Today, the Babushkinsky District Court held two hearings involving Navalny at once — an appeal in the “Yves Rocher case” and sentencing in the defamation case. In the first, the court upheld the replacement of his suspended sentence with a real prison term, despite the ECHR’s demand that Alexei be released immediately. In the second, Navalny was fined 850,000 rubles.
In both proceedings, Alexei delivered a final statement. We are publishing both.
I give final statements so often! This hearing will end, and then I have another one, and there I’ll be giving a final statement too. If someone ever decides to publish all my final statements, it’ll probably make a pretty thick book. It seems to me there’s a kind of peculiar message in this, one being sent to me by the entire authorities as a whole, and by the owner of the marvelous palace, Vladimir Putin. It all looks strange, but the message is: we can do this, look, we can do this. You know, like a juggler or a magician in court, spinning a ball on one finger, then suddenly on another, then on his foot, then on his head. And they’re saying: “Look, we can spin this judicial system on any part of our body. Who do you think you are, going up against us? We can do absolutely anything — look, just like this.”
But honestly, it seems to me that this swagger of theirs… Well yes, of course they can do things to me, and they are doing them. But I’m not the only one who sees it. Ordinary people watching this are deeply affected by it. Because everyone thinks: “Right — and what if I run into the judicial system? What chance would I have of achieving anything here?”
Still, a final statement means I should give a final statement. I don’t even know what to talk about anymore, Your Honor. Shall we talk about God? And salvation? I’ll turn the pathos dial all the way up, so to speak. The thing is, I’m a believer. Which is generally a constant source of mockery at the Anti-Corruption Foundation and among people around me. Most of them are atheists; I used to be one myself, and a fairly militant one. But now I’m a believer, and it really helps me a lot in what I do. Because everything becomes much, much simpler. You see… I spend less time agonizing, and there are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is, well, a certain book in which it’s more or less clearly written what one should do in every situation. Of course it’s not always easy to follow that book, but I try. And so, as I said, it’s easier for me than for many others to do politics in Russia. Recently someone wrote to me: “Navalny, why does everyone keep writing to you ‘stay strong,’ ‘don’t give up,’ ‘endure,’ ‘grit your teeth’? What is there for you to endure? Didn’t you say in an interview that you believe in God? And it says: ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.’ So that should be great for you, then.” And I thought — wow, this person really understands me well. It’s not exactly that things are great for me, but I have always taken that particular commandment as more or less an instruction for action.
And so, while I’m certainly not enjoying where I am, I nevertheless feel no regret about having returned or about what I’m doing. Because I did everything right. On the contrary, I feel something like satisfaction. Because at a difficult moment, I acted as the instructions required and did not betray the commandment. And there’s something important here. For a modern person, of course, this whole commandment — “blessed,” “those who hunger,” “those who thirst for righteousness,” “for they shall be filled” — sounds very lofty. Frankly, it sounds a bit strange. And people who say such things are generally assumed, to be blunt, to look crazy. Crazy, odd people, sitting there in their cell with disheveled hair, trying to encourage themselves somehow, though they are alone, loners, because nobody needs them. And this is the most important thing our authorities and the whole system are trying to tell such people: you are alone. You are on your own. First it’s important to frighten you, and then to prove that you are alone. Because what normal people — we’re normal people, reasonable people — would live by some commandment, for God’s sake? And this idea of loneliness is very important; it is one of the authorities’ main goals. By the way, one of the great philosophers said something about this — Luna Lovegood, remember her from *Harry Potter*? Talking to Harry Potter in difficult times, she said: “It’s important not to feel alone, because if I were Voldemort, I’d very much want you to feel alone.” Our Voldemort in the palace certainly wants that too.
You know, the guards — they’re fine guys in my prison, normal people — but they don’t talk to me. Apparently they’ve been forbidden to speak with me. They use only routine phrases. That too is important: to make you constantly feel alone. But I do not feel alone at all. And I’ll explain why. Because this phrase — “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” — may seem exotic, a little strange, but in fact it is the main political idea in Russia today. Your Honor, what is the most popular political phrase in Russia? The most popular slogan? Somebody help me out. Where does strength lie? That’s right: strength lies in truth. That phrase, which everyone repeats — that’s exactly what this is. It is that very beatitude, just without the “for,” the “hunger,” and the “thirst.” It has simply been compressed to Twitter size. And the whole country repeats in every possible way that strength lies in truth. Whoever has truth on their side will win. And that is very important. And although our country is now built on injustice — we constantly encounter injustice, and the worst kind of injustice is armed injustice — we nevertheless see that at the same time millions of people, tens of millions of people, want truth, want to achieve truth, and sooner or later they will achieve it, they will be filled.
