Alexei Navalny on the program “Tochka” on Echo of Moscow

It’s streaming on the Echo of Moscow website, it’s streaming on the site

plushev.com. Whichever is more convenient for you,

join us; the chat will be running there as well

too. I think it’s already up. We’re

talking about, uh, the fight against corruption. Right now

I’m just pulling up the questions. One second. I

really, really liked one. I really

liked one of the questions that

came in. Uh, that’s actually where I’d like to start.

Actually,

the question was as follows.

About

the fact that you’re planning to criticize

today’s, so to speak,

corrupt officials on the internet, but that’s all nonsense,

complete nonsense — they should be put in jail.

I’d like us to make it clear from

the very beginning that criticizing people on

the internet is, by and large, something anyone can do. But

the work that, for example,

Alexei and the people who are trying

to somehow move the situation off dead

center, is a little different from that,

isn’t it?

Yes, absolutely. That is, we don’t criticize anyone,

or rather, of course we do criticize people,

but first and foremost we

are engaged in precisely

preparing the ground for that much-talked-about imprisonment

or making sure that imprisonment, or

an investigation, or something actually happens.

Because, uh, well, I don’t know, any of

us every day in the mass

media, on television, in newspapers,

reads about some outrageous cases of

corruption. Just reading about them and

thinking to yourself what scoundrels they are, or

even saying it out loud, is one thing, but

something completely different is to draw up

a proper complaint, a crime report,

send it to the Ministry of

Internal Affairs, the FSB (Federal Security Service), the prosecutor’s office,

and make sure that first there is

a preliminary inquiry, then

a criminal case is opened, and so

on. That’s what I and my

supporters are trying to do.

Well then, apart from the campaign connected with

Daimler,

connected with

the bribes that Daimler paid here, and

what you wrote about it — were there any other

such precedents in the fight against

corruption? Specifically?

Actually, first and foremost,

of course, in a narrower sense I deal with

protecting the rights of minority

shareholders. Most likely, this is a fight against

corruption in the largest corporations

that are under state

control. And in that sense, in these,

well, if you like, flash mobs, in mass

campaigns, we organized them around VTB Bank,

where there is very clearly

documented embezzlement amounting to hundreds of

millions of dollars, around Gazprom. In

Gazprom’s case, we managed to get two

criminal cases opened; with Rosneft

as well, and so on and so forth. That is, with

Transneft, uh, it’s no secret to anyone

that corruption on a truly monstrous

scale is taking place in our

state corporations. We are trying to

counter it in practical terms.

You just said that criminal cases were

opened there. I heard that

in the past week there also began

inspections regarding Daimler, and that both

the presidential administration and,

as I heard, the Ministry of Internal Affairs also started

looking into it. Do you think that

this is in fact the result of activity on

the internet?

It’s hard to say to what extent, 100 percent,

all of this happened thanks to our campaign.

But we do have the facts. After there had already been

a huge number of outraged publications

about the fact that Daimler had paid

bribes, only for some reason it was unclear

to whom, and no one was prosecuting those who paid

the bribes. After that, both the prosecutor’s office and

the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs said

that they would not conduct

an investigation because they had no

formal complaints. After that, we organized

this mass complaint campaign. And I

think that became a significant factor, let’s say,

the thing that finally

tipped the scales toward

actually launching inspections, because

we created a situation in which

they couldn’t not do it. We, I

think, sent in more than

a thousand complaints in total to each

agency separately — to the police, the prosecutor’s office, and

the presidential administration. And these were all

formal complaints that required

formal responses. In other words, we

demanded an inquiry, and we provided all

the links to specific documents in which the

Daimler company itself states that yes, we

paid bribes to officials, to such-and-such

officials; the names of the

offshore entities to which

these bribes were transferred are listed. And when we

submit a formal document saying, here is such-and-such

information, conduct an inquiry — well, you can’t

just brush that off.

I was actually about to ask about the numbers,

but you mentioned that more than

a thousand went to each agency there,

right — the presidential administration,

the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

I prepared three complaint templates. Each

of these agencies has a so-called

online reception office. That is, you can send all of this

over the internet. I’m looking at

the statistics from my blog, the newspaper’s website

Vedomosti was among those linking to it. Well,

I think around 1,000

people will take part in it. In my experience, this is

the biggest, the largest such campaign,

the most wide-reaching one so far. And, you know,

what really draws people in is how easy it is

to do. You take a ready-made

complaint. I mean, I can picture

it like this: I’m reading someone—

Navalny, I don’t know, or someone else

or maybe an article in the newspaper Vedomosti. I’m

just reading, it doesn’t matter.

It says: "Daimler has admitted that

it paid bribes, used offshore schemes, and so on." And I think:

"My God, this is awful—how on earth

can any of this be stopped?" But then I think: if I

go to the prosecutor’s office now, I don’t even know

how to file a complaint, or how to write something for court,

there are probably all kinds of people there, some kind of

line, and someone will probably say:

"Don’t interfere with my work—what are you

doing here?" And so on. A waste of time.

