From a nefarious russian to a cam girl
Commodification of dissent: How Nadya of Pussy Riot joined the Clergy of the Mall
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We are having an event in San Francisco on August 12th, and I’m going to screen my short film D8DDY — a dark comedy about the first journalist on OnlyFans. It made me want to write a little bit about one of the inspirations for the film — Nadya Tolokonnikova.
She is maybe the most famous cultural export from Russia to the West in the last 20 years. She was an international celebrity at one point, and she is still probably one of the most recognizable Russians alive — behind Putin. It’s a bit weird to write it out like that. But it’s true. And the thing is, I have a weird relationship to her, even though we never personally met. We were born just a few weeks apart, went to Moscow State University at the same time, our friend networks overlapped, and both of us eventually ended up living in LA.
The first time I heard about her was around 2007 when my former high school classmate S, who was studying philosophy at MSU, told me she befriended a cool group of people who lived in a squat, stole from stores, and did art performances. They were an art group and called themselves VOYNA — “WAR”. S also said there was a very beautiful girl among them, Nadya, that she really liked. A year forward, and S almost got kicked out of the university because she was a photographer at VOYNA’s happening at Moscow’s biological museum, where several couples from the group stripped naked and attempted to fuck in front of some exhibit about the anatomy of bears.
It was a sort of tasteless but funny political performance that was a response to Dmitry Medvedev’s running for president. Medvedev was Putin’s right-hand man and appointed heir to power. And Putin’s administration had recently launched a nativist campaign to pay couples who had more than one child — all in an attempt to reverse the collapse in Russian birthrates that had started happening during the looting and privatizations of the 1990s. VOYNA’s response to all this was to say how fucked Russia was and to go and try to fuck in the museum in front of a banner that read: “FUCK FOR THE HEIR PUPPY BEAR.” What made the whole thing radical rather than kind of sad-looking is Nadya. She was nine months pregnant — and that image was one that really riled people up. How could a mother-to-be do something like that?And it was shocking. No other performance artists were active in Russia or doing anything interesting publicly at the time.
There was a bit of outrage about this action and a few of the participants got expelled from the university when news of it spread. But nothing more serious happened. The eXile, where Yasha worked at the time, was the first big media outlet to write about it, and tried to put the story on the cover of one of their issues. But the newspaper printer in Moscow refused to put it through their printing press. It was the first political censorship in new Russia…and a sign of what was coming.
Then, a few years later, Nadya formed Pussy Riot with a few other women. It was vaguely inspired by Riot Grrrl, and after doing a few performances like singing in Red Square in balaclavas, they struck it big by doing a mock punk performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. This caused a huge scandal among people in Russia — not just the government but regular people — who saw it as sacrilegious. Eventually, two of the participants — Nadya and Masha — were sentenced to two years in prison for it. That made Nadya internationally famous. To people around the world, she became the face of a different Russia…a Russia that was opposed to Putin and which was western and young and relatable. And on top of that, she possessed an effortless beauty and cool. She exchanged letters with Žižek, Madonna wore a balaclava and expressed support during her concert in Moscow, other Western celebrities would bring up Pussy Riot during their concerts all over the world. While Nadya was in jail, Pussy Riot became a world famous brand. And she also seemed to not lose her spirit in prison. She protested bad working conditions in the women’s colony, went on hunger strikes, and wrote open letters describing the violations of prisoners’ rights.
When she got out, she did an interview the same day with the main Russian media vampire, Ksenia Sobchack, goddaughter of Putin. Despite the fact that Nadya was just being released from prison, Sobchak was quite nasty in the interview. Her whole angle was: “Well now that you’re famous, what are you going to do? How are you going to leverage your fame and your brand?” She asked her about what she thinks the Pussy Riot brand is worth and if Nadya had plans regarding her singing career, like going on tour and doing concerts. Nadya was taken aback by it. And I remember thinking at the time that these questions were inappropriate and cynical. And yet Sobchak’s questions ended up being spot on and prophetic. Being an opportunistic media player herself, Sobchak saw the angles very clearly. She saw where this was likely to go.
