“There was a plane, and I died on it.” An interview with Alexei Navalny

— Are you personally writing on Telegram and Twitter from your iPhone now? — I am now. I wrote the last Instagram post myself, and the one before that too. So yes, I’m writing now — I’ve mastered my thumbs again and can type on my phone. And on a computer too. I started using a computer later than anything else, because spreading my fingers to the right width was hard, but now I can do it. — So is everything basically back to normal? — No, it takes effort. I miss keys much more often, and autocorrect annoys me even more than it annoys the average person, which is saying something. Like for everyone else, typing the name “Yulia” is very hard. It used to be hard to type “Yulia,” and now it’s ten times harder. But I can do it. Let’s put it this way: right now it’s easier for me to write a post than to dictate one. Writing is easier than dictating. — How much weight have you lost over all this time? — About 12 to 15 kilograms total, so roughly 26 to 33 pounds. I don’t know exactly. They weighed me once I had started walking and could stand on a scale. When I was still bedridden, they probably didn’t weigh me. Or maybe they did somehow automatically. I’ll have to check my medical chart. When I was already capable of understanding what I was seeing on the scale, it was minus 12 kilos. But I think I’ve already gained back about four kilos. Because I’m eating a lot now. And I can feel that food gives me strength. I started to feel like I could actually walk once I began eating normal food. They fed me through my nose for almost a month, and when I started, to put it simply, stuffing myself with pasta, my strength started coming back. — What are the doctors saying about recovery? — There’s no prior experience to go on. As I understand it, even the doctors don’t have any special knowledge about the toxic agent involved. All they know is that there’s this report that was published, which no one has actually seen. There’s only information from the German media. Some variety of this “Novichok.” There’s a general understanding of how this organophosphate compound works. But they were very honest: we have no idea whether recovery will be 90 percent, 100 percent, 95, 80 — or how fast it will happen. Right now, physically, it’s going fairly fast. Cognitively too, more or less. The main thing is that the essentials have come back. Balance, coordination, things like that — those should come back too. Again, the question is how fast. Will the graph look like this or like this (he shows with his hands one curve shooting sharply upward and another rising gradually)? At some point recovery will slow down. It’s hard to say. “We don’t know. We’ll know more as we observe you. You’ll recover, and then, having seen one case, we’ll know that a person can probably recover from this type of poison at roughly this speed.” But the doctors are more surprised than anything, because as I understand it, by their calculations I should still be at the “sits and stares at the wall” stage. — So there’s progress every single day? — Real progress! We all knew it already — it’s a cliché, a stock phrase — that the human brain is amazing. But it really is amazing. I can see it in myself, in the way you relearn to catch a ball: on the first day you can’t catch a single one, on the second day you catch a third of them. Those skills come back pretty quickly. Some skills, though, are still very hard for me (Navalny is half-reclining on a blanket, and when he lifts himself up, his hands shake badly from the strain; there is an oak tree nearby, and acorns all around). I sit up and my hands shake — why? But walking is no problem at all. If it’s just the movement of “move your legs,” I can walk for an hour, and I think I could do two. But some little thing... If you told me: pick up that acorn from the road — that’s where I’d have real difficulty. I’d pick it up, but it would be harder for me. Walking for two hours would be easier. — After so many years of pressure, and now this poisoning — how do you endure all of it? — I didn’t endure anything. In this situation, I actually had it easiest. There was the plane, and I died on it. After that I remember nothing. All the dramatic events unfolded later, and I missed them — I didn’t see them. All my drama fits into about 35 minutes: from the moment I felt something was wrong to the moment I died. Everything else — the much harder things my wife, my loved ones, and everyone else went through — I missed. So there was nothing for me to endure. The worst part for me was all those hellish hallucinations, and the period when they stopped keeping me so heavily drugged and I started feeling some discomfort. And then there was that awful thing where you’re breathing, but you can’t speak, and the air is going through your mouth, and you move your lips but can’t say anything. When you’re already conscious and recognize everyone, but you can’t write and you can’t come up with a word, can’t say it — that was a pretty scary moment. — Were you afraid that maybe it would never come back at all? — That was still a period of mild mental dullness. And they were giving me a lot of medication that reduces sensitivity. You worry less — it’s a sedative, I don’t know exactly what the proper term is. They ask me, “Do you remember your name?” I remember my name. “Can you say something to us?” I can’t say anything. “Can you write something?” I can’t write anything. I remember how a word is spelled and I can picture it in my head, but my hand won’t write it. Or if it does write, it writes vertically and puts the letters in the wrong order. It’s astonishing. If someone had told me that, I wouldn’t have believed it. They tell you, “Write the word ‘mom.’” And instead of “mom,” you put down some other letters in a column. God knows why. It’s astonishing. So as for the drama of “enduring” — I didn’t really endure much. The last couple of weeks were just hospital discomforts. But as for the pressure and the “how do you endure it” part — in this specific situation, you should really ask Yulia. — Let’s go back to the poisoning. You’ve already said who you think was behind it. But did you know the attempt happened on the anniversary of Trotsky’s murder? — No, I didn’t. — On the exact same day. — Seriously? — No one’s asked you about that yet? — No. — On August 20, Ramón Mercader struck Trotsky on the head (Trotsky died on August 21). And Nemtsov was killed on Special Operations Forces Day. — Is that a holiday? — A holiday for special forces troops. — So you really think there’s some symbolism behind it? — That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you — what do you think? — Who