Then again, suppose I see a post by

Navalny, and it says everything is already

prepared. What do I need to do? Just copy and paste

it and send it off. You also need to add your address

there—we’ll get to that a little later, in more detail—and

that ease is appealing. But we all know

that without effort you don’t exactly

pull a fish out of the pond, as the saying goes. So

does this ease come at the cost of equal

uselessness? You see, even you—

someone so internet-savvy—don’t

really believe in all this e-government

stuff and these new systems of

communication. In fact, citizens

are very often mistaken on this

point. They think that if you

write something out on paper, sign it,

take it to the post office, or better yet drop it off

in a box at some reception office, that’s more reliable

than sending it online. But from a

legal standpoint, it’s 100 percent equivalent. Sending it

online is just as valid—but you do need

to remember that this is not an anonymous complaint;

you have to provide your address, your

name, your details, and so on. In other words,

it is absolutely equivalent, and you can just as well

demand a written

response. You fill it in,

send it online, and receive

a proper written reply—exactly the same kind

as if you had written it out by hand,

filled 20 pages, taken it in, and

dropped it in a box. It’s absolutely the same thing.

Ah yes, of course, there is one problem,

connected with the fact that when we organize

these kinds of mass campaigns, these

agencies try to be clever, as

the prosecutor’s office did. Something rather amusing

happened, and screenshots of the prosecutor’s office website were all over the place

when we

organized a mass submission campaign to them: they

put up this little notice in the anti-corruption

section, and at the bottom it said:

"Sorry, the service is temporarily unavailable."

In other words, they

simply had to give an official response to each of those

thousand complaints.

A response with a registration number.

That means a colossal amount of clerical

work. That doesn’t bother us in the slightest.

Personally, I’m not at all concerned that

the prosecutor’s office will have more work to do.

They won’t break from it—let them work.

But they do resort to tricks like that,

where they really try to

discard some of the complaints somehow, saying

there was a server failure,

so instead of registering 1,000, we registered only

500. But it should be said that with the Interior Ministry website

and the presidential administration website, this

practically never happens. And most

of the people who write there

receive official paper responses.

So this ease absolutely does not

mean it will be just as easy for them to

brush it off. But of course, you also have to

understand that investigating a corruption

case—especially one like this,

where in the Daimler case

the prosecutor’s office, the Interior Ministry, the presidential administration,

the property management directorate, the FSO (Federal Protective Service),

and the Special Purpose Garage are all implicated—

you can’t just send one little note over the internet and

expect everyone to be thrown in jail. Well, that

isn’t going to happen. We understand perfectly well

that it will take us months

to get a criminal case opened

and an investigation carried out.

We also understand perfectly well that the efforts of both the Interior Ministry

and the prosecutor’s office will more likely be

aimed at covering this

case up and, as they say, letting the

people involved off the hook. So this is only the first

step.

Let me remind you, we have Alexei

Navalny in the studio, a well-known blogger, now also known

as an anti-corruption campaigner, a fighter against

corruption and for the rights of minority

shareholders, among other things.

You can send in your questions by SMS to +7

985 970 4545, or in the chat that

accompanies the video stream on the Echo of Moscow website,

or on my site at klyushev.com. Whichever

is more convenient for you—drop in and write.

So,

as for the personal data

that a person has to leave, I

ran into the following situation. When I

linked to your post, my

readers also wrote to me saying the following.

They wrote: "I reposted all of this,

sent it off, and now I’m afraid."

"Now I’m afraid they’ll

come after me, summon me in, talk to me,

and harass me in every possible

way. How much

is this really, I don't know, safe

or what exactly should a person there

be aware of when leaving

their personal data there?

Well, first of all, of course, and I always

urge people: you have to understand that

this is specifically your civic action.

You are not signing anonymously. This is

a specific action by Ivan Ivanov

Petrovich against someone. You need to

be fully aware of that and do it deliberately.

So if you're afraid, well, then you probably shouldn't

get involved in all of this. That's

the first point. Second, of course, people

are usually scared. That's probably also

why I'm suggesting that we all take this on

together, because when 1,000

people have written in, it doesn't seem quite so

frightening. Besides,

Navalny, is that your real last name?

Yes, Navalny is my real last name. And

that's exactly why I always do all this

first. And I do it on paper as well.

