Alexei Navalny’s broadcast with Leonid Volkov

And we’re live. Good evening, Alexei.

Good evening to everyone watching us, to those who still

have any energy left today.

It’s been some kind of YouTube marathon, really.

The transcript here is unclear, but the sense is that there was even more of it afterward.

program.

There were the Sobol–Sobchak debates, and now here is our

evening show. Ever since the lockdown began, basically

I’ve been going live every Sunday.

I try to mix things up with interesting

guests, but today we’ve landed

the ultimate Pokémon: Alexei

Navalny, whose show, because of this,

has been renamed “Sunday with Volkov” (Leonid Volkov is a Russian opposition politician) on

Sundays. I still haven’t learned it yet, Alexei.

Good evening from Leonid Volkov.

I’ll say this: I’m still a beginner YouTuber.

So anyway, let’s do the usual:

hit like.

Join in—there are already 1,200

people watching. I’ll post the link, and now I’ll

do that too, yes, let’s blast it out everywhere.

Great, keep joining. The title

has changed, and here I am in the studio

trying to make things look a little nicer,

to improve the picture a bit, but the essence doesn’t

change: this is an open, friendly

conversation. In other words, it’s not a debate or verbal sparring.

I really

invite someone every week, someone

I already talk to fairly often in

ordinary life—we chat, we talk

about this or that, about various issues.

And really, there’s nothing wrong

with having other people listen in on the conversation

and take part by asking questions and so on.

So today we’re going to

talk with Alexei Navalny about

everything that interests you, everything

you want to discuss, everything that’s happening right now.

We already have 1,800 people watching us.

Excellent, well done, keep joining—and don’t

forget to like and subscribe

to the channel and all that. I won’t keep

repeating it.

Let’s get to the point. And of course, right now the main thing

is the debate between Ksenia Sobchak and

Lyubov Sobol.

They were discussing whether it’s populism or not—

this proposal to give everyone 20,000 rubles (about the equivalent of a modest one-time cash payment)

from the National Wealth Fund

—or the “People’s Wealth Fund,” according to

former presidential candidate Ksenia

Sobchak—and

also Crimea, little Crimeas, and crabs, Alexei.

But as for who won—I think, first of all,

I got enormous, enormous pleasure

simply from seeing a debate—

a real debate on a real

political issue. So many thanks

to Sobol and to Sobchak, actually,

for the fact that in the end, after

a lot of hesitation, she did agree to

take part in these debates. Thanks to Echo of Moscow (a well-known Russian radio station)

for hosting them. Some time ago I read an article

—I don’t remember where—about

how, in all those debates

that air on NTV and Channel One (major Russian federal TV channels),

you first see some people—usually

supposed “patriots” and

“Banderites” (a Russian propaganda label for Ukrainian nationalists)—and

an American journalist, Michael Bohm—and they

argue, and afterward all 200 of them stand in

the same line at the cashier’s desk to collect

their money. It’s well known that there’s a lot of shouting there, yes, yes, yes.

Apparently the criterion is the amount of shouting:

the higher your shouting coefficient, the more

money you get. And of course that’s the best

possible illustration of how modern

Russian politics works. And that’s why it was so

great to watch a debate on an

internal political issue, because

all this discussion about Ukraine

and Crimea—they drag Crimea into everything

by this point, honestly, and I’m just

unable to listen to it anymore. But here there was

a discussion on the most important, super-important,

genuinely political issue, and

it’s timely, it’s very sharp. We

see how it affects everything. Finance ministers,

other ministers, economists—

everyone is talking about it right now, and

it’s great that this happened. I’m very, very

pleased. Well, of course, I’m obviously

not an impartial person here.

Because I was rooting for Sobol, but it seems to me

that even if you judge it objectively,

Sobol clearly outperformed her—though the transcript here is garbled.

Sobchak just got completely outplayed.

Really.

She lies, basically, all the time, and

this time she again tried

to build everything around some kind of

distortions, straw men, and misrepresentations.

It was pretty funny.

As for Larin’s lie—you probably saw it—

she wrote that Sobol had gone to Kasimov (a town in Russia),

yes. For some reason she said, “I’m not self-isolating,

I went to Kasimov,” but

it turned out she hadn’t gone to Kasimov at all,

a correspondent went there instead. Why tell

that lie? It’s unclear. But it was that kind of

ridiculous lie. If I were Lyuba (short for Lyubov),

I probably would have developed

the crab business topic a bit more. She did bring it up, and

good for her. Sobchak obviously didn’t want

to say a single word about it. But

I’m very pleased, very pleased with how

Sobol performed. I’m very pleased.

And I’m incredibly pleased that so

many people watched, and of course Navalny’s channel

—it seems to me the main result of these debates

is that, what, 170,000 people watched them

live across different platforms. That is,

what the hell, about one tenth of a percent

of the country’s population, maybe more. That’s genuinely

a very, very, very large audience, and

it shows there’s a huge demand for this kind of content.

real politics — I mean, we can see it

right now, after the debates, everyone has very

comfortably settled onto their Twitter

sofas and Facebook couches, writing about

how, well, one of them could have done better with numbers

the other could have done better on the facts, they didn’t

really listen to each other, each one was basically

following their own script — it’s all fake, there’s a lot in debates

like that. But where are the real people? They’ve invented

for themselves some world of imaginary

debates. I don’t even know, maybe I’m mistaken, but

American presidential debates are the same too

people just hammer away at their own line

everyone thinks it’s important to deliver their own

talking points, their key

political messages of some kind. They’re not

exactly listening to each other very carefully

and this beautiful idea

that someone cleverly parries someone else

with some memorable line directly responding to

their opponent’s remark — that happens maybe once every four years

and then everyone goes on to

memorize that catchphrase and

retell it to each other in textbooks, like

how someone said, ‘well, well, well,’

‘you’re no Barack Obama,’ right, that’s

a great line — Biden said, ‘This is a big deal,’ or something like that

anyway, the point is clear:

on the one hand, now

a lot of people are grumbling, but on the other hand, 170,000

people watched — so that gives us reason

to say, listen, even

a debate that has certain

problems still draws this many people, just look how many

would watch a real debate between Navalny and

Putin or something like that — people would absolutely watch it

in fact, Navalny and Putin, or any

representative of United Russia with any

representative of the normal opposition

would draw a huge audience. And

I completely agree with you that here we

simply don’t have any debates at all

so people generally don’t really understand

what that even is, or they imagine it based on

some kind of debates they’ve seen happening in

movies rather than in real life. If you

look, for example, even at real debates

in U.S. presidential elections, there

basically isn’t any such clear-cut

thing as one person winning and another

losing, because there it always just

turns out that those who support Trump think

Trump won the debate, while those who are

against him think the opposite. In the previous election,

when Trump became president, I remember

everyone writing that Hillary crushed him

that she destroyed Trump, absolutely steamrolled him

and so on. But then it turned out that

it had no effect on the election at all, so

that’s why this little piece of it is why I’m

so glad and happy — I just saw

a piece of real political life

and it’s really great to feel part of that

By the way, while I’m at it, I want to apologize

to the viewers of your channel who

can see these white and black patches on my

face — it’s just that the sun is shining

through the window, and this is natural lighting in a home

studio — a person in self-isolation

I apologize for not looking as

glamorous — more like a bum in an ice-cream T-shirt

people are watching us; this isn’t really our usual format

for this stream — I decided to show off

for the sake of a VIP guest. What impressed me more, though,

really, was

how much Ksenia Sobchak seemed to think that

she was actually in the Channel One studio

and could do the usual TV tricks there

and just flat-out lie, I mean

why? I mean, this audience

isn’t Channel One’s audience — people do know how

to use the damn internet, they can

google things, they can check what happened and when

Ksenia says, ‘I don’t work for Channel One,’

and then later some kind of

weekly talk show comes out with her on it

it looks ridiculous. ‘I didn’t travel’ — while she travels around

the regions; people can fact-check that

and see it for themselves. So why this whole idea that

some residue won’t remain? Of course it will

it’s just — I mean, you’re simply

lying completely brazenly in the hope that

a large number of people aren’t paying attention

but still, what really struck me, what really

surprised me, was that she began her

remarks with a lie, saying that

she was the first politician to propose helping

people, and saying, ‘look at my

post from April 6.’ And interestingly, in my

Thursday show, I

predicted that she would start lying about this

and I already explained there, I said,

‘Guys, look, here was my video on

March 20, then Sobchak posts roughly

the same thing — clearly taken from my video

— in a compiled post about it on April 6,’ and so

on and so forth. So

why does she insist that she

said it first when that is, in fact,

obviously not true? And really nobody

cares that much about dividing up who said it first

and who said it second, but apparently this kind of

narrative is very important to her, with this

constant twisting of facts — she

simply believes in lying

they all lived in the same building entrance there, they

really are all cut from the same cloth as Zakharova

well, Maria Zakharova acts in a way that

is typical — the whole politics of the Kremlin

is built on lies, in many ways

the politics of the Soviet Union were built

on lies too — it’s a big

political tradition: just constantly

lying. There’s that cliché saying,

‘Honesty is the best policy.’ These people

think that phrase is completely wrong, and that

the correct phrase is ‘Lying is the best

policy,’ so they just lie

in absolutely any situation, but it is very

important

sorry, I’m talking for so long, but in this

that is exactly how their whole setup works, and overall

Sobchak plays quite an important role here

with this kind of built-in talk about populism, about

the idea that, well, maybe we should give it to these people, and

maybe not give it to them, while Vyacheslavchenko proposes

to just swallow it, because right now, look, on the one hand

our idea is to help people—give

20,000 rubles to everyone, and that’s not hard

to argue against—almost impossible—and they

want to drag this off somewhere in the direction

of saying, let’s think about who

should get it and who shouldn’t, and the thing is

that April has already passed, and

it passed in fruitless

discussions: maybe we should give it to these people, and

let’s see, maybe we’ll give it to those with children up to

6 years old

or maybe also to those with children up to 8 years old, but

in the end they gave it to no one, and what

the Kremlin is proposing to us, including

through the mouth of Sobchak, is to continue

this endless discussion about it, while

there are 147 million people here, minus

whoever, yes, and minus Sobchak herself, all shouting

to go at least some way, they say, well

all right, we’ll give it to everyone—let’s discuss it

let’s discuss it

a multi-stage system with

lowering and raising coefficients

and meanwhile there’s simply no one left; then September

arrives

but by September, what will it all have ended with?

