Hi, this is Navalny.
Today another trial begins, one that will add a great deal to my sentence. But I do not want to use this day to ask for sympathy for myself or for other political prisoners. I want to call on everyone to act and to use this day to announce our new, very important project. A big campaigning machine. A machine of truth. We do not merely want to build it—we absolutely will, in order to unite our efforts in the fight against Putin’s lies and the Kremlin’s hypocrisy. We need you very much. Join us.
Why is today a good day for this announcement? Because this very trial proves how right and necessary such a project is. What is the main thing about this trial? Not the lawlessness, not rule by phone call (informal political orders handed down from above), not the submissiveness of shameless judges and prosecutors. The main thing is its form: this is a trial held inside a prison. Putin is not embarrassed to jail the innocent, and he is not afraid that an uprising crowd might break me out during a hearing in Moscow. But he is afraid of what I will say. Even if they are obvious words that everyone already knows. He is afraid of words. And of course not only mine—that is why Kara-Murza and many others were also tried behind closed doors.
Putin is afraid of any word of truth, hates remarks that turn into internet memes, and flies into a rage over “last statements” that reach audiences in the millions. In essence, the task of strengthening and prolonging Putin’s rule is carried out by silencing those who dare to speak the truth. Almost everything that has been done in Russian politics in recent years has been subordinated to that goal. And since the start of the war, the authorities think about almost nothing else. Prison terms for posts, for “discrediting” the army, for “fake news,” arrests, blocks, “foreign agent” labels, and “undesirable organizations.” You might think: why not just let people talk? When the authorities fight rallies they see as dangerous, there is a certain logic to it—but chatter on the internet or even over the phone, what is the problem with that?
It may seem like the opposite is true—that discontent just dissipates into nothing. The couch troops click “like” instead of building barricades. But in reality, politics does not work that way.
Putin has shown himself to be a fool in military matters, a talentless commander, but in politics he is no fool. He knows that the foundation of any political action is ideas and words. Campaigning and persuasion. This is especially clear during elections, particularly where they are highly competitive. Whatever the peculiarities of a given state, its political traditions, or the issues on the agenda, elections still come down to campaigners going door to door, calling people on the phone, and persuading them on social media and in messaging apps. And in every U.S. presidential election, for all the high technology and enormous budgets involved, the candidates themselves will volunteer in call centers to encourage their supporters to come in too—to call, explain, and persuade.
Because nothing has ever surpassed, or will surpass, the most basic form of persuasive campaigning: simply talking to people, simply offering examples and arguments.
People like to claim that election campaigning does not affect them. That they already know exactly what they want, and that no one can change their minds. But that is not true. A large share of voters make up their minds at the polling station, which is why a good campaigner can plant doubt, persuade, and change minds. This has long been proven. And we ourselves have conducted experiments in this area.
So what is there to campaign for when there are no elections? There is plenty, and the stakes are very high. We will run an election-style campaign against the war. And against Putin. Exactly that. A long, persistent, exhausting, but fundamentally important campaign in which we will turn people against the war.
Against the war and against everything connected with it. Against the dead end into which Putin so madly and stupidly turned on February 24, 2022: death, loss, mobilization, war crimes, isolation, sanctions, tens of thousands dead, and millions gone abroad. Economic decline and falling living standards, convicts sent to fight and impoverished conscripts, the dead and the wounded.
This is a very concrete task, and I have no doubt that our work will succeed. Here it is—the main table and the key figure from one of our surveys:
One in five people has relatives or acquaintances who have died in this war. Those numbers will unfortunately keep rising, changing public consciousness as they do. Tens of thousands of wounded and disabled. Hundreds of thousands of mobilized men who have seen Putin’s war with their own eyes as it really is: from talentless, thieving generals to shortages of everything—from socks to shells. They are coming home, and their stories are being heard and retold. That does not mean these people automatically become anti-war activists. But it absolutely does mean that, with our help, they can become one. We have grounds to discuss important questions with them, and many will not refuse to talk.
We will change many minds. In almost everyone, we will plant doubt. This is an election-style campaign against the candidates “War” and Putin. And you and I will run it according to the rules and techniques of good election campaigns: surveying everyone, targeting hundreds of different groups, finding the right approach to each, identifying the undecided, and persuading them.
