The Pussy Riot activist turned Kremlin informer

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the pussy riot artist who turned Kremlin informer.

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0:53Quick warning before we start, there is some strong language in this episode.

1:00It's January 2012 in Red Square, Moscow. Snow covers the cobbles and dusts the onion globes of St Basil's Cathedral. The clock on the Kremlin chimes 11am. Eight women in colourful balaclavas leap onto a stone platform, worn with an electric guitar.

1:25It's Pussy Riot, a new feminist punk band, and their latest song. Putin has chickened out. Or pissed himself, to use the band's preferred translation. It's quite a punchy number. You can watch it all on YouTube, but I'll translate the first verse for you. The rebellious column is heading to the Kremlin. Windows are exploding in FSB offices. Bitches are pissing behind the red walls. Riot declares abortion on the system.

2:03Inspired by the Arab Spring the previous year, Pussy Riot hoped to bring revolution to Russia and stop Vladimir Putin becoming president for the third time. But it wasn't to be. The state cracked down hard. I spent two years in prison. Then it became more like a movement. Many people started to support us and put balaclavas on. So these colorful masks, balaclavas, turned from the symbol of being anonymous to the symbol of protest and solidarity. Abroad, Pussy Riot became celebrated freedom fighters. These three girls, Masha, Katya, Nadia. But at home in Russia, they were treated as enemies of the state.

2:53In December, so-called high court named Pusirayat an extremist organisation. So now all the symbols, including Balaklava, are by Russian law and extremist symbols. And then, in August this year, another video featuring a Pussy Riot member went viral.

3:19This time, it wasn't a punk performance.

3:25Rita Flores had a confession. She was an informant for the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Service, she said. And now, she wants to tell her story.

3:42from the guardian i'm helen pidd today in focus from pussy riots to putin spy

3:54sean walker welcome back to today in focus hi great to see you so remind me what's your job title uh it's just changed it's now special correspondent oh special correspondent i actually think of you as our spy correspondent and the last time we were chatting on the show was about this fascinating network of illegals these russian spies who spend years decades undercover and you of course wrote a great book about all of that called the illegals but your latest exclusive and it's a cracking one is also related to the spy world isn't it you were the first journalist to interview this member of pussy riot who has escaped russia and confessed to being a spy.

4:34Who is she? So, you know, Rita Flores is 29. So she was quite young back when Pussy Riot first made the headlines. The original Pussy Riot group was a kind of loose band of women who had this kind of riot girl punk aesthetic. In all of their public appearances, they would wear balaclavas. So the idea was that they were kind of anonymous, that it could be any woman. They had an explicitly feminist, anti-Putin, anti-religion, anti-conservatism agenda. And they would do these kind of dramatic and very visual art performances. The most notable of which, and the one that later ended up with three of them getting arrested and then jailed for many years, was when they did what they called a punk prayer.

5:31calling for the Virgin Mary to kick out Putin inside Moscow's biggest cathedral.

5:44People may remember back then that it was used by the authorities where Putin was just back in power after spending four years as prime minister and he was building himself up with this new image of a kind of traditional values leader. I would like to say that our country, while going through complex and turbulent processes since the collapse of the Soviet Union, did not, neither the country nor each individual, rely morally on anything other than religious values.

6:13Three of the women who'd been involved in it were arrested. It was a very high-profile trial in Moscow. Our clients have not committed any sort of crime, so we will consider any decision other than acquittal to be illegal. The Pussy Riot 3 didn't look remorseful. In fact, they frequently smiled, especially when the judge read out the text of their offending song. And they were convicted of the charge of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. and they all got two years in prison and Masha and Nadia those two who were the sort of best known of all the kind of pussy riot activists they were sent off to these really harsh Russian prison camps and they served nearly all of those two years.

7:03Women are completely subjugated they must work 16 hours a day they refused meals they are denied personal hygiene they can be put outside and be kept outside 10 12 hours sometimes even days and you know pussy right the idea was it you know it was a kind of feminist punk art collective it didn't have a set membership one of the founding members kind of said like anyone can be pussy riot essentially you just have to take part. And Masha Alyokhina, she was very good friends with Rita Flores. And around 2019, 2020, when they were still in Russia, they began doing some joint kind of protest arts performances in Moscow.