after all that, today is a rather

symbolic day: today marks 40

days since in Russia

the non-working-days regime was declared on March 30

that was when it began, so today is exactly forty days—40

days. That’s a quarantine. In fact, the word “quarantine”

actually comes from a Latin root

meaning 40

because back in the Middle Ages

if a ship carrying plague arrived in Venice, it was kept for 40

days—they were not allowed

to go ashore

so that it would not spread, so

we already have a full-fledged quarantine

in place, but in reality, as for money

they haven’t given any to anyone, and the decision is still hanging there

and tomorrow Putin will again be

supposedly deciding whether to announce

or not announce, extend it or not extend it

this whole story. In that sense, then

moving from discussing the debate to

discussing the five steps, honestly I do not

understand why they won’t give the money, I mean

in the end, I mean, damn, it seems like

it’s

a really easy way to score some

political points, and the money exists, and

it really does, and substantially so

so why is Putin—what, this summer, each

if he sends us 100 rubles each, we’ll somehow make

some huge billions? Putin has

dug in his heels

clearly there is some kind of

concept in his head; at some point

Chubais and Kudrin told him 25 years ago

that you must not hand out money

because there would be inflation, although now even

Chubais and Kudrin are saying the opposite

but surely there are people there

in the presidential administration who deal with elections

who must be sitting there now thinking

for heaven’s sake, we have elections in three

months—regional elections, and in every region

we’ll get crushed everywhere if we don’t do anything now

and here is such an easy way

to earn so many political points

just go and hand it out. Honestly, I can’t

understand why this isn’t happening; it’s not just a matter

of Putin alone. For all his disgusting

criminality, and however much we dislike him

he usually tries to behave fairly

rationally, but here he is acting somehow

truly irrationally. But it seems to me he

is acting rationally—he just has

a different strategy. His rational

strategy has always been that

he would, after all, not govern through

running the country by bribery

and kickbacks—that is, effectively through

allowing the entire official class

across the whole country

to steal and enrich themselves everywhere, and they

have been enriching themselves for 20 years, and all these

local bosses sitting in their posts, and

big bosses like governors and

ministers, and also various

mid-level people like chief doctors of hospitals—they

have the opportunity to enrich themselves, they

become dollar millionaires or

earn hundreds of thousands of dollars

or millions of rubles in exchange

for delivering Putin

election results. In that sense, he

reasons like this: I have 10

trillion rubles

and I will continue to use these 10 trillion rubles

in order to, so to speak,

feed my own people. For him, that means, first of all,

giving a huge amount of money specifically to his

friends; second, giving a huge amount of money to state banks

which

will also redistribute it in the direction, in favor

of those roughly thousand families in

Russia that rule the country; and third, he

really thinks that if we receive money

because for him Russia is divided into

his own guys on the one hand

the National Guard, the police, the FSB (Russia’s security service), local committees

all of them on the state payroll, as he sees it, and he

pays them salaries. And everyone else

who are not state employees, and especially

small business owners or

large or medium-sized ones, any of them—those are

Suspicious people — we’re just everywhere.

Running around here, shouting, my God, small

business is going bankrupt, it’s ужас (a disaster) — they’re literally sitting there

and thinking, ah, to hell with this small

business. You keep talking to us here about small

business as if it were something good. These are

suspicious people who earn money

on their own and don’t even depend on the state.

They’re harmful in general. Putin has simply, crudely

divided the country’s 147 million

people

and singled out 30 million of them

to whom he gives some money, and

hopes that those 30 million will

make everyone else vote the way

they’re supposed to. In fact, even more — 43

million pensioners

plus 20–30 million state employees and members

of their families. Meanwhile, in small business here

about 15 million people work, which

is to say

a tiny number compared with

developed countries, where the economy

largely rests on small business. That

logic is clear to me: he decided long ago for

himself that these people can just die, sure. But

on the other hand, you’re right

to say — I didn’t want to start a debate here,

but here I still really

keep not understanding. You’re right

when you say that he does what

he likes, or whatever — but that’s broad. The

governors, of course, are part of

Putin’s elite, and some big

oligarchs from non-extractive industries, some

of the same people here — say, bankers, for example,

or governors. Governors right now are

all just running around like chickens with

their heads cut off. They were told to

do something, but given no money,

no powers, no tools. So they’re all

doing whatever they can. Some are already

openly fabricating statistics,

some are trying to do something, and those who

have money, like Sobyanin (Moscow’s mayor), are trying

to hand out at least a little bit of money,

just a tiny amount. But really, everyone is

doing whatever they can. Of course they’re panicking:

Putin is far away, but a hungry

riot with pitchforks is right here, close by.

What about the owner of the Magnit retail chain

or Perekrestok — if your

customers have no money, everything collapses.

Or Alfa-Bank, where people are withdrawing

their money. Then people start pulling out

their savings just to buy themselves

things. Again, they all also have to

stand in line before him with some kind of

petition, saying, “You’re our dear father.”

The economy is collapsing — you just need to replace

demand in the economy. Or is that signal simply

not strong enough, and a stronger

signal would be, I don’t know, from someone like

Bortnikov (head of the FSB), who would say:

“Round up all of them, all these capitalists, to hell with them all.”

Well, I’d say that

there is always a line for money — that is,

that is basically the standard state

of Putin and the Russian government.

There is always a line for money because

the state, one way or another,

controls about 80 percent

of the economy.

So they’re simply used to there being

a huge number of people who come

begging and saying there’s no money. And this

line moves — though really it’s more like

not a line but a huge crowd, where there are

some people shoving others aside

with their elbows, and others who

flash their IDs and get through, and

still others who shout, “Hey,

look at my last name — my name is

Katerina Tikhonova (Putin’s daughter),” and over there someone shouts, “Hey, and

my name is Maria Vorontsova (Putin’s daughter) — let me in

immediately!” And the closer you are, the better. So these

people skip the line — the first to get here

just walks right past. In other words, it’s this kind of

constant thing. But there’s probably another

important factor, and it’s purely

ideological. They really do —

Sobchak (likely Ksenia Sobchak) expressed it clearly — they

really say, basically, “But that’s stupid, because

people will just spend it all,” and for them

that is the ultimate argument. Like,

what kind of weird nonsense is it to give people money?

For them, it’s absurd.

I mean, I don’t even know what to tell you.

I really don’t know. It’s just

complete nonsense to them.

It’s nonsense because

people are, in general, just ballast to them.

Their logic is: if we now inject

money into Rostec (a Russian state corporation), maybe it will start

doing something for the economy.

They can even understand why you’d give money to Chubais

— give him money, because Chubais

might suddenly start, and maybe because of him

they’ll finally invent a pill for

immortality. Why? Because back when

we launched all that Rosnano

it was like, well, we’re investing

billions of dollars in Rosnano, and maybe

there will be some super-pill that

will make Putin young again. Or maybe not.

But to simply give money to people —

they think they’ll just drink it away. Doctor Myasnikov (a pro-Kremlin TV doctor)

said it perfectly too, like: “Kids, sit tight,

drink vodka.” This whole Putin elite

seriously believes that the entire

population of Russia is just a crowd of

drunks, and it is burdened by the very idea

that this population exists. If there were fewer of them,

it would be much better, because

there’d be no need to spend oil money on them.

I mean, they sincerely believe

that it is absurd to give

money to the population. Alexei just said that.

said on Volkov's program broadcast

On Sundays, the quote that, well, I...

I'm sure it will hold out and last for quite a long time.

They were showing income figures, something about everyone...

the population of Russia—well, yes, that's not really the point, of course.

Of course, we don't count it strictly per person like that, but...

Yes, of course, this position that...

you can't hand out money to people because they will...

just spend it on food and everyday needs—this really is, like...

the height of cynicism, because it's astonishing that...

even, well, America, which is very...

much a capitalist economy, very much not about...

handing out money to people—in fact, there...

they gave everyone those $1,200—not some huge amount,

nothing extraordinary, but at the same time not

a small amount either—specifically so people would spend it,

to support consumer demand,

simply so that

shops and banks, again,

small businesses—and Putin has none of this.

No, 5,400 people are watching us.

A record for my stream—I wonder why.

That's probably why people are watching, of course.

Don't forget to subscribe.

to my channel, and don't forget to share.

Like this broadcast so that it

gets pushed to the top, and don't forget to ask

questions—we will definitely answer them.

