A discussion between Alexei Navalny and Yuri Saprykin on the right to neutrality

Saprykin: In court you said, “No one has the right to remain neutral now.” Who did you mean by that “we,” and what do you mean by “neutrality”? Navalny: I meant people who understand what is happening in the country right now. They are unhappy with what is going on, but to justify themselves, to cover for their laziness or cowardice, they have found a hundred and thirty reasons explaining why it is acceptable to stay away from active involvement. “I’m a journalist, I have ethics,” “I opened a trendy meatball shop, it’ll get shut down.” I believe that right now it is immoral not to engage in political struggle. To say that taking the right political position will somehow interfere with your meatballs is hypocrisy. The meatballs are, of course, symbolic. I got hung up on them because I had just read an article about them on the Afisha website. What I mean is that there is no contradiction between making meatballs, organizing the Afisha Picnic, being an objective journalist—and taking part in political struggle. Even before that hellish Sobyanin appeal to municipal deputies, state employees were signing for me: a school principal, the head of a district housing maintenance office. They said: “We understand there may be consequences, but we’ll sign.” And 99 percent of people are risking absolutely nothing. No one is threatening your meatballs, no one is standing there with a gun to your temple. Saprykin: Danila and Alexei, who opened that very café, actually say in interviews that they went to rallies and in their free time took—or at least until recently had taken—a fairly active position. But as a result they are constantly mocked for having the nerve to sell meatballs while people are being jailed. The question is posed differently—not whether you can run a business and go to a rally, but whether you have the moral right to be minding your own business at all under the current regime. Navalny: That is the other side of the same hellish hypocrisy. It’s the rhetoric of the most pointless idlers, who periodically tweet and reproach everyone around them for having families and jobs, when supposedly they ought to be hiding out somewhere in the catacombs. Meanwhile, they themselves are not sitting in the catacombs. I still hold to the view that everyone should have 15 minutes a day for fighting the regime. That is enough. You can devote eight hours to it over the next month and a half and, before September 8, stand by campaign cubes and hand out leaflets. Or you can donate 500 rubles to RosUznik. Or, as an objective journalist, you can write an article about how wonderful Gorky Park is, and then come to me and write an article about how we were all robbed through the fake landscaping of Tverskaya Street, turning my blog post into a short article. Even if you think we are doing everything wrong, you can at least state your political position on Facebook by saying that people should stop whining and start fighting. Saprykin: In a similar situation in the 1970s, the well-known text “Live Not by Lies” appeared, in which Alexander Solzhenitsyn formulated, at a very deep level, principles of what one must not do. If they come to you asking you to sign a collective letter condemning an innocent person—don’t sign. If they force you to sing songs praising Leonid Ilyich (Brezhnev)—don’t sing. Just step aside. And that was a fairly universal program of action, suitable for everyone. But your demands suit a certain temperament. If I like action, if I like doing active, energetic things, then I go stand by the cubes, hand out leaflets, print newspapers. But if I’m a hardcore introvert who already spends all his time sitting in his own inner cube, if it is agonizing for me to go out and persuade strangers of anything, if that is just not who I am, then at some point I start to feel that I am committing a terrible betrayal. As if I owe something to the people being jailed, or even to my own conscience, and I have failed to give enough. The set of things we are talking about is very limited. Go to a rally, hand out a leaflet, donate money. What else is there? Navalny: You see, we have reached a state in the political system where the tools of political struggle are very limited. In Solzhenitsyn’s time it was much simpler: then an active position meant precisely non-participation. Saprykin: Instead of eating your Sorokin quota, you hid it in your pocket. “When I said that line about neutrality in court, I was addressing above all not those who lack the strength even to lift their heads, but the notional readers of your magazine. Those who already understand everything, who do not need to think it through” — Alexei Navalny Navalny: Exactly. You don’t eat the quota, and you are already a heroic guy. Of course, the situation now is incomparably better than under Solzhenitsyn, but it is not even comparable to Ukraine, where you have some range of possible actions, let alone the United States. Here everything really has been reduced to campaigning, propaganda, posting flyers, and sending money. But even in such a situation, you, the introvert, can come up with something for yourself: you’ve achieved meatball success—donate 1,000 rubles to the cause. Saprykin: But imagine that you achieved that meatball success because you were included in a targeted support program for young entrepreneurs. They told you, “Take this lease for next to nothing,” you agreed, they put you on some list, took it to Medvedev, and he reported it to United Russia. Navalny: If they are simply offering you a lease—take it. But if they ask you, “In return, hang up this little