7:47And that was how Flores sort of got linked to the group. So she would have definitely been on the radar of the security services. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And she did spend, I think, on a couple of occasions, 15 days in jail, which is a sort of, they call it an administrative arrest. It's not quite a criminal thing, but they just stick you in jail for 15 days to sort of give you a bit of a warning. So that happened to her a few times. She was definitely on the radar. Yeah. Yeah. OK. And is it fair to say that things ramped up after the invasion of Ukraine? You know, what happened after 2022 and the full scale invasion of Ukraine is, I mean, things completely changed in Russia in terms of dissent.

8:30And whether as before 2022, I mean, it was a very sinister regime and terrible things could happen to you if you're an activist, but the repression was kind of selective. The idea was they'd pick off one or two artists, one or two opposition people, give them huge jail sentences, and that would sort of create this chilling effect and stop other people from doing it. Whereas after 2022, it became much more blanket repression. Russia's parliament has unanimously passed legislation that makes fake news a crime punishable by up to 15 years in jail. Russian artist Alexandra Skoczylenko has been sentenced to seven years in prison by a St.

9:05Petersburg court, charged with spreading false information. So, you know, even now, but these days, I mean, just for liking a post on Facebook that is anti-war in Ukraine, you can end up going to jail for years. Yeah. Protest art and protest in general as a meaningful thing has kind of disappeared from the Russian scene.

9:38Tell me, how did you first hear that Rita Flores had escaped Russia? Well, towards the end of August, she and her lawyer, who's a guy called Dmitry Zakhvatov, they put out a video discussion between the two of them, lasted around an hour and a half. Just like in the cinema, in the real world. Where she essentially came out, she said, I've just left Russia, literally two days ago. I want people to know that for the last three years I was working for the FSB, Putin's security services. I want to be able to help other people in my situation to break free of the FSB. And that's why I'm telling everyone about it.

10:31And then she kind of disappeared for a few weeks. I was in touch with a lawyer. And then eventually they said, you know, she's ready to talk. She's ready for interviews.

10:45So I had a kind of long chat over Zoom with her from the location outside Russia. She didn't want to say where exactly she is. She didn't want to say how she left Russia, to which country she exited, to which country she went through on the way to where she is now. When I spoke to her, she was talking from a hotel room and she said she still kind of hasn't worked out where she's going to end up, what she's going to be doing, where she's going to be sort of permanently. And let's talk about how she got recruited by the FSB. What did she tell you?

11:20So the way she tells the story, and of course all of this, we're going on her words, so it all sounds very plausible, but it's um you know always have to remember that you know we don't have the fsb file to to corroborate the story yeah but so the way she tells the story is that um after an apartment search in february 2023 so as happens with many activists the police came to her apartment they were doing a search looking for sort of incriminating stuff about her opposition activity and after they finished the search two guys in plain clothes stayed behind the older of the two told her we're from the FSB we can make things very very bad for you we could you know organize a little accident for your mother you no one will ever know what happened to her we could send you to jail for the things you've been writing on Instagram about the war in Ukraine easily can open a case tomorrow.

12:19Or you can cooperate with us, help us, give us some information that we need. And, you know, then you'll probably be okay. Right. And were they offering her any money or anything like that? What was the incentive? Or was it just merely the fear that if she didn't, her mum might come to some heart? Yeah, so I mean, it seems more stick than carrots. A few days after she agreed to this, she said she was given about 30 or 40 ,000 rubles. She couldn't remember exactly but it's about 300 pounds maybe in cash uh and then she didn't get anything for a couple of years and then towards the end of her time for the last sort of eight or nine months so you know starting in the end of last year until just recently she was getting 50 000 rubles a month so not nothing but certainly i think it wasn't the incentive that sort of led her to do this and I mean in her I mean I asked her obviously you know when you look back at this do you think if only I had been more more strongly said no on that first yeah day maybe I would never have got into this whole mess and she kind of said like well obviously I'm thinking about this a lot but I felt like I didn't have a choice I really believe that they you know I believe they could do anything they said they would do.

