TIME: Elaborate set designs and choreography are not a hallmark of Pussy Riot’s music videos, at least not the ones that turned them into Russia’s most famous protest collective. More typically, the band has had no more than a few minutes to dance around on camera before Russian police, security guards or, in one case, a group of whip-wielding Cossack militiamen, shows up to break up their performances. Not so with the punks’ first foray into hip-hop. Released on Wednesday, their latest clip offers a cutting takedown of corruption in President Vladimir Putin’s government, all filmed with relatively high production values in well-groomed sets around Moscow.
This required quite a bit of guile. In order to film in a Soviet-era banquet hall, the group’s co-founder, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and her crew of back-up dancers, dressed up in the 
blue uniforms of Russian prosecutors, leading the owners of the venue to believe that a law enforcement convention was in progress. The torture scenes were somewhat easier to justify, as these were filmed in a former jail often used as a set for TV dramas. But one of the props did raised some suspicion among the landlords who unwittingly let Pussy Riot use the former jail. “When they saw the golden loaf of bread,” a symbol of corruption in the former Soviet Union, “they sort of understood that something wasn’t right,” says Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov.
Still, the filming was allowed to go on, and the end result (a collaboration with David Sitek of the American band TV on the Radio) affirmed the group’s knack for jabbing the Kremlin where it hurts. In this case, the primary target was Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, who has lately become the weakest link in Putin’s chain of command. In December, Russia’s leading anti-corruption campaigner, Alexei Navalny, published an investigation that accused Chaika and his two sons of enriching themselves through ties with one of Russia’s most notorious criminal gangs. Chaika’s florid denial of these accusations, in which he hints at a CIA plot to discredit him, has since made him the laughingstock of Russia’s blogosphere. And now Pussy Riot’s leading lady has twisted the knife by lampooning Chaika in her lyrics. MORE