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Book Summary and Reviews of Political Girl by Maria Alyokhina

Political Girl by Maria Alyokhina

Political Girl

Life and Fate in Russia

by Maria Alyokhina

  • Published:
  • Dec 2025, 480 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From a member of the Pussy Riot collective: An urgent, intimate, firsthand account of grassroots dissent, bravery, art, and spectacle in Putin's Russia

Picking up where Riot Days left off, Maria (Masha) Alyokhina takes us through her activist experiences between 2014 to 2022. In vivid, diary-like vignettes, we follow her as she goes in and out of Russian prisons, continually dodges police violence, protests at the Sochi Olympics, flies to Kyiv to stand in solidarity with Ukraine, defends the high-level dissident Alexi Navalny, drops banners at Trump Tower, and—in 2022—flees from Russia in disguise to escape a new prison sentence.

Spanning settings from Moscow to London to New York to Harvard, Political Girl has an artistic sensibility, a punk ethos, a deep moral clarity, and an inimitably dry Russian wit. It portrays not only Masha's political activities but also her personal arc: the friends she makes in prison, the woman she falls in love with, her bond with her young son Filip, and her deep passion for art and history. As Trump attempts to bring Putin-style authoritarianism to the U.S., Masha's message to Americans is one of solidarity and hope.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Irreverent, urgent, and illuminating, this bold account offers American readers an invaluable window into contemporary Russia. It's a winner." —Publishers Weekly

This information about Political Girl was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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More Information

Maria (Masha) Alyokhina is a political activist, artist and member of the Pussy Riot collective. She is a recipient of the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace and has also been awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

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