Famous for being jailed after protesting Putin, Russian dissident group Pussy Riot toured New Zealand last month. They chased sheep, stripped in hostels, smoked on stage, and the whole shebang almost ended in near drowning. Amanda Saxton went along for the ride.

The sax player went first, sprinting naked across a Southland beach.

Oreti’s frothy waves were beckoning and the rest of Pussy Riot followed suit at speed. Putin’s least favourite punks swim like fish and don’t mind the southern cold. They’re used to polar ice plunges in the motherland.

Frontwoman Masha Alyokhina, 30, has a theory: “Six coffees and a swim will solve all problems.”

It’s been seven years since she danced on the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral, calling for the Virgin Mary to banish Russia’s then-Prime Minister Vladmir Putin. Masha, the only one to retain underwear for the Oreti dip, spent almost two years in prison for the act.

2012’s bizarre show-trial and subsequent sentencing made Pussy Riot an international cause célèbre. Madonna donned a balaclava during a Moscow concert and called them “courageous”; Sir Paul McCartney hand wrote letters in support of Masha’s early release; Patti Smith and David Lynch praised the group on the BBC.

Since being released Masha has co-won the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thought, written a book, and established an independent media outlet covering human rights abuses in Russia’s penal system. She’s also starred as herself in an anti-Putin episode of Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’.

I met up with Pussy Riot on a rainy Thursday in Nelson. It was 2pm when I landed and the Pussies were asleep. There were 11 in total, including Masha’s activist boyfriend Dmitry Tsorionov, a film-making couple, their toddler, and two Kiwi drivers.

Some had stayed up the night before watching their producer’s wife give birth in Russia, via Skype. Others got haircuts beneath a jetty lit by moonlight then swam, euphorically, through the mirror-esque sea. The last one to fall asleep did so at 10am.

They were on this slapdash run down New Zealand thanks to the new Brazilian president. The Pussies should have been in Brazil, but Jair Bolsonaro cut funding to the festivals they were booked to perform at - shattering their travel plans.

Word reached an Auckland poet known as Sally Strangelove who, in fairy godmother fashion, magicked up Pussy Riot’s extended tour of the Antipodes in lieu of South America.

Sally’s friends Mikey Speering and Shannon McIntyre, both musicians, were the drivers. Mikey, it was noted, “rocked a Greek cocaine dealer aesthetic” and manned a minivan with a taped-on wing mirror. He drove Masha and the non-performing crew.

Shannon’s car was painted with the word “madness” and sported a breathalyser-triggered ignition. She carried the three other stage performers. Kyrill Masheka is an actor Masha befriended in Belarus; the sax-playing Nastya and electro artist-dummer Diana are original Pussy Rioters. They’ve been working on solo projects since 2012 – when Masha, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Katya Samustevich were convicted of “hooliganism inciting religious hatred”.

What Pussy Riot literally did in 2012, according to an eye witnesses at the trio’s court trial, was “planned leaping and hopping” inside one of Russia’s holiest sites. What they aimed to do was protest the incestuous relationship between Russia’s church and state. The Orthodox Church had announced it unchristian to not vote Putin for president. That struck Pussy Riot as more immoral than what they called their “punk prayer”.

Nadya is off doing her own show now, still under the Pussy Riot banner, while Katya has nothing more to do with the group. Its membership is loose and the mission has diversified. In New Zealand, the performance is based on Masha’s 2017 memoir Riot Days, and raises funds for political prisoners in Russia’s penal colonies.

Masha wears a red plastic tiki, acquired in Auckland, and black dresses scored from friends or op-shops. She winds her wild blonde mane up with a silver hair pin found in India, and speaks in a husky voice with Russian directness.

“You must have grapes!” is her welcome to me, from the porch of a Nelson villa. The place is smothered in a vine bearing tangy black fruits – the staple food item of Pussies while in residence. They prefer smoking to eating.

Pussy Riot were in Nelson thanks to former gallery owner Sarah Sharp, who “liked their kaupapa of feminism and freedom”. The show she organised at Old St John’s church sold out in a day. Local musos donated all technical gear and Sarah had the now-12 of us sleeping in her own and friends’ homes. This community-led embrace would be repeated in Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill. Pussy Riot are bona fide celebrities, yet travel on a shoestring and are happy dossing down on a stranger’s sofa.

