I, of course, consider the voters’ strike a success. Of course, a boycott strategy is generally worse, and people understood it less well. It was a forced step. We wanted to take part in the election, we prepared for it, and in fact we were the only ones besides Putin who were actually engaged in campaigning.
I find it very funny to read candidates’ statements like, “I visited this many cities.” Because over the course of the year I visited two or three times more than any of them, spent 2 months in jail, and only stopped traveling after I was denied registration. And on top of that, I wasn’t even allowed to hold meetings. I don’t think any of the candidates had gatherings like the one I had in Samara.
The strike is simple enough. Why was it successful?
We said: if you don’t let us onto the ballot, we’ll declare a boycott and drive turnout down so far that you’ll have to resort to mass fraud again, like in 2011. And everyone will see that Putin was elected in a rigged election.
And Putin replied: no way in hell—I’ll use the administrative machine to herd in so many people that turnout will be higher than in 2012.
And that was that. From that moment on, these “elections” turned into a showdown between the strike headquarters and the Kremlin’s headquarters over boosting turnout. It was a political process. We relied on honest and courageous people. They relied on coercive power and administrative resources.
And everything else—the spoiler candidates, their platforms, their pathetic debates, and their miserable campaign videos—was of no interest to anyone. They existed only as internet jokes.
In the end, we deployed 33,000 election observers (the “candidates” deployed at most a few hundred) and achieved our goal. The 2018 presidential election became yet another massive falsification. They could not produce either the turnout or the result Putin needed without ballot stuffing. I’m not going to post ballot-stuffing videos here—YouTube is full of them. Here is the clearest example.
The 2012 election. The number of registered voters was almost 110 million.
After that, Crimea was annexed, bringing with it 1.8 million voters.
After that, according to official Interior Ministry documents alone, 600,000 migrants were granted citizenship.
On top of that, the population was supposedly growing continuously thanks to Putin’s amazingly successful demographic policy, which he talks about in every major speech.
Then comes the 2018 election. The number of registered voters: 109 million.
Hello—where did you put more than three million adults?
It’s obvious where: they understated the number of voters in order to inflate turnout.
Add the North Caucasus to that. We brought back some astonishing statistics from there:
Also Kemerovo Region and Krasnodar Krai, where observers were thrown out.
That’s it. They piled an extra 10–12% onto turnout.
That is the result of the strike. They could not achieve the targets they needed without fraud. The whole country knows the election was falsified and that people went to polling stations not voluntarily, but under pressure.
35 million people refused to take part in this disgraceful election. We cannot say exactly how many of them simply couldn’t be bothered and how many acted in solidarity out of principle.
But we know for certain that it was many millions—most of those 35 million. Under such a barrage of propaganda and administrative pressure, not showing up for these “elections” became a civic act.
We did it together. We remained honest people, and that binds us together forever. We are not ashamed of how we conducted ourselves on March 18, 2018.
The most important thing in our struggle is collective action. March 18 was an excellent example of that.
Some people write that a side effect was the poor showing by Yavlinsky and Sobchak. As if we kept their voters at home.
My friends, they have no electorate whatsoever. That’s why they were allowed onto the ballot. We saw these same numbers in the very first polls, long before any strike was announced.
This time we once again proved that our polling operation is the best. Did you see the negative-rating measurements?
Neither Sobchak, nor Yavlinsky, nor Titov would have received more than they did under any circumstances. They do not have any significant number of supporters. If I had spent several months desperately urging people to vote for them, the result would have been the same, except that several million people would have kept thinking, “Navalny is an idiot.”
But the main result of our campaign, which has been going on for 15 months and began with this, is us. The movement we created, with real branches in every major city in the country and active supporters in virtually every locality.
A huge number of wonderful, brave, intelligent people who are not afraid of hard work. Who are not afraid of the sound of their own voice.
People who, when faced with a choice between truth and lies, do not even hesitate. For them there is no dilemma at all: they always choose the truth.
For 15 straight months, we ran an effective nationwide campaign under mounting pressure. Real pressure: since November 2017, the news roundup about our headquarters turned into a chronicle of court hearings, searches, and arrests. And no one gave up.
Campaign office heads kept working. No one fled the central headquarters. Volunteers on the ground kept doing their job, because they were doing it for themselves. And that is the coolest thing about us. Each of us knows: “the common cause is my cause.”
For your own future, you hand out leaflets. For your own future, you donate 300 rubles. For your own future, you serve as an election observer.
A huge thank-you to everyone who was with us in any capacity during these amazing 15 months. Thank you for every contribution. You are the best people in this country.
This sounds a little like a farewell post, but it absolutely is not.
We have come out of this campaign far stronger than we were before. We will become stronger still.
In every form—from rallies to elections, from investigations to courtrooms—we will fight for a better future for our country. For the beautiful Russia of the future.