the hell knows. There’s so little logic in all this, so little that’s explainable. Even though we know there are monstrous ghouls sitting in the Kremlin, and that they’re so obsessed with money and power that they’re ready to do all sorts of horrible things and kill as many people as it takes for money and power. But still, the mechanisms of control used to be a bit different. We didn’t assume it worked exactly like this, that they would move to these kinds of methods. At least I didn’t. What you just said surprised me. But clearly Putin personally revels in the idea that he has a battalion of invisible killers. Maybe the main point of trying to kill me was to intimidate a large number of people. People are more afraid of things like this than of bullets, I think. And maybe this symbolism plays some role too. After all, these people go to astrologers. They go to old women in Siberia, to palm readers, to all the rest. We understand that they’re obsessed with occultism, and we can see what kind of Orthodoxy they practice — something close to shamanism. Just look at the Ministry of Defense cathedral. It’s genuinely an occult structure, as far from Orthodoxy as it’s possible to get. So maybe they picked the date deliberately too. Listen, after ending up inside a Pelevin novel in all my drug trips (Viktor Pelevin is a Russian postmodern writer known for surreal, hallucinatory fiction), I wouldn’t be surprised if they stuck a cow skull on a pole and sang “Kroshechka-Khavroshechka” (a Russian folk tale/song) or something like that. I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest, not in the slightest, if they made some kind of voodoo doll and then sent Chepiga, or like in Breaking Bad — remember how those Mexican killers crawled toward some icon, made a sacrifice, and then went off to kill Heisenberg? I genuinely would not be surprised for a second. These are mentally unwell people, and money and power have made them even crazier and much more dangerous. — You must have thought about what triggered the attempt. — That’s all in the realm of speculation. — Let me rephrase: do you think the event they wanted to kill you over has already happened, or is it still to come? — The implementation is speculation. As for the reasons, that’s not entirely speculation — we have twenty years of experience. Despite the mounting pressure, despite the fact that they used almost every mechanism at their disposal — you remember yourself how many simultaneous raids there were, confiscation of everything, fines, everyone owing some utterly insane sums of money, criminal cases, administrative arrests, travel bans from Moscow, and so on. After that there were only two options left: either lock everyone up for long prison terms — but as we know, they don’t want martyrdom. I can easily imagine some meeting where they said: “Well, he brought it on himself. We tried this, this, this, and this. There was one final item left on the list of measures, and we got to it because nothing else worked.” If Smart Voting had worked successfully — and it did, especially in Tomsk — that’s a major threat to the State Duma elections. And more broadly, a major threat to their whole system, because that system is based to a large extent on self-hypnosis and perception. As long as the Kremlin is perceived as very powerful, it is powerful. But once everyone knows it got smashed in Khabarovsk, then in Tomsk, then in Novosibirsk, then somewhere else — it’s no longer powerful, and the whole thing will collapse before you know it. In 1984, ask anyone and they’d tell you the Soviet Union would last for hundreds more years and that system couldn’t be budged. Human rights activists were total marginals. In 1985 they were going on hunger strikes and dying. We’re now standing in a place where there used to be a wall, and we just passed a monument to one of the last refugees shot there — he was shot in 1989. In 1989! And even then everyone thought: yes, of course, you can shoot all these people, because this is forever. There’s a book called Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. That’s how it is here too. They understand perfectly well that as long as people believe this incredibly powerful system is stable, it remains stable. And the main reason for its stability is precisely perception. As soon as everyone says — forgive the banality — “the emperor has no clothes,” it all falls apart. In Tomsk everyone saw how easily it fell apart. And that in cities where there isn’t much fraud, United Russia simply cannot win. It can’t get a majority. And Putin, of course, will lose control. United Russia is the most important piece of political infrastructure; without it, nothing works. You can’t run everything through the courts alone. You still need the CPSU. You still need... what was it called in East Germany (the former GDR), the ruling party? — The Socialist Unity Party of Germany. — In any case, we see that in every authoritarian regime there is a ruling party, the guiding and directing force. That is the foundation of power, not horrible corrupt police officers or bought judges. — You’ve already said you were poisoned to intimidate a large number of people. — They wanted to kill me because they thought it would destroy our infrastructure or at least weaken it severely. We’d have to rebuild everything from scratch. But one of the most important secondary goals was simply to scare everyone. — Then here’s a question: legally speaking, how should your poisoning be classified? Under what article of the criminal code — literally as a question to a lawyer? — As a lawyer, I have no doubt at all: attempted murder of a public and political figure. That’s the charge that should have been brought in the Nemtsov murder case, in the poisoning of Kara-Murza, and all the others. A political and public figure can be more famous or less famous. But let’s not deceive ourselves or be hypocritical — everyone understands who counts as a political and public figure. And of course that is exactly the charge that should be brought. — Staying with the legal side: you’ve already mentioned Kara-Murza — do you think the poisonings of Verzilov and Kara-Murza should be combined into one case? — Listen, I don’t know. As I said, everything directly related to the mechanics is speculation. All I know comes from the German press. I haven’t spoken to any officials here and I know nothing. I haven’t seen any expert reports, and as far as I understand there is no investigation here. Verzilov and Kara-Murza both spent a week in Moscow [after being poisoned]. We understand they were poisoned, but with what — that can no longer be established. As I see it, the people who embezzled a billion rubles on the