Wonderful and fascinating; it did take a little while to get into, I felt, but the perseverance was worth it.

This is an intriguing diary of political activist and Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina. It is heartfelt and almost despairing at times when Alyokhina describes the squalid conditions that she has to be imprisoned in after protesting in a church in Russia. However, her heroic efforts in jail even allowed her to gain some small victories, which makes her an activist through and through. From hunger strikes to taking prison guards to court, her determination should be lauded.

The copy that I received was unformatted making it a little difficult to follow new threads, but reading it as a journal definitely makes more sense as there are small blocks of personal day to day meanderings and quotes.

I picked up Riot Days as a memoir by one of the Pussy Riot group who were imprisoned in Russia for protesting. I had hoped to better understand their experience but unfortunately the structure of the book didn't work for me. 
Initially I was trying to read the Advanced copy via my kindle app and I wondered if the formatting was making it difficult to read so I switched to a PDF version which was easier but still strange. 
Each chapter was split into short sections with bold headings but I couldn't work out the placement of these because sometimes they seemed to relate to what had been written before and sometimes to what came next. 
The text itself was almost like a cross between poetry and prose with short paragraphs and a disjointed style, more like a stream of consciousness. It left me very confused about what was happening as timelines crossed.  
There were a few illustrations used, and I'm not sure if these were drawn by Maria but they were very childish and I don't think they added anything to the narrative. 
The final two chapters were the most informative and seemed to be more linearly structured. In these Maria shares with us how she challenged the injustices in the prison she was in through her legal representation and made life better for the inmates.
The start didn't really help me understand exactly what the initial protest was for and so I experienced a disconnect with her plight , which was undoubtedly traumatic. To be honest it left me wanting to go back and read news items about it instead. I wonder if this is a case of lost in translation. 

I did spot this quote though which spoke to me. Make good choices people. 

"There is no certainty or predictability. There is no fate. There is a choice. My choice and yours, in each moment that demands it."

This is certainly unusual both in its subject matter and in its style which is hard to access. The right to stand up against the Russian government is a given but it is unfortunate it was in an eccentric cause. It hardly seems worth sacrificing the upbringing and happiness of her son for such a limited cause.

This is an account of Maria Alyokhina's time in the Russian Criminal system.

In 2013, she and other members performed a “punk prayer” challenging the Orthodox Church and its support of Putin.  As a result, all three were put on trial with two being sent to prison,  Maria Alyokhina was one of them.

This is her story.

I found, at times, that this was difficult to follow.  Maybe it had lost its way when translated.  Otherwise, the descriptions were vivid and it is an interesting story.

I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are all my own and completely unbiased.  My thanks to NetGalley for this opportunity.

It's interesting to hear Maria's side of the story rather than just the media's interpretation of the events that happened. However it definitely seems like it's translated badly (or could it be the edit?) and some bits I had to read two or three times to make sense of them and even then I sometimes just had to move on. It's a short memoir so something that would only take a couple of hours or maybe a Day but it was hard work to get through it due to the edit/mistranslation. I studied a small proportion of Russian history as part of history at school and found it interesting so it's interesting to read about how things are now. You'd almost hope that there was freedom of speech widely available but it's not like that all. I received this book free from Netgalley for an honest review and it came out last week.

All in all, that was a very insightful read.
I had no idea of the oppressive political landscape, the political entanglement with religion, and the ongoing fight for freedom and a revolution that Russians like Maria Alyokhina and Nadya Tolokno engage in.

“A narrow sliver of light in a huge field of injustice and mistreatment”

The story itself is imbedded with engaging poetry excerpts, song lyrics, and quotes.
And although I believe Maria achieved what she set out to achieve, namely documenting her ordeals and ideals whilst portraying her strong desire to make change happen and her unwillingness to waiver from her believes, I would have loved for the story to be a little more emotional. To really understand what was going through Maria’s mind, to better appreciate the sacrifices she continually made and the risks she took with the decisions she stuck to.