It’s obvious to everyone: there is a palace. You can say it isn’t yours or that it doesn’t exist, but it does. There are poor people. You can say all you like that our standard of living is high, but the country is poor, and everyone can see it. People ought to be prosperous. They built an oil pipeline, they’re making money, and yet there is no money. That is the truth, and you can’t argue your way around it. And sooner or later, the people who want truth will get what they seek — they will be filled.
And there is something important I want to say to you. And through you — to you, the prosecutor — to the authorities as a whole. To everyone: it is important not to fear these people, not to fear those who seek the truth. Because many are afraid: oh God, what will happen, there will be revolution, there will be nightmares and upheaval. But just think how good life would be without constant lying, without this falsehood. The ability not to lie — that would be a wonderful state of affairs. Just think how great it would be to work as a judge with no “telephone justice” (informal pressure from officials telling judges how to rule) at all, no one calling you, and you’re simply an excellent judge with a high salary, even higher than now, a respected pillar of society, and no one can call you up and tell you how to decide cases. And then you go home to your children and grandchildren and tell them that yes, you really are an independent judge. And all the other judges are absolutely independent too. Wouldn’t that be great? It would be wonderful to be a prosecutor who actually works in an adversarial legal system, playing an interesting legal role, defending someone or prosecuting real villains. I hardly think people went to law school and became prosecutors so that later they could take part in fabricating criminal cases and forging signatures for someone else. I do not believe that is why people want to become prosecutors. And I do not believe people want to become police officers so that later they can say: “How great it was when we cracked someone’s skull at a rally! Or we escorted some guy who was innocent. We’re listening to his upcoming final statement.” Nobody wants that! Nobody wants to be like that; everyone wants to be a normal police officer. Because this lying has only downsides, no upsides at all. They don’t even pay you more for it. There are drawbacks, but no benefits. And that goes for everyone, from business onward… Businesspeople too. Any business in this country is worth half as much because there is no real judicial system, because there is injustice, because there is chaos and poverty. And of course everyone would be much better off if this lying and injustice did not exist. It would be much better if the people who want truth achieved that truth. The FSB officers (Russia’s security service) are the same. Not a single person in the world was ever a bright-eyed schoolboy saying: “I’ll join the FSB, and they’ll send me to wash an opposition politician’s underpants because someone smeared them with poison.” There are no such people! Nobody wants to do that! Everyone wants to be a normal, respected person — to catch terrorists, bandits, spies, to fight all of that.
And this is very important — simply not to fear the people who seek the truth, and perhaps even to support them in some way. Directly, indirectly, or maybe not even support them, but at least not assist this lie, not contribute to this falsehood, not make the world around you worse. There is, of course, a small risk in that, but first, it is small, and second, as another great philosopher of our time, Rick Sanchez, said: “Life is risk. If you don’t take risks, you’re just a limp bundle of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.”
The last thing I want to say. I’m getting a huge number of letters now. And every other one ends with the phrase “Russia will be free.” It’s a great slogan; I say it all the time too, repeat it, write it in replies, chant it at rallies. But I keep thinking: something is missing. Of course I want Russia to be free — that is necessary — but it is not enough. It cannot be the goal in itself.
I want Russia to be rich, as befits its natural wealth. I want that national wealth to be distributed more fairly, so that everyone gets their share of the oil-and-gas pie. I want us to be not only free but also, you know, to have decent healthcare. I want men to live to retirement age, because right now half of Russia’s men do not, and women are not doing much better. I want education to be decent and for people to be able to study properly. And of course I would like people in Russia to be paid the same for the same work as in an average European country, because right now they are paid far less. Anyone — a police officer, a programmer, a journalist, anyone at all — everyone earns much less.
I would like many other things to happen in our country. We need to fight not so much the fact that Russia is unfree as the fact that, overall, it is unhappy in every respect. We have everything, and yet somehow we are an unhappy country. Open Russian literature — great Russian literature — and my God, it is full of nothing but descriptions of misery and suffering. We are a very unhappy country, and we cannot break out of this cycle of unhappiness. Of course we want to. So I propose changing the slogan and saying that Russia must be not only free, but happy. Russia will be happy.
It’s absurdly funny that this is another final statement. All day the prosecutor has been saying that I demand some kind of special treatment for myself. It seems to me that having two final statements in one day is also a kind of exceptional treatment — one I did not ask for, but apparently have.