latest modification of Novichok came to Putin and said: look, right here in the instructions we wrote that after 48 hours not the slightest trace remains. Like the latest COVID vaccine, it’s the best of all. Our Novichok — we tested it on all sorts of targets: rats, ducks, some guy in a park, a passerby in the metro. After 48 hours nothing remains. But it did remain. Mass spectrometers — Swedish, French, and German — showed it was Novichok. And those other cases were kept for a week and nothing remained. In my case they were hoping that 48 hours would pass and nothing would be found. So from a formal legal standpoint, the answer to whether the cases should be merged is: I don’t know. From a political standpoint, I have very little doubt that the poisoning of all these people, like the murder of Nemtsov, were state operations of some kind. — Novichok is a rare substance. If they were handing it out to everyone, as you told Der Spiegel, half the country would already have been poisoned. So is it some very small group that uses these toxic agents? — That’s the main argument for Putin being behind it. Especially now, after Novichok has been moved into the category of fully prohibited substances that you’re not even allowed to store. In theory, there cannot be a situation in Russia where someone stole Novichok from a lab, because it isn’t supposed to exist. And no one else could have authorized its use — no one except the heads of the special services could have directly ordered the preparation of this team of killers. A scenario where some talented chemist made it and then some random eager killer used it — impossible. That eager killer would kill himself and everyone around him. This method of murder presupposes — there was an investigation into this after Skripal — that inside, I don’t remember whether it was the GRU or the SVR, there are groups trained to use this stuff. Chemical weapons are horrible, but they’re fairly ineffective. That’s exactly why, as you remember, they were abandoned after World War I, when there weren’t even any conventions yet. Everyone stopped using them because... — They poisoned themselves. — Yes, people died horrible deaths. But everyone around them died horrible deaths too — their own side, the enemy, horses, birds, everything on earth died horrible deaths. So people banned chemical weapons. That was absolutely the right thing to do. But Putin decided to use them actively. In fact, Europe’s reaction — I’d say one that goes beyond the usual format — is connected precisely to that. It’s not because some opposition politician named Alexei Navalny was poisoned. It’s because everyone really hates the idea — whereas Putin really loves the idea — of a brigade of elusive, invisible killers. — To continue that point: do you think they didn’t anticipate this kind of international reaction? Or do they just not care? — I think the plan was pretty simple, and in fact a chain of lucky accidents led to what happened. Fine, suppose I’d died on the plane. Then they’d have taken my body in Moscow, or Omsk, or Tomsk, or wherever, for examination for a few days. It would have been a terribly suspicious death. Mediazona would have written: suspicious death, experts say the death is suspicious. But then Dr. Myasnikov would have replied that what finished Navalny off was moonshine in Kaftanchikovo. Or something else. After all, the man is over 40 and lives under stress. Well, a suspicious death — it happens, people die in their 40s. And it would have gone into the record like this: Nemtsov was probably killed, and Navalny was probably killed. Or maybe not — no one was caught red-handed. And that would be it, plan accomplished. There would have been no reaction. There would have been a statement: we demand an investigation into the suspicious death of Alexei Navalny. Fine, go investigate. Go exhume him. Run your tests. There would already be nothing left. — Another question about the West: is it in real danger? They use this weapon freely here — why not use it against politicians who call for sanctions, and then against anyone who allows themselves certain statements? — I think that’s exactly what the reaction is about. It’s not that the West is in direct danger; it’s that it needs some boundaries. The West, broadly speaking, spends a great deal of effort trying to ensure that taxpayers live peacefully and safely. That’s the main goal. And to do that, they limit certain things. There are conventions and rules. You can have tanks and artillery. Yes, states unfortunately kill people. A drone flies in and fires a missile at someone. The drone operator got the order, the operator got it from a general, the president made the decision on the military operation. There is a chain of command. It may be right, it may be wrong, it may even be criminal, but it is publicly sanctioned by the state, and it is clear who is responsible. Here, by contrast, there’s some secret bizarre thing — someone opens a car door or picks up a cup of coffee and dies. And he can die anywhere. We understand that Putin probably won’t poison people left and right in Western countries where there are mass spectrometers that can detect something, and that makes him cautious. But in simpler countries — say Ukraine, Georgia, or wherever — there are no constraints at all. Go ahead, poison as many as you like. In principle, any state with a normal chemical industry can brew you a tanker of this Novichok. Give it a year and it’ll develop and produce it. It’s a complex substance, but if you’re capable of making complex pharmaceuticals, then what — would the Netherlands really have trouble making chemical weapons? But that is exactly why everyone decided they should not be made. A thick red line was drawn. In principle, many states could make biological weapons too. Sure, it can be done — but it must not be done. That’s a shared understanding. And in fact there are two forks in the road. If I’m right, and Putin gave the order, that’s very, very bad. But if I’m wrong... — So you admit you could be wrong? — I do not admit that I’m wrong. But everyone who says Navalny is wrong has to admit that Russia has a system in which lower-ranking officials can somehow get hold of Novichok, have people capable of using it, can enter hotels, can seize surveillance footage, can ensure no criminal case is opened, can arrange for medical panels flown in from Moscow to say, “We consulted with the German doctors and he is not fit for transport.” Even though the German doctors came and said: we can take him right now, do you understand? And those doctors were brought in under escort and taken away under escort — it looked very strange. In other words, it looks like a total loss of