That Thursday was their first performance in a church since 2012. It was also the show’s first time without a trumpet player – he’d flown back to Moscow already – and during soundcheck things weren’t quite right.

“Shannon, go on drums,” shouted Kyrill, the idea being that Diana could focus on the keyboard and compensate for the lack of brass.

“Sure,” replied the 21-year-old. “How d’ya want me to play?”

“Dramatically,” Kyrill commanded. Shannon cut some eye-holes in her headband to wear on stage and just like that, Pussy Riot’s newest member was a Kiwi. Fortunately she’s the type to take improvising with the world’s most notorious dissident group, in front of a large audience, entirely in her stride.

An hour later the church was throbbing. Showgoers ranged from white-haired grannies to mohawked men in leather; they’d grappled with each other for pews near the front, though no one seemed quite sure what to expect.

City councillor Matt Lawrey’s spirits were high. “Just before coming here I sent someone a text saying, ‘Sorry, I’d love to talk, but I’ve gotta go – we’re off to Pussy Riot,’” he cackled. “That is a sentence I never thought I’d say or write in Nelson. Ever.”

The show is a genre-defying mash-up of sax solos, political commentary and theatrics. It’s loud, touching, brave and surprisingly funny. Bathed in red and purple light with smoke from her cigarette wafting, 5’3”-in-fishnets Masha stands on stage, staunchly.

She’s learned it’s best to not tell organisers about the smoking beforehand.

No one accused Pussy Riot of blasphemy at Old St John’s, but police were called to the afterparty. There was an argument with the venue’s doorman over whether or not the Pussy Riot toddler could enter. Nyet, it transpired. Under-18-year-olds are not allowed in New Zealand bars after 10pm. At just 18 months, the film-makers’ daughter has a way to go yet.

I was at Pussy Riot headquarters by 10 the next morning. The Russians were sleeping while Mikey and Shannon fretted in the kitchen.

“Shall we try again?” asked Mikey.

“We must motivate them with what they love most,” declared Shannon, heading for a bedroom door.

She knocked tentatively. “Morning swim?”

Silence.

“WE HAVE SOUND CHECK AT 5PM AND IT TAKES FIVE AND A HALF HOURS TO GET TO CHRISTCHURCH,” Mikey yelled, again to silence.

“Morning swim!!!” they bellowed together.

An explosive utterance in Russian indicated at least one Pussy had awoken.

They finally drift into the kitchen, with sleepy brains which appear to sharpen as a hunt for a lighter intensifies. After its discovery under a pair of fishnet stockings, once the first cigarettes are lit, the Pussies are apologetic.

“Russians and New Zealanders are different,” Masha attempts to explain. “We both party all night, but Russians must then sleep all day. You just jump up at 8am and keep going, it’s very strange.”

Kyrill apologetically suggests we use fire alarms to wake them. His nicotine stained fingers are the same yellow as his nose. His nose is yellow due to iodine, with which he was treating a small dog bite.

Glancing at the nose, Masha remembers something. “We need dogs!” she exclaims. “Where is Raspberry?”

Raspberry, I learn, is the dog of Sally’s neighbour in Auckland. Each day Raspberry’s owner would fling open the Russians’ bedroom doors, letting her rough-and-tumble the Russians out of bed.

We left Nelson just before midday on Friday, March 15, bound for Christchurch. I was in the minivan and we discussed our “favourite music to listen to whilst driving” – theoretically, as the stereo didn’t work.

There’s not much cellphone reception along the mountainous Lewis Pass, so when a text came through saying “a neo-Nazi’s gone crazy in chch” we had no way of knowing the context.

“Dozens dead, don’t go there,” read the next message, minutes later. We still couldn’t check the news, but the pitting of Tchaikovsky against T. Rex lost lustre.

“There are white supremacists in New Zealand?” asked an incredulous Masha.

Naively, I told her it must be a mistake.