And what I want to discuss next is...

after all.

Okay, we've discussed why Putin isn't giving out

money. I don't entirely agree—maybe

he really does think that somehow

this will drag on too long and there really won't

be enough—I don't know. Well, fine, there won't be enough for what?

I mean, the point always is that

this reserve is always there to be spent anyway.

He simply sincerely believes that

well, basically, giving it to these oligarchs...

When you say that in America they handed out

$1,200 checks, that means that in

America they pumped money into the economy

through the population—they took, what was it,

nearly 400 million people, and through those 400

million little needles they injected money into

the economy. We're saying the same thing here:

let's use 147 million little needles and simply inject GDP

into the economy—20,000 rubles per person (about $220),

through each one. But he thinks that

that's nonsense—that it shouldn't be 147 million

little needles, but something like four hoses: this one goes

to Rotenberg,

this one to Chemezov, and another one somewhere else, I don't know,

and that's it—and that's how you pour money

into the economy. He simply believes in that

kind of thing. It's absolutely absurd and

it seems to me it contradicts the economic

consensus that exists at the present moment

in economic science, but, well...

it's a matter of belief, right? That is,

this person believes that giving people

money is pointless, like it's wasted on them entirely.

He's seen these people for years, seen them...

you can't give them anything, that's all.

And after that, any argument simply no longer

works—he just sees it that way.

So don't forget to subscribe

to support the Five Steps program on

the website 5steps.info, on Change.org, and on VKontakte (Russian social network).

After all, this is a huge petition,

with a total of one and a half million signatures.

I think we had already brought it

past that mark.

That's more than one percent of the country's population, and that's

quite important. It's important to show

this pressure and keep pushing it, and our

demands are unquestionably right and

fair, supported by economists and

by ordinary people. What is Putin going to do

next with the coronavirus and with the statistics?

I'm going to talk a little now about the numbers—

my favorite hobby every Sunday.

I talk about the coronavirus numbers, and today

two things impressed me. The first thing

is that we now have

statistics—

finally published after not being released for three months—

on mortality in Moscow.

The real figures, not the ones that were published on

the Telegram channel of Alexei Venediktov.

This came out right during the debates,

so a lot of people probably missed it. It's

quite sensational. Mediazona

published the statistics.

Yes, yes, yes—it was during the debates,

so everyone missed it. On Mediazona

there's an article saying that this year, in

April, in Moscow, 20% more people died—

in April, 20% more people died

than in a normal year, than

the average—18.5%

more people than last

year; in absolute terms, by 2,000

people. The official number of deaths

from coronavirus in Moscow for April was not

2,000, but around 600 people. That is,

this excess mortality is three times

higher than the officially reported

coronavirus death toll. This fits very

well with what many people

had noticed earlier—though not anymore now—when

all those hospitals were still

Kommunarka, Filatov Hospital, Hospital No. 15, No. 52,

which had originally been designated for this—when

they published

their daily reports, they all said: we have

something like 300 patients being treated,

with severe pneumonia,

100 of them with confirmed

coronavirus, and 200 more simply with severe

pneumonia—and everyone understood, of course, that this was also

coronavirus. And in the end, the Moscow Health Department

issued an order

to classify them all as coronavirus cases and treat them

as coronavirus. But for almost the entire

month of April,

the real ratio was always two to

one—that is, in Moscow there were twice as many.

there were more people recorded with community-acquired

pneumonia than with coronavirus, judging

because, well, some of these

patients recovered, and some of these

patients died, so apparently

the same proportion remained, apparently

for every one person who died with confirmed

coronavirus, there were two deaths without

confirmed coronavirus, because

there is simply no other way to explain this increase of

two thousand deaths above the long-term

average for April in Moscow, it just

doesn’t work — in other words, the official

statistics in Moscow

are underreporting by a factor of three, maybe even more

because after all, the self-isolation regime

— shamefully not called a quarantine —

still led to people going out less

and fewer people dying in traffic accidents

every country that had a lockdown recorded

a drop in traffic deaths and lower

mortality from many other causes

so if 600 coronavirus

deaths correspond to an increase of two thousand

deaths, then the real excess may even

be not threefold but closer to fourfold

compared with the official statistics — and that’s in Moscow, where

overall, as we can see, the attitude

of the local authorities is fairly alarmist; we

read a lot about how Sobyanin

was persuading Putin to abandon this

crazy plan to hold the April 22

vote, dragged him to

Kommunarka (a Moscow hospital complex), showed him how bad things really

were — and in the regions, it turns out, the situation

is even worse, much worse in fact. And this

second thing that, in terms of the numbers,

really struck me today was that I

noticed this morning

the statistics for Krasnodar Krai, and then

I poked around a bit in the statistics of other

regions and saw that we already have about a dozen

regions that, from the moment they said

they had reached a plateau, have been drawing that plateau — and in a

very Churov/Pamfilova-style way (a reference to Russian election officials associated with suspiciously neat results),

absolutely ruler-straight, I mean

the statistics there are completely fabricated

Ivan, I wanted to ask you — when

we were talking about the five steps and about

help for people, I said I don’t understand why

Putin is acting this way, and now I want to

ask you, since you’re

very good with math and numbers — I

really don’t understand how they, why they

are hiding this mortality and how, in the end,

they think they’ll hide it. I mean, when all this was just

beginning, I had a conversation with the head of

the Doctors’ Alliance medical union

Vasilyeva, and I asked her then

— Anastasia, what are they going to do?

They can hide the statistics, but people

will die, and those people have

relatives and so on — you can’t really

hide mortality. And she answered me that

they would keep hiding

the mortality and shifting it into other

categories, and we can see that this is exactly what’s happening

That’s right — they record it however they like

as long as it’s not coronavirus. But you can’t

hide that completely — no matter how much they try to cover it up

they can’t do it, it’s showing through everywhere

I mean, and we can see — you were talking about

this on Thursday and showed the order

from the Health Ministry dated April 8, basically saying that if

there is coronavirus and something else, list

the other thing as the cause of death, and the whole

Twitter was then full of the famous

Gulag order from May 1941, which said

that if the cause of death was known to be

starvation, write down heart

failure

Well, this is really the exact same trick, the

same lie. An elderly person dies

and yes, people really do die from coronavirus

— mostly, after all, it is elderly people who die

the average age of those who died in Germany is 81

years — that is a very advanced age, and in

some sense, obviously, Putin

is counting on the fact that

— cynically speaking — this somehow

helps him a little, because Russians

mostly do not live to that age

we have a completely different demographic profile

On my program I showed this guy

who was speaking on Channel One

and saying, well, basically this is

actually a kind of weird advantage right now

a big plus in Russia is simply that hardly anyone

lives to that age. So yes, it’s like

they seem to be thinking: if we simply

just

don’t have many people aged 81,

then we won’t have such unpleasant mortality

figures as in Europe, after all, where the worst

numbers are

Italy, Spain, Belgium — these are countries with very old

populations, countries with very elderly

populations, and that is where all these

terrifying figures come from. But really, when

coronavirus gets into nursing

homes, when coronavirus gets into

a hospice — and that means a person

is in a hospice, that is, a place where

palliative care is provided

to terminally ill patients — and then coronavirus strikes that hospice, and the person dies

from coronavirus in the hospice

In Europe, such a person

is included in the statistics of deaths from

coronavirus, even though the person was terminally

ill and would have died in a month

or a year anyway, and so on, because they

take a humanistic view of life, because

that person is still someone’s aunt,

someone’s relative; it matters to someone that they

might have lived a few more months or a year

and they should not have died from this thing

and would not have died if proper

sanitary rules had been observed there, and if the hospice had not

it spread there, in Italy, in northern Italy

there have been a great many deaths there

mostly among severely ill elderly people

there, in medical facilities

well, it seems obvious that Putin thinks that in

our case, first of all, there aren’t really any particular

factors

much more often stay at home with their children rather than in

nursing homes; we don’t have this kind of

extensive system that exists in Europe and in

America, where it’s normal for an elderly person

to live in a care home; in recent years, in

Russia, that’s generally not accepted — there’s a kind of

stigma around it, as if to say: what, you couldn’t cope?

couldn’t manage it yourselves? Though of course,

it’s good when a person is properly cared for

there’s also a different age structure, so

somehow they’re hoping that all these factors

will soften the blow, I don’t know

maybe they believe in the BCG vaccine theory, maybe someone sold them that idea

and of course, on top of that, they write down other

causes of death — that’s what we can see from the

numbers; and again, Moscow’s figures are 3 to 4 times

lower than the actual April mortality figures, but

if you use the real ones, it comes out roughly like Germany’s, and

right now we supposedly have four times fewer than

Germany — it’s laughable, it’s basically

a joke to anyone who would

compare medicine in Germany and in Russia. But if

they weren’t hiding these numbers, it would look like

Germany, and that wouldn’t actually be shameful

in Germany they’ve done very well

Germany is considered a kind of model for

Europe; and, as elsewhere, thanks to

these other factors, thanks to a different

age structure and so on, they

could have done fairly well, but apparently

they really want to be simply better than

everyone else, they really want to beat everybody

and they’re very used to lying; well, and they really

want to announce as soon as possible that we

coped, got through it, overcame it, reached the plateau

as we discussed, there’s been a lot of loosening

the resort season stretched out to eight months

all right, let me play devil’s advocate — I still

don’t understand how they’re going to deal with this

going forward; for example, if we turn our attention to

the North Caucasus, Dagestan in particular

right now, doctors’ deaths there

are being recorded on this “Wall of Memory”

website online; at the very least

we know, more or less accurately, about all

the medical workers in the country who have died from

coronavirus, and right now in Dagestan

medical workers — and relatively young ones, I mean, they’re not

80 years old — have died in greater numbers than the official

total death count altogether, and I get a lot of messages from there

and all these people have

relatives, and everyone else has

relatives too — and most people have

acquaintances; everyone knows that a person died of

coronavirus, or maybe they died

at home, but while dying they were coughing terribly and all

the signs were there

so what is their strategy — to keep fining people

to keep opening fake-news cases against

everyone who points

a finger at the obvious lies in the mortality

statistics?

well, I think yes — but what else can they do? I mean

again, take Kursk Region

and Krasnodar Krai

again, these are regions where they have traditionally

falsified elections like crazy, and now there

we’re seeing the same wild falsification

of medical statistics. Yes, Krasnodar

Krai

has been saying for seven days in a row that they have 98–99

new cases; the probability of that, if it were

really a plateau — the probability of such a coincidence

happening by chance is one in many trillions

yes, it’s like if a monkey

sitting at a keyboard randomly typed out

*War and Peace* — could that happen?

