For a weekday gathering in the woods, the turnout was decent. For actually achieving change, it was far too small. And even if yesterday there had been not 2,500 people but 25,000, it still would not have been enough.
That is exactly what I spoke about yesterday in my remarks. We need to stop being naive, stop hoping for easy results, and—most importantly—finally stop wringing our hands, getting disappointed, and whining when those results do not come quickly.
Listen:
Just yesterday there was a rally, and today *Vedomosti* writes:
2.2 trillion rubles. Or rather: 2,200,000,000,000 rubles.
Well, even if it is only 1,000,000,000,000 rubles for upgrading the existing system. And we will pay that money—7,000 rubles from every citizen of the Russian Federation. And that money will go to very specific firms, suppliers of equipment certified by the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service; you can read about them here).
That is the whole picture: they have figured out how to make a trillion off us, and we are upset that, so far, an online petition and one modest rally have not affected them.
For a trillion, my friends, you have to fight. And you have to fight for the right to use the phone and the internet without surveillance. We need to hold 20 rallies, or maybe 200, or maybe 2,000.
In any case, there is no way around a mass turnout in the streets, with each of us doing our part and setting aside laziness and personal matters.
This is how the meeting goes:
*- Hello, Rotenberg. Hello, Timchenko. Hello, Kovalchuk. Hello, my son-in-law Kirill Shamalov. Good afternoon, Vladimir Vladimirovich. - We are holding a meeting on the project of taking a trillion rubles from the people for our own benefit. Report: is anything happening in the country that would make us give up that trillion, or at least curb our appetites? No, Vladimir Vladimirovich, nothing threatens our plan to extract a trillion. The people are sitting at home and getting ready to pay up. We propose raising the stakes to two trillion. - Agreed, let us get to work.*
That is all. We need to add some new variables to that meeting. So that someone says: maybe to hell with it—let us make do with the current hundreds of billions, this is starting to look dicey.
They invest time and money, rig elections, seize the media, jail people, fabricate cases, pick the most hypocritical people for parliament and the most dishonest for journalism. In short, they work at it. They get what they want.
And we need to work too, if we want to get what we want.
Otherwise, it will not happen. Neither money nor freedom comes for free.