I strongly doubt those huge figures for “support for the war” produced by Kremlin pollsters. First of all because it is unclear what “support for the special military operation” even means. I ask for everything written and said by Strelkov and Prigozhin to be sent to me, and I read it very carefully. Are they for the war? Well, obviously. But for all their mutual dislike, I find in no one clearer anti-Putin and anti-Kremlin statements. And to be honest, statements that are already close to anti-war. Have you watched Prigozhin’s interview? For all its bloodthirstiness, it is anti-war. The “cook” (a reference to Yevgeny Prigozhin, once known as “Putin’s chef”) says outright that it is over, the war is lost. A victory scenario—by his own phrase, the “optimal” scenario, in which we keep what we have already grabbed—is hardly possible. The elite stole everything, and their children are abroad. The generals are stupid thieves. Our weapons are bad, there are no shells. Actually, this is the way the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) always talked, but now it is being said by the war’s chief supporter and one of its main commanders.
And our task is this: when a voter repeats all of that back to us, we ask gently: maybe to hell with this war then? Why did we get into it in the first place? Yes, for many people what they dislike is not war itself, but a losing war. Or a senseless war. Fine—any anti-war campaign (see Vietnam, see Iraq) relies on that too.
Here, I am trying to persuade the cops around me as best I can. Of course they say they support the war. Naturally—the conversation is being recorded on a body camera. It is useless to talk to them about war crimes, Bucha, aggression, or sanctions. They do not care who is suffering over there. But when I ask: “So where are the shells? Where did your Putin, after 23 years in power and with all that money, screw away the shells, the socks, the body armor, and the quadcopters?”—they have no answer. “I did not make up the shell shortage. It was your Prigozhin, the very man you were tiptoeing around when he came here to recruit convicts for the war. And if your government has wrecked everything so thoroughly that there is no intelligence, no commanders, no secure border, no air defense, no shells, no socks—then why the hell did you charge into this war? To put a million people in the ground?” They do not carry me around on their shoulders after conversations like that, but they do stop and think, and they do begin to doubt.
And we will look for a different approach to each person, without trying to speak to a programmer from Moscow, a young mother from Oryol, and a retired military officer from Chelyabinsk in the same language. This is an election-style campaign against the candidate “War,” and it can be run successfully only if it rests on an army of tens—or better yet hundreds—of thousands of convinced, diligent, hardworking people who believe in success. People who do not burn out after five minutes of work, do not faint because someone told them to get lost, do not become demoralized after meeting the average voter, and do not expect that voter to be logical, reasonable, educated, polite, and immediately persuaded. This is intelligent, subtle, persistent work for the long haul, and I call on those who want real work and a real contribution—not endless whining on Facebook and Twitter, where we are trying to persuade ourselves—to join us.
We are already against the war, we are already several million strong, and we have already learned how to organize and finance our own actions. If, let us imagine, out of the 1.5 million who left since the start of the war and mobilization, the 1.5 million who left after 2014, and the 1 million who stayed in Russia but are not afraid, every tenth person joins the campaign against the candidate “War,” then this army of 400,000 campaigners could reach 12 million citizens a month, even if each campaigner makes just one contact a day—that is, without overexerting themselves at all. A campaigning machine of that power would radically change public sentiment in the country within 3–4 months.
Now let us stop fantasizing. Because in practice that is unlikely. People are lazy, they have their own lives. The loudest ones, the people demanding “real action,” are always the first to disappear. Idlers, as always, will find excuses for themselves: “How is this real action? I would go derail trains, but this is nonsense.” And they will focus on criticism without derailing a single train. And so on. In short, all the same things that happen in any election campaign. Even so, we know for certain that there are tens of thousands of people ready to devote at least one hour a day to conscientious, persistent work for the common good. That is a colossal force. It will be very difficult to organize such a campaigning machine—one of the largest in the world. But the eyes are afraid while the hands keep working. I am sure that our first goal can be to reach 10 million voters with anti-war, anti-Putin campaigning. That alone guarantees a noticeable shift in public opinion. How that will affect the political situation, no one can predict. But our work will certainly not be in vain.
Let us move on to specifics. What tools of persuasion are available to us inside Russia? Rallies/pickets—no. Door-to-door canvassing—no. Calls from your own phone, if the caller is inside Russia—no. Call centers inside Russia—no. As we can see, the main arsenal of traditional election campaigns is unavailable to us. Let us acknowledge that soberly.