A monkey could type, and a random

person could too, but the probability of it

is extremely small — about the same as

the probability that Krasnodar’s

medical statistics are accurate. As for

the statistics on detected cases, they’ve already

lied, which means they’ll have to

keep lying in the death statistics too; if they don’t have

people in their statistics as being sick with

coronavirus, then how are they going to record

deaths from coronavirus? Well, they’ll

write down other causes of death and keep

covering it up. More than that, in this

situation — sorry — these changes in

Moscow, in this situation, as I understand it,

at some point they simply decided that

let’s show it after all; not only did they

finally release these statistics, there was

a sharp jump, and now Sobyanin is also

simply preparing public opinion

saying that in reality, in Moscow,

there are 300,000 infected, according to the results

of screening; maybe they’ll make an about-face

sooner or later, because

otherwise, right now they need

to hide a mouse, and after a while

they’ll need to hide an elephant in the room

I mean, that will be harder. Maybe

they themselves believed their own propaganda

maybe they decided that with this

very self-isolation, this forced

police-style lockdown, with all these digital collars

they could suppress the epidemic, could make it so

that the numbers wouldn’t grow

into something monstrous — that the mouse would grow into at most

a rabbit, and somehow it would pass. But

the rabbit is quietly running off into the forest

as if all of this would somehow dissipate there. I only

have this one assumption:

someone sold them the idea that if we introduce

self-isolation — and every time he says

“mandatory,” it makes me cringe —

damn it, “self-isolation” isn’t something you impose; what we introduced is this pseudo-

quarantine, and, well, things would kind of go down

that notorious contact rate will go down

to zero, and, well, little by little

it’ll all blow over, everything will be fine, but they

apparently really failed to take into account that

when you put people under quarantine and don’t

give them any money, they’re forced

to break it as a matter of course. Maybe also

you know what occurred to me just now?

A thought: we know who, politically speaking,

is the father and, in

fact, the real leader of Vladimir

Putin and his entire regime — Alexander

Grigoryevich Lukashenko. That is, everything that

in Russia is supposedly thought up by Putin

was actually implemented in Belarus a few

years earlier. Maybe they’re just wistfully

looking at Belarus

where he just waves it all away like, “Only drunks get it,”

the only thing there is, like, “just keep a low

profile, damn it. As for your coronavirus, I’m

going to deal with it very simply here — I’ll just flat-out

ignore it, and basically I couldn’t care less,”

couldn’t give a damn. And, well, maybe that will lead

to him hiding the statistics, while everyone

will still, say, by October all be

in the same place, it’ll pass, and everything

will be whatever. Of course, all this

sounds plausible, but it requires, you know,

a certain reserve of recklessness, I guess,

which Alexander Grigoryevich has

and Vladimir doesn’t. We know how much he likes

to disappear, to crawl under

cover, and so on. That is,

Alexander Grigoryevich clearly decided that this is how

things really are, while he’s been completely overtaken by

a very strong fear of getting sick. Deep down he really

during self-isolation, when he stood there with

flowers and there was absolutely no one around,

it was obvious he understands about himself that

he is, well, an old man, an elderly

person with less-than-excellent health, and he

clearly doesn’t want to find out firsthand

which part of the statistics he’ll end up in, and

therefore

I mean, Lukashenko — well, that is,

he goes ahead with his parades and all that,

Lukashenko behaves like some deranged

absolute dictator, which he is,

but he’s also, in a way, setting

an example for himself

He says masks are unnecessary, yes, he goes around

without looking at anything, without reading, wherever it takes him,

he holds events, talks to people,

goes out for a *subbotnik* (a voluntary community work day), goes to the parade.

Putin clearly can’t do that psychologically and

doesn’t want to, so they can’t do what

Lukashenko does. Right, that’s true, but

it’s also true that we can see Putin actually has

some kind of super-paranoid

fear of getting infected. But nobody wants

to get infected; all normal people protect

themselves and protect their loved ones. But this whole

bunker thing — look, right now everyone

is discussing nothing but that bunker, and judging by

everything, it really is a [__] bunker, or

I don’t know, some kind of strange

strange place with strange walls, and

he simply never comes out of it. May 9 was

his first public appearance in 33

days. Though of course that appearance was

quite striking — really a kind of

presidential loneliness

on display. So that’s probably

probably

and his plan, after all, was apparently this:

Chubais still hasn’t invented the immortality pill,

ha-ha, and meanwhile out here on the way

you might catch a cold. But now Chubais

hasn’t invented it, so now it’s been entrusted to Maria Vorontsova

— basically, since Chubais failed

to live up to expectations, now it will be started by

Kovalchuk and the elder daughter — wait, yes, and

Maria, the older one, the elder daughter,

Maria Vorontsova,

who is actually

a biologist and endocrinologist, will start making

his immortality pill. He hopes it

works out that way. We need some kind of Large Hadron Collider for the elbow

They’ll selfishly invent a pill without the people

Will everyone get one, or will there be only one

single copy? I’ll give it only

to Putin. 6,200 people are watching us — don’t

forget to hit like. Here someone writes to us

— it’s a real brainstorming session here. Well yes, we’re

guys, this is how we talk, we’re live on air

discussing it, but what’s really

important is that there’s actually a big secret

and it is this: people often ask me in interviews,

they ask Alexei

why all this is called

what are the odds this week, actually

Politics is terribly interesting — it’s the most important

kind of practical activity, and in fact

all those problems are really

interesting to deal with. That’s what we, well, that’s what we

do, in short.

So, we were discussing the question of what

will happen now — there was some plan here, still

I’ve lost it — Popova, yes, we were discussing

how they’re going to come out of the plateau

I don’t have any better answer

to your question, Alexei, than this: well,

they really did convince themselves that

the quarantine would help, and decided they would

lie until it did help, and

then pretend there was no elephant in the room

But now the situation is obviously slipping

out of control

After all, this situation in the regions

is getting worse: more and more regions

are moving away from realistic figures and starting to produce

made-up ones. So really, this elephant

is getting bigger and bigger, and it’s tearing at the seams more and more

At some point this will burst somehow, and somehow

a big

lie will come out. The question is what will happen then

how people will react to it. Can I

ask you a question before I ask it?

A question for you—since I’m praising you so much.

The thing is, we have a little group chat there,

with Leonid and Ivan Zhdanov, the director of

the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation), and from the very beginning of all this

stuff,

with the coronavirus, by the way,

as you remember, I was more of a

skeptic. I was saying this whole thing

was nonsense, and I even said that they wouldn’t shut restaurants in

Moscow. But when I was saying that,

it was all back in February, yes, yes, yes—when Leonid

was saying that we needed to

immediately close the office and move everyone

to remote work, I

said, what kind of nonsense is that? Of course

that would never happen in Russia. And

Leonid, just for our little

group, regularly makes some kind of

mathematical forecast about what’s going to happen,

and that forecast

is genuinely frighteningly accurate. I mean,

we recently compared what you had predicted

two months ago—if I remember correctly,

up to 1,000 people. And I actually wanted to

lead into exactly that, actually.

I also remembered our little chat with you and

Ivan. I actually just now pulled up

its history. So, on March 15 I wrote

that by April 15 there would be 27,000 in Moscow, and in

Russia, from 27,000 cases.

Based on the statistics as of March 15,

that’s basically what happened. Here I really did hit it, within

1,000—but of course that was more luck. And on the 15th,

to boot,

it was only 100, and as for forecasts through April 15,

you asked me to make a forecast for May

15, and I said that in Moscow on May 15 there would be

400,000 to 500,000 cases. Now officially

in Moscow right now it’s 100,000, and officially by May 15

it will be 150,000.

But, Sergey, if you ask me, I completely

agree—300,000.

And, given the trend, by May 15 my

forecast will land right on target. Right, and that’s exactly why

I want to ask you:

considering that of all the people who

make forecasts—and there are quite a lot of them—

you’ve been the most accurate. But

in your personal view, when will this damned

quarantine, this self-isolation, be lifted in Russia? Well,

okay—when should it be lifted? Under what

conditions should that happen? Obviously

Putin may start lifting it now because

they need the vote, but

properly speaking, when does all this mess end?

Please explain, because I don’t understand.

