A Warning for Americans From a Member of Pussy Riot

A Warning for Americans From a Member of Pussy Riot

Leading up to Ms. Tolokonnikova's trial, Russian news reports carried suggestions that she and her bandmates were pawns of Hillary Clinton's State Department or witches working with a global satanic conspiracy - perhaps linked to the one that was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, as lawyers for one of their offended accusers put it.

nytimes.com

And it was a modest Russia-in-America answer to the more voluminous pro-Trump propaganda Mr. Putin exported to the United States. Some arrived through his sophisticated state-financed news networks (one, Sputnik, featured #CrookedHillary hashtags on its Twitter feed). And if assessments by the United States intelligence community are correct, some came through state-supported internet skulduggery.

Ms. Tolokonnikova said she became more involved here because the stakes were bigger than one country.

“What happens in one country makes huge influence on what’s going on in other countries,” she said. “So, I didn’t want Donald Trump to be elected because it would obviously encourage authoritarian politicians around the world to be more authoritarian, and it did.” (To wit, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines claiming without substantiation that Mr. Trump had endorsed his murderous drug crackdown.)