Prisons are new focus for Pussy Riot

Two members of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot said world attention helped ease their captivity in a prison system they now aim to change.

"The prison system hated us, they wanted us to die," said Nadya Tolokonnikova, who served 16 months in a prison labor camp after being convicted of "hooliganism" for a raucous protest at the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

Pussy Riot gained international notoriety after a series of Moscow protests in which the women wore brightly colored mini-dresses and balaclavas covering their faces while chanting anti-government slogans in public spaces for mass-media appeal.

Tolokonnikova, Masha Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich were arrested after their December 2012 church protest, which consisted of walking onto the altar, shouting slogans and punching the air. The antics were meant to demonstrate against the re-election of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Alekhina says has "thrown aside" the idea of democracy.

Russian authorities treated the group harshly, issuing a 2,800-page indictment and two-year sentences, garnering plenty of criticism from Western observers.

International attention "was kind of a miracle for us," Tolokonnikova said. It pressured prison officials to demand only eight-hour work shifts, rather than the 16-hour shifts required of other inmates, Tolokonnikova said.

She and Masha Alekhina spoke to USA TODAY while on a world tour to promote their new project, an independent news site, MediaZona, which focuses on law enforcement, prisons and the courts.

They were in Washington, D.C., for a conference on global youth protests and social change organized by the television network Fusion, a joint venture of Univision and Disney.

The wave of protests in Caracas, Mexico City, Hong Kong and elsewhere "feels like" a trend, and technology has played a big role, said Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who also spoke at the event.

"Social media allowed people to connect with other people and share their views" in a way they were afraid to do 50 years ago, Power said. "Social media (have) done away with that fear, but also, the level of repression and despair is so great that people are willing to go out there."

One of the goals of the event is to show activists they are not alone, said Karim Amer, who produced the documentary The Square, about the Tahrir Square protests that brought down Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The Muslim Brotherhood government that replaced Mubarak's was replaced after a second wave of protests in 2013, by another military leader. Now, The Square's editor, Sanaa Seif, 20, is serving a three-year prison sentence for participating in an unauthorized protest.

"If we allow a dissident to be silenced, we allow them to fight a lonely fight," Amer said. "We have to continue to stand together against any injustice, whether it's in Tahrir Square, Ferguson or Kiev."

Tolokonnikova and Alekhina said they are trying to provide the kind of attention that benefited them in prison to other inmates in Russia and around the world.

"Law enforcement and prisons are a good way to understand how a country is dealing with democracy," Tolokonnikova said. "In this respect, the prison systems of Russia and the United States are a lot more similar than, say, a country like Norway."