Because

I mean, when would it have ended if

Russia had acted according to the same

model as European countries?

Roughly now—that is, 40 days from the start of the

active growth phase. In our case, that is, in

Russia’s case, from the end of March.

That was enough for almost everyone to get through

the plateau, except Sweden and Belarus, which

openly said they would not do that

and are now, essentially, dealing with

a fairly difficult situation. And except for

the United Kingdom, which spent a very long time

wavering and lurching around, unable to

settle on its model, the whole

situation dragged on there. But other countries,

both those not hit very hard—those where

it simply took longer to arrive, like

Finland, the Baltic states,

or Norway—and those hit very hard,

like France, Spain, Italy, and Belgium, nevertheless

all managed it in 40 days. In 40

days they lived through the explosive growth phase, and then

By the way, this is where Russia’s

idea of a “plateau” is completely different. In Russia

they say a plateau is when there is, like, a constant

number of new cases per day. But a plateau

—I’ve said this on my own broadcasts—

is not that at all.

A plateau is when the burden on the medical system stops growing.

That is, when

each day there are as many new

patients as there are people being discharged. In Russia, we are still

very, very far from that. So as for

a plateau in the number of active cases,

in Russia, the latest statistics

showed about 11,000 new

cases and 5,000 discharged, so it’s still

more than twice as many.

New cases still far outnumber discharges.

So we are still very far from a plateau.

Most European countries—

the overwhelming majority of European

countries—went through the plateau and on to

a stable decline, with restrictions being lifted, in

40 days. We could have been

here already, at this point, if

people had stayed home, if people had been given

money so they could calmly stay

at home. But now, basically, we have to start

counting those 40 days from scratch, because

again, there has been no move toward a plateau.

We still have explosive growth

in the number of new cases, even according to

the official statistics, which are mercilessly

being falsified.

All right, but still, let’s look at it objectively,

really objectively, as if nobody were

watching us,

6,000 people—or as if they are watching, but we’re

discussing this absolutely honestly. Who

is to blame for this? I mean, it’s clear that

Putin didn’t act in time, we know that,

yes, because in all other countries

quarantine had already been declared, while in Russia it still hadn’t.

So what exactly was done

absolutely, spectacularly wrong already

at the time when this very

isolation was introduced? Why aren’t 40 days enough for us?

Well, you know my answer to that. I’ve written about

it, and tomorrow a big video about it will come out on my channel.

A big video about this—subscribe to

the channel that I believe Putin is to blame for all this mess

to blame — the cat had kittens, and somehow that's Putin's fault too

to blame, basically, for everything. We often get

criticized, like, “you reduce everything

to Putin,” and so on. But damn it,

that really is exactly how it was. They spent all of

March trying to save the constitutional vote

They didn’t build up stocks of protective equipment,

they didn’t prepare the hospitals, they didn’t prepare

any real infrastructure for this, even though they

had a month to spare. And second,

they didn’t give people money, they didn’t go for

— the audio jumped there — okay, got it

but still, here I am, I’ve been sitting

at home for more than a month, and everyone’s been

at home for more than a month. So why didn’t

it work? Why didn’t this self-isolation

work by now? Or did it

work?

Patty, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you

I can’t hear you. One, one, one. But I can hear you. I

can start now

Judging by the Moscow statistics, which

apparently

are much more relevant than the statistics

from the regions, the slowdown is happening, but it

is happening slowly because of the authorities’

unwillingness to really put the country under

a fairly strict lockdown, because, again,

they didn’t want to hand out money. After all, they

ended up taking measures that were terribly

half-hearted. Let’s remember again

our chat — I told you back then, and you

said they would never close things down

they wouldn’t shut the metro, and I said they would

close some things, stop the metro. In fact,

they did it halfway: they closed restaurants, but not the metro

Come on, the metro is impossible to shut down — nowhere

did they shut the metro, there are tons of examples

and analyses. In Italy they shut it down, in Milan

The Moscow metro is impossible to stop

It accounts for, what, 80 percent

of all passenger traffic, of all transport

So these things just aren’t comparable

still, what I mean is that if you

even look at those self-isolation

indices, they show that, unfortunately, in

Moscow itself, which is

after all the largest metropolis in Europe

a critical number of people remained

out on the streets, still circulating

interacting with one another while

doing so without masks, without adequate

protective equipment. So that’s why Moscow has

the second-worst statistics in the world among

major cities

after New York. And in New York they didn’t even

stop the subway either, right? So

it’s obvious that yes, it’s probably too

big a city, too complex in how it functions

too many people have to

go to work every day and interact with other

people for the city to

function somehow, and so it just didn’t

work out there. But in the regions, listen,

in the regions we didn’t see any serious

lockdown anywhere. People keep writing to us

saying, “Here everyone’s out walking, everyone’s going about

their business.” So apparently there wasn’t really

a sufficiently serious

quarantine in place. All right then, given

all that — first Putin

spent a whole month preparing

his idiotic vote instead of introducing

quarantine, then we got this strange quarantine

and then they created crowds in the

metro, and now for some reason they’ve allowed

construction sites to operate; in the regions, generally speaking,

in many places there wasn’t really any proper quarantine

at all. Given all that, when will this all

end? Because if in Moscow

it is still dying down

judging by the fact that, well, more and

more people are getting infected, that again

leads to the development of the notorious

herd immunity. I would cautiously

suggest that if everything stays

as it is now, this story will go on for another

two months

If they had really gone for another two months

of quarantine — I mean

self-isolation, yes, yes — then ideally

properly, for real, it should have been another

month or two. But judging by the fact that they’re now

about to rush into lifting this quarantine,

the situation could really worsen

again, seriously

And besides, in two months, without

any exaggeration at all, Russia will have

something like 20 million people who simply

won’t have anything to eat — literally

in the most direct sense. And since

they have no intention of handing out money, I

think that tomorrow they’ll start announcing

the lifting of restrictions. Putin will be

doing PR on the news: “Look, we won”

the statistics will supposedly go in the right direction, meaning

things are getting better for us — and fortunately for them,

they’ve learned very well how to manage statistics

And in reality we’ll just get

a big second wave, but on paper

in the statistics, apparently, everything will already

look fairly good

in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, there’s no

trust in these numbers at all. The picture froze — can you

hear me?

Yes, for now — I’m back

Oh, you’re back, you reconnected

Excellent. Alexei, people are writing to us that in

Kyiv they closed the metro. Well yes, but again

Kyiv isn’t Moscow. The size of the city is still very important

the size of the city

it makes it possible there to get to work honestly

using other forms of transport

All right, can I ask one more thing

one more question

that I really, really don’t fully

understand? I keep reading about the Swedish

the model, and I keep reading completely

diametrically opposed opinions saying that

like, ha-ha-ha, look, people talked a lot about the Swedes

and said it wouldn’t work for them, but nothing came of it

and right now I have an open

tab

I saw an article an hour ago, maybe two hours ago

and opened it so I wouldn’t forget to read it later. It

is called this: “The Swedish strategy for

combating COVID-19 has been recognized as the best”

model for society to live by,” and the subheading says

the World Health Organization

has recognized that the Swedish approach to fighting

blah blah blah should be taken as an example, blah

blah blah, in order to return to normal

life. Please explain to me: what do you

think about this?

Listen, the Swedish model is

not like the Belarusian model

of “let’s just ignore everything.” No, the Swedish

model is not the Belarusian one. First of all, that’s

a major misconception. It’s not true.

The Swedish model is not the Belarusian one.

In the Belarusian model, COVID really is

basically denied — as if there is no disease, we’ll

hold a subbotnik (a Soviet-style voluntary community work day), we’ll hold a parade, we’ll

go hug elderly people, it’s

just the regular flu, and all that. That’s not the Swedish

model. The Swedish model is

a measured, adult, though risky

approach. They say: yes, you need to

keep your distance, yes, you need to

observe it;

you need isolation — well, not total isolation, but you should avoid unnecessary

contacts. But we are not going to shut down

the economy. Stores will stay open,

restaurants will stay open. All people are

adults, you understand your own risks,

so behave responsibly. There are also

restrictions there too, for example visits to

nursing homes are banned; they are trying

to isolate high-risk groups.

But at the same time, yes, there are basically no restrictions there

on work or on much of public

life. In the Swedish model,

the state

relies on the maturity of society and on

the responsibility of each individual.

There’s hand sanitizer everywhere, people

wash their hands, everyone understands the risks, but

at the same time they believe that in this

way they will develop

herd immunity fairly quickly, and they won’t have to

shut down the economy. I’m clarifying because I

also constantly see interviews with their chief

epidemiologist there, their main

elder statesman, so to speak,

who keeps literally saying

the following phrase: that isolation and quarantine are

basically

not scientifically proven and are actually unscientific,

contrary to everything. So do they

basically deny the idea that

isolation and quarantine have any

effect at all? Is that true or not? How

does it actually work, and how does it work in practice?

Well, they’re actually saying something else.

I mean, first of all, that headline

that got your attention — it’s also trying to

be completely clickbait. The article itself is

not about what the headline says, that supposedly

the Swedish model has been recognized as ideal

by the World Health Organization.

by the World Health Organization.

There are a lot of questions there, but in this case

the article I read simply wasn’t about that. It was about

quarantine too.

