So, here’s the situation. I’m forced to state that holding meetings with voters in the form of officially approved rallies is no longer possible.
In other words, they simply are not giving us permits at all. None whatsoever.
At first they did approve them—the Kremlin thought no one would show up. People did.
Then they stopped approving them in the biggest cities—so we successfully started traveling to smaller ones.
Then, apparently, the Kremlin pinned its hopes on the weather. The colder it gets, the harder it is to gather people outdoors. But we managed it in the snow and in the rain too.
So now they simply tell us: we will not let you hold the meeting, period. Every week we submit around 200 applications, and everywhere we get refusals. Completely illegal ones.
You remember that under the law, a rally cannot simply be banned. The authorities are required to offer an alternative venue. At first they offered us bad locations, but once it became clear that people would gather there too, they stopped offering any alternatives at all.
That means the administrations of 40 to 50 of Russia’s largest cities are openly and blatantly violating the law every single week. Volkov describes this in detail here.
We—and I personally—have not the slightest doubt that all of this is being coordinated from Moscow. Officials in every city cannot start acting in the same illegal way without specific instructions.
And there is no doubt whatsoever that this order was given personally by President Putin, because he is simply afraid of our campaign. He does not want to part with the comforting idea of his 86 percent. In reality, he has no real support in the regions—only a television soap bubble.
Rallies in his support will never look like ours. No one will ever come to them voluntarily and without being paid. We have seen these so-called “Putings” (a Russian pun combining “Putin” and “rallies”) many times—paid crowds and state employees herded in.
Most politically active people are on our side. And that frightens Putin. That is why he is afraid to let me take part in the election.
So, two things.
We are filing suit against both Putin and his administration. In court, we will present comprehensive evidence showing how city administrations across the country are acting in an organized, synchronized way and under explicit instructions from Moscow. We will demand that official witnesses be questioned, and we will argue that all these illegal orders were given personally by Putin—no one else could have done it.
Yes, yes, we know all about Russian courts, but it is important for us to act strictly within the law. And, if you like, head-on. We know who is banning these meetings, don’t we? We do. So that is exactly whom we are suing.
We are not canceling meetings with voters, but we are switching to a different format. We will hold them on private land and in private venues, just as we did at the last meeting in Tambov.
So we are looking for honest and fearless people in the regions who own warehouses, hangars, shopping centers, movie theaters, and so on—any premises capable of holding more than a thousand people.
I am sure such people exist. And they cannot be intimidated by cheap stunts like a pig’s head hung on the doors of a shopping center.
After all, in Irkutsk there was a wonderful person—the owner of a furniture center—who provided a venue for my meeting on November 4 (Read his interview, by the way). That means there are people like that everywhere.
We are not giving up, we are continuing to work, and we are doing everything in our power.
Support us, this is a common cause.