As this special issue comes hot off the press, nearly five years have passed since the activist art group Pisya Riot formed in Moscow, and four years since their "Punk Prayer" performance and the following court case pasted the slightly revised name Pussy Riot across headlines and columns all over the world. A few weeks before the activists entered the church and while tens of thousands of Russians were demonstrating against Putin's return to the presidency, a video showing eight masked women with guitars, feminist flags, and purple stage smoke on the Red Square's Lobnoe mesto began circulating among scholars with an interest in Russian contemporary culture and popular music. Prophetic abilities were not required to acknowledge that this was already a major event, a milestone, something that would make its mark on the discourse of Russian art and politics for years to come. Clearly, this was about a lot more than popular music, inspiring and frustrating as that may have been for experts on the music scenes of Russia. The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project Post-Socialist Punk was just entering its final stages, compiling interviews from punk environments in three Russian cities, when the calls started coming in from journalists near and far: What's this masked feminist punk band about? Surely you must know? Whatever it was, it did not belong to any of the scenes just studied. This was not the so-called Russian musical underground, in punk or any other guise; this was a fresh branch of Russian performance art, armed with punk and new media. Beyond that there were initially more questions than answers.With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps it all began back in the mid-2000s and the events we covered in our last special issue (32 (3), 2009), where we noted how state and church sought to appropriate Russian rock music following the Ukrainian Orange Revolution. Weeks before the issue was launched, on 29 May, Voiná activists sprang up from their seats in the Tagansky regional courtroom, armed with guitars, microphones, and mini-amps, launching into a Russian cover version of "All Cops Are Bastards" by the British punk band 999. If the Russian government had armed itself with rock 'n' roll, the next logical step for the activists was to strike back with punk.Five short YouTube videos and a few years later, with academic research piling up, where do we stand? Pussy Riot have addressed pressing issues in contemporary Russia: women's rights; LGBT rights; police brutality; free speech; elite consumerism; the alliance of state, church, and security apparatus. In most Western commentary, the Russian context of all these issues has been awarded very little attention, leaving academic researchers with the considerable task of filling in the picture and preserving its nuances. For, although the