Then I got a text from my boss asking if we were anywhere near Christchurch and could I help report on the shooting. We hit a spot of decent reception and the push alerts flew in, Stuff, Al Jazeera, the BBC and The New York Times jostling for space on my screen. There’d been a massacre. A person had gunned down Muslim men, women and children as they prayed at a mosque. And it had happened within the past hour, in the city we were headed towards for a sold-out Pussy Riot show.

“Now you have your own Breivik,” whispered Masha.

She was referring to far-right Norwegian Anders Breivik, who in 2011 shot 69 people dead at a youth camp.

We pulled over at the first point of civilisation possible, a truck stop cafe with its TV tuned to the news. There was footage of armed cops frantically gesturing at cars to turn around as they neared a mosque and harrowing images of the wounded being taken away on stretchers. We were told repeatedly that “the situation is evolving”.

A man in a knitted beanie, sitting nearby, hissed that the gunman had filmed the attack via a Go-Pro strapped to his helmet. “Come and see,” he invited. It was grainy footage, but showed the muzzle of a gun making its way across a green carpet. Humans who came into view were shot. The scene was strewn with blood and bodies, some prone but others crawling.

“It’s a hoax, maybe a video game?” I suggested, again naively.

The now-banned footage was genuine and the official death count reached 50.

We were in the cafe for hours, glued to the news and figuring out what to do. Christchurch was in lockdown and the gig was cancelled. The venue, Blue Smoke, was keen for us to live stream something about the attack in lieu of a performance. It was decided Shannon’s crew would drive directly on to Dunedin. Mikey’s – including Masha and I – would go to Christchurch.

En route we read passages of the gunman’s now-banned racist manifesto and Masha spoke of serial killers she’d met as fellow prisoners in Russian penal colonies. It was dark when we got to Blue Smoke.

A staff member set up his camera, to film Masha speaking from stage. “From my heart I want to express solidarity for those families, whose members have been killed today,” she began.

“[The gunman’s] message was full of hate. Unfortunately I’m living in a country where hate is very normal, and usually provided by the state. And … I just want you to overcome it because this is a way to nowhere.”

Plucking eucalyptus leaves and purple freesias from a Blue Smoke vase, Masha announced she wanted to visit the mosques. It was midnight and guarded cordons stopped us getting too close, but a cop outside Al Noor Masjid let us through to place Masha’s posy on the footpath. It was just the second of what would become a mountain of floral offerings.

Six of our crew then departed for Dunedin, arriving at dawn.

Saturday morning was logistical mayhem for those of us still in Christchurch. I’d planned to fly, then drive to Dunedin – but rentals were impossible to come by. A kind aunt ended up ferrying me down in her car.

Masha, already there, had been asked to speak at Otago University but the event was called off due to security concerns. Eager to do something, the Pussies took to the streets. They were welcomed in by the nation’s only cannabis museum, where stoned yet friendly folk offered their space for a film screening. That’s where we finally rendezvoused.

The films were of Pussy Riot’s early pop-up protests: their donning of bright summer dresses, tights, and balaclavas for short shouty spectacles. They’d perform atop buses, in subways, the snow, and at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. While the acts themselves seemed juvenile – women and men jumping about, making fun of Putin – the aftermaths were most important element to capture.

At the Winter Olympics, for instance, they were publicly horse whipped by Cossack militia. The filmmakers with us in Dunedin had documented welts appearing on Pussy Riot flesh in Sochi. Context was crucial to the end product: a video clip of each protest’s before, during and after, beamed out over the internet.

Calling Pussy Riot a band has always been wrong. They identify as political provocateurs, showing what happens to Russians who disagree – noisily – with repressive laws.

The cannabis museum was packed out that night and all koha collected was donated to families affected by the mosque shootings.

On Sunday, we attend a vigil outside Al Huda Mosque then road trip round the Otago Peninsula. More than the albatross, than Larnach Castle, Masha is enchanted by sheep. She whimpers imploringly as we pass, so I stop the rental car (finally picked up from Dunedin Airport on Saturday afternoon). She bounds out and over the fence.

“Privet!” Masha calls, Russian for “hello”. While sheep are clearly her spirit animal – they have the same blonde curls – the animals refuse to acknowledge this. They run and Masha returns dejected.

At a coffee stop she buys pita bread “for the sheeps”. It’s a bribe that I, a farmer’s daughter, suspect the average romney will shun. I’m proven right paddock after paddock.