13:47And tell me about her FSB handlers. It was interesting talking to her about how this sort of developed was that the two men who showed up on that first day, she says, are the only two FSB officers she ever saw over that three years. And they kind of did this good cop, bad cop, classic routine, right? So the older of the two was aggressive, was threatening he would only pop up every now and then uh to sort of really reiterate that she was in danger her family was in danger if she didn't cooperate the younger of the two um guy who called himself Ivan we don't know if that's his real name that she would meet with him much more regularly and he would be more friendly he would sort of say that you know he wanted to be friends she said that he told her he will you know he will help re-educate her so that you know she loves russia she becomes an obedient wife has lots of children and sort of uh you know gets rid of this childish terrible opposition activism but that he would also sometimes kind of say these threats but then he kind of say them as a joke sorry and this is the nice guy this is the nice This is a good cop, yeah.

15:01Okay, and the bad cop? Who was he? The way she described it, he introduced himself by a range of different names in the first meeting to the point where she sort of got very irritated that he wasn't giving her, you know, he was giving her obviously fake names. And so she and Ivan, the relatively good cop, they started calling him the jacket, Pijak in Russian.

15:33Because there was one time when they met and she sort of painted this quite surrealist scene. They met in a kind of leafy park on the outskirts of Moscow. And this guy who's like a big, tall, stocky guy shows up wearing this kind of shiny black three-piece suit. And she just said this image of him in the park in this shiny suit threatening her. she still has it stuck in her mind and so she started calling him uh the jacket after that so the two yeah the good cop was yvonne the bad cop was the jacket and that you know he again it sounds to me i mean if you've watched any police drama it just sounds like you know 101 sort of source handling i mean so as soon as the jacket would go away yvonne would be sort of like you know i know he's really annoying he's awful but like if you handle him with me like if you behave well then you'll get to handle you know i'll be handling you and like we'll be fine and you just have to do this and everything's going to be all right and you know there is there's plenty of reasons why you would take the fsb seriously yeah yeah that's marina litvinenko whose husband was poisoned in britain sergey skripal alexia navalny's widow i suppose yeah yeah and plenty of plenty of opposition people who have been sort of suspiciously poisoned or things have happened to them and so on um so she said she did i mean again i think this is one of the places so she said that almost as soon as she'd agreed she was doing everything not to be cooperative so she was sort of making the giving the impression that she was being cooperative but actually trying to sabotage her own work as an informant right okay the way she put it was that as soon as she would get a target so they would say we're interested in this particular artist who's doing anti-war arts she would kind of provoke a deliberate conflict with that person so you know she would start attacking them say horrible things to them they would kind of fall out and in that way this person then wouldn't share any sensitive details with her right okay so did the fsb have a kind of target list that they put to her and said right we want you to go and find out what this particular artist this filmmaker is up to yeah so so it basically worked like look you're in the scene you're in the art world like you know we want you to to tell us as much as you can about all the people you know but then there were specific targets so there were two protest artists that she was asked to kind of write reports on get information about and then when things really escalated which I think towards the end of 2024, it first came up.

18:17And then in 2025, it started intensifying. So there's a guy called Pyotr Verzilov. The whole Pussy Riot story has brought to Russians and people around the world just exact this impression. Painful memories of Soviet rule. Painful memories of Russia's totalitarian past. He used to be the partner of one of the original members of Pussy Riot. He was always being kind of around the pussy riot scene. But at some point he went off after 2022, moved to Ukraine, and he now fights for the Ukrainian army. And he's seen as a, you know, there's a suggestion he was poisoned once in the past. Pyotr Vizilov lost his sight hearing an ability to walk when he fell mysteriously ill last week.

19:04He was airlifted here to Berlin. He's clearly seen as a real enemy of the regime. And so they said to Rita, who knows Vasilov very well, like, we want you to get as much information as you can out of him. So we want you to be messaging him, chatting him, doing video calls. We want you to sort of fix where his house is in Ukraine, where he's living. And then at some point, they apparently said they wanted her to try and arrange a meeting with him in Serbia and that then they'd kidnap and kill him.

19:41again this was one of the moments where i mean i said to her like this seems odd to me because like why didn't they just why did they tell you that they wanted to kill him like surely yeah that sounds risky surely you'd be better you'd just tell you that they want to have a conversation with him and she said well it's pretty obvious it wasn't innocent at this point they started paying her money she was also doing a very good impression so she says of somebody who was kind of collaborating in good faith while all the time she was thinking about how she could get out of this and how she could leave right okay and presumably the work that she was doing for the FSB if you can call it that was supposed to be top secret did she tell anybody what she was up to yeah I mean so she said uh in one of the moments that made me laugh she said you know I was told I was sworn to absolute secrecy.