So, that's why I tell everyone:

I've already done it myself. I was the first to write

one. And besides, for me,

as the organizer, naturally there are more

problems than for anyone else, because any complaints are directed at me,

because I created this trouble. I don't

know of a single case where people

who took part with me in

actions like this, uh, received

any threats or anything else. Well, in

many ways that would be pointless. Whether

500 people wrote in, or 1,000, or 200,

or even just 20 people. Well, each one, in

general,

Well, someone wrote to me directly saying that

yes, now they'll all put us on

a watch list, on file, and if anything happens,

you know, like when participants in

rallies are detained and their fingerprints are taken

just in case

Then by all means stay home, live

under your bed, just read the newspaper,

say everywhere that they're crooks and scoundrels, and then

go back to sleep—then nobody will put you on

a watch list. I

urge people to take part precisely in

these kinds of civic flash mobs. We need to

show that we are citizens, because

it's impossible to read the newspapers every day,

where they describe utterly, simply

cynical schemes in which someone stole

another billion, stole it from us, and

we just get upset, sigh,

say they're crooks everywhere—and then nothing

happens after that. I, I believe that

this money is being stolen from us. And if,

for example, you went to the market and

your wallet was picked, you would go to the police

(militsiya, the former Russian police). Why don't you think it's

necessary to go to the police if

even if your wallet wasn't literally stolen, this

money never made it to you somehow? In exactly

the same way, broadly speaking, much more

dangerous and sophisticated crooks have stolen

your money. You need to file complaints in exactly the same way.

Well, if you're afraid.

But you already mentioned—and now we'll move a little

away from the internet and instead

talk citizen to citizen.

You already mentioned that, uh, involved

in all these scandals are precisely the

agencies that we

appeal to with requests that they

carry out an investigation. You

said that their efforts would be directed

more against, uh, our efforts,

against having all this

investigated, against a case being

opened, and in favor of having these cases

buried.

Is there any point at all

in appealing to those who, in fact,

are most likely involved themselves?

Ah, well, in the broad sense, this is

a question of whether justice can

be achieved. In our country, this

is quite difficult to do, but I sincerely believe

and many of the people who work with me

believe that it can

be done. Yes, we know that the prosecutor's office and

the police (militsiya, the former Russian police), for the most part, so to speak,

frankly, are crooks and bribe-takers just

like the others. Right now, the same

prosecutor's office is itself under investigation

for allegedly buying equipment in exchange for bribes

Hewlett-Packard

HP. Right.

Yes. It's related to our program's topic, but even so,

are we supposed to just watch this

and do nothing? We have to put

pressure on them. I believe we must

do everything we can. We must

at least try. We have to press them.

And if it weren't 1,000 people taking part in

this but a million, we would simply

crush them all there and

flatten them. So we'll do it gradually

instead. One way or another, this is

a question of acting or simply resigning yourself

to all of this, pulling your head out of the sand or

just worrying and thinking that

nothing can be done at all. We have

the tools; I'm a lawyer, an attorney. In

any case, we do have the tools,

and enough of them. And

But will the authorities take it seriously if

they receive even 1,000, even

10,000,

electronic messages written from

the same template, and they

understand that it's just mindless button-pressing.

Let me explain. So,

let's say we had a guest

on the show, and he kept being asked a question

on the same topic over and over, and he was absolutely

I’m sure this is a coordinated campaign,

that these are some kind of trolls. And when he

expressed that opinion, there were ten times

more questions like that, because

people will think

I remember this person, and he could say

that, well, he said they were some kind of

anonymous trolls on the internet. But here

there are no anonymous trolls at all. These are

specific people with specific addresses

who write in and demand that a reply be sent

to their home address. That’s

the first point. Yes, they’re template-based, but still

this person sent it. They are following this

case. They may appeal some

response. Besides, I can say that

out of the thousand people who simply copied

and sent in a complaint, about 100 people

registered with me as people willing

to work on this continuously. They

monitor the internet, and, within

their capabilities, they carry out, uh, analysis

of these offshore companies and try

to identify the specific

beneficial owners.

It’s actually possible. And besides,

these cars were

purchased through the state procurement system.

So by properly studying what’s available online, we

can simply determine, for example,

the Special Purpose Garage (the state transport service for top officials) in the period from

2001 to 2005. And who exactly,

which specific person placed that order, in what

year it was purchased, and at what pri

and already enough about who headed it, it seems to me,

I think,

who was in charge, and so on. So this is

a colossal amount of work; naturally, I

can’t do it alone, but people themselves

are joining forces. I simply provided

them with a platform to unite, and they are conducting this

investigation. Obviously, we’re not

the police, and we can’t dig everything up, but we

understand perfectly well how

this investigation should proceed. We’ve

broken it down step by step, and the things

that we can do ourselves, we

do. So this work is absolutely not

limited to copy-and-paste.

By the way, tell us more about that. I

just saw on your blog that you were

calling on, I think, maybe lawyers

or maybe translators, in any case,

to join forces somehow. How many

people responded, who’s working? Not, not

by name, I mean. So, specifically,

on the Daimler case right now

registered. We do all this through Google,

which provides fairly convenient

services through Google Wave

or Google Docs. And there are

about 115 people registered in the group. Look,

you see, it’s simple. Daimler,

the American Daimler entity admitted all of this and

entered into a settlement with the court. So we need

to prepare a request to the American

Daimler office. Some people draft it, others

translate it, and others send it. Then

we need to approach the Russian side.

