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Pussy Riot Drummer Who Eluded Arrest Says Band Is Still Active Underground

pussy riot drummer kot interview 60 minutes

With two members incarcerated, Russian punk band Pussy Riot continues to practice in secret, drummer “Kot” revealed in an interview with 60 Minutes.

Kot, of course, is a pseudonym; the several women who make up the feminist protest group perform in brightly colored balaclavas to conceal their identities. Three were arrested and exposed — as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich — following the anti-Putin protest staged an Orthodox church in Moscow that sent Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova to prison and sparked worldwide criticismSamutsevich was later freed. Kot, with another member, fled the country. She only emerged from hiding for her first television interview, which aired Sunday night (March 24) and brought cameras into the band’s recondite rehearsal space.

In the clip above, Kot says that, though she is anxious, doing the interview is an act of protest. “I’m here to say you shouldn’t give up,” she says. “What happened to us is unacceptable.”