You need patience, I tell her. To sit with them for a few hours. Their curiosity will overwhelm them and they’ll creep closer to nibble your dress. Masha was willing, but we’d have missed soundcheck.

On the winding rural road back to Dunedin, Masha speaks about life before Pussy Riot, how the group came to exist, and why it evolved.

The daughter of mathematicians, she was raised by her mother and grandmother in Moscow. When her classmates trooped off to university, Masha hitchhiked to the Black Sea with her boyfriend Nikita and a tent. Masha fell both pregnant and in love with an ancient forest called Utrish on their travels.

Back in Moscow the couple discovered Utrish was slated for development. She gave birth to Philip at age 18, enrolled in university, and began campaigning to save the forest. It was her first foray into activism.

Then she was introduced to the notorious anarchist-art collective Voina. Voina’s stunts were extreme and usually venereal: a mockhanging of homosexuals, public orgies, shoplifting via a vagina, painting a 65 metre long penis on a drawbridge. They started lending a hand to Masha’s environmental rallies, and the two movements mingled momentarily.

Nadya Tolokonnikova and her husband were part of Voina, but left and formed Pussy Riot with Masha. The new group pledged to protest their increasingly totalitarian government. Masha’s book opens with the rationale: “Filming a frozen chicken being pushed up a c... was good, but it wasn’t for a mass audience”.

Masha and her son’s father had split up by then, but were – and are – still close. Nikita, a yoga teacher, took over Philip’s full-time care when Masha was sent to jail. Now they parent him jointly. Masha says Philip (now aged 11) is the best person she’s ever met.

There is a photo of him in the Riot Days show, standing in snow outside Masha’s penal colony holding a sign that reads “let moms go”.

Riot Days the book is an unsentimental expose of penal colonies. Masha describes how inmates stuffed cracks in window frames with chewed-up bread and sanitary pads to keep out bitter winds, and had “naked Thursdays” – a weekly mass strip search for new tattoos. It also details how she defended the wasted victims of crocodile, a flesh eating drug, from abuse by guards. The befriending of “happy junkies, sly con artists, gypsies, robbers, [and] murderers”.

“If you hear someone talking about humane treatment in Russian prisons, block your ears,” Masha wrote.

“Even better, challenge it as the lie that it is.”

She launched hunger strikes and petitioned authorities to improve conditions. To her own surprise, there were wins. Warmer clothes appeared for the -30 degree winter, so did milk. A stinking pile of manure was removed from outside a workshop where women prisoners sewed police uniforms. The manure attracted swarms of insects and rats in the summer, which tormented the women.

Masha spent 21 months in penal colonies. Afterwards, she adjusted Pussy Riot’s spotlight to focus on prisoners’ rights as well as politics. Her and Nadya’s media organisation MediaZona and international tours serve that purpose, and Masha still gets locked up for staging protests around Russia.

We got back to downtown Dunedin just in time for a quick rehearsal. Minutes before the show, a uniformed policewoman entered the boutique brewery venue and asked if she could please get a photo with Masha. “I’m such a fan, she’s just so brave,” constable Leanne Benjamin gushed.

There have been many excited squeals, hugs, and eager selfies on the tour. Along with communities pulling together to see the Pussies sheltered and up on stage in their hometowns, people form snake-like queues after each show to get copies of Riot Days signed. At one middle-of-nowhere coffee stop, two women raced out of the local takeaways shop and announced they were “huge fans”.

The Pussies indulged them by climbing onto the roof of Shannon’s car, pulling off their tops, and spelling out the word “riot” with their bodies.

Why do Kiwi women fan-girl over Pussy Riot? Invercargill’s deputy mayor Bex Amundsen reckons its the example Masha sets of self sacrifice for the greater good.

She gets arrested, humiliated, and physically hurt on the regular in Russia, but appears to stay utterly unfazed. In most photos you see of Masha handcuffed to cops (there are many), her lips are in a wry little smile.

“She reminds me how lucky we are to have the freedom to stand up for what we believe in – without the risk of anything like Masha faces,” says Bex. “So I don’t know why we don’t do it more.”