We need to monitor all the

state procurement websites where these deals took place, where we can

track these transactions. And we can also

monitor all the offshore companies as well;

they are named in the Justice Department materials,

specifically the companies to which

the bribes were attributed, and so on. In other words,

basically, sitting at a computer,

and these days, uh, you can find quite

a lot of information. Again, we need

to monitor all the mass media.

A lot is being written about this in Germany

on this subject. Some of our people know German,

and they translate those articles for us,

send them over, and so on. And again,

we need correspondence with the U.S. Department of Justice, which

was, in fact, conducting the investigation. We’re

currently trying to request some

additional information from them. So,

that is, a huge number of people—they

are, of course, not lawyers, and most

of them aren’t lawyers, but if we take our, our

overall strategy and plan

and break it into small parts, then

practically everyone can do something,

can contribute in some way.

Despite the fact that you’re

an unknown blogger, and online you’re

well known in the blogosphere, above all

on LiveJournal, I’m more than sure that among

our listeners today there will be

people who are hearing about

this activity for the first time today. And maybe among

them there will even be some who would like

to get involved. Should they contact you

through comments on your blog? How

exactly? No problem. They just need to go to

my blog; there are instructions there. They need

to write to me by email. You can call it

Navalny’s LiveJournal.

Yes, first of all, for the Daimler case specifically,

you need to get in touch with me by

email, and I’ll add you to this group. And

more generally, what I regularly do is

put together various instructions. Say

some major

corruption scandal happens. I create

instructions for how any person who

is fed up with all this, yes, who

is unhappy about it all, but can spare

at least 3 or 5 minutes

of free time, can at least simply,

as we call it, poke

these crooks with a stick tipped

with iron. That matters. And, despite

the fact that it may seem easy, for

the system it’s quite painful.

A great question has come in from Andrei. How

do you distinguish complaints whose authors wrote not

their details—not their real first name, last name, and

address? Are they also adding fake

entries? Do you verify whether they’re real?

I don’t verify them—I don’t even see them. In

general, these people submit them

themselves. Well, if someone uses a fake name,

a fake address, then if it’s

a fake address, then naturally no reply

will reach them. So it’s all

very simple. Whether or not their

appeal is added to the case and whether it

becomes grounds for review,

if it does, that gets clarified and determined,

if the address physically exists but

the last name is wrong, it will still be added,

it will be included, of course, and a letter will

be sent off into the void, so to speak. Yes.

Still, some of these people—we’ve

already had a case where someone from St. Petersburg

was summoned to give an explanation in connection with his

complaint precisely in the Daimler case to the

Main Military Prosecutor’s Office. So,

if, uh,

besides what you advised, he also wrote to the

Main

Military Prosecutor’s Office,

the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office, because

it really does seem that this involves,

among others, FSB servicemen (Russia’s security service), and

the Defense Ministry directly. So this will be

handled by the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office.

For those who wrote to the Prosecutor General’s Office,

it will end up with the military prosecutors anyway. Well,

there’ll be some extra step, it’ll be forwarded

through the clerical office. He wrote directly to the

military prosecutors, so for him it all happened

faster. So, uh, a fake complaint like that

well, at some stage

it will simply be determined that it’s

fake, and in that sense it won’t add

anything to the overall body of our

effort.

Besides, it seems to me this is

completely pointless. Yes. Why?

Why do it?

Well, maybe only in order to

discredit the idea. Though in any case

it won’t lead anywhere. There’s still

a formal procedure. In the

Ministry of Internal Affairs, there is a procedure

for reviewing appeals and complaints, a procedure

for reviewing crime reports.

You can go to a police station,

hand a written crime report through the little window there,

or you can send it over

the internet. And here those are absolutely

equivalent things. And if someone

wants to engage in that kind of nonsense, well, it

won’t really spoil anything for us.

Apart from the fact that we can see, yes, that

checks have begun there and so on, but

are there any signs that the authorities

take this kind of activity at all seriously,

this kind of struggle,

this kind of anti-corruption effort? And in general,

we’ve established that

it’s still unclear whether this is a result of our

actions—whether it’s a consequence of the case itself

or of what we did. But are there any

other signs? Maybe someone

called, someone said something, someone wrote

something, and so on. Is there any kind of

stirring?

Well, specifically on Daimler, I can see that

there’s been a bit of movement, right?

At first, before all this, everyone was saying that

we’re not going to investigate anything, we

don’t know anything. That happened over in America,

not here. There are no complaints here. After

we sent ours,

actually Daimler should be put on trial,

yes, and Daimler is guilty in general. We

sent it, and right away there were some

statements—someone from United Russia said, “Well,

we need to fight corruption,” or something else

along those lines. Then, really,

we can’t reliably establish whether our action

was the cause of all this. But we

can see the simple facts. Before that there was

silence; after that there were statements from the

police and the FSB. And now the presidential administration

is saying that Medvedev gave

such an instruction. Maybe this

would have happened without our action, or maybe

not. To be honest, I don’t think it would have,

because I know for a fact,

and many people know, that the presidential administration

and all of them—they do, in fact,

monitor the real public agenda,

the actual agenda: what people

are discussing online, what is causing

significant public anger. And the situation with

Daimler really did provoke

significant outrage, when

an American court established that the company

had paid bribes in Russia to officials,

the police, the Defense Ministry, the Moscow city government,

and so on, while in Russia everything was

smooth and quiet, as if those bribes had,

basically, never been taken by anyone here.

