A week ago, I asked for your help. Now I’m reporting back. The help came through, and I think this video will upset both President Putin and his chef, Prigozhin, who was carrying out the task of taking your money away from the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
The authorities would not leave alone the 7,607 people who had signed up to send us monthly donations, so with the help of corrupt judges they decided to seize our organization itself along with those subscriptions.
I won’t lie—we were worried about this. We could switch to another legal entity, but some people would not renew their subscription, some would forget, some would opt out, and so on.
So here’s the question: a week ago, we had 7,607 monthly donation subscriptions (with an average donation of 615 rubles). How many do you think we have now?
15,626 people, with an average donation of 485 rubles.
That is more than double.
Hooray! This is amazing, and we are incredibly glad that at a difficult moment so many people were ready to immediately rally behind the slogan “We stand with ACF.”
It is a huge responsibility for us, and we are immensely proud of this trust.
This is the best collective response to the gang of thieves entrenched in the Kremlin, and it is a very instructive story for all of us.
First, the world is full of good people. They are ready to help, and they are not afraid. Ask—and help will come.
Second, this is an example of how much more understandable, honest, and transparent the opposition is than the authorities. What money keeps United Russia going? State budget funding plus shady schemes for stealing that same public money. How do state television, their political pundits, small and large spoiler parties, Russia Today (RT), Simonyan, Solovyov, PR operatives, political technologists—all of this, which can broadly be called “the political system that sustains Vladimir Putin’s power”—actually work?
It is all built on secret corrupt schemes. Or open corrupt schemes. Take Prigozhin, for example. He supplies spoiled food to schools and kindergartens, makes enormous profits, and spends part of that money on his trolls, who sit there writing comments about how wonderfully and prosperously everyone lives in Putin’s marvelous Russia.
Unlike them, everything on our side is clear down to the last kopek. There are 15,000 people. Each chips in 485 rubles—that is how it works.
Putin can lie all he wants about foreign funding, and his Investigative Committee can declare our money criminal as much as it likes, but we—and they—know this: the opposition in Russia exists on honest money from ordinary citizens. The authorities exist on money stolen from those same honest citizens.
On behalf of myself and all my colleagues at ACF and in the regional headquarters, I want to thank each and every one of you. This will be a long confrontation. Obviously, Putin will now want to steal this money too. And we will keep inventing ways to survive, while they will keep inventing ways to destroy us. (Just now, news came in that we have once again been completely illegally fined 300,000 rubles.) But the main thing is clear. Together, we are the country’s largest organized political force acting voluntarily. The potential of our collective action is enormous, and only a small part of it has been tapped so far. We must not give up, we must work every day, and we must believe in ourselves—then we will change the country.
If you have not yet become someone who stands with ACF, join us. Sign up as an election observer. Sign up for Smart Voting.
But that is not all. Let us move on to the section that is not in the video. The thing is, last night I had an amusing exchange on Twitter with Vinokurova, an employee of the state-run Russia Today (RT), Vinokurova.
She is every bit as pointless as RT itself. The only useful thing Vinokurova has done in her life is create the meme “Everything was going so well until Navalny showed up.”
So, once again, she started lamenting that she is being harassed online and that people are making her life difficult. A tragic little fate, in short.
I wrote that RT employees, who receive huge salaries from a channel nobody watches, can hardly complain to the rest of Russia about how hard life is.
Because the scheme works like this: workers earning 20,000 to 25,000 rubles a month are financing trash like Vinokurova, Simonyan, and Krasovsky, whose salaries run into the hundreds of thousands and millions.
What followed was a long and funny thread in which Vinokurova first agreed to disclose her salary “in exchange for yours,” and then squirmed like an eel but still never revealed it.
Here is the latest part of that exchange, from today.
Well then. Not a problem at all. I have been publishing declarations of my income and property for many years.
I think it is safe to say that I am person number one when it comes to the close attention all state agencies pay to my income and any financial transactions whatsoever.
I have never received money from ACF and, like many of you, I myself am subscribed to donate to the foundation. You understand that if even a single kopek of your donations had ended up with me, there would already be a million “exposé” films about it.
As it is, all the Kremlin crooks can do is endlessly repeat the lie that “the unemployed Navalny lives off donations.” I am glad that the record doubling of recurring donors in a week showed that people understand perfectly well: their donations go to ACF and the network of headquarters, and have nothing to do with my personal finances.
Sole proprietor “Navalny” is my entire income (apart from minor stock payouts). As you know, I do not run advertising, although on Instagram I could easily earn at least as much.
In 2019, my income was 5,440,000 rubles.
Over the same period, I paid 326,400 rubles in taxes.
This income consists of transfers under contracts for legal services, organizing work at the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights), and so on. These are cashless payments made by Russian citizens from their accounts in Russian banks. For any “oversight bodies,” everything is completely transparent. Who is paying? I have already said this in an interview with Osetinskaya—there are no secrets here either. At the moment, Boris Zimin is the main source of income for my sole proprietorship. The money of Zimin and his family is also clear and transparent. The work of their Dynasty Foundation was wonderful and noble. (It was, until idiots in the government forced them to shut it down.)
As you can see, little has changed since the time Yury Dud asked me about my income.
So, dear Katya Vinokurova and the rest of the Russia Today staff, you can roughly calculate that on average I receive 453,000 rubles a month.
That is quite a large sum by Russian salary standards, but it is 10 times less than what the Simonyan-Keosayan family earns in a week from each episode of their monstrous TV show.
And it is even less than what, as we know from open sources, the political prostitute Krasovsky earns at RT: 543,000 rubles a month, taken from taxpayers’ pockets.
See how easy that is? There—just like that, and everyone knows the exact figure of my income. What do I have to hide? My home is constantly being searched anyway.
Now I am very much looking forward to the same move from RT employee Vinokurova and the other staff of this channel. Please tell us how much each of you is taking out of our pockets.
Once again, huge thanks to everyone who supported us and became a regular donor. You are the best.