Pussy Riot tells Amanpour: ‘We are free people, and free people feel no fear’

“We were never afraid from the beginning – neither before our imprisonment, nor during it, nor right now,” Masha Alyokhina said. “We have no reasons to be afraid. We are free people, and free people feel no fear.”As the Winter Olympics get underway in Sochi, Russia, Alyokhina and her fellow activist Nadya Tolokonnikova are two of the sharpest thorns in President Vladimir Putin’s side.Like so many host countries before it, Russia has faced a barrage of criticism leading up to the Games – but with Russia it seems personal, and much of the venom is directed as Putin himself.The West and many Russians are angry about his wholesale assault on human rights – the crackdown on political opponents and dissent, and the harsh treatment of gays.Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were thrown in prison after they were convicted of “hooliganism” and inciting religious hatred for performing a riotous punk song in a Moscow Cathedral – and posting a video of the action online.“It is a system of slavery,” Tolokonnikova said of the penal colony. “People turn into cogs, into a factory.”“You have no choice where you will work. You are forced to sow. You have no choice in this matter.”“Some penal colonies, for example the one I was in Mordovia, the work day can be as long as 16 or 20 hours. And the next colony to mine, the work day was 20 hours.”“Prisoners are also forced to perform completely unpaid labor hauling sacks, which are very heavy, and trying to lift these harms the health of female prisoners. They have to haul bags of cement, they have to haul bags of sand.”The pay for this work, she told Amanpour, was three or four dollars a month.“The administration does everything to make prisoners feel squashed and silent because it is easier to control people this way,” she said.Alyokhina told Amanpour that while she herself was not the victim of violence while in prison, the use of force was indeed rampant.“Russian colonies see violence used to all prisoners constantly,” she said. “We see violence from the part of the administration, as well as prisoners who work for the administration. They beat people when requested to do so by the administration.”The most shocking part of the penal system, she told Amanpour, was the “total lack” of adequate health care.“If you, for example, are sick – say you have HIV – you have no support from outside. You will simply die in the colony most likely.”The prison administration pays far too little, she said, for reasonable medical professionals to work in the system.President Putin released the two activists just before Christmas, widely seen by observers as a public relations move ahead of the Sochi Olympics.As Russians strive for more personal freedoms, Alyokhina said she is not concerned with the increasingly authoritarian president.“We are not thinking about what Putin will be doing at all. We will be thinking about what we need to do,” she said.“If we keep looking at Putin and his repressive measures we will have to just shut ourselves in a tiny room with our head under the covers and not utter another word until the end of our days, and we have no intention of doing that.”The Russian government says that its population was shocked and outraged by Pussy Riot’s public actions, but Alyokhina dismissed that notion.“You should not be listening to federal channels,” she said. “You should be listening to ordinary people, and ordinary people actually do support us.”Tolokonnikova said that they will continue their push to help prisoners worldwide, and expose the malfeasance of prison administrators.“If we didn’t believe in what we were doing, if we didn’t believe that we could bring change to our country, we wouldn’t have begun doing it.”(CNN)ANN.Az