However, there are new opportunities, new technologies. Offshore call centers, decentralized call centers. Messaging apps—campaigning through them can be astonishingly effective, given that even every granny now has WhatsApp and Telegram. Campaigning on Kremlin-controlled social networks is also possible, if the risks are managed properly. So a rough description of the campaigning machine we are going to build is this: a system that lets you (the campaigners) log in from anywhere at a convenient time and, while remaining anonymous if you wish, contact a voter inside the Russian Federation by voice or text who matches the necessary parameters—sex, age, city, occupation, and so on. The system teaches you how to campaign by drawing on previous experience, suggesting conversation structures, facts, and phrases. In a sense, this is like creating and training artificial intelligence. We must create and train a system of collective intelligence that persuades voters to oppose the candidates we hate—“War” and Putin.
“Wow,” you might say.
Yes, it is an ambitious task. But broadly speaking, there is nothing impossible or unprecedented about it. Marketers, advertisers, and political consultants have been doing similar things for decades. Cold calls, warm contacts, sales funnels—all of that is well known. It is just that marketers are not usually thrown in prison for it. Our activity, by contrast, will undoubtedly be declared illegal and subversive. The full force of the state apparatus will be thrown into fighting it. Fine—then we will throw all our strength into fighting the apparatus of war, corruption, and stupidity.
A great deal of technical work lies ahead. Nothing like this exists yet. The system must be highly flexible and possess qualities that seem mutually exclusive. It must be an easy-to-use contact database, but designed in such a way that it cannot, in principle, leak and become a source of problems for people. Anyone willing should be able to join the work quickly, but provocateurs, crooks, fools, hotheads, and so on must be filtered out as fast as possible. We will have to create a large number of disposable accounts, but this must not turn into a spam machine. The campaign machine must be able to adapt instantly to blocks and any other countermeasures, and be as creative as possible. My colleagues and I have built or tried to build elements of something like this since 2012—old-timers may remember the DMP project, which I announced at one of the rallies.
However, the scale of the project was such that there was never enough time, knowledge, money, or personnel. I think this is one of my biggest political mistakes: I did not make DMP a priority, and we did not build it after the 2013 election, constantly getting distracted by other matters. But now we simply have no choice. Not politically—what could be more important than stopping the war and the regime that lives by war? And not organizationally either—hundreds of thousands of the most active and capable people have been pushed abroad. They are ready to do something, but what? We receive thousands of messages: “Guys, give us some kind of useful work we can do from abroad, or in Russia, but without unnecessary risk.”
So. We are beginning to design, we are beginning to build, we are beginning to hire, we are beginning to raise money. We need you very much. Above all, we need those who understand the technical, logistical, and organizational side of what I have described. We are gathering opinions, expertise, and ideas. Soon we will organize hackathons in different cities. And of course, we need the most resilient, the most patient, the most understanding people—the ones who will become the heart and essence of this system. Technically, a shell is built, but it is people who fill it.
For this campaigning to succeed by the time the full machine is created and launched, we must conduct thousands of hours of conversations. Listen to them and analyze them. Determine the parameters for microtargeting. Create, test, revise, and improve hundreds of conversation scripts for different target groups.
We are looking for the first 100 pioneers—volunteer campaigners ready to take on this amazing but difficult work. Especially amid the inevitable chaos and mess of the first steps.
Write to antiwar@navalny.com if you are: — an IT specialist ready to devote a great deal of time to developing technological solutions for our campaign system; — a marketer, sociologist, or political scientist ready to devote a great deal of time to creating conversation scripts, engagement funnels, and so on; — a supporter ready to provide substantial targeted funding specifically for this campaigning project; — a volunteer who wants to be among the first hundred people to devote a great deal of time to the conversations themselves, refining scripts and finding the words and approaches that can win voters away from candidate Putin and candidate “War.”
Please write in reasonable detail about yourself, where you are from and where you live now, and how much time you have for this work. We will contact you soon.
This is a long-term project. Putin’s military defeat is inevitable. But no one knows what it will look like or what its consequences will be. Those who make up the ruling elite, ready to start a war for money and to strengthen their own positions, are not going anywhere. They are not flying off to the moon. Their response to a lost war will be hysteria and preparation for a new one. That is exactly how they will keep brainwashing citizens. No one but us will enter this struggle for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. So we must enter it—and win.