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Pussy Riot Protesters Sent to Prison Camps

As Miriam Elder reports for The Guardian, the protest group Pussy Riot announced on its Twitter feed Monday that two jailed members of the all-female collective, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Maria Alyokhina, 24 - both mothers of young children - have been sent to penal colonies to serve their sentences.

The women were sentenced to two years in jail for bursting into Moscow's main cathedral in February and performing a song calling on the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Vladimir Putin. A third member of the group was released after an appeal hearing this month.

A lawyer for the two women confirmed the news to Agence France-Presse, saying, “Nadya Tolokonnikova has been sent to Mordovia, and Maria Alyokhina to Perm.” The group's brief statement described Perm and Mordovia as “the harshest camps of all the possible choices.”

As Marina Lapenkova of AFP explained:

The Perm region, where temperatures can fall as low as minus 50 degrees Celsius in winter, housed Stalin-era labour camps, one of which has been turned into a museum about the history of political repression.

Mordovia is a region dotted with lakes that is chiefly known for its prison camps dating back to the Stalin era.

Years after the Soviet gulag, conditions in Russia's penal colonies remain notoriously harsh, as my colleague Andrew Kramer reported two years ago.

Ms. Elder notes in her report that both women “had petitioned to serve their sentences in Moscow, arguing that they wanted to be close to their children. Alyo khina has a five-year-old son named Filipp, while Tolokonnikova has a four-year-old daughter named Gera.”

Ms. Tolokonnikova's young daughter traveled to the United States last month along with her father, the activist Pyotr Verzilov, to lobby Congress to pass legislation that would impose sanctions on Russian officials involved in human rights abuses. The four-year-old's experience in Washington, where she and her father were feted by rights groups, and sat next to Aung San Sui Kyi at one event, was featured recently in the independent Russian documentary series, “Srok,” or “The Term,” which charts the opposition movement in episodes posted on YouTube.

An episode of a Russian documentary, “Srok,” or The Term,” charting Russia's opposition movement, focused on the experi ence of the young daughter of a jailed member of the protest group Pussy Riot.

Alya Kirillova, the producer of the observational documentary, who also shot the video of the young girl's trip to Washington, told The Lede in an instant-message interview this month that she and her colleagues are following the various strands of Russia's opposition movement to try to understand the potential leaders better. “We neither chronicle protest rallies nor make news reports. We record the thoughts and emotions of those leaders. We want to understand where they lead us. What they call us up for,” Ms. Kirillova wrote.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.