The girls did start their own media outlet Mediazona and an advocacy group Zona Prava (Zone of Rights), which focused on prisoners’ rights, helped fight for better prison conditions, and focused on the unfairness of the Russian judicial system and the horrible treatment of people caught in it.
But the political activism soon began to recede. Nadya along with Masha — for whom no one seemed to care because of her lesser looks — toured around America, met Hillary Clinton and many other liberal luminaries. Masha started doing theatrical performances and art shows, but mostly in Europe. And Nadya got a record deal with an American music label, played shows, and started making music videos in English. None of what she was doing was very popular with regular people even in America. There was no organic appeal to it. But it was a hit with the New York Times crowd — and the paper would cover every one of her music video releases like it was a huge news item. Every song was a powerful act of resistance against Putin (and then Trump).
Nadya would do talks around America and Europe, and I by accident even caught her appearing as a headliner at the libertarian convention in DC in 2016 when I was pursuing my ill-fated doc film on Russian libertarians. On stage, she told everyone that she was a Bernie supporter…and got some boos. But the crowd loved her anyway. She was a fighter against totalitarianism.
It seemed that for some years after being released from prison, Nadya split her time between Moscow and LA and continued to participate in oppositional politics in Russia, making music videos there and art happenings. But the thing is, not many Russians were interested in it. Outside of a small liberal circle, not only did people not care for her art but they often found it senseless and offensive. It wasn’t just Russian Orthodox believers who weren’t into her. Regular people, even those opposed to Putin, thought it was crass and counterproductive to desecrate a church.
Her fame and impact were always bigger abroad — where she came off as a glorious woman single-handedly fighting evil Putin. It seemed she was particularly loved by liberal boomers. She probably reminded them of their youth and the 1960s. Nadya was a lib rad fem icon, a Gloria Steinem kind of gal. But a Gloria Steinem who is totally focused on the evils of one man.
Her singular focus on Putin could get a little weird. Like with her “Putin’s Ashes” performance, which she did as part of her solo show for the Jeffrey Deitch gallery, where she and other women burned a huge portrait of Vladimir Putin in the Mojave Desert. There seemed to be an almost erotic obsession with Putin on her end. He did make her career in America possible, after all. So the psychic connection may truly be real — and very strong.
“Everyone who participated in the performance needed to have this strong and psychic energetic relationship with Vladimir Putin,” Tolokonnikova told Artnet News.
With no real base of support in Russia, it made sense that Nadya eventually made a full move to LA. But despite her having a label deal and periodic art shows, her financial stability only started with OnlyFans.
OnlyFans is natural for a famous, beautiful woman. And celebrities, especially the second tier and over-the-hill types, are increasingly on OnlyFans. So Nadya didn’t really stand out. She had a strong brand and she was cashing in. At the same time, she could still be a Russia expert that would be invited to comment on politics on CNN, MSNBC, write op-eds for the establishment, and do talks at art museums.
Nadya seemed to have it all: fame, money, respect. The last puzzle in her American dream was an American man, and she found one, a crypto millionaire surfer from the Pacific Palisades. She became a Russian trophy wife. Smart, beautiful, and famous! And independent — she still runs her OnlyFans. Her wedding, of course, was covered by the New York Times.
So now she lives in Palisades and does her art — art that looks more like kids’ crafts. And then she does photoshoots for OnlyFans. There’s a strange quality to her costumes and videos. It’s like she’s got this abused teenager vibe. It reminds me of the Bad Uncle girl in Nathan Barley.
Her activity on the porn site has only intensified, and she even has a kind of reality TV show on OnlyFans TV— something that I had no idea even existed! Now she regularly does little programs about her life, about the kind of men she likes, what turns her on and of course about the art that she is making now. Sometimes she actually makes the art on cam while dressed sexy as a dominatrix.
I get it, she is sex positive. She is in charge of her sexuality. She literally charges for it — some horny losers pay her $20 a month plus tips to jerk off to her semi-naked pics. She says it’s all part of her plan to fight the patriarchy. Right. Men who look at her racy photos and then her radical anarchist ideas will definitely turn into Pyotr Kropotkin. Sure thing.