United Russia emblem here,” then that is obvious vileness. If something good is being done, there is no problem in praising it. But don’t politically help this regime, don’t prolong its life, don’t lie. If you are an honest journalist and you write about areas of life where there really have been improvements, then write about them. But when you get home, remember the other 90 percent of reality, where everything is only getting worse, and take an honest position on that too. Saprykin: I meant something a little different. Recently I watched a film based on Vasily Bykov’s novella In the Fog. About the war, naturally. There were workers repairing a railroad. Three of them said, “Let’s dismantle it and derail a train.” But one objected: “Why dismantle it? It’s not only German trains that will run here; one day ours will too. And the next train may be carrying our POWs.” They didn’t listen to him, told him to get lost, and dismantled the track. Then they are all caught, three are hanged, and that one man is released. But in the end he is in an awful position: on the one hand, he cannot go back to the railroad because he is, in a sense, an accomplice to a crime. On the other hand, the partisans try to execute him because he did not want to derail the train and therefore probably informed on his comrades, since he was released. By simply trying to do his job, he ends up in a terrible position. Some think he is collaborating with the occupiers; others cannot understand how he dares to work at all when the rails ought to be torn up. Even though he was simply trying to do his job. Navalny: Again, you are comparing incomparable things—different times, different historical situations. There the question was life and death, or at least freedom and unfreedom, whereas now... Saprykin: Of course I’m sharpening the contrast, but let’s take a concrete example—our idol Kapkov, who does his job well. Navalny: Yours. Saprykin: Ours. Whatever he touches, he does well. As a result, the hardliners from the oil-and-gas investigative committee are probably unhappy with him because he has created such freedom in Moscow, while opposition sympathizers are unhappy because he distracts working people from protest by making their lives a little better. Once they get to Gorky Park, they are not quite so angry anymore. Navalny: Our system of power is so senseless and stupid that when a single person appeared who fulfilled seven points of his job description, everyone started running after him shouting, “My God, look at these wooden benches!” With the kind of money in the Moscow budget, we should have benches everywhere. There should be those benches in my Maryinsky Park, and they are not there. I feel neither reverence nor any special disgust toward Kapkov. He is simply an official who, for reasons of his own, carries out seven points of his instructions. Fine—let him carry them out. Saprykin: So if you get elected, will you invite Kapkov to work for you? Navalny: Of course not. Kapkov is a political figure. If he were simply the head of a department doing his job well, he could stay. But he is the embodiment of this regime: Putin, Abramovich, Sobyanin. Saprykin: Which means you’ll have to call Ksenia Sobchak—or, worse, me—and ask us to run culture. But we have no idea how document flow works, how the law works, how this whole bureaucratic machine functions. And, essentially, we would not be able to propose anything better than what is being done now. “There is a huge stratum of people mired in everyday problems, people who struggle enormously just to earn their daily bread. And when, having finally reached them, we start yelling, ‘Guys, what the hell are you wasting your time on? Get printing a newspaper, now!’—it produces nothing in them but irritation” — Yury Saprykin Navalny: Listen, Kapkov, by manual control, straightened out two theaters and three parks, while everything else remained the same mess it always was. In every department there are dozens of people who are not corrupt and are ready to work by normal rules. And if someone appears who can impose normal rules on them, then we will spend ten times less money on landscaping Tverskaya Street and get landscaping ten times better. Russia is not a doomed country with some vortex from Lukyanenko’s novels spinning above it. Put competent people in place, and everything will work perfectly. Saprykin: Everything connected with parks and urbanism is part of the popular theory of small deeds. But at the same time, it is as if we forget the huge number of people whose deeds are so small they do not even fit that theory. Imagine a woman who spends day and night caring for her paralyzed grandmother. Suppose she has internet access, and from it she hears that she has no right to neutrality, that she urgently needs to take an active political position. But she simply has no time even to leave the bedside. And then she realizes that none of this has anything to do with her. Burgers and benches are a very narrow layer of our Facebook friends. They really can choose—work on benches or work on politics. But behind them there is a huge stratum of people mired in everyday problems, people who struggle enormously just to earn their daily bread. And when, having finally reached them, we start yelling, “Guys, what the hell are you wasting your time on? Get printing a newspaper, now!”