For this final statement I have a piece of paper, this one. It’s pretty battered, because I carry it in my pocket to every hearing. And whenever I leave the pretrial detention center (SIZO), they search me and every time they say: “What’s this? Not allowed — only case materials are permitted.” And I say: this is my most important case material. Remember, at the very beginning you gave us half an hour to review the case file, and I looked through the classified materials, the inventories. The only thing — the only thing — that interested me, I copied out from there.
And then throughout the trial I would take it out of my pocket and glance at it secretly. Every time at the most theatrical moments, when our prosecutor was pretending to cry here and straining her voice, saying: “Veterans are everything to us, our state exists for veterans. Only we love them, while people like you insult them.”
When you, Your Honor, said: “Don’t you dare. Veterans are what matters most. Everything in Russia is for veterans.” And even later, when I turned on the television in my cell, they were talking about how I had insulted a veteran. The veteran, of course, is the most important thing in the country, and all of Russia exists for the veteran. I would take out this piece of paper again and look at it. It is a note — a certificate from the social welfare office — and it lists what assistance they provided to veteran Artemenko.
Here is the certificate for the last four years. It says that the last time he received a food package was on 06.07, and in total over the past four years he received assistance seven times. Three times he received vouchers for food packages, once an actual food package, and three times vouchers for groceries. And if I counted correctly — and I think I did — the total value of those vouchers is about 10,000 rubles. That’s the full extent of your concern for veterans, for God’s sake — you hypocritical scoundrels! That is what your real attitude toward veterans looks like. Toward the elderly, toward everyone — that is how things work in this country.
Another page in the case file is the composition of the investigative team. Fifteen people from different regions — fifteen idlers and louts — were brought to Moscow, housed there, given per diem payments and higher salaries so they could investigate this “crime,” you understand. More money was probably spent on that than the veteran received in state assistance in his entire life. One day of this trial — just calculate how much all these state employees here cost — one day of this trial costs far, far more than veteran and war participant Artemenko received in state assistance over the last four years from a government that dares to claim it cares about veterans. The most disgusting, vile, revolting thing about this government is that it exists in order to rob these people. The most unfortunate people — veterans, these pensioners. They are the source of this money. Where do palaces come from, and toilet brushes costing 50,000 rubles apiece? We know money does not come from nowhere. It comes from there. It was stolen from this veteran. Someone did not get proper medical treatment, someone did not get a proper education, someone was not given a wheelchair, someone was not given medicine — so that a palace could be built, so that Putin’s mothers-in-law could be bought apartments, so that Medvedev could have four palaces.
And everyone has to be given something, but to give, you have to take from someone else. And they do take — in order to protect their ability to steal. They use the very people they have robbed. That is the most revolting part. Every single day, you rob this veteran, every single day, and then you drag him out, wave him around, and say: “We will stay in power forever because we are protecting him.” And that is truly monstrous.
A little twerp spoke here — the one who filed the complaint against me. And he said the best line of the whole trial. He said: “Well, I watch this video, and there’s an elderly man there, and you can see he’s poor, so that means he’s a pensioner and a veteran.” But why is he poor? Why is that such an automatic association for everyone in our country? A veteran — well, that means poor. A war veteran means very old and most likely destitute. And of course people see it instantly; the picture just clicks into place. Poor means veteran. Why is that? I don’t understand. If he is a war participant, and all of you here have stolen your fill while telling us how much you love them, how you protect them, why can I tell at first glance that he is poor? Why is it that if you take all the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, or fine, let’s take those that lost the war — Italy, Japan, Germany — in Russia the victorious soldier has the smallest pension? The smallest, and you do not want to raise it! I proposed such a law and asked that their pensions be raised to the level of German Bundeswehr soldiers. No, can’t raise it!
Because then there wouldn’t be enough for the palace. Because money does not come from nowhere. For those fancy homes of United Russia members to appear in Gelendzhik or on the French Riviera, someone has to be robbed. And of course the best, most convenient people to rob are veterans and pensioners. Our authorities — from Putin to United Russia and all the way down to all of you — have turned into a huge pig, you know, slurping from a trough full of money, petrodollars, with its head buried in it. And when someone taps it by the ear and says, “Hey! This is for everyone!” you lift your head and say, “What? We will not allow veterans to be insulted!” — and then stick your head right back in. And everyone says: “Maybe you should stop stealing?” And you pull out that face of yours again and say: “What? We will not allow the results of World War II to be revised!”
What do you, your Putin, and your United Russia have to do with that war at all? Just listen to yourselves: “We are the victors,” you say. As if you had climbed out of the trenches yourselves.
