Look at the photo. These are the materials from the administrative case against the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF). Twenty-three volumes, 5,609 pages that are supposedly meant to prove that ACF and Navalny’s campaign headquarters are extremists.
Navalny is an extremist, Zhdanov is an extremist, Volkov is an extremist, all their colleagues are extremists—everyone, absolutely everyone around them is an extremist.
It was on the basis of this very case, this stack of paper, that ACF was banned. Headquarters in 37 cities have been dissolved. Our former employees are in ever-growing danger. You can imagine it: 6 a.m., the doorbell rings, the peephole is taped over, masked men are breaking in, face to the floor, and so on. Up to 10 years in a penal colony.
Over Putin’s twenty years in power, we seem to have gotten used to every kind of madness and lawlessness, but this is truly a new level—both of absurdity and of repression against common sense. We, a nonprofit human rights organization, one of the largest and best-known in the country, devoted to anti-corruption investigations, have been placed in the same category as the “Order of the Noble Devil” sect, skinheads, separatists, and terrorist groups that planned and actually carried out attacks on Russian territory. ACF staff are now being equated with jihadists.
But even that did not seem enough for them. Alongside this case, a separate law was hastily drafted and passed, banning anyone connected to ACF and the headquarters from running for any public office. The Constitution says that anyone can be elected (as long as they are legally competent and not in prison), and Putin just took a pencil and added: “And anyone who supports Navalny can’t either, thanks.”
An absolutely unprecedented purge has taken place, and we have yet to fully grasp its scale. An entire generation has literally been cut off from political participation. Sixty percent of young people aged 18 to 29 do not support Putin. That is 11 million people who could have become municipal deputies, joined city councils, or been elected to the State Duma (the lower house of parliament). But that definitely will not happen now—as long as Putin remains in power.
It would seem that such an unprecedented purge would require some kind of unprecedented legal case. And indeed, on the surface, the case looks very impressive.
Just remember the prosecutor’s office press release that started it all.
Destabilization, undermining the constitutional order, organizing a color revolution—and all of it allegedly directed and funded by foreign sponsors.
And the proceedings themselves were classified! Their findings were apparently so valuable and unique that not only journalists were barred from the hearing, but we were too. The only people allowed in were our lawyers from Team 29 and other attorneys involved in the case: Ivan Pavlov, Valeria Vetoshkina, Evgeny Smirnov, Maxim Olenichev, Anton Golubev, Vladimir Voronin, and Ilya Novikov. Many thanks to them for their honest and extremely important work.
So. The prosecutor’s office announced the trial of the century. And in the case materials, we expected to find something to match. Evidence. Documents. Payment records. Transcripts of secret meetings with the U.S. State Department, where Navalny sketches out a plan to seize the Kremlin on a napkin.
But alas. Like everything the Putin regime does, this case also turned out to be a sham. We were declared extremists for no reason at all. Instead of evidence and documents, there is nothing there. Fiction. Clumsily invented by Putin’s prosecutor Popov, who, incidentally, we discovered owns hotels in Montenegro, an apartment in Spain, and a country house on Rublyovka (an elite area outside Moscow), all registered in the names of his elderly parents.
Prosecutor Popov got angry and decided to take revenge. But he has only enough brains and professionalism to steal. He and his team could not even manage to fabricate a case against ACF properly. He was surely hoping that no one would ever learn about his disgraceful work—the case was classified, after all. But we are going to tell you exactly what Putin’s prosecutors tried so hard to hide from public view.
We are making public not only the court ruling, but also all the case materials. Do not kid yourselves into thinking there is a real investigation here, or any evidence of extremism. There is none of that in the case—not even in the couple of classified volumes we cannot show. They are no different.
So what is actually in this stack of paper that is supposed to prove our guilt? We made a simple color-coded chart to help you better appreciate the emptiness of the prosecutor’s case:
For example: 436 pages of official warnings handed out before rallies, 387 pages of case files on people with no connection whatsoever to ACF or the headquarters, 124 pages of one agency writing to another, 22 pages that are completely blank, and another 24 that are simply unreadable. But most of all, there are screenshots and descriptions of internet pages. More than a thousand pages of the case look roughly like this.
One-fifth of the entire investigation of the century. Here is a screenshot from the headquarters website, here is a screenshot from YouTube, and here is a screenshot of—I do not even know what... the fact that Comrade Major cannot log into Facebook?
You could laugh at this waste paper and feel sorry for the paper it was printed on. But this is what ACF was declared extremist on the basis of. This is an official document. Just look: a report stating that a certain police major, under mixed lighting, connected to the global Internet and spent several hours taking screenshots of our websites, burned everything onto a CD, and added it to the case file. And all of this was paid for with our tax money.