20:35I wasn't supposed to tell my partner. I wasn't supposed to tell anyone. But I immediately told about 20 people within three days because I'm in massive gossip. But just to be clear, did she admit to ever giving the FSB like legit dirt on any of her friends, artistic colleagues? I mean, I think it's pretty clear that she was passing along information. She would say that it was never serious information. She was always trying to find things that was already in the public domain. So if they asked her, you know, where is Pyotr Vasilov right now? She would look at what he posted on Twitter and she would see where he was now and she would try to pass things across that like they probably could have found anyway out of from open source things or...

21:18So her tactic was just to be a bit rubbish. Yeah. Just to be not a very good and not a very well-connected informant. Yeah, but I mean, the fact that it lasted for three years and that they started paying her And I think this is a place, again, where it's important to remember that we just have her testimony. To me, the way that the FSB did the recruitment, the tasks they gave her, the way they ran her as an agent ring true. Her statement that, look, she might have said yes, but she was kind of disgusted by this inside and trying to sabotage it also rings true. but all of those details of you know were you actually never passing on anything useful was there not a moment earlier where you could have run did these 20 people you told not give you some better advice about how to get out of this there are some questions about those particular parts of the story for sure

22:20coming up can Masha one of the original pussy rioters forgive Rita

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23:10After talking to Sean, I can't stop wondering what Rita's fellow artist made of her confession. Aha! Masha. So I call Masha Al-Yokina. She is a founder member of Pussy Riot. She spent almost two years in jail for the punk prayer protest back in 2012 and had been harassed by the police and security services ever since. And she herself escaped Russia in extraordinary style a few years ago. Some listeners will know, but it's quite the story. Can you just tell us briefly how you managed to escape house arrest and leave Russia? Weren't you disguised as a food delivery person? Yeah, because apartment was surrounded by political police.

23:55So, and there are thousands of couriers around Moscow. So, I changed clothes to not look like me. But I actually did not, I wasn't sure that it will work. But it worked. And also, I didn't have a passport. So, Russians have two passports. The internal one, which is a piece of shit for the world, and the international one. so with international one you can travel and you can receive a visa and so on but they took they took international one so i just started to drive to the direction of belarus in the car which been organized by my friends and then from belarus to european union i had three attempts of crossing the border and two failed and I was interrogated by Belarus KGB for a while and I was hiding in different apartments of people who let me in in Belarus and then with the help of an Icelandic government buddies I got a document and I went to the border for the third time and tried to cross it but they stopped me started again the interrogation but I played a role of Icelandic actress of drama theater who is like very late for rehearsal and who lost documents so I basically said that like I went to the bar with friends and and and got drunk and kind of sort of like lost everything and it worked incredibly brave And let's talk a bit about Rita Flores, because I think you knew her when you were still in Russia.

25:40Is that right? With Rita, we did an action together near Kremlin called Careful Fragile. And she was detained for the section and spent 15 days in detention center, which is jail. That was November of 2020 then. in 2021, police started to detain all members of Pussy Riot who were in Russia for 15 days. And then again for 15 days and again and again. We called it press carousels because you don't know when it starts, when it finishes. They just grab you on the street and detain. And they did it with Rita as well. So she spent two times for 15 days in detention centre. And what did you think a few weeks ago when she made this confession in the video with her lawyer that she had been working for the FSB?

26:34She contacted me before. Oh, yeah? For help, yes. She sent me this information and asked for help, and Dima, the lawyer, who made this interview, is my close friend, and we together were helping her to evacuate from there. Were you shocked when she said she'd been informing for the FSB? I was fucking surprised, but, you know, I mean, the level of my, let's call it sensitivity to many things became like less because again, this is, I have certain level of internal immunity because I went like through prison and different tough stuff. You become more like practical, I think. Yeah, more pragmatic.

27:28You see, I can't describe my emotions completely, but usually in these situations, I sort of know what to do. So when a person is honestly saying to you what is going on and asking for help, I think it's better to help. And you cannot change past, but much better to have her abroad and safe. So you can forgive her, can you? I would not judge. It's just not working. what's the reason to judge already a person who is already feel guilty i want to actually underline nobody been killed nobody been imprisoned and all the harm which she's supposed to do against different activists including pussy right members was not done so basically she was fooling them but yes she got money from them yes she was like signing papers and yes she was technically working with them.