After I announced my intention to run in the presidential election, I gave a whole bunch of interviews. One of the questions that came up most often was how I was going to campaign for votes if I have no access to television, no access to the federal print media either, and there is no way Channel One would sell me ad time.
That’s all true. Those are all weak points in our campaign.
So let’s look at our strengths instead. What can we do, in terms of campaigning, that neither the authorities nor the other candidates can?
Exactly: tell the truth.
So let’s run an experiment together—without television, but with the truth. Right now, I’m going to try to persuade the residents of a very large Russian city to support my candidacy.
Take Nizhny Novgorod, for example—the country’s fifth-largest city—and tell its residents the truth: the city’s mayor, a member of the United Russia party, secretly bought two apartments in Miami, Florida, in the United States. He paid 130 million rubles for them. And the mayor’s family made these purchases at exactly the same time his entire party and the “national leader Putin” were hysterically proclaiming what great patriots they were and how fiercely they stood up to that very same America.
Take a look:
And if you don’t just want to look, but want to verify everything yourself by studying the documents, then read on:
So. Nizhny Novgorod is a city of over one million people, a major industrial and economic center. It is located in the picturesque spot where the Volga and Oka rivers meet. The old city center, the embankment, the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, Minin and Pozharsky (Russian national heroes), the GAZ automobile plant—all of this is Nizhny Novgorod.
But not everything is well in Nizhny Novgorod. It is one of the poorest Russian cities with a population over one million. 64% of the population are low-income. In other words, more than half the population has enough money only for basic necessities. Every tenth resident of Nizhny Novgorod lives below the poverty line, with an income of less than 9,000 rubles a month.
Last year, just before New Year’s, public transport in Nizhny stopped running. There was no money for bus fuel, and electricity for trolleybuses and trams was cut off for nonpayment. This year, officials are hoping for a winter with little snow, because the budget does not have enough money to clear the streets.
Nizhny Novgorod has a mayor—or rather, a Head of the City, which is the official title. The head is elected by the city duma deputies from among their own ranks, and since October 2015 that position has been held by Ivan Nikolayevich Karnilin.
As expected, he is a member of United Russia. As expected, he has devoted his whole life to the motherland—he has been continuously elected to the city duma for 22 years, all the way since 1994!
And, as befits a high-ranking representative of Putin’s government, he is an astonishing patriot, living the humblest of lifestyles and despising the values the West tries to impose on us.
In his rare interviews, Ivan Nikolayevich talks about how much he loves Russian nature and how he restores his soul on his land in the Shatki district of Nizhny Novgorod Region, swimming in the river and going to the banya (traditional Russian steam bath).
He likes to boast about how constantly he stays in touch with the public, reporting on the installation of as many as four benches on Lenin Avenue. He also talks about his other important achievements. For example, how he found the funds to buy 1,000 Easter kulich cakes and hand them out to elderly people.
There is no doubt that Easter cakes are exactly what a resident of Nizhny Novgorod living at or near the poverty line really needs. Why would anyone need discounted public transport or a wheelchair ramp at the building entrance when there’s kulich?
And now I’m going to do something outrageous—indeed, downright offensive to every United Russia official.
I type the surname “Karnilin” into the Miami, Florida real estate owners registry. Any one of you can do the same and personally verify that all our information is accurate.
And right away I see a certain Albina Karnilina who owns property in Miami.
We open again the interview where Ivan Nikolayevich talked about the river and the banya, and we see that his wife has exactly the same name—Albina Karnilina. Ivan Nikolayevich also spoke about his children and young grandchildren.
In another interview, he even specified the names of his children and grandchildren. His son is named Nikolai, his daughter Irina, and his granddaughter Valeria. According to Karnilin himself, his children are not businessmen or layabouts, but are following in their father’s footsteps—working in public service.
Don’t think I looked into and am describing the family members of the head of Nizhny Novgorod in such detail out of idle curiosity. We’re going to need these names later.
