Origins Pussy Riot members Pussy Riot was a collective formed in August , their name being two English-language words [21] written in the Latin rather than Cyrillic. The group was composed of some dozen performers and about 15 people who handled the technical work of shooting and editing videos that were posted on the Internet. Tolokonnikova, her husband, Pyotr Verzilov , and Samutsevich were members of the anarchist art collective " Voina " from the group's early days in , until an acrimonious split in Following the split, they formed a separate Moscow-based group, also named "Voina", saying that they had as much right to use this name as Voina founder Oleg Vorotnikov.