control. That would mean these groups — or, as people like to say, these Kremlin towers — are poisoning people with Novichok. And tomorrow who else will they poison? — Each other. — Each other, and the day after tomorrow... the category of “each other” can end up including anyone. If it can be bought, or if the people who possess it can be corrupted, then things are much, much worse. That’s the concern. In fact, the West’s tough reaction is connected to the fact that it absolutely dislikes either of those two possibilities. If I had been shot, they would have issued a statement: we are outraged, what kind of lawlessness and terror is this, we demand an investigation. But chemical weapons are an outright violation of conventions, of fundamental norms. If Le Monde is to be believed, in that famous conversation with Macron — “I’m not some Russian peasant” — they were expecting a certain kind of conversation based on shared assumptions: you’re a president, I’m a president, let’s talk president to president. You tell us something like: well, there was a system failure, they wanted to bump him off, we’ll fix it now, punish someone somehow. Don’t make a fuss, let’s settle it. And Putin says: he poisoned himself with Novichok. — And that’s crossing a red line again? — Of course. First of all, for me it’s indirect confirmation that Putin personally gave the order. Because he’s not just covering this up — he’s covering it up with some fantastical, monstrous lie. It’s not just crossing the red line — it’s crossing it and then, like children playing tag, taunting everyone from the other side. Fine, tomorrow everyone will start making this damned chemical weapon. And then what? Great. And all of that will lead to someone eventually brewing seven liters of it, damn it, and wiping out a city. This must not be done. That’s why everyone is so alarmed about it. — Ten years ago you gave an interview to Esquire, and there was a moment when they asked whether you were afraid of sharing the fate of people who had been attacked. Back then Kashin and Beketov were the names in the news. They asked: what if what happened to Kashin and Beketov happens to you? And you said, well, if something happens to me, first, I’d prefer it to be more like Kashin than Beketov, and second, I hope people will come out for me. How do you feel about the fact that people didn’t come out? — What were they supposed to come out for? They didn’t, and rightly so. What for? First of all, listen, the situation really was: okay, some guy blacked out. Kira understood immediately, Kira saw it all (Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh, sitting nearby, nods). You can ask her. I was really waiting for her to arrive so I could ask her about it — I was curious how it all happened. So, I blacked out. They were all saying: diabetes. Nothing was known about chemical weapons. It was obvious I’d been poisoned. A completely healthy person doesn’t just suddenly collapse. Besides, right before that I said I’d been poisoned. I already understood everything. — You understood? — Of course I understood, it was completely obvious. But then Volkov says to me, damn, well... the ambulance people said it looked like a drug overdose. — A drug overdose? — They told me it was narcotic poisoning. In other words, they saw a guy lying there in a coma, unconscious, and thought: well, drugs, obviously. What else could it be? The picture looked like a typical overdose case. Poisoning, yes. And they said: he’ll be fine the next day. Yulia and Volkov were saying: we’ll take you to Germany now, and the next day you’ll wake up and kill us all, damn it. Yulia goes around to these doctors, and they tell her: pancreatitis, metabolic disorder. They’re doctors, she isn’t, and she has no access, no way to get to me, no way to bring in a proper doctor. Nobody understood what was going on, and maybe it really was something else... it was impossible to sort out. So yes, by the duck test, if it looks like he was poisoned, then he probably was poisoned. But there were no test results, no access to the body, absolutely nothing. So no possibility could be ruled out. Plus they were saying he couldn’t be transported. And it was scary to argue with them too, because there were some truly awful people running that hospital. The management, I mean. At the lower level, a lot of people actually helped — good people. In the corridors they mouthed to Yulia, “Get him out of here fast,” and then went into the medical panel and said: he is not fit for transport. Nobody knew anything, nobody understood anything. God, I’ve been answering for so long — what was the question again? — Why didn’t people come out for you? Is that normal? — They didn’t understand what they were supposed to come out for. A guy fell into a coma and was most likely poisoned. — Was “most likely” the problem? — First, “most likely.” Second, he seemed to survive. Third... In fact, people did the most important thing, the thing that probably saved my life — they talked about it nonstop. And the reaction reached such a level that a secondary death would have been much worse. I didn’t drop dead on the plane, but if I’d died in the hospital in Omsk, that would definitely have been on the regime’s conscience. That’s why they let me go. — Too much attention? — Too much attention, and there wasn’t really anything concrete to protest over. It would have been strange to come out. Come out for what? You come out if someone is jailed. If someone dies. Some kind of protest. That’s the trick of this format of murder: everything is very unclear. — So the main thing is to create lots of versions. They love that. — Yes, lots of distracting versions. What happened is unclear. If it had turned out that the Novichok had decomposed and I hadn’t been taken out, or something else had happened, nobody would still understand anything. — They’d still be saying “pancreatitis.” — Of course. Like with Verzilov or Kara-Murza, for example. Maybe he was poisoned, or maybe he was into barbiturates or something? They’re still pushing that version now. It’s just that in my case three independent laboratories confirmed [Novichok]. And that changes the situation a bit. — You were poisoned amid the protests in Belarus, and you missed almost a month of them, but Lukashenko is still in power despite very large-scale protests. So the question is: do you ever get the feeling that no matter how many millions come out, if the security forces are on the side of the dictator and tyrant, nothing changes? — No, I don’t have that feeling. Two things surprised me when I came out [of the coma]. Belarus didn’t surprise me: I’m wholeheartedly on the side of those fighting the tyrant, of course, but