Let’s return to the Miami apartment. Here is the situation. A certain Albina Karnilina bought a 130-square-meter apartment exactly three years ago—in December 2013. She paid $824,000 for it. She paid the full amount up front—without loans, a mortgage, or any other encumbrances.
Let’s take a closer look at the apartment. It is located in this building—the tallest one on the beachfront, with direct beach access, its own pier, a swimming pool, and all the other joys of life in Miami.
Quite freely—thanks to the openness of the city of Miami!—you can obtain the floor plan of Madam Karnilina’s apartment and even photographs of the interior. Let’s examine them.
The floor plan shows a huge living room with a wraparound terrace, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a walk-in closet. In real life, the apartment looks like this:
Now wait a second, you might say—how many Albina Karnilinas could there be? Surely this is just someone with the same name as the mayor’s wife!
My answer: first, yes, there are not many Albina Karnilinas. And second, the document for the American apartment names the buyer’s heir as one Irina Ivanovna Ovchinnikova, who lives... in Nizhny Novgorod. The property transfer documents list her exact address.
Then, in our own Rosreestr (Russia’s state property registry), we order an extract for the apartment at that address and find the following owners there—Albina Ivanovna Karnilina and Irina Ivanovna Karnilina. Note: not Ovchinnikova, as in the American documents, but Karnilina. We recall the list of Mayor Karnilin’s relatives that I laid out at the beginning of this post, and we see that this is exactly the name of the city head’s daughter.
So, for now, our body of evidence includes two exact namesakes of the wife and daughter of the mayor of Nizhny Novgorod. But we want more proof, right?
In his declaration, Karnilin lists an apartment among his assets. Huge by Nizhny Novgorod standards—almost 300 square meters. With that size, it is not hard to find. Here is the extract, and here is the list of owners:
At number one we see Ivan Nikolayevich Karnilin. This is the mayor of Nizhny Novgorod; it was in his declaration that we found this apartment.
At number two, Albina Ivanovna Karnilina, the exact namesake of the mayor of Nizhny Novgorod’s wife and, at the same time, the namesake of the buyer of the apartment in Miami.
At number three, Nikolai Ivanovich Karnilin, the exact namesake of the mayor of Nizhny Novgorod’s son.
And number four, Irina Ivanovna Karnilina. The exact namesake of the mayor of Nizhny Novgorod’s daughter, and also the namesake of the heir to the Miami apartment.
So it turns out that the women who bought the American real estate live in Russia in the same apartment as the mayor of Nizhny Novgorod, Ivan Karnilin.
So let’s stop playing these games about exact namesakes: it is obvious that this is the family of the mayor of Nizhny Novgorod.
You may have noticed that in the Russian documents, which are older, the mayor’s daughter is listed under the surname Karnilina. But in the American documents she has a different surname—Ovchinnikova. The most obvious explanation is that she got married.
It is fairly easy to confirm this by finding Irina Ovchinnikova from Nizhny Novgorod on social media. Look at this photo of the Karnilin family from 2000. The girl Irina in the picture is about 10 to 12 years old.
And now look at this photo from social media. Recognize her?
We found this picture on the profile of Irina Ovchinnikova from Nizhny Novgorod. She got married in 2012 and changed her surname.
Here she is posing in a wedding dress.
And here she is celebrating her daughter’s birthday. Notice the paper banner. It says, “Little Lera is 1 year old.” And once again, let’s recall Mayor Ivan Karnilin’s interview, where he said he had a granddaughter named Valeria.
We already have matching Karnilin names across three generations, so let’s keep going. There is still a lot more that is interesting.
Now let’s move to 2014, when the Karnilin family were already the happy owners of their first ocean-view apartment. In the spring of 2014, the international situation was heating up—the war in eastern Ukraine began, sectoral sanctions were introduced, and everyone was talking about the start of a new Cold War.
A true United Russia member, following the party line on patriotism and import substitution, ought to have hurried to sell the apartment in hostile Miami, buy a little house on the Black Sea, and help defend the country’s geopolitical interests.
