Members of Pussy Riot to appear on Season 3 of "House of Cards"

By By Baynard Woods

Aug 08, 2014 1:12 PM

Pussy Riot Spacey — (Photo Illustration by Athena Towery)

Two sources associated with the production team of Kevin Spacey's Netflix show "House of Cards," confirmed that Nadezhda "Nadya" Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, of the anti-Putinist Russian punk band/performance art/protest group Pussy Riot, were on the show's set in Baltimore yesterday. "Nadezhda and Maria from Pussy Riot were on set, and are in season 3 of HoC," a staffer told City Paper in a message on the condition of anonymity.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina came to notoriety when they were arrested for performing an anti-Putin "punk prayer" inside a Moscow cathedral and setneced to two years in Russian penal colonies.

In 2013, the pair was released after serving 22 months. When they arrived in Sochi, the site of the Winter Olympics, to bring attention to the Dostoevskian conditions of Russia's penal colonies, they were attacked by paramilitary thugs and whipped (it was captured on camera).

Since then, the duo has appeared in the U.S. several times, including at an Amnesty International concert, which prompted an open letter from others claiming to speak for Pussy Riot, which denounced the pair and said they "are no longer members of the group, and will no longer take part in radical actionism." Both Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina denied that they were no longer part of the group and denounced the letter. When they spoke at New York's Lincoln Center, they decalred "Be Pussy Riot! Anyone can be Pussy Riot!"

Their reported appearance on the upcoming season of "House of Cards" may signal a shift towards foreign policy in the show's third season, but our source would confirm no more than their presence.