Born and raised in Moscow, Masha Demianova got her first camera at 14. Now aged 24, she is said to be "pioneering female gaze photography" in Russia.
Natalia Gorbanevskaya, a translator on maternity leave, set off with her three-month-old son, in a pram borrowed from her friend Masha.
Masha Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a think-tank, says the Kremlin has sought to "isolate and stigmatise" such people, while creating a myth of a new Russian identity from a hotchpotch of Orthodox piety, traditional values and provincial distrust of urban elites.Gays and lesbians make easy targets.
But on the day he became famous, he felt that staying silent and motionless was the most eloquent way to make his point.The "noise" made by the Pussy Rioters Nadezhda "Nadia" Tolokonnikova and Maria "Masha" Alekhina was of brief duration, less than 40 seconds, but it was loud and cacophonous.
The general trend, says Masha Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, is to safe, non-political subjects.Mr Putin and his aides argue that similar approaches can be found in Western countries.
In "The Man Without a Face" Masha Gessen, a well-known journalist in Moscow, is especially interesting on Mr Putin's time working for the mayor of St Petersburg amid the chaos of the early 1990s.
Boris's wife, Masha, is at the roadside, selling milk, fresh from their two cows, to passing drivers.
The Great Vowel Shift in the 15th and 16th centuries altered the pronunciation of many words but left their spelling unchanged; and as Masha Bell, an independent literacy researcher, notes, the 15th-century advent of printing presses initially staffed by non-English speakers helped to magnify the muddle.
Witnesses spoke of explosives and bulldozers being used to knock down buildings including a restaurant and multi-storey block of flats.Take Masha al-Arbaeen, a poor area in northern Hama (see below).
An article in the New Republic in February by Masha Gessen, a leading Russian-American journalist, accusing the American media of largely ignoring "the death of Russia's nascent democracy" under Mr Putin, started a furious debate on Johnson's Russia List, the online forum of the small international community of English-speaking Russia-watchers.