If a person’s health is already weakened,

if they’re elderly and sit at home within four walls,

their emotional

well-being worsens, just their general condition worsens. They need

to go outside and get some fresh air. In that sense,

they say you don’t need to sit at home the way

we say. You should allow — well, not allow

construction sites where thousands of migrant workers are in

unsanitary conditions — but you should

allow jogging, walking,

cycling, getting fresh air, so that

people don’t go crazy stuck in their apartments,

so that domestic violence doesn’t rise, and so

on. But even so, judging by the

numbers,

the Swedes don’t seem to be doing all that well after all.

You have to compare like with like.

Sweden, like all the countries of Northern Europe,

had a huge head start because

all of this from the Italian and Spanish

outbreak centers didn’t arrive there right away. Right now in

Sweden there are more deaths than the total

in all the neighboring countries — Norway and

Finland, and the Baltic states

— I can’t remember exactly which ones off the top of my head.

Sweden is, of course, a more or less

more populous country than all of those. Sweden’s

population is about 10 million, and

it has more deaths than the neighboring

countries, whose populations are

about six times larger in total. Sweden, in terms

of deaths per capita, per

million people — tomorrow it will overtake

— actually no, it already did today, I mean tomorrow —

today it overtook the Netherlands.

Among the relatively hard-hit countries,

the only ones now with worse figures than Sweden are

Belgium, France, and Italy,

Spain, and the United Kingdom — that is,

very large countries, among which

France and Italy in particular were

hit hard by the outbreak. So Sweden —

that is, in all the other Nordic countries,

in all the other Scandinavian and

Baltic countries,

those figures are somewhere around

30 to 40 deaths per million, while Sweden

today is at 307, 319 — so roughly ten

times worse. And this whole idea that

there’s some “Swedish miracle,” that we should look at how Sweden

made it work — that’s all nonsense.

I got nothing from them, but that doesn’t seem

like a miracle. You can call it whatever you want, but

this is impossible to use as a model.

Using it like that is, well, a much more

responsible approach than Lukashenko’s line.

There, it’s like: seriously, you’re adults, and we’re

sort of Vikings, we’ll take on the challenge and

we’ll cope. But at least we won’t

shut down the economy, and we’ll accept

those losses that are supposedly inevitable. We won’t

just sit there, afraid, waiting for a vaccine, well

and, basically, whatever happens, happens.

And flights are operating everywhere too—I checked, you can

fly from Stockholm, you can fly to

Italy and back without any problem, yes, right

now. So I’d say that

as for the scientific consensus—here I’m stepping into an area where I

feel confident when I talk about

mathematics and statistics; that’s my

education, my specialty. But when it comes to

talking about the scientific consensus,

the medical one, I’m

not really qualified—I don’t have the relevant

education. But from what I can see from the

publications, the scientific consensus still

is that

the Swedish path is not suitable for most

countries, let’s put it that way. It probably works,

yes, for Sweden—a country with an extremely

good healthcare system, extremely wealthy,

and with an extremely high level of trust and

dialogue between citizens and the authorities,

where the government can say: you’re

adults, we’re counting on you to do everything

right, we just have to endure this. And

the citizens say: yes, okay, we’re adults, we

understand, we’ll put up with it.

And we’ll basically accept as a given some

costs and losses. But I, honestly,

am surprised that Swedish society

turned out to be so patient with this

experiment being carried out on it.

The chief epidemiologist there—for example,

the main point,

the main idea of the Swedish strategy is that

they won’t have a second wave later on.

We need to compare outcomes in a year. It’s

true, maybe if they achieve

that herd immunity, maybe

they won’t later have the kind of

shocks of a second wave. We’ll see, we’ll see.

We’ll see. So, 6,600 people are watching us right now, and we’ve

already been live for an hour. The topic is far from

exhausted. Alexei Navalny is our guest on

Volkov’s Sunday stream. Don’t forget

to like and share this video

and subscribe to my channel.

Tomorrow a big video will come out about

the statistics and economics of coronavirus. But

people write that Sweden doesn’t have major transport hubs,

there are lots of private homes there too,

it’s completely different there, a completely different

population density; people live there, well,

Listen, in Norway too, probably,

a much larger number of people live on

isolated farmsteads, or in Estonia as well, so

in that sense, that argument doesn’t really help us.

Let’s move on to questions—we promised to

answer questions.

If I decide to donate X rubles

every month, in what proportion should I

divide it between

FBK and the regional headquarters? I really love this

honest question. Split it however feels

comfortable to you—half and half, for example, would be great.

Now, about

the White House tweet—there are a lot of questions

about your reaction and so on. I mean,

it’s obviously a topic that couldn’t fail to

come up in our chat, and damn,

it really struck a nerve with everyone.

Yes, it’s an interesting thing. It got to me too,

personally, so much so that yesterday I even decided

to join in, apparently alongside Zakharova (Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman),

the Russian embassy, officially—I don’t know—and

everyone else. I joined those who

went ahead and wrote a response, even in English,

very afraid of making some kind of

mistake.

They wrote a response saying that the White House,

quoting Trump’s remarks, said

that on May 8, May 8,

the United States and Great Britain won victory over

Nazism, and

on the one hand, there’s the endless official

narrative of our authorities, who

for the last 10 years, my God, have been fighting

what they call the greatest evil on planet Earth:

the rewriting of history. Like some kind of

“rewriting history—we will not allow anyone

to rewrite history,” and all our

foreign policy and rhetoric are aimed at that. On

the other hand, in this case we’re probably seeing

not, of course, a rewriting of history but simply

some kind of idiocy. I mean, the people who

came up with saying it like that, writing

a speech like that,

did something unacceptable.

I think that in this sense it was undoubtedly

offensive—of course it was offensive.

That’s what they did, and it’s entirely right

to be outraged by it. No one

can say that, basically,

the United States and Great Britain defeated

Nazism. After that there’s simply an interesting

discussion about everyone’s contribution—well,

10 to 20 million lives, Lend-Lease there,

and here the atomic bomb would already have been ready by

September—Miyazaki, yes, or bombs—well,

you can argue endlessly

in the subjunctive mood, but damn, just

to come out and declare at the state

level

that Great Britain and the United States won the war—well,

that’s not exactly a small detail to leave out.

Yes, and then I read a bit of all those

Twitter threads where they then sort of write

about 27 million, and then...

I’m playing, and the Chinese are saying that actually

the largest number of Chinese citizens died in

the Second World War.

When you hear something like that, it’s not just a case of

“you can’t take words out of a song” (a Russian saying meaning you can’t erase what was said). Here, though, they’re trying to take things out of

the song — they’re trying to remove a verse and

even basically remake the title into

a new song and somehow get non-authorial

rights to it, and ban everyone else from using it. What interests me more is this:

what I’m more interested in is this — I mean,

basically,

what were they thinking? I don’t know — Trump’s and

the White House’s social media people — I mean, is this really

how it is in their heads? Has everything there genuinely

already reached the point of historical distortion, or did they

just clumsily, awkwardly reflect

the historical fact that on May 8

the Germans signed the surrender in

the presence of Britain, and on May 9

they signed it again before the Soviet Union?

That’s why Victory Day is commemorated around the world on

May 8, while in Russia it’s May 9, because there were two

acts of surrender.

Or — I don’t know — is it something

else? Or, I don’t know, is Trump freaking on

Putin’s payroll, as many people suggest,

or compromised by someone, and tweeting

things on purpose that very

strongly promote Putin’s

narrative? Because of course this is the kind of thing that

plays right into Putin’s hands — like,

“See? It’s not for nothing that we’re introducing all these

special historical narratives; it’s not for nothing that I’ve

been writing an article about Poland for two months,”

because, look, they really are

distorting things at that level

— what exactly is going on here, in this?

I looked carefully at the context, because

I thought, well, I’m about to write

something and start cursing them out, but

then maybe it would turn out that they

really did mean that the act of

surrender was signed on May 8, and by May 9

everyone celebrates victory on May 8, and only

we celebrate it on May 9. But no — the context there

was specifically that “we,” meaning they,

won. But it seems to me that all of this

is actually described by

a well-known saying:

defeat

“Victory has a thousand fathers, while defeat

is always an orphan.” Basically, it’s that

urge that any official, any

public figure has

to appropriate as much of

the victory as possible. Because, unquestionably, victory in

the Second World War is a kind of

absolute good from a political

point of view.

I mean, you can’t really say

— well, you can say it, but you’ll immediately get slapped down —

for suggesting that, well, maybe it would have been good if

it hadn’t been won quite so completely, or if

there had been a bit of losing too, because victory is

an absolute consensus everywhere — among the left,

the right — maybe not all on the right,

but among most leftists, centrists, and

mainstream conservatives — that this is absolute

good, and everyone wants to claim as much of that

absolute good as possible. And then

after that, it’s just some person — good Lord —

an official is an official,

a state media manager is

a state media manager — he just

went ahead and wrote something like that. But what’s really interesting here is that

what’s absolutely interesting is that they

aren’t apologizing for it,

unless I’m mistaken. I think maybe someone on Trump’s team

apologized, but Trump himself is not going to apologize.

He didn’t apologize for plenty of other things either,

and they’re not going to apologize for this. And

this is one of those things where, it seems to me,

it’s entirely appropriate for all of us

to be outraged, because our authorities are always telling us

that we’re supposed to be outraged

about all sorts of other things.

In our case, our authorities are very fond of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

and keep insisting that it was somehow

entirely justified.

And our authorities try not to notice

the presence

of Hitler’s people — the Nazis — at the parade on

Red Square in 1940,

and endlessly, endlessly drag us into

all sorts of other arguments more than anything else.