“If you dream alone, the dream remains only a dream, but if you dream with others, you create reality”

Great and quick read. Thanks for opening my eyes.
Thanks NetGalley and Penguin Books for a review copy.

Now I know that 5 stars disguises the difficulties in the writing style and at times the lack of structure but it reflects more the person, that is Maria Alyokhina and her struggle inside the Russian penal system.
She came to my attention on Radio 2, when I caught the end of her interview with Jeremy Vine. I had already requested this book as I had previously been a great reader of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his famous account "The Gulag Archipelago" about the Soviet forced labor camp system. I wanted to compare a modern day account of a political prisoner.
What I didn't appreciate was that the author's notority and custodial sentence surrounded her involvement with the punk group 'Pussy Riot' and their infamous playing in a Moscow cathedral.
Before I began to read this personal account, I listened again to the radio download of her interview in full which is part of a series I think about what it is to be human.
Her declaration and subsequent answers to the questions about her interment greatly impressed me and made any difficulties associated with the advanced reading copy of little concern.
No doubt the finished published book will appear more coherent and hopefully sell in its millions. I can not comprehend her self determination to see that protest is what makes us human and if we just comply we lose our identity and appear as machines.
I loved the honesty of this book, the lack of ego and self promotion. I loved her concern and inclusion of others from the prisoners to the guards and jailers. Her spirit is a crative force and could not be broken, yet the book reads not as a tribute to her resilience but that of those prisoners who do not face the prospect of an early release.
I guess the establishment sees such individuals as radical elements in a society, undermining the status quo. I guess through punk and music she has grown into the woman she is, a political activist and seeker of justice for others.
I am not sure how she is universally received from Human Rights organisations to Amnesty International. She clearly has no time for Putin's regime but as a person I can not judge her on her politics but on her humanity. Which I commend to you as you read this book for yourself.

I didn’t know what to make of this book when I requested it to read from NetGalley. Then leave an honest review after you have read it. But I am glad I did. After hearing Maria Alyokhina on the Jeremy Vine show I checked my kindle downloads and started to read Riot Days by Maria Alyokhina. 
This book may only have a few pages but it gives you a strong account of the Pussy Riot that happened in Russia in 2012. 
This book is raw, gripping and contains Maria’s personal account of what happened to her.  Three of the group were caught and then put on trial. Two of them were jailed. Maria served 2 years sentence and started a bitter struggle against the Russian prison system and an iron-willed refusal to be deprived of her humanity. Maria is a very strong young lady and I wish her all the best for her future.
It is a shocking book and contains some shocking language but Please don’t be put off! This account of history of what happened in 2012 in Russia need to be heard. 

Reviews on https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2123692350
and AMAZON UK.

Way back in 2012, Pussy Riot hit the headlines. Doubtless assisted by their memorable name, this group of masked women interrupted a church service in Moscow to protest against Vladimir Putin. Three of the group were caught and put on trial, two of them were jailed.

This is the story of Maria Alyokhina, one of the jailed women.

Riot Days is a short book, covering the lead up to the protest, the protest itself, a brief spell on the run, the trial and the prison colonies. Alyokhina narrates in a somewhat clipped, jerky fashion. Especially at the start, there is a real lack of any sense of why she and her colleagues are doing what they are doing, They don't like Putin, but there is no hint of why they don't like him. It is an almost childlike push back against authority for no reason. 

This continues through the trial and prison. Alyokhina rebels against everything. She argues and pushes back in a system in which to do so has always been counter-productive. And always it seems to be without particular reason. A battle fought over a padlock that has been imposed because of a refusal to follow an instruction. Although this defies explanation, it lifts an otherwise ordinary retelling of the Gulag Archipelago to a new level. We see how a system manages to both live by an unbending framework of rules and make things up as it goes along. It is Kafkaesque, but very real. And there is a fascinating portrait of someone who is contrary regardless of consequence - and what happens when she takes on the monolithic system.

In honesty, this is not a great piece of writing. It is clunky, linear and ends abruptly. But it is so compelling it is hard to turn away.

I really liked this- I've been following the actions of Pussy Riot for years so was anxious to read this and it's certainly worth it. The lack of efficiency in the system, the barrage of human rights abuses in prisons, the breadth of travel across Russia to be dropped in awful conditions for the sake of singing a jokey tune in a church is an overt exercise of power. Masha's story is built on her own feminism and her determination to criticise a church and government that work hand in hand to reduce the rights of others. This is really worth the read, notably because Masha continued, while in prison, to fight for her fellow prisoners using her own 'political' status to improve their rights- even when it made her unpopular. Her spirit of resistance is monumental.

The book is written in what at first glance looks like the style of a Beatles publication, but it has a context and socio-political background that are rather different. Maria Alyokhina tells the story of Pussy Riot, and the massive Russian government state retribution that followed its appearance, in a light-hearted yet penetrating series of narrative fragments and flashes, with effective interjections of text from the transcript of the court proceedings. The almost unreal quality of the pre-trial days is summed up in the author's exasperation: "giving an interview over Skype while wearing a balaclava and sitting in a cafe without ordering anything is weirder than ordinarily sitting in a cafe without ordering anything." The later sections, with their portrayal of life in a penal colony, are at times reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn, while the women's struggle with the recalcitrant and macho prison guards extends a theme familiar from the writings of Irina Ratushinskaya. Perhaps the most moving moments are the ones in which the Soviet dissident tradition is invoked - a constant theme throughout the book, with references and quotations that embrace such figures as Mandelstam, Bukovsky and Podrabinek. Yet Alyokhina's style has a freshness and originality that are all their own. 

"When Pussy Riot performed on Lobnoye Mesto, we unfurled a violet flag: the Venus mirror symbol, a clenched fist in the centre. There were eight of us, like the eight dissidents in 1968.." 

Thus, far from being just an ephemeral manifestation of pop culture, Pussy Riot is firmly linked to the Soviet/Russian and East European dissident mainstream. This is perhaps the book's most important feature, and the one that recommends it most of all to a global readership.

I am sure we all remember the trouble that surrounded the feminist/ political activist punk/Avant Garde collective from Moscow.  Here we are taken back to those days as Maria Alyokhina presents us with her account of the times leading up to her arrest, the actual incident that caused it, and then onto her incarceration.

Of course, Maria was not the only member of the collective to be arrested and charged, and then imprisoned, but the girls were broken up so they did not serve sentences at the same place.  Prosecuted for religious hatred we all know that this was not really the case, it was more for their political outspokenness.  In this country and many others, they may have got a fine and been bound over to keep the peace, after all with their costumes and not very good performances they are hardly dangerous, just likely to be complained about because of their singing.

In Russia however, things are slightly different.  To be honest looking at the country you can see that certain things never changed even when the Czarist regime was overthrown, and so we see a penal system that hasn’t really altered that much over the centuries.  Although as such there aren’t really political arrests in Russia, well not officially we can see this is not the case in reality, especially when talking out about Putin and the way the country is run.

We thus have a quite naïve group of young ladies finding themselves in deep waters.  At times, this reads like a piece of absurdism as we read of the trial, and some of the experiences in prison.  However, we also see the realities of being locked up as a political as well as a normal prisoner in these current times.

As Maria goes on fighting the system from inside so we see the trouble that she causes, and also the effects that she can positively at times gain for herself and others.  Hardly high literature, and written in a rather frenetic style this does have a certain freedom and energy in the writing.  What makes this so gripping is not only the style, but also the way that we see that really putting someone like Maria in prison is rather like shooting yourself in the foot.

Standing up for your rights, overcoming adversity and authoritarian leaders are the rights we take for granted, and this book reminds us of how important our human rights are.