And your questions: +7985 970 4545.

There is also a chat accompanying

the video stream. There are about 200 people there.

Which is nice and wonderful. Ask your questions there,

preferably by addressing them directly to

me. And I’ll pass them on to Alexei, because

otherwise I can’t easily pick them out from your

lively conversations with one another. Our radio listeners are reminding us

about the questions they sent

to the website, and about the public procurement

website that you also mentioned.

All sorts of interesting things have repeatedly

come to light there as well.

And

this story with

different letters, right, Cyrillic

was absolutely uncovered as well

by internet users who

caused a scandal over it. And

before long, this drew a response

from Medvedev, who said that this

had to be stopped. Besides, this kind of cunning

scheme, which, as I understand it, had not been

suspected either by the antimonopoly service

or anywhere else, was completely

exposed thanks to internet users.

Well, only a person

who is, first of all, very observant

could do that, and secondly,

someone who is at least more or less technically

competent, you know. There are huge numbers

of observant people who

want to keep an eye on officials

who are trying to steal something, because

even on LiveJournal there is

a community where people monitor

government procurement websites. And all those famous

gold-plated beds for the Defense Ministry for 22 million

rubles, some insane tenders for

websites that also cost tens of

millions of rubles, and so on. All those

cars, when some tiny

state-owned unitary enterprise

buys itself a car for $300,000.

All of this is uncovered by people on the

internet who, by and large, have no professional

connection to government procurement

at all. They just sit there, monitor things,

they want to

find something out, they want to catch someone out. In

that too, I think, there is nothing wrong.

Someone writes here: "Navalny finally woke up. Here,

all tenders and government procurement follow a scheme of

inflated prices and subsequent kickbacks.

Wake up." Pi.

Listen, I’m not the one who woke up — you did.

I’ve been fighting this for quite a long time.

And if you’re so smart and know all this,

then join in. But who has ever

filed a complaint about it, or who

has ever appealed to anyone? Yes, everyone

knows it. Officials are crooks. Well, then they

will always remain crooks if we do not

oppose it at least

in some minimal way. Ilya from Yekaterinburg,

for example, is quite an active listener of ours.

For instance, he received a written

response from the district administration to

an email with photographs of poorly

cleaned streets. By the way, although despite the fact

that this has rather

an indirect or

remote connection to fighting corruption, it is still,

incidentally, a form of civic activity.

No, I think it has a direct connection

to fighting corruption, because

they really are obliged to respond,

including to electronic messages.

If 3 million rubles were written off for improving your courtyard

and it was not actually

improved, then I think it is perfectly

normal not to be lazy,

to take a few photos on your mobile phone

of it and send them by email,

demanding a response.

This is a completely normal civic

action that will take 5

minutes of your time, but quite likely, with

a high degree of probability, it will lead to

some mechanisms in the authorities starting

to turn somewhere. And maybe

not this time, but next time,

at the very least, less will be stolen and less money

will be written off for improving your

courtyard.

By the way, a question on that point.

Do you know anything about how things stand

in the regions? We keep talking about

the federal level. I know you often

spend time in Kirov Region. Well, maybe there

it is a bit easier in that sense, in terms

of openness and interaction with

the local authorities. But what is it like in the regions?

Surely people write to you with something

to report.

Well, it is just as difficult. In Kirov Region

it is difficult because, on the one hand, for

people it is something bizarre, yes, to send something

over the internet, by email, and on the

other hand it is even more bizarre

for officials, because, well, in

the regions, you have to understand, there are still

these old party-era guys sitting there with

red faces — what internet?

They do not know how to use it,

but nevertheless it is their duty,

so if you really stay on them,

they will respond too. The other thing is

that, of course, in the regions people are more

afraid.

And in the regions, if you are specifically

investigating how, say,

money was simply written off there for repairing your apartment building entrance

and you write letters and

prove it, then in the regions, of course,

there is a much greater chance that you will

get hit over the head, especially if you

are doing it non-publicly. I simply

have the opportunity to do this and write about it in

my blog, and a thousand people read it. But someone else

is carrying on their own small

struggle somewhere in some town N. And, well, it is quite

possible that someone from the housing maintenance office will come to them,

or they will start intimidating them. Hardly

any actual use of force, but at

the very least, unpleasant phone calls are certainly

something you can get, and people do get them.

People are asking you — there have been many stories

connected with you — they are asking you:

"What about Sheremetyevo?" —

asks Ravilch from Moscow.