She has a 17-year-old daughter who in a year could maybe join family business? She wouldn’t be the first. Denise Richard’s daughter did it. Nepo OnlyFans creators is a thing. But it’s not ballsy if you are a rich and famous media woman. Sex work is not work in this case. It’s just another area of turning your looks into a commodity…and a quickly devalued commodity. And it’s not clear how “empowering” and “anti-patriarchy” it all is when 20% of your earnings go to a shady Ukrainian-Jewish pimp billionaire. Rumor on the street that he’s in talks to sell his e-pimp business for $8 billion.
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The reason I’m retelling Nadya’s story is not because I’m critical of her personally. She seems like a nice and genuine person. She’s pure in a way, not cynical. No, her trajectory captures something bigger about our age.
Her story is very Black Mirror to me. In fact, you could easily imagine an episode inspired by her in the series. She also reminds me of the pretty girl in an early BM episode called 15 Million Merits, who got out of the drudgery of life and joined the stars on TV but is made to do porn instead of singing, as she initially wanted, because her singing is too average. That episode also shows what commodification of dissent looks like in the modern world. The main character of that episode, Bing, even reminds me a bit of Yasha’s moral struggle within the influencer world. A genuine desire to resist the system brings you attention and fame and just incorporates you into it. Isn’t it what being successful with a radical podcast, YouTube show, or Substack is nowadays? You say or write your “radical message” and then log off to go live the nice life that is possible only to a few. But it’s a life you built thanks to your success in the market of ideas as a radical journalist/activist… It’s all virtual in the end. The fights happen inside a VR game, like in Black Mirror. And we don’t even notice that there is something fishy about it all. We are too merged with the system. It’s not unlike the pod that connects to our spinal cord in David Cronenberg’s Existenz. It’s all a game that ultimately is measured in number of subscribers and virtual fights one wins.
[In Adam Curtis voice] “What they didn’t know is that Internet — the very thing that promised them freedom from a rigid hierarchical system — is a product of that very system. What they thought was empowerment was thactually the giving up of all personal power.”
Jordan Peele cast Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out because of his speech in the Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits"
In the end, Nadya fully joined the American liberal media-political establishment. And its allure is understandable. They make her feel she is fighting a good fight against an evil Putin. She’s praised, given a chance to work, gets to hang out with top liberal celebrities and politicians. But there is a cost and major limitation involved. Nadya plays a role — a supportive role — in their political world: to shore up faith in the American system…to lowkey sell the idea that it is the only possible world. She is the updated equivalent of a Soviet dissident who is beloved in America only because they talk about the evil oppressiveness of the USSR. And it’s really not an interesting or even believable proposition anymore. The US has no credibility on this, and all the liberal pussy hat protests against Trump — which Nadya has joined and added to her “pussy” brand — only underline the emptiness of the liberal promise. The liberals made Trump possible. It was the liberal establishment that oversaw the looting of America in the same way they green-lit the looting of Russia by backing Yeltsin and, at first, Putin. We talked about this recently in our conversations with Greg Grandin and John Ganz. And yet liberals are ready to blame Putin and Trump for the crack-up of America. And Nadya is right there with them, supporting them with her looks, her voice, her “art”.
Nadya joined the libs. Her art is now basically art for Kamala voters. And as a result, her underground artist cred has completely evaporated. She produces the most boring boomer crap — all of it centered on that one anti-Putin church performance she did over a decade ago: pussy shirts, furry pussy paintings, Putin portraits, and now anti-Trump merch. She’s become a cliché of a dissident — a cliché that is hard to escape.
Even in her OnlyFans, Nadya constantly references her time in Russian prison as part of her mythology — a hot, strong grrrl in a totalitarian prison (fight the patriarchy!) — which she sells to horny male subscribers. She literally puts old videos from her trial and imprisonment into her erotic montages, using this one heroic episode of her biography to make money. It is a textbook example of commodification of dissent. And it’s hard to find it empowering or cool, unless you are a brainwashed, dimwitted American boomer still stuck in the media images and narratives of the 1960s counterculture. But that’s her core audience, and she’s monetizing her one brush with fame to the fullest, and selling it to the only audience that’s buying — just like Ksenia Sobchak predicted Nadya would do.