So what happens in our case?
On the very day a Malaysian Boeing is shot down over eastern Ukraine, and the Cold War with Europe and the United States truly begins, Albina Karnilina buys another apartment in Miami, in the same building, for $1,100,000.
The apartment is more expensive and, accordingly, larger. Its total area is 159 square meters, and it also has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two balconies, and a wonderful view from the window.
Let’s sum up. In 2013 and 2014, the wife of the Head of the City of Nizhny Novgorod bought two apartments in Miami, USA, with a total value of nearly two million dollars, or 130 million rubles.
That is an enormous amount of money—in Nizhny Novgorod, it would buy around 60 good one-bedroom apartments.
There is no information anywhere that Albina Karnilina is a businesswoman or a public official with a huge declared income. Her husband, meanwhile, has served as a deputy of the Nizhny Novgorod City Duma for 22 years and is now the mayor. His official income for 2015 was 4.7 million rubles.
And he simply “forgot” to mention his wife, Albina Ivanovna, in his declaration.
Amazing, considering that just recently he was talking in interviews about their close-knit and loving family.
We sent an official inquiry to Nizhny’s city hall—but received no substantive information. We did, however, have a good laugh when we discovered that officials had begun frantically deleting information about Karnilin’s marital status from the official website.
And one more amusing fact: from 2014 to 2016, the Karnilin family paid about $76,000 in property taxes alone to the U.S. budget—nearly 5 million rubles. This is easy to see in the same Miami registry (apartment 1, apartment 2).
In 2015, those taxes came to $26,280.55—more than a third of Ivan Karnilin’s official income. How exactly does that work, I wonder? On November 5 of that year, did the head of Nizhny Novgorod stop by the bank after work and wire 1.7 million rubles from his Russian account to the municipality of Miami? We know for certain that the bills were paid on that day.
To sum up:
The family of the mayor of Nizhny Novgorod picked up two apartments in Miami.
They paid 130 million rubles for the apartments, many times more than the official earnings of Karnilin himself and his family members. The source of the funds is unknown. It is hard not to recall that if our bill on combating illicit enrichment had been adopted, this alone would have been enough to open a criminal case.
The apartments were not declared. Until the very last moment, Karnilin stated everywhere that he was married, and after our inquiry he began removing information about his family. It may be a sham divorce, but that changes nothing in substance.
If they bought apartments and pay taxes in the United States, then they must also have bank accounts there. And officials and their wives are explicitly prohibited from holding such accounts.
All of this was done by the mayor of one of the country’s poorest major cities, where every tenth resident lives below the poverty line—that is, is officially destitute—and 64% are officially low-income, meaning officially poor.
These facts should be known to the FSB, the Interior Ministry, and the presidential administration—I repeat, this is the head not of a village but of a major city—but they consider this normal, because their own bosses are in similar situations. And if they do not know, then they are simply unfit for their jobs. Why do we need security services and law enforcement agencies that know less than the public Anti-Corruption Foundation?
And there can be only one main conclusion here: this government must be changed. It has degraded, become thoroughly corrupt, buried itself in lies, and will never be able to reform itself.
The authorities must be challenged in a fair election. That is what I am doing, and I ask for your support. If you think I should be one of the candidates, go here https://2018.navalny.com/ and leave your email address so that we can later collect your signature.
And of course, as part of this campaigning experiment, I really need your help spreading the information. Share this video.
Especially if you live in Nizhny Novgorod. Links on local websites, forums, and chats will be very helpful. Even more useful will be posts in places where we will not be allowed to buy direct advertising: Odnoklassniki and VKontakte (Russian social networks).
The best thing you can do is post this video on your social media and say plainly what you think about it. For example: I live in Nizhny, and I am absolutely outraged by our city head’s secret apartments in Miami against the backdrop of canceled bus routes. That is why I want there to be a candidate in the election who tells the truth, and I will give my signature to support his nomination.
Maybe I won’t need any other campaigning at all.