Things are going great in the regions, guys. There is support in the regions—and a lot of it.
We’ve begun our autumn tour, and for the first time we started inviting not only volunteers from our closed mailing list to the rallies, but anyone who wanted to come.
The result: in Murmansk, Yekaterinburg, and Omsk, our events became the largest political rallies seen there in recent years. There is endless arguing over how many thousands showed up where, but after each rally I asked local journalists: what rally has been bigger in recent years? Even pro-government ones were forced to admit—it was the biggest.
Maybe we got lucky. Maybe circumstances just came together that way. Maybe the weather helped (in Yekaterinburg and Omsk the weather was wonderful; in Murmansk it was +5°C / 41°F and raining). In any case, we saw the most important thing: tremendous support on the ground.
We felt the main thing clearly: it is impossible to hold a presidential election without our participation. It would simply be a sham.
People are tired of seeing the same faces in power for 18 years straight. People understand perfectly well that they have no future “with these people in the Kremlin.” They are sick of the monopoly. Sick of the lies. Sick of poverty and deprivation being passed off as stability.
It is actually quite funny to watch the authorities panic when they see the size of our gatherings. In every city, one or two other rallies are inevitably staged alongside ours. Those events get careful coverage, with reports of huge crowds. They are pushed into “Yandex News” (Russia’s major news aggregator) by manipulating the system’s algorithm. All media resources are being thrown into promoting the line that “once again, nobody came to Navalny’s rally.”
And we’re satisfied—there is nothing we need to prove. People were there; they saw everything with their own eyes. Seeing yet another ridiculous lie like this will only make them support us even more.
We are proud that we are running a real nationwide campaign, not a fake one confined to the Garden Ring (central Moscow). We do not want to be part of a rigged game in which candidates think not about voters, but only about how not to anger Putin and the Kremlin.
A huge thank-you to our campaign offices—there are now 80 of them across the country. Thank you to the volunteers organizing these events. Thank you to everyone who comes.
Help our campaign and become part of it. Support us financially—without that, regional trips like these will be impossible. Sign up as a volunteer and bring in new people ready to add their signature in support of my nomination.
Photo reports from the events: