"After one conversation with a prison guard, who pleads with her to stop her hunger strike, Maria Alyokhina records her reaction: 'What kind of answer can I give you, Guard? I protest wherever I can, wherever I need to. That’s my nature. I need to protest'. As the end of her incarceration draws nearer, Alyokhina and another inmate at IK-2 in Nizhny Novgorod make an insulting poster and parade it up and down before the entire prison colony. 'This is what protest should be — desperate, sudden and joyous'. (...) The grinding reality of prison life in Russia takes up over half of Riot Days.It is hard not to grimace at Alyokhina’s description of the intense cold of one cell in Moscow, where cracks in the walls are stuffed with chewed bread and sanitary pads. She recounts inspections by guards of naked prisoners, apparently looking for tattoos, regular gynaecological examinations and her brushes with drug addicts on the verge of death, murderers and stool pigeons" (daqui)