looking at the degree of Lukashenko’s madness, I understand that different outcomes are possible. He’ll stop at nothing. But when they told me that 80 days had passed and people in Khabarovsk were still coming out — that surprised me. I thought: wow. I was only in the hospital for 36 days, 24 of them in intensive care, and then for some time after that I still wasn’t really myself. It seems to me that all these historical and especially geographical parallels don’t really work. We’ve seen different things. Again, take the Soviet Union. Or here, symbolically, East Germany. The Wall still stood in 1990, and the Stasi was one of the strongest intelligence services in the world. And they really did, like madmen, shoot peaceful people trying to cross the border. I don’t think it was like that in the USSR. In the USSR they at least tried to catch them; here they just shot them on sight. So what? It all collapsed in a single day. So no, I don’t think that way. Everything is very individual. There is no universal rule, no template, no straight road. — In the context of Belarus, a question about sanctions. Do you think Western pressure affects authoritarian regimes or not — sanctions, no sanctions? Or is it all useless? — I think it does affect them, but we haven’t seen any real pressure yet. Because there’s a clear rule and understanding: yes, the authoritarian leader himself fights for power, because power brings money. But the people around him fight for money. The entire second, third, and fourth tiers support Putin because... roughly speaking, the generic chief doctor of the Omsk hospital joins United Russia in order to steal money from a CT scanner procurement contract. That’s why he needs the regime. Those are the people sanctions should target. They’re not going to keep their money in Belarus or Russia anyway. In that sense, sanctions lists should include far more people — and people who actually have money. If you put Mishkin and Chepiga on a sanctions list, or whatever their names were — sure, they have some money, they stole something, bought themselves a G-Wagen or built a big dacha, but that’s not exactly earth-shattering. But there are huge numbers of Putin-era officials who stole a million dollars and keep it in a bank somewhere in Switzerland or here in Germany. Or stole a million dollars and bought an apartment in Berlin. Or stole a million dollars and keep it in cash at home, then come to Berlin for the weekend and spend it. Those are the people who need to be put on sanctions lists — call them sanctions, blacklists, whatever you want. That would work. If we’re talking about Belarus — good Lord, half the country goes to Poland, right? Including all the officials. Every second official shouting “Forward, Batka” (a familiar nickname for Lukashenko meaning “father”) has arranged some kind of Pole’s Card, or whatever it’s called, so he can travel there without a visa. That’s where barriers need to be put up, because sectoral sanctions don’t achieve the effect. They hit the country’s economy as a whole and make everyone a bit poorer. From that point of view, they may even help consolidate the regime. But they can’t impose real sanctions, and it’s obvious why — my position hasn’t changed, I’ve been saying the same thing since 2010, repeating it like a parrot. — Useless? — Useless, because their answer is obvious, understandable, and correct. They say: well, Alexei, you understand what rule of law means. You understand that we have courts here, that we have procedures. We can’t just do it. We understand everything about your Usmanov, but how exactly do you propose that we just go and seize his yacht in Barcelona? Usmanov will go to court, and the court will overturn it. All these people have armies of lawyers, armies of bankers, and there are regulations everywhere — you can’t just start adding people to lists left and right. — So what should be done? — Nothing. No one is going to solve our problems for us. In my case, for example, they’ll all pass it on to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. And things will proceed there, because what interests them is making sure there are no chemical weapons. In all other situations, they deal with their own citizens. Germany, Britain, the United States — none of them are ever going to devote themselves to figuring out how to free Russian people from tyranny. We need to stop thinking that way and stop hoping so much that the outside world will help us. It’s nonsense. The outside world is concerned with itself. Imagine some Uzbek dissident comes to Russia — easy enough for you to imagine, since you have Mediazona. Central Asia — and tells us about the terrible crimes of the regime. We listen sympathetically, say wow, share all his interviews. Fine, an Uzbek dissident, it’s all terrible. But what are we supposed to do, go to war with Uzbekistan? No. Damn it, let them sort it out themselves — it’s Uzbekistan, or Cambodia, or Myanmar. It’s not us. Same here. The Germans are alarmed by chemical weapons. But in general, as for democracy in Russia — sure, they’d like Russia to be a stable, normal, prosperous country so there isn’t a flood of migration and all the rest. But they have plenty of concerns of their own. Any small problem in the state of Brandenburg is a million times more important to them than everything happening in Russia. — Back to Belarus again. Did you and Yulia discuss Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s candidacy? Sorry, I know this is the umpteenth time I’m asking about it — Plyushchev suggested nominating her, after all... — We didn’t discuss it. Tikhanovskaya is great. We’re following it with interest. And it was the right thing to do. But it can’t be replicated. It came together in a unique situation and worked in a unique situation. The men ran, two were jailed, one fled. Then these desperate women united. Plus Lukashenko made a fatal mistake — he thought a woman wouldn’t get any support even in a fair system. But you can’t say: let’s do exactly the same thing. That’s just as pointless and silly as saying, “There was a referendum in Chile, so we should handle the constitutional amendments vote the way Chile did.” — It doesn’t work like that? — It doesn’t. That’s the kind of talk you get from armchair pundits. I’m sitting here in a vest myself (Navalny really is wearing a puffer vest over a T-shirt). And from some rather odd political scientists. It’s all very nice — I admire Tikhanovskaya. She really is impressive. I think it’s very hard for her now. Even harder than before — the initial surge is over, now the routine has begun, everyone’s quarreled, there’s no money. Her husband is still in prison, everyone is still in prison. It’s