Life always makes its own adjustments. The post announced yesterday with ACF’s annual report was supposed to include the report itself and an appeal for donations.
Today I realize I need to begin with a comment on the latest episode of the soap opera “The Adventures of the Investigative Committee”: Former Kommersant publishing house CEO Demyan Kudryavtsev wrote on Facebook that he had been summoned for questioning by law enforcement in connection with donations to Alexei Navalny. ... On Facebook, Yan Chernyak quotes a story from June 8, 2014: The doorbell rings. I ask who it is. The answer: “Police.” We continue talking through the barred door. A guy with ID says a new criminal case has been opened against Navalny over alleged abuses during the mayoral campaign. Naturally, it’s being handled by the Investigative Committee. ... Similar accounts can be found on LiveJournal in Maria Rabinovich’s post and in Anton Krasovsky’s Facebook note. Maria Rabinovich’s LiveJournal post says people are being questioned as witnesses in a criminal case.
On May 23, 2014, investigators from the Investigative Committee searched the Yandex.Money office. http://roem.ru/2014/06/09/yamoney101066/
Over the past couple of days, we too have received a few messages saying that donors to the election campaign are being harassed with this nonsense.
Here is what we know as of today: there is a criminal case, opened on the complaint of Vladimir Zhirinovsky (yes, really!!!), who is evidently very upset that we uncovered his family’s real estate in Dubai. The suspects in this case are Vladimir Ashurkov and Nikolai Lyaskin (possibly also Konstantin Yankauskas), who helped raise money for the election campaign. They are accused of allegedly urging people to donate to Navalny’s campaign and then stealing the funds that were raised.
Who did they supposedly steal the money from? That would mean from me. But since the Investigative Committee knows perfectly well that nothing was stolen, and that my response to their questions would be to tell them they’re crazy, they are trying to find evidence that the people whose names appear in the report never donated anything at all—or to find someone willing to help them fabricate this case and file a complaint as a victim. Apparently, they are planning to question nearly 600 people.
In short, we are seeing a repeat of the situation from May 2011, when after RosPil’s first successful online fundraising campaign, the Kremlin riffraff tried to convince themselves and everyone else that this could not possibly be real, that the money must have come from some oligarch (or the U.S. State Department), and that the thousands of donors were just a cover. Back then, the FSB enlisted the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi, and after getting donors’ contact details from Yandex, they called everyone up.
Now it is roughly the same thing, only adjusted for harsher times. Not secretly, but openly; not as part of a preliminary inquiry, but as part of a criminal case; in May 2011 they were still embarrassed to fabricate a case completely out of thin air, but now they are not.
What I want to say in this connection is this: Once again, I thank those who financed my election campaign, and I apologize for this inconvenience. You can’t even really call it “inconvenience through no fault of my own”—it is my fault, of course, because I have no intention of softening my position, scaling back my work, “keeping my head down,” or “stopping the personal attacks.” My support goes out to Vladimir Ashurkov, Nikolai Lyaskin, and Konstantin Yankauskas, whose honest and selfless political work has led to what honest and selfless political work in Russia leads to: a criminal case. For everyone being pestered with questions, I suggest two possible approaches. Which one you choose depends on how much free time you have: if you have plenty of free time, you can answer the Investigative Committee’s ridiculous questions honestly (you can read them here). This funding was completely legal and transparent. You violated nothing, and there is nothing to fear. if you do not want to waste your time, just say immediately: “I am invoking Article 51 in response to all questions.” The investigator will write down something like: “On the basis of Article 51 of the Constitution, I refuse to testify.” He may of course try to tell you fairy tales about how, as a witness, you cannot do that, but stand your ground: this is a political case, and I am invoking Article 51.
The overwhelming majority of lawyers will advise you to stick to strategy No. 2 and give an explanation along these lines: “I consider this case politically motivated. I have not violated the law. All my actions were in full compliance with current legislation. I refuse to provide any further testimony on the basis of Article 51 of the Constitution.”
So yes, yesterday we were a bit upset by all this commotion—not exactly the best backdrop for releasing a report and launching a new round of fundraising. But then we decided: we cannot change our plans over something as trivial as mass interrogations and intimidation (smiley face).
That is exactly what all this is meant to achieve: someone will get upset, someone will get scared, someone will postpone their plans, someone will think “to hell with it,” and they—quite pleased with themselves—will once again pull out their giant saw, tie a St. George ribbon (a Russian military-patriotic symbol) around it, and happily keep sawing through the budget.
We do not like that prospect. We know we are right, and we know our work is needed—at the very least by the 72% of citizens who believe there is too much corruption in Russia:
Especially since, as Anton Nosik once observed, there is a clear pattern: every new attack on us leads to an increase in donations.
So, here is the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s report for 2013: http://report.fbk.info/
It is being released with a delay, due to the fact that since February this year, communicating with me has, to put it mildly, not been the easiest task.
This time, we shifted the focus of the report. Previously, it was mostly statistics on canceled public procurement contracts, but three years after RosPil began its work, that no longer seems like a meaningful assessment, so we tried to present an overall picture of what the Anti-Corruption Foundation you funded in 2013 actually was.
Since the now historic first fundraising drive for RosPil, together with you and thanks to you, we have gone through a major evolution. What ACF looks like now, who we are, what our priorities are, and what the main milestones of our work in 2013 were—that is what this new report is about.
