The operation to “take everything away from the family of the enemy of the people, Navalny” turned out to be far more sweeping than I could have imagined.
As you may remember, not long ago MPK, a subsidiary of the state-owned Svyaz-Bank, woke up and initiated enforcement proceedings, claiming that Oleg and I had “stolen” 4.5 million rubles. For nine months after the trial, they were clearly avoiding their right to sue me, but in the end they did it.
I withdrew money from my accounts and so far have managed to pay off about 2 million rubles. They’ll take another million themselves from a frozen account, and for the rest I asked for an installment plan—300,000 rubles a month. I was scratching my head over what to do next, especially since—just now, in fact—the “supervising inspector” told me that the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) has petitioned the court to extend my probation because I haven’t paid.
And then I learned the true scale of the operation. It turns out that on the very same day—July 31—when MPK launched enforcement proceedings, the company that filed a civil suit against me was... KIROVLES!
A lawsuit for 16 million rubles! When the case was heard in court two years ago, they declined to file a civil claim: the case was already a complete disgrace, with neither an economic nor an accounting expert review. They declared the entire turnover of Ofitserov’s company to be “damages.” All of his money went through official channels, he submitted the accounting entries to the court, and even for a political Kafkaesque trial that every lawyer in the country laughed at (case materials here, see for yourself), adding a civil suit on top of that would have been too much.
But those were different times. Now even this will do.
Chronologically, it all lines up quite clearly with our refusal to silently accept being barred from the elections in Novosibirsk. The lawsuits were filed two days after our people refused to leave the election commission building, announced a hunger strike, a protest action in Novosibirsk, and we began consultations on holding a broader protest rally in Moscow.
It feels like 2012 again. Back then, after I called on people to come to Lubyanka without official authorization, four criminal cases were opened against me in a single week. Now they’ve decided to squeeze me by seizing money and property.
And once again, there’s effectively a hostage. I myself don’t yet really know what to do, and it’s even less clear what Pyotr Ofitserov is supposed to do now with his children—six of them already! The image of them carrying a television, bicycles, and “extra sets” of outerwear out of his house—he lives in Troitsk—looks straight out of a movie about Nazi punitive squads.
Just to be clear: when I say “it’s unclear what to do,” I mean it’s unclear how to solve this problem. What is absolutely clear is that there will be no change in our work; we will not give up our right to take part in elections or to express peaceful protest. I urge everyone to come to the rally on the 20th and to all the rallies that follow. It matters. I wrote a post about this last night—read it if you haven’t yet.
I’ll admit, this move infuriates me beyond words. Most of all when I picture those thieving mugs discussing it and snickering: let’s do this too. He runs around raising money—well then, let him hand over everything he collects to us, heh-heh. We’ll write in the papers that he’s not just politically bankrupt, but literally bankrupt. We’ll bury him in debt for years.
What’s more, we are essentially seeing a new, cunning format of repression being tested. You open any case at all, no matter how absurd, invent a damage figure out of thin air. Then come a suspended sentence and a civil suit. So technically no one has been jailed—no new political prisoner has appeared—but their property has been taken and they’ve been shackled.
It infuriates me, but it doesn’t scare me. We’ll answer their inventiveness with our persistence.
To those good people who also wrote in the comments last time: let’s raise the amount together. I obviously can’t come anywhere close to paying 16 million rubles on my own; there will clearly have to be a property inventory, although I don’t really have much to inventory.
But I’m still not sure about fundraising. To be honest, as the Russian saying goes, it would just “choke me like a toad” to raise 16 million and direct it not toward useful work, but toward voluntarily paying off robbers.
In any case, there will be a court hearing on this civil suit. Obviously it will be symbolic, but still. At the very least, we’ll once again show—if not to the judge, then to everyone present—just how blatantly the Kirovles case was fabricated.
Come to the rally. For a fair trial as well. Sunday, 5:00 p.m., Maryino metro station.
Anyone who writes a few words on their social media saying people should come is doing a good thing.