We are all very worried about what may be happening to Alexander Turovsky, our volunteer, who was beaten by police at the campaign headquarters and who today published a very strange post: "I want nothing to do with Navalny; he did not help me."
I already wrote on Facebook that we do not believe Alexander wrote this post himself, without pressure (there were suggestions that his account had been hacked, but Meduza managed to reach him by phone).
I spoke with him myself on the day of the hearing, as soon as I got out of the special detention center, and told him we would provide any help needed. We even hired three (!!) lawyers for him. He appeared on Sobol's program on Monday. Turovsky was supposed to be one of the topics on my program today, "Navalny at 20:18". Everyone who spoke with him literally yesterday says he expressed nothing of the sort and made no such complaints.
People in the comments on his post correctly pointed out a whole host of small signs that he did not write it himself—from the quotation marks to the dashes, which he had never used before.
Here is my Facebook post:
And I decided to write this post because I realized what bothers me most about Turovsky's post. It is this mention of the story about "Lebedev, who was not helped":
And Lebedev himself is frolicking in the comments along with all the Kremlin's Facebook propagandists (and, by the way, take note—they have already cobbled together an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda).
Well, in this case we know for certain that this Lebedev was a planted guy. It is all a complete lie, and his "story" was actively pushed by Kremlin media in exactly this framing: Navalny calls on his supporters to go to protests and get arrested, and then abandons them.
And now Navalny is calling on his supporters to go to rallies ("he urged us to get hauled off by the police"), and then abandons them.
This is exactly what the Kremlin wants: fewer people turning out for rallies.
At the time, the Foundation's director, Roman Rubanov, transferred to Lebedev's bank card exactly the amount in the estimate he had sent—for compensation for a broken camera and phone.
We have the full correspondence and the payment record. The real Turovsky would never have mentioned this story—either he did not know about it (he joined us much later), or he knew that Lebedev was a fraud and a provocateur. In other words, this was clearly written by some "PR man" working from a brief.
And here is a screenshot of the payment record:
When, a few months later, he started writing posts saying, "I was abandoned and not helped," and those posts immediately turned into LifeNews articles, we understood what was going on and did not even pay attention—it is obvious that people are constantly trying to plant agents and provocateurs among us; that is inevitable.
However, in Turovsky's case, everyone who knows him rules out the possibility that he was planted or bought off.
We are seriously afraid that he has been intimidated in some way, and we are worried about him.
Alexander, you will read this post. No matter how difficult the situation may be, we will understand and will try to help with every resource available to us. Come to us. If you cannot come, meet with one of your comrades and tell them. We are on your side.