very hard to do opposition politics in Belarus now, even from outside Belarus. But all these political parallels don’t mean much. We followed everything, but... — It doesn’t apply to Russia? — I think it doesn’t. — By the way, Belarus or Byelorussia? — Belarusians want people to say Belarus — what, am I supposed to begrudge them that? If Belarusians like it, I’ll say Belarus. If I’m speaking automatically, I’ll say Byelorussia, because I said Byelorussia all my life. But if they really want Belarus, why wouldn’t I say Belarus? So in writing I use Belarus. Or I correct myself afterward. But in conversation, as you can hear, I keep saying Byelorussia. Honestly, I think there’s a lot of pointless discussion around this, but if it matters a lot to people, then fine — Belarus it is. — A slightly different angle on family. You already said you were afraid for your family, that they might have been poisoned too. — It’s an unpleasant thought. — Sure, but was it like that the last time too? When there was the brilliant green attack and the first poisoning? — In the detention center? — In the detention center. Did you have those thoughts about risks to your family then or not? — The scale was completely different, of course. The brilliant green attack — that was clear enough. Those were aggressive groups subordinate to the Moscow police headquarters and Center “E” (the anti-extremism police unit). Whether in coordination with them or not, they carry out that kind of harassment. They overdid it, and the Kremlin was more likely angry, because I’d get sympathy and lose an eye. In that wave of what were apparently fleeting emotions, they gave me back my foreign passport so I wouldn’t get so much sympathy and instead everyone would say I was a Kremlin agent because I got my passport back. — You made a deal. — As for the poisoning in the detention center, it was clear that was a state operation. I looked in the mirror and saw my face turning into a balloon. I was standing there, talking. I got a bit frightened looking at the faces of the people looking at me — they were very scared — but I didn’t have the thought that this was it, the end, that I was dead, that I was going to die. They did something, but the scale was incomparable. It’s not that I forgot those events, but they’ve sort of... faded. You mention it and I remember it, but it’s nothing. A completely different format and scale. — Still, it was poisoning. You yourself say the state was behind it. Was that a warning back then? — Who knows. I’m telling you, they’re crazy. They like it — Putin likes it, I’m sure he does. Poisoning is a very complicated thing to administer: calculate the dose, apply it so it won’t be found. Very often it doesn’t work. Then again, we don’t know how many successful operations there were — maybe their success rate is 95 percent. We only know about the unsuccessful cases, where something went wrong. But it’s a very difficult method to manage. They like it very much because it’s terrifying — it fills people with dread. It has this aura of mystical death, mysterious demise, and as you rightly said, it generates lots of versions. You can throw those versions around: a person blacks out, falls down — and immediately you can talk about alcohol, moonshine, drugs, a coconut candy and sugar, diabetes, and so on. People know from experience that people die from all sorts of things at any age. They really like that. For them it’s soft power, a crucial element of hybrid warfare. The ability to poison someone, and everyone around goes: oh, what happened? And they discuss it and discuss it. And they sit there and... — Finally, we’re so cool. — It’s awesome! Look what this one wrote, ha-ha-ha, and what that one wrote, hilarious! And we know how we did it, and who we’ll do it to next. Then it’ll be this one, and then him too. Look, he’s writing, damn it. Wonder what he’ll write when... the list starts moving further down. I haven’t seen an order to use some hypothetical “cocktail number 9” on this person and that person, but I have not the slightest doubt that the fairly broad use of these exotic methods of murder or attempted murder is, of course, sanctioned by Putin personally. He likes it. He sees it as one of his great achievements. — From poisoning to elections. Are you satisfied with the results in Novosibirsk and Tomsk? — Naturally, I’m very pleased with Tomsk. In Novosibirsk they stole three seats, but still. If in Tomsk we completely crushed United Russia, then in Novosibirsk we battered it badly. In regions where they didn’t let us in — Tambov Region, a very difficult region — even there a lot of Smart Voting candidates won. So yes, I’m satisfied, in the sense that now it will be easier for me and my colleagues to explain how Smart Voting works and why it matters to take part in it. The key to the strategy’s success is that enough people believe in it. The pointless, long, tedious debate about “how can you possibly vote for the Communists” will never end. But now it’ll be easier for us. It was clear we would do it, and we did it. And the Kremlin knew we would do it, which is why what happened, happened. — On the other hand, gubernatorial elections — are those hopeless? — Smart Voting and any of our strategies for gubernatorial or presidential elections simply don’t work there. It’s a specific strategy — better to say a tactic. Smart Voting is specifically for single-member districts in State Duma elections and regional legislative assemblies. In gubernatorial elections, there’s an individual, hand-picked selection of the government’s candidate and his opponents. You can’t beat that with a political-technology tool like Smart Voting; it just doesn’t work there. After Furgal was elected, after Sipyagin was elected, after Konovalov was elected in Khakassia, they drew conclusions. They now vet candidates very carefully at the selection stage. In gubernatorial elections we said: vote for a runoff, vote for anyone who isn’t the government’s candidate. But gubernatorial elections, like presidential ones, are basically unwinnable for now. The authorities aren’t fools either; they adapt. My 2011 strategy of “vote for any party except United Russia” worked, but by 2012 it was already over. — Do you think Smart Voting could change significantly at some point, be modernized? — For these people it’s a matter of survival. When we came up with Smart Voting, we sat down with a calculator and worked out whether it would work or not. And they’re not idiots on Facebook clutching their hearts and crying, “Oh my God, how can anyone vote for the Communists!” They sat down with a calculator too and said: holy hell, they’re going to knock us out everywhere. And they started