—it produces nothing in them but irritation. Navalny: I’m not asking them to drop everything and stand in my picket line. I’m simply saying that no one has the right now to say: “My life is so hard, I have three children, I take care of my grandmothers, therefore I don’t care about politics.” And besides, when I said that line about neutrality in court, I was addressing above all not those who lack the strength even to lift their heads, but the notional readers of your magazine. Those who already understand everything, who do not need to think anything through: people with a higher education, a decent job, and regular internet access. My task is to save those who, for objective reasons, do not understand any of this—those who watch Channel One, those who are battling cold radiators and dreadful housing and коммунальные services (public utilities and housing maintenance) in Moscow against the backdrop of a city budget of two trillion rubles. But all change, and I have repeated this a million times, is made by one percent of the active population. The people who already understand what I am talking about number in the millions. Millions. They are the ones who must do something. Saprykin: You know, I think that one percent of the active population is paralyzed by another thought as well. We all became active not so long ago; this experience is only a year and a half old, a little more. People suddenly started going out into the streets, standing in pickets, going to court hearings, handing out leaflets. But at some point they suddenly saw that because they had become so active, things had become noticeably worse for everyone around them. They came to stand outside the Pussy Riot trial and shout at the judges, “Shame! Shame!”—and the judges went completely feral and gave them two years. In reality, of course, the judges did not do that of their own accord, but to you it seems like all of it is the result of this confrontation in which you took part. Because we came out on Bolotnaya and then came out again, several dozen people are now going to be sent away for a long time. That one percent looks at this and thinks: “Are we sure we should go to the courthouse next time? Won’t it make things worse?” Not worse for me, but for the person in court. And that is not cowardice; it is the question of taking an action and seeing an effect directly opposite to the one you were aiming for. Navalny: I’m very sorry, of course, but to me that seems like typical cowardice, which everyone is trying to wrap in the design of some rational reflection about usefulness or harm. That is the first thing. Second: nothing has gotten worse. Things are bad for everyone because not one percent has come out, but only 0.1 percent so far. This government will make things worse anyway, because it has no other option. That is the logic of any authoritarian regime’s development. You just have to understand this: people who go out and do something are, in practical terms, risking almost nothing. Saprykin: The defendants in the “Bolotnaya case” are unlikely to believe us. Yes, it is a tiny percentage, but each of them is a living person who is suffering terribly right now. Navalny: The regime randomly selects random victims. And that is the most painful part. But you cannot say that everyone who goes to a rally is in danger. We have invented some nonsense: that all of us will be beaten and jailed. It is impossible to kill and imprison everyone. Saprykin: There is another hypothesis as to why things have in fact gotten worse. When we went out into the streets, we shouted at the people sitting behind the Kremlin wall: “Put Putin behind bars,” “bring on lustration,” and so on. I don’t know whether you ever heard the rumor that the decision to launch the Kirovles criminal case was made after you said on TV Rain: “Under me, Putin will go to prison.” Navalny: Well, that was after all six cases had already been opened. Saprykin: It’s just that by their code, that is the kind of challenge you cannot fail to answer. For them it becomes a struggle for survival, for crushing an opponent who threatens not just their careers but their freedom and their wealth. And that is precisely why the fight is conducted in such a brutal and uncompromising way. Take your courtroom speech, for example. You threw yourself onto the embrasure yourself. Everything you said about Ofitserov was very powerful, important, and honest, but after that you were basically saying: “And now, bastards, I am leaving you no way out. I am telling you in plain language that I will destroy this vile government, and you have no choice but to jail me for these promises.” Navalny: I told them from the start: “If you want to play legal bullshit with me and shuffle papers around in courtroom arguments—the defense side, the prosecution side—then let’s play that game.” We played it. And in my view, we played it quite successfully. All the prosecution witnesses testified in my favor. But I am not going to keep playing that game once it comes to the substance of the matter. Everything I think needs to be said plainly, I will say plainly, because I value the trust of the people who value me and my position. For many years I have consistently said: “This is a vile, thieving government.” I fight it in various ways, it starts fighting me, people watch me, some support me, some do not. And then, when it comes to the most important moment, I start mumbling and take a soft line? What would the people I work with say to me? “What an idiot! Why did you do that? What was the point of starting all this in the first place?” I’ll give a strange example from our campaign cubes. The people who come work there hand out leaflets much better than paid canvassers. Because why the hell come at all if you’re just going to slack off? No one is going to mark you absent. It’s the same with me—why the hell would I slack off if I got myself into this for some reason? I could just have been selling meatballs. Saprykin: Aren’t you