The Sheremetyevo story is an amusing one, which

also began with me, as an ordinary

passenger,

standing there waiting for my baggage for two hours,

and then spending another two hours trying, in the parking lot,

to wait for my car. So I wrote

an ordinary irritated post which, to

my surprise, generated a big,

loud—well, not success exactly, but a lot of attention, after

which, among others, Sheremetyevo got in

touch with me and suggested that I, well,

take part in some joint

efforts to change the transportation

situation. And in fact, there is

a working group, and I managed to bring in

specialists in transport

logistics, who offered some

recommendations for easing this deadlocked,

basically, transportation situation at

Sheremetyevo. And it’s not just that things are moving,

of course—this work is not simply about making

people who have been working there for many years

according to one system start working by

another. Well, from the top

management there is political will. From

the mid-level staff there,

naturally, there isn’t much desire to do any

extra work. They think, “People criticized us online,”

“so now are we supposed to change the system

we’ve been using for years?” Not everyone

understands it. But the work

is moving forward nonetheless. And as far as I know, they’ve even

been taking technical measurements there,

simply to see how long a car sits in traffic at

Sheremetyevo. In that sense, there has been

not exactly a major improvement,

but some improvement has happened.

Great. Ah, we also got an excellent question from Andrei

as well. What is your whole project funded by?

Are you paying for everything yourselves?

It doesn’t require any funding

at all. It costs 0 rubles, 0 kopecks. Yes,

every single person can do this. Andrei, you

can easily do it yourself. Basically,

this is what needed to be done. And I

wrote three sample complaints. Any lawyer

by training, or anyone who

just reads the right books, could write such

complaints without any problem. I provided

links to them, links to the online reception portals,

that’s it—it costs 0 rubles.

Ah, yes, someone asked me to tell you that in

Kirov, according to a person from Kirov, most

officials are quite advanced, and you’re mistaken.

Belykh probably wrote that. I know,

No, that’s not him, it’s one of our listeners. I, I know

the Kirov officials, and I remember how I

spent a year trying

to get Wi-Fi installed in

the administration building in Kirov Region. And

unfortunately, I didn’t manage to do it.

Ah, all right. Let’s get back to Daimler.

There are questions here. Yaroslav,

what I like is—again, this has nothing

to do with it—but I like the mindset of

Yaroslav from Taganrog. So what,

is it really right to let bribe-givers off,

like Daimler, in exchange for money? It seems to me

that everything with Daimler is already perfectly clear.

But Daimler was not let off, in fact. Daimler

was held liable in the United States in order

to settle the investigation.

Daimler agreed to pay a fine,

I think, of $185 million

as required by law,

yes. And it, and it agreed to fully

cooperate with the U.S. Department of Justice and with other

law enforcement agencies. It’s just that

for some reason our police and prosecutors are not

eager to cooperate with Daimler.

Daimler is absolutely ready to bear full

responsibility. They fired all the people,

well, at least according to their public

statements, and they are ready, as I

understand it, to reveal the names of those who

demanded bribes. But for some reason our

prosecutor’s office is not very interested in asking.

Maglov asks on Twitter: "What are your

expectations for the Daimler campaign

from Navalny?" We said that

an investigation has begun. But how do you

think it will end in the end?

Ah, how will it end? Hard to say. I

think the next stage will be that

the prosecutor’s office and the police will

try to close the case on grounds of

the statute of limitations, or that they can’t

establish something, and so on. In other words,

it’s obvious they will try to sweep this whole case

under the rug, because, well, senior officials,

and both the Defense Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the FSB (Russia’s security service) are

involved in this. And I have no

illusions that tomorrow everyone will

be, so to speak, thrown under the bus. They

they can defend themselves, and they will

defend themselves—they have the tools

to do so. I expect that we will spend a lot

of time on court proceedings, including

against the prosecutor’s office, which will

try to shut this case down. But overall I

am optimistic, because all the

materials and specific evidence

that bribes were paid do exist,

and they exist in the U.S., and the company

Daimler has them too. In other words, this is a fact proven in court,

albeit an American court, but still a fact established in court,

that the company paid bribes here.

So they won’t be able to get away with it easily,

but they will do everything

possible. So we’ll still be filing lawsuits using your

templates?

Well, I have no doubt about that. Of course, you can’t

file in court like that through

the internet, but as for having to do more

writing and making copies, I have no

doubt about that.

Let’s get back to purely internet-related

questions. It’s great that there is such an

option, and it appeared, generally speaking,

relatively recently—to submit

a crime report and so on online. But

what, in your view, is still missing, and badly missing,

there, so to speak

speaking, from a technological point of view?

That would be great to do. The only thing is

we noticed that you can't file with the court,

for example. Maybe that's a good thing, I

don't know.

Well, I think it's not good that with the court

likewise, I don't see any problem with

why you shouldn't be able to go to court via

the internet. That is, if you provide

your—first of all, we constantly have

some kind of—I don't follow this that closely—

some kind of problems with electronic digital

signatures. And because of that, it holds up

it to this day; because of that, it holds up

the whole notorious

e-government and so on.