inventing different countermeasures. In Novosibirsk, for example, they split the districts between the Communists and United Russia. And in Novosibirsk we didn’t get the same result as in Tomsk; there they used a very sophisticated technology against Smart Voting. I have no doubt that for the State Duma elections and the next cycle of regional elections there will be some new technology again. Hence the three-day voting. — Besides outright ballot stuffing? — Yes, besides ballot stuffing. Of course they’ll come up with more. These are sophisticated people, and they have all the mechanisms needed to implement their sophistication. They’ll think of something, and we’ll think of something else. — Then from voting to 2024. I have a pretty simple question about Putin. It’s obvious he’ll run, right? — Pff. You surprised me with that question. — Why? — Because of course he’ll run. Obviously. — Doesn’t he look at Lukashenko and think he’ll end up looking about the same? — On the contrary. I think Lukashenko, Assad — for him these are absolutely the right examples: stand to the very end. Put out a tank and shoot, walk around with an assault rifle, do whatever else, but the main thing is to stay in power. For him, Lukashenko and Assad and some other guys are winners. The people who showed weakness and left are losers, because they got scared. He doesn’t think they pitied their people or refused to shoot. To him it’s like: what nonsense, people just came out into the streets and frightened them, and instead of putting out a company of machine gunners and giving the order, they just... didn’t. So why wouldn’t Lukashenko appeal to him? Lukashenko, despite having none of the right qualities and having driven the country into an economic and political dead end, still retains total control. — So he isn’t afraid of losing the majority? — No, of course it matters to him not to lose the majority, which is why it’s always a complicated game. That’s why they didn’t jail me — they didn’t want to turn me into a hero. Even so, we can see that Russia is changing a lot. Right now the repression can probably be called mass repression — criminal cases are opened every day — but still, we have to admit that there haven’t been hundreds of new political prisoners in Russia, there haven’t been water cannons in the streets, there hasn’t been tear gas. Every time a truly large number of people come out into the streets and there’s a real threat — like in the Golunov case, or my jailing in 2013 — when people come out or there’s an obvious emotional surge that could have consequences, they take a step back. They use a kind of political judo or aikido or whatever you want to call it. They retreat. They prefer manipulation to frontal assault. That’s a known thing. And of course Putin cares about his approval rating. He understands perfectly well that you can have as many police and water cannons as you like — his rating and United Russia’s rating are still crucial. Why do we irritate them so much? You often hear this line of argument: what nonsense, Navalny fixates on United Russia, but United Russia is nothing, all parties are United Russia. But that’s absolutely not true. They understand very well that United Russia’s rating, its ability to win and control the regions, is the key thing. And Putin’s rating is the key thing. They watch it very closely. Without that, everything falls apart. Why is Lukashenko having such problems? Because objectively his rating has fallen very sharply. — One more question, and your answer may offend a certain number of people. — About Israel or Armenia? — No, I’m not going to ask about that — let’s skip geopolitics. I mean the opposition. You said very bluntly that no, no emigration — a politician has to be in Russia. What is it you dislike so much about a Russian politician in exile? — I’m fine with it. It’s everyone’s personal choice. And we have plenty of people who were effectively forced out of the country. And of course, being here, they’re a hundred times more useful than if they were sitting in prison. I don’t see the slightest problem with people not being in Russia; we live in a global world. I don’t feel any negative emotions toward them, no sense of superiority over those who operate from abroad. I’m simply saying that I will return — not because I don’t want to be like them. I’m saying I don’t want to engage in émigré politics. For example, I don’t want to host livestreams from here or do other things like that. It doesn’t seem quite right to me for Alexei Navalny in Berlin to be calling for revolution. If I do something, I want to share the risks with the people who work in my office. — Did you see the Levada poll? Twenty percent support your activities, 50 percent view you negatively. Is 20 percent a lot or a little? — It’s a lot, of course. Because that 20 percent concerns me — a completely non-systemic politician whom even newspapers that aren’t 100 percent pro-government still often call just a “blogger.” Now I’m officially described everywhere as “a CIA agent who receives instructions.” For many, many years now, probably since 2008 when I started suing various Gazproms, there has been a dense wave of propaganda against me. And still, 20 percent approval or support is, of course, a lot. I understand perfectly well that if there were elections and I were allowed to run, it would look very different. A 50 percent negative rating is also a lot. But how are people who watch television supposed to feel about me, when television tells them there’s this Navalny, he’s been convicted three times, he insulted a veteran? Some veteran, somewhere, he insulted? People probably imagine I was standing in the street, a veteran walked by, and I snatched a carnation from his hand and trampled it. He insulted a veteran, he works with CIA agents, and so on — that’s what people hear on TV. They know nothing, they don’t go on YouTube — what are they supposed to think of me? If television told you Ivan Petrov dismembered someone, you probably wouldn’t start thinking well of Ivan Petrov, even if in general you don’t trust Russian television. It’s the same for them. I’m calm about it. I still stand by my position. It’s good that Levada showed that number. If it had shown a worse number — and I wasn’t expecting such a good one — I still wouldn’t have been too upset, because the question isn’t what they measured now, but what needs to be done so that next time they measure something different. — Do you think there will be a “Navalny list” of sanctions? — No, I hope not. I don’t want any “Navalny list”; we don’t need some stupid “Navalny list.” What we need is a Putin list, a list of the people who robbed Russian citizens. Some sanctions