But specifically in this situation,

I very consciously joined

the righteous anger of everyone, and that too, it seems to me,

is important. I said this on the program,

but I’ll repeat it: we should not

hand May 9 over to Putin and all those creeps.

Why the hell should we give them May 9?

Why should we hand all of this over to them?

We need to talk about this, and we need

to be outraged about it, including when, I don’t know,

Trump writes something like that. Because

inside our country too, there’s this kind of

absolute consensus that this is

a shared holiday, one that belongs to everyone. In

my family, for example, my grandmother

signed the Reichstag (the German parliament building in Berlin, a symbolic act by Soviet soldiers in 1945); that’s one of

the family’s cherished symbols, and rightly so.

My grandfather served in

Dovator’s division, and in Yulia’s family her grandmother and

grandfather also served and fought — there are frontline veterans,

real veterans, genuinely so — and

for us, May 9 has always been

and still is something completely sacred.

And now I see this regrettable

trend: because Putin is trying

to grab hold of this sacred thing,

a lot of people are saying, well, let’s unwind it,

let’s stop treating it as something especially

sacred. I think that is completely

wrong. It is still something sacred,

and it belongs to us no less

than it belongs to anyone else.

In our country, here I can’t help but

agree. In a way, this affects me too: both my

grandfathers fought in the war, and barely made it back

alive. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here in this world.

But for our family too, as for any family,

these are great holidays, and it’s simply

deeply upsetting what they’ve turned them into

over the last 15 years or so—with

the ribbon and the Immortal Regiment (a commemorative march where people carry portraits of relatives who fought in World War II), which

at first was, by all accounts, a wonderful initiative

that I attended myself, and all my relatives

wanted to join—but then it became

something awful, this stiff official ritual, where you’re

notified by the Gosuslugi portal (Russia’s state services website) and told

exactly how it is supposed to be conducted. All of that

is understandable, but still—let me switch to

provocative-question mode.

In 2017, Ella Pamfilova

allowed Alexei Navalny to run in the

presidential election, as she should have

done.

Alexei Navalny won the presidential

election. Now, in our Beautiful Russia

of the Future, which is doing a great job fighting

the coronavirus—so, it’s May 9, 2020.

President Navalny is sitting there in the

Kremlin and

working, holding another

meeting on supplies of personal

protective equipment to hospitals, and then

the White House puts out some kind of

statement. So what do you do—recall ambassadors, sort of

send someone off, say something? You need

to do exactly what I did without being

that kind of president: write something like,

“Are you people serious? What you wrote is stupid.”

Well, okay, they

wrote something stupid. You need to say: “You

wrote something stupid.” They didn’t declare

war on us. What happened is that a foolish person,

a foolish speechwriter, wrote a foolish speech, and

Trump, for some reason, repeated that foolishness. They

posted it on Twitter, it was translated on Twitter—

to hell with all of them. What matters is that

sometimes you just have to show a hundred grams’ worth of fire—meaning,

we don’t care about any of them. They’re

stupid people. We know everything about what

happened, and we condemned them for it,

considered it unacceptable, but also

kept a sense of proportion. That is, I absolutely think

that this particular thing cannot

be left

without a response. But you see, when it comes

to the legacy

of the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet term for the Eastern Front of World War II), there are such

enormous issues compared with which

tweets are just some tiny, I don’t know,

speck next to planet Earth. We still have

hundreds of thousands of people who have not

been buried. We still have, there in mass graves

in the Leningrad Region,

you understand—and that’s not even mentioning places like

Rzhev, where bones are literally lying everywhere, on the

ground. There are huge areas there

of terrible neglect and poverty, an enormous

amount of it. That’s what needs attention.

This also affects things like

benefits and payments. As I learned with horror,

this is still a whole problem:

people are recognized as missing in

action rather than dead, and accordingly their

widows and other relatives

can’t receive certain payments. It’s just

—honestly, listen,

the situation itself—and this is a silly

word, maybe slang, but it’s exactly the right one,

sorry for using it on your

program—but it really drives me crazy.

What really drives me crazy is a situation in

which

our frontline veterans—how many of them are even left,

good Lord, you can practically count them on your fingers—

those actual frontline soldiers, they

receive several times less than those who

fought on Germany’s side.

I mean, it’s just some kind of superhuman

level of swinishness—you can’t even

imagine it. You are a victorious soldier

receiving pennies compared with a soldier of the

Wehrmacht. Surely our country

can pay them a decent pension.

How many of them are left now

is a separate and rather sad

question. Apparently, there are no such statistics, and

no one publishes them. But if you simply

look at the statistics again, by

time series, so to speak, and by

life expectancy, then apparently there are

several tens of thousands of them.

Frontline veterans—but officially, veterans and those

equated with them number 1.2 million

in our country. In fact, they first equated

everyone who was more or less an adult during

the war, then they equated a large

number of their children. But okay,

they also equated everyone who, say, until 1953

or 1956 served in NKVD troops, running around

the Baltics and western Ukraine

fighting partisans. So these could

be people who are only around 80 years old.

So they’re still relatively young. The point is that

in fact, in order to increase payments there,

we don’t even need to take anything away from anyone.

That is, we have, in

principle—earlier, once upon a time, everything

started with frontline veterans, and then it was expanded.

But still, nothing stops us from

singling out the specific category of frontline veterans

within this broader veteran category, and

paying those actual frontline veterans substantially more.

I mean, so that each of them receives no

less than a Wehrmacht soldier. We can

do that right now—we can. But damn it, no.

Instead, Putin is off discussing

something with Poland, sorting things out, instead of

making sure that his own

people—those who at least have some kind of

increased veteran pension—are properly provided for.

but still lives in absolute poverty, that's destitution

that's absolutely life as it is. Happy Victory Day to everyone.

about the past, it's all far removed and

and our quarrels, and Putin's holiday

certainly, or let's put it this way, ours to the same

same extent as IV, and Putin is no worse

no worse and no better

as for that—can I, can I pull out this

that reading rehabilitates Putin a little

actually, it seems to me that this whole

this transformation of Victory Day into such a

hellish official spectacle started around the 50th

anniversary of the victory, when it was

when they were opening the memorial on Poklonnaya

Hill—I remember it very well—they made

a parade there, invited a whole bunch of

guests, and Yeltsin was the first who tried

while having very low approval ratings, to find

some kind of bright symbolic thing, and he started

to make it super official

somewhere, as I already said, all of that was

a very important holiday for the family while

Grandma was still alive. We used to go, we used to go to

all the time to Gorky Park on the days around

we didn't go to the Bolshoi Theatre, we went to Gorky Park

because that was where her unit

met in Gorky Park, and I mean

it was always important, but it was

something genuinely warm, heartfelt, and tasteful

an informal holiday, and not some false

Soviet Union—but in the Soviet Union everything

was official and overly ceremonial, but May 9

still never felt to me—it's not that I

am trying here to somehow justify Yeltsin

but still, those are two very different things

1995 and 2020. Of course, first of all

50 years is a major round anniversary, really

everyone came then, it was a genuinely important date, and

there were truly huge numbers of living

veterans. I mean, those who are 95 now

were around 70 back then

there really were hundreds of thousands or

millions of living veterans, still vigorous

who really were living memory

it made sense to gather that living memory there

and pass it on, and so on. I

remember well that even then it didn't

seem as natural to me as it does now

when now, really,

the veterans, I mean

they are ninety-three and older, and

so at the parades there appear

some people—if you let

you know, judging by their age and all that

you know

some of them are younger than my parents, but they have

medals, and they can barely walk, draped in

all those medals. I mean, what kind of

nonsense is that? And all of this gets passed off, but

fine, let them all have medals, sure

we understand: medals for the construction of Moscow

for Moscow's 850th anniversary, medals for service in communications

for thirty years of service, twenty

some communications medal, I don't know, with Putin, with

Crimea, and so on. Even if they

legitimately have those medals, still, when

all of this is presented to us as

war veterans, it looks, of course,

to put it plainly, not very good. I'll change

the subject, though not entirely, since we've already

talked about the White House and their unsuccessful

tweet. Before the coronavirus started and

took over the entire political agenda, you and I

were both actively following

the American elections because, well,

politics turned out to be terribly interesting

we ended up in the same position: you

were rooting for Sanders, who lost; I

was rooting for Buttigieg, who lost

so what now—Biden versus Trump, and

how exactly, how do we even

imagine this? Like, in Russia too, in

September there are regional elections; in America, in

Russia the numbers are bad, but in America the numbers are the worst

for this coronavirus. How

can elections even be held at all? How is all of

this going to work, and are you still

following it, and

you know, like you, I've practically stopped

following it. In that sense, I'm not

some kind of expert on American

elections. For me it's probably like—I'm not very

if we take football, I hardly understand

football, but when

I root for Spartak too—it's a Moscow

team. If someone asks who I root for

I'll say Spartak, and if they then

ask who the coach is, I don't know and

never have, and don't want to know. Well, similarly

I root for the Moscow team in Moscow

when the World Cup happens, I run out and together

with everyone else I grab myself a beer and start

watching football because there's that

buzz—and it's the same here

I really liked Sanders's campaign, I

watched how he did these things in general

I really liked the campaign techniques

the way he did it. In that

sense, I was rooting for him—not ideologically, I just

wanted these

cool guys who were so good at

presenting things, or whatever—I don't know. In the same way

everyone rooted for Iceland in football

because they were fun

bearded guys

who did those dances and all that, so

for me, in that sense,

Sanders and his campaign were a collection of those

cool people. The miracle didn't happen—Iceland

got knocked out

yes, the miracle didn't happen, Iceland was out

and now it's just, well, kind of going on

in the usual way—there isn't even any

traditional campaign. I probably would

keep following it if there were still going to be these

rallies

yes, speeches, some kind of tension

some kind of agenda on different issues

I would watch it—I love politics, I really do.

