Let's face it: in this country we do not have anything or anyone anywhere near as impressive as Pussy Riot.

Sadly, the closest we have ever come to Pussy Riot is former youth league president Julius "Little Julie" Malema, YL acting president Ronald Lamola, former treasurer Pule Mabe, various other former YL office bearers, and of courseMagdalene "O Magdalena" Moonsamy and "Pretty Boy" Floyd Shivambu.

But they, alas, have not shown the skills or synchronicity of the Russian Pussy Riot, nor have they been as effective, and they are pretty much hors de combat at the minute.

You do know what Pussy Riot is, don't you?

Don't be embarrassed if your answer is No and if you've been thinking that I am just being my usual crass and adolescent self.

Until a couple of days ago, I too didn't know what or who Pussy Riot was. I thought Pussy Riot was the name of a party that my friend Roy and I held with a number of female friends in his room at Mount Scopus in about March 1971.

But in the last few days I have grown much wiser and now I am, as my friends in the legal fraternity might say, very seized with Pussy Riot. And I have thus been scouring what used to be called the news wires (i.e. World Wide Web) for everything that I can find regarding my new role models.

Some people refer to Pussy Riot as a female punk band. This is not precise. Wikipedia more accurately defines Pussy Riot as "a Russian feminist punk-rock collective that stages politically provocative impromptu  performances in Moscow, on subjects such as the status of women in Russia, and, most recently, against the election campaign of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for president of Russia."

Putin, you need to know (if you don't), is apparently a real putz - though that's too gentle a word for him. He makes most heavies - Gwede Mantashe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Blade Nzimande, etc - seem like girl scouts.

Wikipedia also explained that members of Pussy Riot usually wear brightly-colored dresses and tights, even in bitterly cold weather. They also always wear balaclavas, like Seffrican bank robbers, or SA defence force conscripts standing guard at2am in winter, both while performing and giving interviews.

Pussy Riot members, Wikipedia informs us further, always use pseudonyms during interviews - because it's not the individual that counts but the collective. Right on, sisters! The collective is made up of about 10 performers, and about 15 people who handle the technical work of shooting and editing their videos, which are posted to the Internet.

The group - says Wikipedia -cites American punk rock band Bikini Kill and the Riot grrrl movement of the 1990s as an inspiration. "What we have in common is impudence, politically loaded lyrics, the importance of feminist discourse and a non-standard female image," says the Pussy Riot collective. In March, three women from the group, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Aliokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were charged with hooliganism.

On 21 February in Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral, as part of their protests against Putin's political activities, they entered an area in front of the altar usually reserved for clergy, and began singing "Mother of God, Drive Putin Out." Guards and church staff stopped them in less than a minute, but a video of the performance was distributed.

According to various newspaper reports, mainly in the Guardian, reports of the performance caused deep anger among many of the Orthodox faithful, the majority of the Russian population. Thousands turned out for services to protect the church. "War has been declared against the Orthodox people," Father Vsevolod Chaplin, a top church official, was quoted as saying in March while state television denounced the women as "devils."

It was all a bit like painting a satirical oil of our president with his alleged chiluga hanging out - it was equivalent to sacrilege.

Both the Telegraph and the Guardian have reported extensively on subsequent events. Pussy Riot's trial began in late July, with the three women attracting considerable sympathy in Russia and outside it. It's been alleged that they've been harshly treated while in custody and the trial as a whole has been compared by some foreign observers to one of Stalin's show trials.

Tom Parfitt of the Telegraph has reported that Putin's Russia is in the dock with Pussy Riot - that Russian opposition politicians say the trial is part of Putin's strategy to silence his critics; they say he'll also tighten checks on foreign-funded lobby groups, place new controls on the Internet, and levy big fines on protesters. Some opposition members put it even more strongly, claiming that the trial is coming at a pivotal point in Putin's "increasingly brutal bid to crush the crumbling remains of his country's civil liberties".

In court, the three women have been handled as dangerous criminals, handcuffed to policewomen and guarded by an officer with an attack dog. The trial was held in the same courtroom as the politically-charged case against oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

In fact it's the report by Miriam Elder of the Guardian on Khodorkovsky that I found fascinating. Russia's most famous prisoner - the jailed former chief of Yukos - likened the trial to a medieval inquisition and said their prison regime may amount to torture.

"The word ‘tried' can be used here only in the sense in which it was used by medieval inquisitors," Khodorkovsky is reported as writing on his own web site, which he presumably operates via his son in the US. Now, we might not, as I said, have any group as effective as Pussy Riot, but, hey, we beat the Russians hands down when it comes to mistreating awaiting-trial prisoners.

I know this from my days working at the Wits Justice Project (WJP) where unfortunately - or fortunately - my colleagues and I did not operate wearing brightly-coloured tights and balaclavas.

First, said Khodorkovsky, defendants in such a high-profile case are woken before breakfast and shuttled to court at the crack of dawn. Then, after a court session lasting late into evening, the women arrive back at their cells after dinner and probably only have time to sleep for about three hours before being woken for the next day of the trial.

Well, now, in Seffrica you're also sent off at dawn, without breakfast, in a police van. If you don't have enough money to bribe the driver, you have to ride in the back where, if you're a man, you might well get raped - with a screwdriver or some other similar object.

You don't sleep much, if at all, not because the court session has gone late into the night (actually our court sessions hardly ever start) - but because you're sharing your 50-person awaiting trial cell with 200 other folk. And, again, more than likely you'll get raped, especially if you're a man. This is not good for one's beauty sleep of an evening.

The only time to shower is on Saturday, Khodorkovsky added. "I don't know how the girls can endure it," he is reported as writing.

My sense, though I have been to Moscow for five days only, was that a weekly shower was pretty much par for the course in Russia. In a South African jail, of course, you can shower every night - problem being that there are 50 other folk also wanting to have use of one of the two shower heads and also the latrines are in there too so you need to wear plastic bags over your feet ...

Khodorkovsky also said that, during an 11-hour day locked in a glass and metal courtroom cage known as "the aquarium", instant noodles were the only food served.

"I know what the aquarium in courtroom number seven is. They made it specially for us," Khodorkovsky said, referring to his own experience during the second of his two trials. "You feel like a tropical fish," he said. "It's hot. The air conditioning doesn't circulate through the glass."

There's no aquarium in Seffrica but there are no noodles either. No money? No food. The warder or bailiff not prepared to get you anything? No food.

"The judge of course knows about this regime. Is this [not in fact] torture?" asked Khodorkovsky.

Sure it is - in Russia, as it is here, whether you're a humble Seffrican waiting for a trial or a member of Pussy Riot.

Still, I would like to see some of the engaged members of our society - Angie Motshekga, alleged minister of basic education, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, former minister of correctional services, and even Blade Nzimande, minister of higher education - out there in tights and balaclavas. Nzimande could get away with red rights, don't you think?

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