ACF today is not only—and not even primarily—about challenging government procurement contracts. It is also our investigations department, whose creation and launch was the most important achievement of 2013. It is RosZhKH and RosYama. It is public campaigns. It is draft legislation. It is lobbying for the interests of large social groups—from those whose pension savings were taken by the government to those who do not want to pay for officials’ expensive cars. It is attempts to create new mechanisms for citizen influence, such as the “People’s Deputy” campaign. It is our first fully independent regional branches. It is a huge number of volunteers working across different projects.
ACF remains the most transparent civic organization in Russia. It is important for us to uphold that standard, and we know that you expect that standard from us.
You fund our work, and you can see who works for us and where they work. You can review our income and our expenditures, as well as the structure of those expenditures.
Thanks to you, in 2013 ACF received 23 million rubles (about US$660,000 at the time) from 16,000 people.
In Russia, there is no political party, civic organization, or any other structure with a larger number of donors. We are proud of your trust and value it deeply.
ACF spent 24.5 million rubles in 2013:
We spent more than we raised not because we decided to imitate the state and run up debt—it was for a technical reason: for many months, we were unable to withdraw money that had previously been collected through PayPal. In other words, this was simply a carryover of existing funds.
Incidentally, if you look at the structure of our expenditures, you can understand why businesses built around human capital struggle to survive in Russia:
Huge payroll taxes and insane rent. In 2013, we moved from a more expensive central location to the cheaper Avtozavodskaya district. The cost per square meter went down, but we rented more space. Overall, our rent increased, but now we can run projects that rely on large numbers of volunteers (sociology, for example): we actually have room to seat them. No matter what office we work from, Moscow’s absurd rental prices eat up a great deal.
As before, we pay our taxes in full. That too is a serious burden on our budget. If the RosPil team received 4.9 million rubles in take-home pay over the year, we paid 2.03 million rubles in payroll taxes on top of that. Knowing this, I laugh every time I hear officials once again declare that “small business must be developed.”
Among the year’s disappointments, I would note that we were unable to launch the online system for tracking the progress of investigations. It was almost finished, but for a number of different reasons we were unable to complete it. Here Sasha Gornik writes about it in detail. We will launch it this year.
We decided not to include a “plans for 2014” section in the report: first, it is already June, and you have seen that we have already carried out some of our plans (above all, launching the polling service and new investigations); second, let’s not pretend otherwise—we understand that our plans depend to some extent on whether I remain under house arrest or something worse, and on whether the unlawful criminal prosecution of Ashurkov or Lyaskin continues, and so on.
This will affect our work, and we are prepared for that. But of one thing you can be absolutely certain: our work will not stop under any circumstances.
Neither Putin nor United Russia, together with all their investigative committees, can destroy us, because we depend only on you. You fund the foundation. You control it. It works for you, and it will keep working as long as you want it to.
We are announcing a new fundraising drive for the Anti-Corruption Foundation and asking you to support us.
Interestingly, when I first looked at this chart (it did not yet have any labels),
I asked: what on earth happened in November that made everyone start sending money? It turned out to be the publication of the report on the election campaign.
In other words, the single strongest factor motivating you to contribute was a report on previous contributions. That is tremendously interesting, and it illustrates an informal social contract: we fund you—you report back to us—we fund you again.
How badly this approach is missing from the relationship between officials and citizens, isn’t it?
After the idiotic law on electronic payments came into force, we can no longer use electronic systems like Yandex.Money to collect donations. The same goes for PayPal, WebMoney, Bitcoin, and so on.
You can see for yourselves what resources the authorities are throwing into trying to catch us on some kind of financial violation. That is why we cannot allow ourselves various technically legal but still workaround-type schemes involving internal PayPal transfers and the like.
The good news is that there is now a payment gateway through which everyone—including us—can collect donations fully legally from anyone who has a bank card.
So, as of today, there are two ways to donate to us: a) by bank card, b) by direct bank transfer using our account details.
Your money is our lifeblood. The Anti-Corruption Foundation is not just people in an office sitting at computers—it is those same 16,000 people who, through a concrete action of their own, are saying: I want to live in a country without corruption, and even if all I personally can do is send a few hundred rubles, I will do it, and that will be my civic gesture and a clear signal to those in power.
I thank everyone who supported us in 2013, and I thank in advance those who will continue with us and support us now. My thanks come both from me personally and from all ACF staff.
We work because you exist.
If you want not only to become an ACF donor, but also to help us with fundraising, the simplest and most effective way to do it is to post proof of your payment on social media. Set an example for your friends.
And finally, I will move on to the grandiose part, with metaphors borrowed from modern mass culture. This was not planned, but against the backdrop of all these threats and interrogations, I have to say it.
There is an episode in *Game of Thrones*: Daenerys, leading an army of former slaves, approaches a city of slaveholders. Her army loads the catapults and fires at the city—not with weapons, but with the shackles removed from those who had once been slaves.
A powerful symbol of humanity’s eternal struggle for dignity and the right to control its own destiny. An eternal argument between those who demand what is theirs and those who do not believe anything can be changed.
I am not saying that the 700 rubles you send to ACF are shackles you have torn off and hurled in the face of Putin and his thieves. Times are milder now: no shackles, no catapults.
I simply want to say that some actions—even symbolic ones—are worth taking at any time, if only to answer a question for yourself: what would I have done if I had been in the place of the man in chains?