They studied philosophy and read poet Osip Mandelstam, a Stalin critic who died in a labour camp in 1938, before turning into the unwitting stars of a global cause celebre.

All-girl punk band Pussy Riot, with their home-made balaclavas and neon dresses, have for the past year staged impromptu performances of protest songs in public places such as subway stations and even on Red Square.

Now three members of the band face two years in a remote prison camp for denouncing President Vladimir Putin in a "punk prayer" they staged in Russia's main cathedral.

Most of the band's performances and writing have deal with the marginalised role of women in Russian society and the dominance Putin has secured over politics since rising to power 12 years ago.

They also skewer the Church's open backing of Putin and hint darkly at its ties to the secret police.

A Moscow judge on Friday found the three guilty of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred". The woman have apologised for offending the Orthodox faithful, but not for their political views.

US pop icon Madonna said she prayed for the three women because "they have done something courageous (and) paid the price".

--- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22

The singer was born in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth -- the Norilsk nickel mining city above the Arctic circle that Stalin developed using Soviet prison labour.

She studies at Russia's top-rated Moscow State University and has a daughter with her husband Pyotr Verzilov who has backed the group's cause.

Both are also members of the controversial Voina (War) performance art group that won a prestigious Russian prize for painting a 65-metre (210-foot) phallus opposite a security service building in Putin's native Saint Petersburg.

She compared her hearing to the tribunals Stalin used to conduct his bloody political purges in the 1930s and told the judge that the three members "expect to remain (behind bars) for a very long time to come".

"I do not believe in this court. There is no court. It is an illusion," she said before the verdict was issued in reference to Russian judges' propensity to toe the Kremlin line in big cases.

--- Maria Alyokhina, 24

The single mother of a five-year-old son is a Greenpeace member who has campaigned and scuffled with police in the past during a green group's passionate defence of a small forest outside Moscow.

The campaign against the road building there proved fertile ground for Russian political activism by developing many of the leaders who spearheaded opposition to Putin's return to a third presidential term this year.

Alyokhina's software-engineer mother recently revealed that her daughter was also religious and was only protesting against the Church's open backing for Putin.

Her final court statement condemned Russia as a place where only "so-called freedom" exists.

--- Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30

The eldest of the three worked on designing computer software for the Nerpa class nuclear submarine after graduating from a Moscow physics institute.

She left to study photography and eventually graduated from a Moscow multimedia centre.

She joined the Voina performance art group at the same time and was regarded as one of the most active members of a March 2011 campaign to kiss as many policewomen as possible in public.