To Russia’s rabble-rousers, with love — but not transparency.
Mayor de Blasio welcomed two members of the Russian punk protest band Pussy Riot to City Hall on Friday and praised their advocacy for free speech while shutting out the media from their closed-door meeting.
Instead, the reporters and photographers were only offered administration-approved photos of the behind-the-curtain powwow — a notable departure from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration.
Standing in a lobby area, the mayor, his wife Chirlane McCray and a gathering of staffers applauded the dissident duo — Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova — before ducking into the mayor’s office for nearly an hour.
The women are touring the city after having been imprisoned in Russia for two years on charges of hooliganism.
They had staged a protest inside a Russian church and were vocally critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin and political conditions in their homeland.
“Their strength and resilience in the face of what they’ve gone through is truly inspirational,” Hizzoner told the media earlier in the day.
“I saw the interviews when they came out of prison and there was an incredibly admirable defiance that they basically made clear they will speak out even if it meant being imprisoned again.”
After the meeting, Alekhina and Tolokonnikova said through a translator that they had spoken mostly of their new advocacy for prison reform, and the possibility of visiting local jails.
“He seemed like a very wonderful man,” one of them said in Russian.
The mayor’s warm embrace of the two activists came in stark contrast to the cold treatment they reportedly got from six of their anonymous bandmates.
In a blog posted to the Pussy Riot Live Journal, the American-visiting pair were supposedly booted from the band for having appeared Wednesday at a star-studded Amnesty International concert at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.
Earlier Friday, the mayor yukked it up over the band’s outrageous name.
“Can I say ‘Pussy Riot?’ ” the mayor quipped. “Yes, I can.”
