In February 2012, five Russian women in brightly coloured dresses and balaclavas screamed a “punk prayer” from the altar of a Moscow cathedral, imploring the Virgin Mary to “banish” the country’s increasingly repressive president, Vladimir Putin.

A decade later Putin started an all-out invasion of Ukraine, claiming the pro-western democracy was run by Nazis conniving with Nato to destroy Russia.

Maria Alyokhina, who was jailed for two years for her part in the punk prayer, listened to Putin in a Moscow cell; she had been detained for the umpteenth time for protesting against the regime that was now starting Europe’s biggest war since 1945.

“Ten years,” the co-founder of protest and performance-art group Pussy Riot reflects in her new book, Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia. “Virgin Mary, banish Putin. Well, where are you now?”

Alyokhina could be lamenting the absence of divine intervention in Russia, or asking herself and like-minded compatriots what they had achieved in a decade of painful and largely fruitless opposition. Or perhaps challenging the West over its failure to stop Putin’s methodical construction of a brutal dictatorship and war machine.

The book is a vivid diary of how she and friends scrapped with that system at close quarters and saw it grow stronger and stranger as it fed on paranoia and violence, until many were forced to flee and continue their fight abroad.

“I had no clear idea of who I was writing for,” Alyokhina says on a video call from Berlin. “For everyone who is fighting, I suppose. It is everything I can give. It is my experience of what I saw with my own eyes, everything that was happening with me and with those who were – and are – fighting for this country, to make a difference.