Thinking about her Kiwi fanbase, Masha makes the same fond squeak she emits upon spying a sheep. She says Pussy Riot’s reception in their own land is “maybe 10 per cent of this at most”.

Even if a Russian cop did support the Pussy Riot kaupapa, she says he would never admit it in public. People are afraid to loudly speak their opinions “because they might lose their job, go to prison, get poisoned or even shot”. Masha believes this mentality was seeded under Stalin, in the Soviet era when millions of people  were killed by force and the Gulag system. She thinks the current government’s laws curtailing Russians’ speech and actions - with its harsh handling of dissenters - has both rewoken and reinforced that fear.

But you’re not scared? I ask her.

“No...”

Masha is uncomfortable when things get too navel-gazey. She’s neither saint nor oracle, just a punk who likes action and, speaking of which, the Pussies want to party after the brewery. When they discover Sunday nights in Dunedin are dead, they decide our hostel’s living room will do.

Beneath flashing Christmas lights and a precariously suspended kayak, the Pussies crank up Shakira. Briefly, a DIY strip club is in session. When the sultry music fades, Masha declares it time for the Spice Girls. Wannabe starts us bopping wholesomely through the pop of our 90s childhoods. Next up is Nirvana, gods of our early teens, to which we headbang with vigour. Radiohead’s Paranoid Android sends us to the fire escape for cigarettes and a stint of soul searching.

I return to the cliched question of why Masha stays in Russia.

“If everyone will leave Russia, Putin wins,” she replies. “I have this, let’s say privilege, to make changes. I want people to be less indifferent, less scared about everything. And this is a lot of work.”

We were in bed around 5am that Monday. As I woke up, three hours later, Shannon asked if I could remember how we’d left the living room.

“The hostel guy asked me if I knew who’d been in there last night,” she said. “He was like, ‘The lounge is pretty munted, eh.’”

After a tidy up, we made tracks for Invercargill. A local marae was waiting to welcome the Pussies, who’d already delved into Māori culture through hanging out at the Ihumātao stonefields in south Auckland.

Historically significant Ihumātao is being occupied by activists determined to stop it being developed into a housing estate.

Pussy Riot had marched with the Ihumātao crowd and hundreds of supporters in Wellington, before taking the ferry to Nelson. They marched up the stairs of parliament with a petition calling on the government to give the land to Māori. The experience impressed Masha.

“We cannot see or even imagine this situation in Russia,” she said. “Because if you even collect 10 people and go to Russian State Duma – Russia’s parliament in Moscow – in five minutes you will be arrested. You may face up to 15 years in jail.”

Invercargill’s Te Tomairangi Marae spoiled Pussy Riot with pikelets with jam; the Pussies gave thanks through an impromptu Russian folk song. Then they asked if, by any chance, anyone might know of a good place to swim.

“Hop in your cars, I’ll take you to Oreti!” cried a local, and off we careered to the beach.

It was most of the Russians’ penultimate full day in the country. That night’s gig at Invercagill’s Tuatara Lodge would be the final (public) shindig on the tour. The next day we’d drive up to Queenstown to catch a flight to Auckland.

Everyone, bar Masha and her boyfriend, would fly to Moscow on Wednesday, after a rollicking farewell party with Raspberry the dog at Sally’s place on Tuesday night. They filled their bags with big blocks of Mainland cheese - souvenirs from New Zealand - as decent dairy products are hard to come by in Russia. This is due to Putin’s ban on certain food imports from the European Union, sparked in retaliation for the EU imposing economic sanctions after his annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Masha and Dmitry stayed an extra week because Masha is currently banned from leaving Russia.

She knows the holes in her country’s borders and obviously escaped to get here, but such escapes can take longer than planned. As she was due at a writers’ festival in Ireland in early April, the couple decided to avoid getting trapped in Russia by flying directly to Dublin from Auckland.

Dmitry, 30, was the quietest yet smiliest Russian on tour, and has a handmade rubbish bin for cigarette butts – fashioned from a laboratory test tube – strapped to his belt. On the surface, his relationship with Masha seems incongruous; it began because Masha couldn’t resist befriending a man who’d bayed for her blood. Dmitry campaigned for Masha’s imprisonment back in 2012.