afraid that if you are imprisoned, first people will come out into the streets and there will be many of them, but then gradually what always happens will happen—some will get tired, some will lose interest. Their eyes will glaze over. Only there will no longer be the person saying, “Guys, don’t lie and don’t steal.” In fact, what makes you so dangerous is that you are always poking people with a stick, not letting them sleep, coming up with new things that make them jump out of their chairs. And then there may be no one left to come up with them. Navalny: I understand how organizational processes work in politics: yes, at first everyone runs around, then interest fades more and more. I have no illusions and I understand that this is exactly what will happen; I understand it very well, and there is nothing to be done about it. As for the second part—that was partly my reproach to the educated audience. Guys, you are the reason I am alone. You write me tedious complaints on Facebook too, but I have an audience of a million people, so I’m calm. But anyone else, you will devour at the stage of their very first post. The world does not begin and end with me—I’m just two little rays of light. But unfortunately, to break through now requires more courage, more resources, more daring, more support than it did when I started doing this. Well, I hope the educated class will stop immediately making a hundred complaints against people who are actually doing something. Let’s nurture those guys who are not tweeting, but standing in the streets handing out leaflets. Instead of exclaiming, “Everything is terrible, time to get out.” It was disgusting how everyone rushed to discuss Gordeeva’s article. Saprykin: By the way, it seems to me that article is not really about emigration—it is about how not to keep checking Facebook all the time. About how you get so overwhelmed by this flood of bad news, and also by the reproaches that you do not always react to that news, that in the end your conscience starts gnawing at you: here is a trial, here is an arrest, here is a picket, here are sick children, and you simply do not have the time or the emotional resources to do something about every single one. And the moral authorities around you keep reproaching you too: “All honest people must come here! All caring people must do this!” And at some point you think: to hell with all of it, I’ll switch off my phone and lie on the beach. You are speaking from the position of a strong person, ready to go to the end. But there are people whose hands really do drop. Navalny: What do you mean, your hands have dropped? Show me—where are the weights on your legs? Where are your shackles? Who has tortured and killed you? Is life so hard for us that we need to take sedatives? It’s all nonsense. Saprykin: Tell me, if you could go back now to December 5 and December 24, what would you do differently? Navalny: On December 5 I would do the same thing. On December 10 we should have gone not to Manezhnaya Square, but to the detention centers and freed all one hundred people who had been detained. Saprykin: The reason I ask is that Katya Gordeeva is eaten up by reflection. Are you? Do you go back to the moment when it seems something went wrong? Navalny: No. But you and I first spoke before the Sakharov rally, when you spent an hour explaining to me that nationalists should not be invited to speak at the protest. That was our first phone conversation. Of course, looking back from here, I understand that it was all nonsense, not at all what we should have been dealing with. Saprykin: We really were discussing tiny, petty, utterly insignificant questions. Navalny: We spent far too much time on discussions. I regret that I started interacting with everyone indiscriminately. I should have isolated myself and created an organizational center, and we should have been setting up these cubes we are using now back then already. We should have been doing organizational work. To hell with everyone. The organizing committee—those were all important people, and at that point I barely knew any of them. In a way I was intimidated by how great they all were. And they really are great. It’s just such a pity about the time. I have no regrets, because back then nobody knew what had to be done. And I was not ready for it either. I had never spoken at a rally of more than three thousand people, never stormed anything except construction-site fences. It happened the way it happened. There is no point tormenting yourself over it. I think it could not have happened any other way then. Unfortunately. What matters for us now, in the middle of the campaign, is that we are creating a political infrastructure that everyone will be able to use: people can sign up for pickets themselves, we can see them on a map, and if we schedule a rally, the next day we can organize 50 leaflet-distribution points and print the materials quickly. Saprykin: Are you ready to spend ten or fifteen years of your life fighting this regime? Navalny: It is not called “spending.” I like this life; I am a very happy person. I am doing a great thing, people love me for it, Afisha magazine photographs me and may even put me on the cover. Everything is great. Yes, everything has its price—rock stars die of overdoses, politicians go to prison. But the fact that so many people support me gives me a feeling of euphoria. I suppose you have moments like that too. When you put on your Afisha Picnic and realize that 50,000 people are grateful to you—surely that happens? Saprykin: Yes, after the Picnic we were bursting with euphoria; we felt like kings of the universe. Navalny: Well, that’s how I feel every day.