I was kindly provided with a review copy of this by the publisher via NetGalley for reviewing purposes.

This is Maria Alyokhina, a feminist and member of the  punk band, Pussy Riot's story. She and other members of her band protest in a church and she tells us in her own unique way about her arrest, her 2 year sentence, having to leave her young son and prison life. An interesting political story.

In this exceptional memoir, former Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina recounts the run up to and aftermath of the performance that had her arrested for "hooliganism" in 2012, documenting her time on the run, her arrest, trial and subsequent incarceration in a number of human-rights flouting prisons and penal colonies. Writing in stark and yet intensely poetic prose, she explores her experiences as an uncompromising dissident, a member of a collective, a fierce human rights activist, a friend, a mother. Strength and sheer will permeate this text and it is impossible not to be moved, impressed, downright astounded by Alyokhina's resilience, fortitude and clarity in the face of oppressive adversity. You really need to read this.

I loved this book.  If you want to be inspired to take action against an oppressive political system, look no further.  Alyokhina’s memoir reads like one long prose poem.  Her words elicit strong emotions in the reader, outrage, a yearning for freedom, and a desire to rise up and join the revolution.

Maria Alyokhina is a founding member of Pussy Riot, the punk band whose widely covered protest against the collusion of the Russian Orthodox Church with Vladimir Putin landed several of its members in prison.  Alyokhina was sentenced to two years in prison for her role in the protest.   While this book does cover, in a small way, the planning of and the execution of the protest, most of it is spent on the trial and her incarceration.  Alyokhina seems most proud, not of the protest itself, but of the improved conditions her savvy use of Russia’s legal system, and her own notoriety, won for the women she was incarcerated with in a prison complex in the taiga.  

Many of the conditions she details are so horrible, it makes one wonder if the infamous Soviet gulags were ever shut down at all.  From Alyokhina’s description, it appears they continued to run under the false guise of regular prisons purporting to follow a regulated penal code.  In actuality, the women in the prison camps are subject to the whims of the guards and live in freezing, torturous conditions.  Alyokhina butts heads with the guards in her prison for oversleeping.  Prisoners are not allowed to sleep in their cells during the day and must rise immediately when the guard wakes them up a 5:20 am, even though they will then have to spend hours sitting or standing in their cell doing absolutely nothing.  

As a “political,” Alyokhina feels it is her duty to fight against the unjust conditions the women live in.  She refuses to plead guilty to ‘violating the regimen,’ saying of her choice to fight:

“Such moments of choice, made in prison, will stay with you for the rest of your life.  The decisions become the most important ones you ever make.  Because you can’t forget anything you do here within the prison walls.  Once you betray yourself, even a single time, you can’t stop.  You become another person, a stranger to yourself.  You become a prisoner.  And that means you have been defeated.  They will have truly deprived you of your freedom.”

This is the stuff teenage girls should read to feel empowered, not the Hunger Games.

'We wrote and, letter by letter, we became a revolutionary statement'

Arrested for 'hooliganism' in a Moscow cathedral, this is Alyokhina's account of her arrest, trial and 2-year imprisonment in penal camps in the Urals. Young, intellectual, self-aware, her writing is fragmented yet vivid, locating itself alongside other texts of repression and institutional absurdity (1984, The Trial): 'officially there are no political prisoners in the Russian criminal justice system. But, in official quarters, they called me a 'political' - a political prisoner, that it.'

Impressionistic, angry,  absolutely committed and unrepentant, not without a black sense of humour, Alyokhina confronts modern Russia head-on and refuses to step down: 'Freedom doesn't exist unless you fight for it every day.' An important proponent of where art, feminism and activism coalesce.

Alyokhina is not a writer but has a strong voice and describes her experiences with humour and anger.  This short memoir describes the protest she went to prison for, her trial and life in prison.  She inspires with her defiant politics in the face of grinding bureaucracy and arbitrary abuse.