are inevitable because of the chemical weapons. The OPCW — an organization Russia helped create and, incidentally, used to like very much — will show that chemical weapons were used. I think the hysteria from the Foreign Ministry is connected to the fact that they saw a draft of the report, because they are members of the OPCW. That part is inevitable. There will be some reaction because the Convention was violated. But those will be more ritual sanctions. Again, I’ll repeat: who cares about those sanctions? They won’t help us in any way. — Aren’t you cold? And not tired? Or is it getting hard to formulate things (it’s already evening, and it has gotten noticeably colder outside)? — When they flew me out of Omsk, the German pilots’ report describing my condition said I was in coma stage 3. It also said my body temperature was 34 degrees Celsius, so now I’m never cold. — Just two more questions. The first one, I think you’ll take with humor. Still, I think it’s more serious than it sounds. You’ve probably already read that political analysts told Kommersant... — That criminal cases would be opened? — They said there would be a treason case. On the one hand, we understand that it’s complete nonsense. But on the other hand — couldn’t they actually do it? — Listen, you’re the editor-in-chief of Mediazona, and you understand better than anyone that after some time passes, the only suspects in the case of my poisoning will be me and the ACF staff, there will be searches at our offices, and we’ll be the ones who suffer — there will be repression against us in connection with the attempted murder of the person who created the ACF. There is not the slightest doubt about that. I’ve been seeing this kind of political commentary since 2010, when I was returning from Yale. Three weeks before I came back, there were articles in, I think, the same Kommersant saying that Navalny would most likely face criminal charges because of his activities in Kirov. They just don’t want me to come back. That’s all. — So they’re trying to push you out of the country, like Trotsky? Does it feel that way? — Absolutely. One hundred percent. If they manage to make it so I don’t return, that will probably be even better for them than killing me. Because in the public mind, if a person leaves, he has surrendered. I don’t want to criticize anyone. But they would love that, obviously. All these statements by Peskov and Putin’s remarks. I’m just waiting for them to start standing in solo pickets saying: “Don’t come back,” “We demand that this YouTube Vlasovite (a reference to General Vlasov, associated in Russian memory with treason) not return to our country.” — You’ve been in politics for 15 years. — Since 2003, actually even earlier. — Practically twenty. You’ve watched all this, from early Putin to what we have today. Do you think the opposition could really have influenced anything over that time, or were these irreversible processes? — History doesn’t know the subjunctive, obviously, but yes, of course it could have. It could have had a major influence back when it still sat in the Duma. But no one imagined it then. Putin in 2001 or 2000 was not at all the Putin we have now. Even Nemtsov was going around with... what was it? “Kiriyenko to the Duma, Putin to the presidency.” Maybe Nemtsov less so than someone like Chubais and the others. Back then everything was completely different. I came into politics because I didn’t like Putin coming to power, but I still couldn’t remotely imagine that this is where things would end up. So yes, maybe they could have influenced it. And maybe I could have influenced it. Could I have acted more effectively? I could have. Could I have done something cleverer, bolder, smarter? One hundred percent I could have. One hundred percent. But what’s the point of talking about it now? It wasn’t done. It’s the same kind of discussion as saying, you know, we should have gone not to Bolotnaya but to... — Should you have, in the end? — It’s complete nonsense! None of that mattered! What mattered was the mood. The issue wasn’t the location. I wasn’t at the first rally, but I was at the second, and everyone came up to me saying: Alexei, just don’t use aggressive slogans, we have to be as kind and nice as possible. Because in the end it’s about the mood in society. Of course politicians create reality, but reality also very often governs politicians. Maybe it could have been different, but it didn’t work out. — And have the moods changed now? — I think so, yes. And it’s pretty obvious. The regional elections show it. — And Khabarovsk. — Khabarovsk shows that things are happening that were hard to imagine. Many of them don’t seem important. But to me, for example, it seems hugely important that in Tambov, a scrubbed-clean region with a super-strong tradition of fraud, Smart Voting candidates were also winning. That’s fundamentally important. Why are they introducing three-day voting? Because they can’t do otherwise. Why is there no referendum? Because the old man would have lost a referendum. The situation is changing, and changing fast. And they are growing more vicious. They are even poisoning people—precisely because they feel the ground slipping from under their feet. And remember how Putin wrote in his book about a rat cornered and then lunging? Probably, despite all their power, Novichok, Zolotov in his beret, Solovyov on YouTube, Dr. Myasnikov, and so on, they still, on the whole, feel like a cornered rat. Because the people are against them. Right now, there is not a single place—from the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda to Channel One’s website, Mediazona, or the line at a local clinic—where people are not cursing the authorities. They may say things like: “If not Putin, then who? There’s no one else. The opposition is even worse.” But overall there is an intensely negative attitude toward the government, along with a general sense of despair, disappointment, and the understanding that the people in power are incapable of changing anything. It is a muffled murmur that arises in a situation of forced helplessness, when people do not believe in change and certainly do not believe that elections, politicians, or the opposition will help. In other words, all of this has worked. But overall, for them—I mean for Putin—the only path is downward. Downward. And they compensate for falling approval ratings and a declining economy by other means, from rigging elections to killing people. But that is not what they dream of. What they want is for everyone to love them. And for them to be able to steal money. And for everything to be great. The way it was in 2007. But 2007 will never come back, not for them and not for us.