And it keeps going. Just this summer, Nadya did a Marina Abramović-type show at MOCA in LA where she spent ten days in the glass cell that recreated her prison environment in Russia while making experimental electronic music. Thirteen years have passed since she got thrown in jail, and that’s still her calling card? This is the event she wants to aestheticize to entertain the LA art crowd? She claims she is a devoted activist who, as she says, “fights Putin with her art.” She’s not. She’s not fighting Putin. If anything, she’s shoring up his power domestically by associating herself with American deep state and only proving to the people in Russia that the opposition is funded by the West. Nadya sold out to power — okay, not Russian power, but U.S. power. But is standing with Biden is so much more honorable than standing with Putin?
Many common Russians — if they heard of her at all — were offended and angry by her sacrilegious happening at the church. And I guarantee that many Americans would react similarly if she tried to do the same kind of performance in her adopted home. Say…she invaded some church to protest Trump. Or a synagogue with a pussy punk prayer to protest Israel’s massacre in Gaza. America is a very religious Puritan place — much more so than Russia. Would anyone in the establishment embrace and champion a person who would desecrate a church for politics? I don’t think so. But as long as she does it elsewhere — as long as she does it in a place that is demonized and not respected…that’s fine.
Despite her current fame, it’s really hard not to think that since she separated from Petr Verzilov, her first husband and a member of VOYNA, she hasn’t been able to produce anything memorable or even witty. Her solo career stopped at Pussy Riot and so naturally culminated in an OnlyFans, reliving the only successful thing she did: doing prison time in Russia that launched her to the stars and without which her current life would’ve been impossible. So maybe she does have to thank Putin, and she does in her own way by obsessively focusing on him.
This isn’t the only way. Petr Pavlensky, another famous political performance artist from Russia, offers a counter-example. You might remember him as the guy who stapled his balls to the Red Square, sewed his lips shut, cut off his ear, and wrapped himself in barbed wire…
He was toasted in Western media for his brave artistic opposition to Putin’s rule. But it wasn’t Putin he was protesting. He was protesting all unjust systems. When he had to flee Russia and got asylum in France, he continued the same kind of protests. In Paris, he set fire to the Bank of France, saying “the Banque de France has taken the place of the Bastille, and bankers have taken the place of monarchs.” In France, he got a three-year jail term for desecrating a bank — more than what Nadya got for desecrating a church. The point, though, is that Pavlensky didn’t commodify his dissent by joining the other side. In an interview a few years back, he addressed the difference between him and Nadya. He said he had a principled position regarding “opposing power in Russia and in the West too, unlike Pussy Riot who just happily joined the other master”. And Pavlensky got prison time again a few years later for posting footage of a French politician masturbating… Meanwhile, at an event in LA right before the last presidential election, Nadya was urging everyone to vote for Biden. And also, to the question about Israel committing genocide during her last year talk about evil Putin at The Wende Museum, she just said that she thinks the hostages should be released first. Basically, she believes what Israel is doing is justified. So much for the radical politics — so much for being against “The Man.”
What else to say here? Well, just there’s something very tragic about Nadya’s story. Sure, on paper, she has won at life. She’s beautiful and famous, respected, has a wealthy, good-looking husband, and lives in Pacific Palisades, a place that’s as close to heaven on earth as you can get. And yet there is a haunted quality to her media life. She is trapped in the Vampire Castle, cursed to forever replay that one event that made her famous years ago. Over and over and over again…until she is too old to wear a thong.
—Evgenia
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Sad to see this end for pussy riot, I appreciated the shock at the time of their performance. Tasteless or not, it was refreshing Id thought. Great to see Pavlensky is sticking to his moral viewpoints. Thanks Evgenia!
Thank you for this critique of Pussy Riot Evegenia! I was so sick of their performative bullshit even back in the 2010s and I'm not surprised in the least about her recent gimmicks. American liberals are so clueless about Russia they go for any petty rubbish as long as its "anti-Putin". This is the first time I'm hearing about Pavlensky, I'm ashamed to say. He sounds like a true dissenter. Thank you for mentioning him.