Second, what we lack is a clearer

registration system. As I already said,

the prosecutor's office—for example, the Prosecutor General's Office—still

can still resort to tricks like

saying, "Oh, everything broke down here,

so, sorry, we had

1,000 complaints disappear." Right? And maybe

those weren't complaints about Daimler

but reports about terrorism or something

like that. They just disappeared, that's all. And we

didn't see them, don't know—somehow

the computer shut down, the server wasn't working.

What we lack is a registration system, and we also

lack the situation where every

official would see it as

something normal,

so that they would treat an email

in exactly the same way

absolutely as a written

appeal. So here we simply

lack some kind of pressure, some kind of push

on them. Uh,

but otherwise, generally speaking, right now

the toolkit, so to speak, is much

broader than what we actually use in practice.

That is, we're not even using 10%

of the possibilities that already exist now.

By the way, I'd like to take this opportunity

to thank the recent guest of one of

our programs. She was here with us for March 8 (International Women's Day)

here. Alyona Popova, with her project

Duma 2.0, also supported, uh, Alexei and

his anti-Daimler, well, in quotation marks,

campaign, of course.

If people start joining in not just

on their own with individual projects, but

that's somehow a somewhat different level, it seems to me,

and a very good one. They're asking,

whether you could create a section on your blog

with the results of investigations?

Well, it's still a long way to any results. One of

the problems in my work is that people,

of course, are often impatient,

they don't understand how the process works, because

they write something, and then a week later

they say, well, we sent it a week ago, and there are no results

yet. It's all pointless, there are no results

yet. Where are the arrests? Or a month

has gone by? But you have to understand that if

an investigation proceeds the way it is supposed to

proceed under normal circumstances, it takes

months. If they want to bury the case,

they'll be burying it for years.

So, well, all of this is very drawn out. And,

naturally, the results of this project,

well, I have no doubt that we will

simply read about them in the newspapers, just as we

now read in the papers reports about

the fact that an investigation has been launched, citing

the presidential administration, the Interior Ministry. And

all of this is very stretched out over time. And

those who expect that you just press a button

and someone ends up in jail somewhere on the

other end—of course, that's not how it works.

And

more generally, I'm extremely curious, again

setting the internet aside,

how it is possible first to say that

there are no grounds to open

a criminal case, and then with the same

zeal open it when the boss

orders you to. I just can't understand it. That's exactly

why we're doing this. We have to put them

simply in a position where, well,

they have to say something, because

uh, they can remain silent until

you send them an official

letter. If you've sent a letter, they

have to reply either yes or no.

Well, if they had written that there was no

crime here, that too would have been

a scandal. It would have been simply ridiculous.

Yes. Daimler itself says, "We paid bribes,"

and here there's no corpus delicti, no elements of a crime

to be found. So we simply put them in

a position—an offer they couldn't

refuse. They had to

respond.

Returning to the technological side

of the matter we were discussing, I'll add my own

two cents. It seems to me that

Alexei Navalny is neglecting, for no good reason,

such a wonderful thing as Twitter,

but in that sense I've already been, behind the scenes,

later.

I just haven't gotten the hang of it yet

I'll do a bit of evangelizing on that front. And I

hope we'll bring Twitter into the fight

against corruption too. It'll be even

more fun there. True, on Twitter you can't

post a long message, but you can

link to it. I mean

that big form of yours for appeals to

the Prosecutor General's Office or somewhere else.

Alexei asks: "Igor, are we going to

go after HP as well?" He means,

of course, the case involving supplies from

HP. Besides that, the story also mentions

other companies. I read about it in RBK Daily.

And I think we will definitely pursue the HP case,

especially since it is

directly analogous. And in exactly the same way

but, as I understand it, in Germany

the company Hewlett-Packard said that yes,

we paid bribes to the Prosecutor General’s

Office so that they would buy

our equipment. That, too, is a kind of

established fact—maybe not in

court, but in the course of the investigation. So

therefore, well, I personally won’t be able to resist

the temptation to try, in this way,

to put the Prosecutor General’s Office through its paces on

the question of finding bribe-takers within it.

And of course, we’ll be working on that case.

But getting back to it—we’ve been doing this all day,

we’ve got this hyperlink-style way of thinking, we keep

circling back.

Today, returning to your point about

how, well, if 500 or 1,000

complaints flood in, then they won’t

be working anymore, they’ll only be replying,

that’s nothing terrible—they won’t break, really.

In fact, someone who spends two

minutes thinking about this issue might

well say: "But we’ve got this whole

terrorism problem." You know, there’s

no one left to catch terrorists and real

criminals, and on top of that we’re burying them

under all sorts of, let’s be honest, perhaps

not very promising cases,

which, as you said, they’ll try

in every possible way to sweep under the rug, maybe

we should spare them that.

No, exactly the opposite. When these people in the

Ministry of Internal Affairs take bribes

from Daimler for purchasing cars, isn’t that

one of the reasons why they

aren’t investigating terrorism?

