2 Members of Pussy Riot Freed Under Amnesty Law

  Two women from the punk group Pussy Riot serving two-year prison terms for staging a protest performance against President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral were released on Monday under a new amnesty law.

The case of Maria Alyokhina, who was set free from a prison in the western city of Nizhny Novgorod on Monday morning, and her co-defendant, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who was released later in the day in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, had drawn international condemnation of Russia’s human rights record. Critics said their prosecution and relatively stiff sentences represented a brutal repression of free speech.

In a telephone interview on Monday, Ms. Alyokhina said she did not want amnesty and that officials had forced her to leave the prison. She said that the amnesty program was designed to make Mr. Putin look benevolent, and that she would have preferred to serve the remainder of her sentence.

“I think this is an attempt to improve the image of the current government, a little, before the Sochi Olympics — particularly for the Western Europeans,” she said. “But I don’t consider this humane or merciful.”

She added, “This is a lie.”

“We didn’t ask for any pardon,” said Ms. Alyokhina. “I would have sat here until the end of my sentence because I don’t need mercy from Putin.” The women had been jailed since March 2012 and would have been released within the next three months.

On Thursday, hours after the adoption of the amnesty law, Mr. Putin said that he would also grant clemency to Russia’s most famous prisoner, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former Yukos oil tycoon. Mr. Khodorkovsky was released from a penal colony in northern Russia later that night and flown to Berlin, where he held a news conference on Sunday.

While Mr. Putin has described the amnesty law and Mr. Khodorkovsky’s pardon as efforts to make the Russian criminal justice system more humane, it has also underscored his singular authority in this country and, to critics, the very arbitrariness of the Russian legal process that rights groups have long denounced.

The two women were convicted, along with a third woman, Yekaterina Samutsevich, whose sentence was later overturned on appeal, of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. The women had insisted repeatedly that they were motivated not by antireligious sentiment but by opposition to Mr. Putin and to Russia’s political system.

They said they had chosen the church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, for their “punk prayer” to criticize the political support for Mr. Putin and the Kremlin shown by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill 1.

The Russian Parliament, at Mr. Putin’s direction, passed the sweeping amnesty law last week, and it was also expected to bring the release of the Greenpeace activists recently arrested while protesting oil exploration in the Arctic.

Others who stand to benefit from the law include defendants accused of crimes in connection with an antigovernment protest that turned violent after Mr. Putin’s re-election as president.

The members of Pussy Riot, Mr. Khodorkovsky and the Greenpeace activists had all become international symbols for critics of the Russian system, and could well have been the subject of protests and demonstrations during the Winter Olympics, which will be held in the southern Russian city of Sochi in February.

It has not been clear, however, whether Mr. Putin was motivated by the Olympics or some other factors. About to enter his 15th year as Russia’s pre-eminent political leader, he seems increasingly confident and in control, though he may soon face serious challenges as a result of the country’s slowing economy.

Anticipation for the release of Ms. Tolokonnikova, the best-known of the Pussy Riot protesters, has been building since last week, when it became clear that the amnesty law approved by Parliament would cut short her sentence.

Ms. Tolokonnikova’s transfer to Siberia in November was not seen as an effort to punish her further. Instead, it brought her closer to her grandmother who lives in Krasnoyarsk, and where Ms. Tolokonnikova spent many summers as a child.

For a little more than a month, she has been held in a prison hospital on the edge of the city, where her husband, Pyotr Verzilov, and a handful of journalists arrived last week and have waited for news outside the prison gates in freezing temperatures.

More than 2,600 miles from Moscow, Krasnoyarsk has often been the site of exile for political opponents by Russia’s rulers dating to the Decembrist rebellion in the 18th century, when elites demanding a Constitution from the tsar were sent there.

Under Stalin, the city became a major hub in the gulag system; today there are seven prisons within the city limits and 23,000 inmates in the region. Heavy Soviet-era prison trucks regularly rumble through the streets, past the gingerbread wooden cottages that dot the landscape of former factories, many built by prisoners but now collapsed.

A sign on the front of the prison holding Ms. Tolokonnikova seeks to set the current correctional system apart from this history. It says, “Today the criminal penitentiary system is not a gulag — it’s a center of socio-psychological help for convicts and a system of transitional technology.”

Ms. Tolokonnikova’s official home address is in Krasnoyarsk, where she often lived in the summers with her paternal grandmother, Vera I. Tolokonnikova, in a typical, run-down Soviet apartment bloc. The apartment is located less than a half-mile from the prison-hospital, and family members indicated she would stay with her grandmother for a while after her release.