13 Ukraine and Russia. We all came together to curse Vladimir Putin.
The ultimate art piece is the performance that is documented in videos called Putin's Ashes, accompanied with the song that I wrote.

Speaker 12 In the piece, Nadia can be seen leading the women clad in fishnets and red ski masks in a ritualistic ceremony to burn a large portrait of Putin and collect its ashes. Putin didn't like it one bit.

Speaker 13 My parents got visited by police and asked some questions. Then there were a couple of searches at my friend's apartment who still lived in Russia and to my ex-mother-in-law.

Speaker 12 Nadia was declared a foreign agent by the Russian court. She was put on a country's most wanted criminal list.

Speaker 13 Now I'm arrested in absentia.

Speaker 13 So I knew that if I go back to Russia, I'm going to be arrested immediately. And even now when I hear left Russia, I feel unease about it.

Speaker 13 The only meaningful connection that I've ever had in terms of my art and geography was the connection between me, my art, and Russia. I think I get it.

Speaker 12 Your heart's still in Russia, right? Your heart's in your art.

Speaker 13 I'm very attached to the place. I'm very attached to my language.
You know, I would much rather speak in Russian right now.

Speaker 13 I never think that I'm the smartest or like, you know, the most talented or the most connected. Definitely not the most powerful.
But

Speaker 13 I have this dedication and I always think like what if more talented musicians did what Pesaret did but I stick to this DIY principle follow your dreams and damn the consequences

Speaker 12 after years of imprisonment harassment and attacks Nadia's commitment to see a better Russia without Putin has never wavered And I just know she won't ever stop as long as he's in power.

Speaker 12 It's nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Speaker 12 I can't believe I'm already saying this, but this is the last episode of the first season of The Girlfriends Spotlight. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 12 And if you haven't heard the other seven amazing stories, then do go back and listen. And if you like them, tell your friends.
We'll be back with more incredible stories of women winning soon.

Speaker 12 But in the meantime, coming up next on The Girlfriends, a brand new original limited series with me, your girl, Annie Sin.

Speaker 12 Kelly Harnett spent over a decade in prison for a murder she says she didn't commit. I'm 100% innocent.
While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch. He goes, oh God, Harnett, jailhouse lawyer.

Speaker 12 And as she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for the women locked up alongside her. You're supposed to have your faith in God, but I had nothing but faith in her.

Speaker 12 So many of these women had lived the same stories.

Speaker 3 I said, were you a victim of domestic violence?

Speaker 12 And she was like, yeah.

Speaker 12 But maybe Kelly could change the ending.

Speaker 12 I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals out of here? I'm going to be the first one to do that.

Speaker 12 This is the story of Kelly Harnett, a woman who spent 12 years fighting not just for her own freedom, but her girlfriends too.

Speaker 12 I think I have a mission from God to save souls by getting people out of prison.

Speaker 12 The Girlfriends, jailhouse lawyer. Listen from July 14th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 27 Hey, it's Anna. You've reached the girlfriend's hotline.
Leave your story after the tone. Okay, gotta go.
Love ya.

Speaker 28 So I have this friend who I've been friends with for almost

Speaker 28 nine, ten years now.

Speaker 28 And although we've only actually

Speaker 28 lived in the same place for three of them, me and her have built this routine.

Speaker 28 while living apart from each other and it'll be that we'll wake up and we'll call each other, we'll eat our meals together.

Speaker 28 There was a time where I was over at this guy's house that I was seeing and I think he went to P and in that 45 seconds I managed to fit in a call just to update her about my whereabouts.

Speaker 28 I mean yesterday she gave me a tour of what was in her fridge. I guess it sounds creepy in some sense, but I think it's a really

Speaker 28 just

Speaker 28 nice and stable and beautiful connection that has grown and somehow deepened in the distance and not in spite of it.

Speaker 27 If you have your own story like the one you just heard and you'd like the whole girlfriends gang to hear it, then please send it to us.

Speaker 27 You can record it as a voice memo under 90 seconds, please, and email it straight to thegirlfriends at novel.audio. Please don't include your name.
We're keeping things a little anon.

Speaker 27 We want stories like the time your friend still showed up to your kid's birthday party, even though she was really seriously hungover.

Speaker 27 Or the time she didn't get mad when you spilled a mug of coffee all over her white sofa. Not the white sofa.
I want stories that are meaningful or silly. I want big, I want small.

Speaker 27 I'm desperate to hear them. So send them over.

Speaker 12 This season, the Girlfriend Spotlight is supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide. They do amazing work to help women's rights organisations and movements to strengthen and grow.

Speaker 12 If you'd like to find out more or donate to help them secure equal rights for women and girls across the globe, you can go to womankind.org.uk.

Speaker 12 The Girlfriend's Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeart podcasts. For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.
The show is hosted by me, Anna Sinfield.

Speaker 12 This episode was written and produced by Amalia Sortland. Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr.
Our researcher is Zayana Yousaf. The editor is Hannah Marshall.

Speaker 12 Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are our executive producers. Production management from Joe Savage, Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolfe.

Speaker 12 Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Jay Ko Tayevich, Nicholas Alexander and Anna Sinfield.

Speaker 12 Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein and Gemma Freeman. The series artwork was designed by Christina Lemkule.

Speaker 12 Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development and special thanks to Katrina Norvell, Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcast, as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME.

Speaker 17 The busiest time of the year? It's here, between parties, shopping, and decorating.

Speaker 3 Who has time?

Speaker 16 With Airtasker, you can get anything done, cleaning, wrapping, even someone to to build a gingerbread house that doesn't collapse.

Speaker 17 Download the Airtasker app or go to AirTasker.com.

Speaker 16 Airtasker, get anything done.

Speaker 2 Hey, audiobook lovers.

Speaker 3 I'm Cal Penn. I'm Ed Helms.

Speaker 2 Ed and I are inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with our new podcast, Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.

Speaker 8 Each week, we sit down with your favorite iHeart podcast hosts and some very special guests to discuss the latest and greatest audiobooks from Audible.

Speaker 9 Listen to Iarsay on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

Speaker 10 Follow Iarsay and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

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Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.