They’re all busy making money,

they all take bribes. So

trying to bring them to their senses, trying

to root out corruption there, or to jail

particular people, or those who have become

especially cynical in the way they

take bribes—that is completely normal.

And a Ministry of Internal Affairs, the security services,

the prosecutor’s office, in which there is no

bribery at any level, would without

any doubt—I am deeply

convinced of this—do a much better job of

fighting terrorism as well.

Here’s another interesting misconception I saw on

Twitter. Alla 11 writes here: "

Let’s go tomorrow to a rally against

the corrupt officials. All of Russia will probably

come out. And at the same time everyone will learn about

anti-Daimler." It seems to me that far fewer people

will come out to any rally, even one against

the most blatant

corruption imaginable, than will

copy and paste.

a crime report.

One doesn’t interfere with the other. People who

go to rallies—I go to them myself,

I fully support them—but here

what matters is some kind of formal

action. For example, a great many

reports have been written, and rallies and pickets

have been held against the mayor of our capital.

There are serious grounds to believe that

he appears to be one of those

major corrupt figures. There are a million

reports and articles. Now show me at least

one person who has written

a formal complaint so that these

cases of corruption would be investigated. No one

is simply doing that. So one thing

doesn’t interfere with the other. Let’s go to a rally,

but after that let’s also make

a formal appeal demanding

an investigation, because, well, you shouted

in front of the police, the police told you off,

well, you shouted and dispersed, but there’s no complaint on file.

I admire your noble

work. It must take a huge amount of

time. I want to take part in your

efforts—please explain once again how

to do that. Borisov writes in.

In any search engine, type in

the surname Navalny, go to my

blog, scroll through it, and everything is explained there.

Read it—it will take you exactly two minutes

to understand how to join in.

Well, for older people, maybe

it will take a little longer.

But really, in fact, you’ll see

the transcript of our conversation on the website.

Navalny’s surname, I hope, will be

spelled correctly there. So then you’ll

be able to find his blog through a search engine

without any trouble. But is a blog

really a good format, and have you thought

about creating a separate

anti-corruption resource of some kind,

and, say, writing all the miscellaneous stuff

exclusively on your blog, because

I see that you have both, just as I do,

for example.

Ah, there have been many suggestions, requests, and

wishes regarding a separate resource, but

you see, a resource—a website—again

has to be maintained, someone has to work on it. I,

to be honest, am not a specialist in these

matters. At the moment, a blog as a

format—that is, in terms of the ratio of

time spent to effectiveness—

suits me overall. Although,

of course, the number of cases being investigated

will apparently still require

a website, so that on that site we can

upload archives and samples of various

complaints, because very often, well,

you need to do roughly the same thing that

we did before. And so as not to

create it all over again, but simply refer back to

the archive, a website is more convenient. And is this for you

more of a hobby, or a kind of

foundation for political activity?

It is a foundation for political

activity that is so

I like that it’s become my hobby. That is,

I devote everything to it. I believe that

it’s the right thing to do, and I like it. I

like causing problems for these people,

who, in turn, create problems

for me and for the rest of the country.

Right. Yes. Speaking of problems. Someone

who didn’t sign up made an exception,

by quoting those two words, and I can ask

that question too. People ask: "Aren’t

you scared?"

Yes, that’s a very popular question. No, I’m not scared.

If I were scared, I wouldn’t be doing

this, of course.

I’ll say it again: I’m a rational person, I know

what kind of country I live in, and I understand

what kinds of problems may arise. But, in the

end, someone has to do

this. Alongside me, there are

dozens, even hundreds, of people involved

in this. I’m probably acting here

as a kind of frontman. And probably, if anything

happens, the main blow will fall

on me. But the fact that there are

people behind me, people who are working

with me on this, gives me additional

confidence that, well, it won’t be so easy

to swallow me up.

It will be very interesting to watch

how events unfold. In general, this very

system, which is

corrupt, has suddenly, for some reason,

given us tools that

could strip it of at least some

small part of that corruption.

It’s incredibly interesting to see how

events will develop. Maybe I’m speaking

about this somewhat naively, uh, I don’t

know, but

why, all of a sudden, is this

e-government starting? Why? It

can only create problems,

can’t it? Nothing but problems. It is of no

use whatsoever to the authorities.

Well, first of all, the authorities are not

homogeneous either, and they do need some

feedback and

responses—the reaction of the country and society. That’s

the first point. Second, well, time cannot

be stopped. And the authorities—we can

see that they are very much

nowadays fascinated by all sorts of

internet gadgets, blogs, and so on.

So they follow this trend; they are forced

to do it. They cannot be so

archaic that they turn everything back

again. Like, let’s write everything on

clay tablets.

Which, in fact, may be what destroys it?

Alexei Navalny just said that

time cannot be stopped. Indeed,

we literally have 10 seconds left. I thank

Alexei for taking part in today’s

program, and everyone who

watched us today, listened, sent messages, and so

on.