When Nadya Tolokonnikova was 22, “the spirit of oprichnina” was already making its way through the capital of Russia. She formed Pussy Riot, a Riot grrrl-esque punk performance art group, in 2011, the year before Vladimir Putin’s administration sentenced her to two years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” a vindictive response to a Pussy Riot performance-protest held in a Russian Orthodox church in Moscow. When Tolokonnikova and her bandmate were granted political amnesty in 2014, it was believed to be Putin’s olive branch to the Winter Olympics committee. Fast forward to today, and here’s “pretty much the situation,” as fellow iconoclast Vladimir Sorokin, one of Russia’s most famous and provocative living novelists, puts it. “A completely unimaginable symbiosis with the USSR, with Tsarist Russia, with the oprichnina and the wild 90s,” he continued. “A dragon with many heads made up of different eras–such a grotesque beast.”