“Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens.” The Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen’s latest book begins with the “miracle” that occurred on February 21, 2012, when five women belonging to the feminist art collective Pussy Riot clambered onto a platform in Moscow’s Cathedral of Saint Saviour and performed a “Punk Prayer” beseeching “Mother of God, get rid of Putin”. The church was empty; their actual “performance” lasted a mere 40 seconds, yet the posted footage of Pussy Riot’s orange-purple-and-yellow-balaclavaed figures in their gaudily mismatched dresses, prancing, kick-boxing and fist-pumping against a gilded backdrop of Russian Orthodox saints was to become a world-famous icon of protest art. And six months later, when three of the original Pussy Riot performers were tried and sentenced to two years’ hard labour for the bizarre crime of “undermining the spiritual foundations of the state”, these “intellectual pranksters who presented themselves as silly young girls” turned out to possess the moral lucidity necessary to turn their own show trial into an indictment of Putin’s autocratic regime.