They’ve been sensationalised as an alt-right Romeo meets Antifa Juliet love story, and Masha looks pained when remembering the coverage. Dmitry got booted from his own radical Russian Orthodox Christian movement, God’s Will, for fraternising with Masha – but says he’d already ideologically moved away from it by the time they crossed paths at a party in late 2016. Masha says she, in turn, got a slew of “and did you know” emails from disapproving friends containing links to the group’s antics.

God’s Will’s mission is to attack anything blasphemous. Be it the slightly satanic Marilyn Manson (at whom Dmitry threw eggs), the Russian director of an Oscar Wilde play (whose name Dmitry wrote on a severed pig’s head and placed outside the Moscow Art Theatre), or Pussy Riot dancing on a church altar.

These days Dmitry’s activism combats communistic hangovers; he describes himself as a socially conservative libertarian in line with the thinking of former US presidential candidate Ron Paul. The Republican reckons a government should exist for national defence and the justice system, nothing more.

So Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime gives Dmitry plenty to rail against. Much of it identical to what Pussy Riot – who value freedom above all else – seek to lampoon. Russia, for the record, scores 20/100 in the Freedom of the World Index, one point above Venezuela and two points behind Egypt. New Zealand scores 98/100.

A year ago, the couple was arrested for tossing paper aeroplanes at the Federal Security Services building. They were protesting Government’s ban of the encrypted messaging service Telegram. Masha, the event’s organiser, was hit with 100 hours of community service and the travel ban.

Her community service is to clean the endless stairwells of towering Soviet era apartment blocks and that’s what she’ll be doing when she gets back to Moscow.

Masha and Dmitry still fight over issues they fought over from the start. We talk about some on our way through the black sand dunes of a west Auckland beach one evening. Feminist Masha defends a woman’s right to abortion while Dmitry describes himself as “extremely pro-life”. Abortion goes against what he sees as a human embryo’s right to not get killed. On the beach, Masha stamps her foot in dismay: “I wish you wouldn’t remind me of this,” she says.

The sun setting over the sea distracts her from abortions, and seduces the two of us into the water. Dmitry stays on dry land.

I don’t go far out, but am still sucked by the rip. Masha doesn’t have a cautious bone in her body and besides, is practically a mermaid; she vanishes. The waves are loud enough to drown both my screams to come back and her screams for help.

My toes eventually grip sand and I claw myself to shore. Masha’s not back, it’s dark, Dmitry is worried.

The surf life saving club is near the car park, about a kilometre away. I run there. While I’m running, strangers on the beach with a satellite phone (there is no reception at Bethells) call the emergency services.

At the clubhouse, lifeguards are speaking to the strangers on the beach. My knees give way when someone tells me Masha has made it out of the water.

She arrives by quad bike, ghostly and limp, wearing a man’s oilskin vest. She inhaled seawater and medics called her ordeal a “near drowning”. The oilskin gets replaced by a white sheet, worn toga-style, then policemen drive the two Russians and me to Waitematā Hospital.

In a hospital bed, Masha questions her theory: “OK, maybe six coffees and a swim won’t solve all problems,” she acknowledges. The wry little smile is back.

“I’m sorry. This was the only time in my life that I thought I would die.”

Later, the day she flies to Ireland, the Pussy Rioter reflects on her time in New Zealand. She reckons that – as with her protests in Russia – it’s aftermaths that count. Masha spoke of the inescapable love radiating for Muslims here in the wake of Christchurch’s mosque shootings. How nondescript West Auckland shops bore signs reading “As-salaam alaikum!” and “We are one”.

She said she felt a smaller-scaled but not dissimilar embrace from her “Kiwi family” after the near drowning.

“If you have sad moments, you remember something about love, something good. So now I have these moments from New Zealand,” Masha says.

Then she reiterates a comment made back at the beach. It was about her relationship with Dmitry being a testament to tolerance and is the same thing she said after the mosque massacre: “I think we should just agree to be able to live together with different views and not kill each other.”

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY
Amanda Saxton

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Robyn Edie and Braden Fastier

VIDEOGRAPHY
Jason Dorday

DESIGN & LAYOUT
Suyeon Son and Kathryn George