But all right, perhaps it was worth it, and under that mixed lighting Comrade Major did manage to find those instructions for making Molotov cocktails that Putin talks about?
And again, no. But here is what they did find: someone named Daniil Bezvorotny (not an ACF employee, just a random person) posted on VKontakte a clip from the cartoon *Tom and Jerry*, where the cat represents the USSR and the mouse represents Nazi Germany. That is extremism. Or this: a resident of Tula posts an audio recording by the band Korroziya Metalla. That is extremism too. And especially wonderful is this: a police major from the Republic of Adygea describes how he examined someone’s VKontakte page. There he saw a person on horseback, the status “your daddy,” and a video titled “Jesus Slippers Are Your Last Hope.” And that TOO is extremism and an attack on the constitutional order.
What do all these screenshots have to do with anything, and how are they connected to ACF? In no way at all. They literally gathered materials on random people, most of them completely unrelated to ACF, and wrote that taken together it is all, of course, extremism. Here, for example: an explanatory statement. A man went to buy shawarma in Cherkessk, saw someone being detained, stopped to look, and was detained himself. And that too was added as evidence of our extremism.
And what about the claim that ACF acts in the interests of foreign patrons? The prosecutor said outright in court that ACF is controlled from abroad and that there is evidence of this. What do you imagine when you hear something like that? At the very least, Rockefeller or the State Department sending instructions to ACF. Perhaps secret meetings abroad with Masons and other handlers.
But the only evidence that ACF is controlled from abroad is this document.
It is the protocol appointing the supervisory board, signed by Navalny and me. And you may be surprised, but yes, it really was signed in Berlin on October 11, 2020—just a few weeks after Navalny regained consciousness there from the coma caused by Novichok poisoning. There is not a single other piece of evidence in the case linking us to any foreign organizations. This protocol is the best dozens of prosecutors managed to find.
But perhaps they did manage to uncover at least some real extremism? After all, the best forces were thrown into the investigation.
You know what? Yes.
Among these ridiculous screenshots, incomprehensible meaningless reports, and thousands of pages that have nothing to do with either extremism or ACF, we found the real reason Putin wants to ban us.
It is a video about United Russia’s promises: “Let’s Remind the Crooks and Thieves of Their 2002 Manifesto.” You can easily find it online. The video consists of several promises made by United Russia and contains just a few frames shown one after another.
Since the video is banned, we made slides from it that most certainly contain nothing extremist.
The original video was created in 2011, before the State Duma elections of the previous-but-one convocation. At the end, it calls on viewers not to vote for the party of crooks and thieves—vote for any other party, just not them. In 2013, the Kirov District Court of Novosibirsk officially declared this two-minute clip extremist. Navalny posted it on his channel, and according to the investigators, that is enough to shut down ACF and declare everyone connected with us and supportive of us to be extremists. They have no other evidence and no other arguments.
Putin tells the whole world that we are enemies and criminals. He puts us in the same category as terrorist organizations and murderers. He meets with world leaders, gives press conferences—and what does he say? That an honest court established it. That politics has nothing to do with it. That it is OUR own fault and that we publish instructions for assembling Molotov cocktails.
But that simply does not exist. The court established no such thing. We were declared extremists because someone unrelated to us wrote something online about Jesus slippers. Or because someone was detained near a shawarma stand. And the only real “extremism” they managed to find was not instructions for making a Molotov cocktail, but instructions to vote for any party except Putin’s United Russia.
And in Putin’s view, that is real extremism. The real reason we were banned. The real threat for which it was worth destroying an organization that fought corruption for 10 years, and did so thanks to you—the people who supported us all this time. We worked honestly and told the truth. We were open and transparent. We told millions of people what you will never hear on television, what the entire Putin system guards so zealously and desperately. And for Putin, that is far more frightening than any Molotov cocktail.
But despite the fact that Navalny is in prison, despite the fact that we had to close our office and dozens of headquarters, lay off hundreds of people, and face dozens of criminal cases, we will keep working anyway. Now we know exactly what they fear most: that their beloved party of crooks and thieves, despite ballot stuffing, manipulation, and fraud, will not be able to win the elections. And we must do everything to make sure that is exactly what happens.
You and I have only one truly effective way to defeat United Russia: Smart Voting.
Sign up and stay tuned. A few days before the election in September, we will send you the name of the candidate with the best chance of defeating the United Russia candidate in your region. It is very simple: remember the name, go to your polling station, and vote. Defeating United Russia is much easier than it seems. It worked two years ago, last year, and it will work now as well. And that is the best way to support us. As for us, no matter what, we will keep working.
People