You use this because you do not want to talk about the present. You use it because it is very awkward to discuss any current problem. Because people want to talk to you about corruption, poverty, inequality, the collapse of healthcare — and you have nothing to say about any of it. And when specific people like me start asking questions that are too sharp, suddenly it becomes: “What palace? What palace are you talking about? What Dimon (a nickname for Dmitry Medvedev), what Putin? Let’s talk about how he insulted a veteran!” That is exactly why this trial was invented. Because you do not want to talk about anything else.
Here the prosecutor… One of the nastiest moments of the whole trial, of course, was when the prosecutor read out those fabricated statements. It was all obvious to us: ten pages of testimony. Just think — first they got together and said: “Right, now we need testimony for him to read in court.” But the old man is elderly and of course can no longer speak. “All right then, to hell with it, let’s take his old memoirs and sign for him.” They even laughed at the old man: “What difference does it make, he’s old anyway.” And then she read it out, pausing dramatically, pretending her voice was trembling.
And I would like to remind you, for example, of a recent and important episode in our country’s life, one I mentioned during this trial, but it is never too late to recall it again. In Krasnodar Krai, under the direct protection of former Prosecutor General Chaika, who still works in the prosecutor’s office, and his entourage, who still hold senior positions there, the Tsapok gang operated. They terrorized an entire Cossack village (stanitsa), raped schoolgirls, and murdered people. And they were caught only after — because they were protected by the prosecutor’s office and the courts — only after they slaughtered an entire large family, killed adults and children, piled their bodies in the yard, set them on fire — that is in the official case materials — and threw a living newborn baby into that fire. Do you understand? And about that episode… All of that happened because the prosecutor’s office stood behind them, the courts stood behind them, United Russia stood behind them. Members of the United Russia party did all this. And that episode, you see, you do not want to read out. Your voice does not tremble then, even though those are genuine fascist crimes. Your voice does not tremble — on the contrary, in a very proud voice you say: “Hm, who’s last in line at the cashier?” And you are ready to serve this enormous hog with its snout buried in the common petrodollars because you hope a few crumbs will fall your way.
I turn on the television and see a report — a shameful report. They are literally showing the moment when the veteran learned that Navalny had insulted him and felt unwell. And by an amazing coincidence, at that very moment there just happened to be a film crew in the veteran’s home, filming him. There he is lying there — and they show it, I see it on television — lying in his underwear on a blanket, with his grandson standing nearby, happiness in his eyes, pleased with himself, and it is written all over his face: my God, I’ve finally monetized grandpa. It worked. He has become useful to our family again. Everyone is happy, the cameras are rolling, and behind the camera, probably, stands Margarita Simonyan (a prominent state media executive), saying: come on, grandpa, don’t move, just lie there. And this 95-year-old man is lying there in his underwear on a blanket, and his face says: what is even happening? Why are they doing all this? And they say: “It’s fine! It’s fine — it’ll be more touching this way!”
With this entire trial, whose purpose is perfectly clear, you have genuinely humiliated and insulted all these veterans ten times worse than anything done before. You truly degraded a human being’s dignity, using a person like a puppet, someone who clearly does not fully understand what is happening… one moment he wants to testify, the next he does not. You simply sign on his behalf openly. In your eyes he is not even a person. I mean, do you understand — a living person, legally competent — how can you just go ahead and sign ten different statements for him in different handwriting? Because to you he is not a person at all. To you and to your authorities he is just a mechanism, a puppet you want to use for your own purposes.
I began my remarks with this on the first day, and I will continue: yes, I absolutely believe that for all of this you will burn in hell. I hope you are all still relatively young people, and that not only will you burn in hell, but you will also answer before a normal human court for what you have done. I understand what you have staged here. One court, then that court’s ruling comes into force, now another court — all so that in the evening they can say that this last court, and once again… they jailed him for 3.5 years, and now you will sentence me again to 3.5 years so that you can say: “Navalny is in prison not because he evaded the investigation, but because he insulted a veteran.” And you will go on, as they say, stuffing television viewers’ ears with all your nonsense. Your design is obvious, and of course you will deceive some portion of your television audience, but I am certain — I simply know — that your plan will not work. A huge number of people following this trial can see how all this is happening. They feel just as disgusted and sickened as I do, because unlike you, they regard veterans, pensioners, and everyone else as people, normal people, who cannot be mocked, who cannot first be dragged in to appear in your vile videos, then have statements signed on their behalf and forged, who cannot be filmed like this in a helpless state. And what you have planned, I am sure, will not succeed, and one way or another the truth will prevail, and everyone will answer according to their deeds. Thank you.