The debates—aside from that, nothing is happening.

Everyone is talking about the coronavirus.

So I basically stopped following what

was going on, and because of that I kind of

went back to a situation where

there’s some football on, people are playing,

and basically it doesn’t really matter who

wins out of them, and the fans are the ones who win.

There’s the Belarusian championship going on.

Well, no—it’s not that Belarus should suddenly become the center of the world, I

understand that. No, I understand that

it is still some kind of top league, and there

everything is great there, and of course when

the final comes, I’ll probably watch that too.

When we get out of all this and there are debates again, I

will watch them too, and I’ll go back to

reading all sorts of analysis, but overall that’s

more or less how it is. To wrap up

the American topic on our broadcast: the film

—there are no women in it, terrible sexism;

it shows only success stories; a great

film that opens your eyes, gives

young people a path forward, shows how we could

actually live—that’s probably the kind of

two-pole opinion.

I’ve heard both among people who

watched it and discussed it. Where is your position

on that scale?

I really liked the film—not like

absolutely loved it, but it was very

interesting to watch. Dud (the journalist and YouTuber) really

is remarkable in that—good Lord—at 3 hours and 3 minutes,

who would have said I’d sit and watch

a film about Silicon Valley

for three hours? But I really did.

I even pulled it up on YouTube on the big TV,

we turned it on—me and Zakhar—and we all

watched it. It was really interesting, there’s

something familiar in it, and I was very

interested to hear about Stanford, because

someone close to me studies there, and that’s why Dasha

should be asked what she thinks about it.

So,

in any case, he’s a cool guy

because he knows how to make films

that are three hours long on what seems, well, not exactly

a worn-out topic, but still a topic where, basically, there’s nothing

new—I didn’t really learn anything new from it, and

I’ve been to Palo Alto and I’ve been to

Stanford; I probably know more about Stanford

than Dud does, simply because I’ve

taken an interest in it. But the film is interesting,

good, and very debatable—like that final

monologue by Andrei Doronichev, whom I

know and met there when

I came to Palo Alto—that whole bit about

men and dominoes,

yes, and about how he takes his young

partner and goes off somewhere—I mean, I even

wrote that, overall, it’s a great

metaphor, even though I completely disagree with it.

But it was very well said, and all of it was very

interesting to watch. Though there are

obvious downsides to this film: there isn’t

really a single woman in it, even though there are

successful women in the Valley; there are probably

women who could also tell

some great stories there. This

film, as many have already written, does not

reflect the full picture, because

a lot of people come there and

live there far from wealthy lives and

don’t earn any millions, and

they struggle and suffer. When that same

Doronichev, when I came there, he

took me around San Francisco on a kind of tour and

told me how much housing costs there, I

was just shocked. And then a taxi driver

said—this taxi driver said—

that he rents a room for $5,000 a month

or something like that.

So in that sense, is the film

some kind of main and

definitive description of what

is happening in that part of California?

Well, no, of course not. It seems to me he didn’t

have that task, and it probably isn’t

some kind of hymn to immigration, but

rather, I think he just wanted to show how

some regular guys from

Ulyanovsk (a Russian city) made it there and

are doing great work, and that all of this is cool—that

our people can do all of this too.

That’s the positive

message I caught in this film—the positive idea that

when they clearly say that we can have

the same thing here too, and we will have the same thing here too,

and that our people are talented and smart, and

all of that can emerge here as well.

It’s just a wonderful image of Russia’s future.

If more of them stayed here voluntarily, then here we could

earn money, and a narrative naturally arises.

As I watched it, it inevitably

creates a narrative that everyone will

watch it, get inspired by it, and then more

kids will go into programming or

come up with their own startups and leave

for the Valley afterward.

But what the film doesn’t say is that 9 out of 10 of them

will go broke and end up working as Uber

drivers, and they’ll be unhappy there,

and so on and so on. And so,

what exactly do we get from that? But

you just shouldn’t take this film

as some kind of instruction manual for people.

Still, probably for

the average person watching it, yes,

the stronger thought is, “Damn,

what the hell am I doing sitting here?” Even though

it’s like, “I should go learn

to code in Python right now instead of what I’m

doing,” and like,

just pack up and leave for the Valley.” Well, some

people will have thoughts like that, but

probably a larger number of people

will come away thinking, “I’d better really study

math properly.” Yes, that’s what I’m dealing with right now.

I've been struggling with Python for two years, and every time

when I sit here and look at this

thing and think, damn, why am I only

getting this at school? We just touched on it a little.

Just a bit of math.

So I think, I'm sure, that this is

an excellent, uplifting, positive film

People may argue with that, but people are just

immersed in it. I mean, you argue with it

because you've seen it all, you've been there

you know these IT people, you've seen these

startup founders, you know how all of this

works.

But most people have no idea at all

where it is, what Stanford is, not just some name

or how these startups are structured. I mean, it's

something fascinating. Well yes, in that sense I am

of course very biased here, and

I've been there many times. I worked for a company

whose second office was in Palo Alto, and I used to go there

to the office every month, and there were

employees there whom I managed. I walked around there

the streets, drank coffee, immersed myself in that

atmosphere. It's really one of my

favorite places.

It's awesome there. You walk around the campus, for example

like,

and someone says, 'It's just a hole, I don't know how anyone can

live there, it's a damn village.'

There's basically one street there, and the university, but

that's exactly what's wonderful about it. The university—you

feel like you're in the center of something, even though it's a village.

Like some backwater village, just with a Starbucks.

But—sorry, let me interrupt—go on.

Starbucks or Blue Bottle, God, what difference does it make?

It's that kind of place.

Then you go over to the

Stanford campus, and you walk around and you just want

to stay there. Around you there are all kinds of people—Chinese,

Europeans, all sorts of others,

different students walking around with books

or just chatting, and you feel

that the noosphere there—the atmosphere of thought—could practically be cut with a knife.

It's just that dense.

It's simply, truly incredible. Really, when I

was there for the first time, and

every time after that when I came back

after a year away, or after a couple of years, I

had this feeling: that's it, I want to

drop everything and enroll there as a first-year

student. It doesn't matter what's fashionable there right now—I don't

know, molecular biology or whatever—and go study it

just because you want to be in that

environment where everyone is like they're from *The Big Bang*

*Theory*, only for real.

What really stood out to me—sorry—

was that they managed to create there

an atmosphere where being smart

is really cool. That's what this film is about, that's the

main idea of the film. Yes, yes. Well, I don't know,

maybe I'm reading too much into it, like

what a wonderful thing education is. Here,

in our country, anything gets put front and center

just like any other [__], basically, in our country.

But there it's elevated, yes. It shows something very

important: that the state, and society in general,

should value education

and invest in it. And we'll become prosperous only

when we start, when we invest

a great deal of money in education. Then we'll have

our own Stanford,

an economy will grow up around Stanford,

then everyone will have loads of money and we'll

walk around with cigars or with

cups of whatever trendy drink people carry there

these days.

Someone was showing me around San Francisco and said

that coffee shops aren't what's fashionable now; what's popular

is those places that sell that

matcha stuff—what's it called? What, 'macha'? Come on.

Anyway, it's some kind of weird concoction,

sort of caffeinated.

Well, it's like—laughs—Japanese

tea prepared in some elaborate way,

Japanese, or maybe some Latin American thing—well,

whatever, some foreign trend—and you

drink it from a glass mug

with a metal straw, and it's Japanese

matcha or something—basically some kind of sludge,

and people are very pleased with themselves. It made me think

that I haven't been to

Stanford in a very long time.

Leonid, it's quarantine now, they won't let you in. I

was supposed to give a lecture at Stanford on May 5, damn it,

the lecture was scheduled, tickets were bought, everything was set, but in the end

I gave it remotely and just

basically cried. But really,

seriously, jokes aside, lots of money and

the ability to drink coffee from paper cups or

I don't know, whiskey from a shot glass, whatever

you like—

that will only come when we have

great education. That is, when

we have real universities, when people won't need

to leave Russia to get

a good education. Unfortunately, very often

that's how it works: people of your type,

your cast of mind and intelligence, who are drawn to

math and physics, can still find

something here, yes. But to get a humanities

education in Russia is just

a catastrophe. It's simply been destroyed, and all

these university rectors from United Russia (the ruling political party) make it

worse and worse and worse every year.

Humanities education in Russia is

one enormous pain. But by the way, I want to

bring us back with an interesting return question

to what we wrote about.

In the context of the Beautiful Russia of the Future (a political slogan about a reformed future Russia), what

is your program? So what exactly are you proposing?

Every time, I send everyone to

the program that's on the presidential campaign website—it still

sits there from 2016—but I

remember how all through 2017 we worked on it

and studied it carefully.

We promised to publish it first in September,

then in October, but we couldn't get it right; we

sat there rewriting and rewriting it, and then

We basically erased everything and, like,

wrote in big letters what one smart

person suggested to us back then: basically, the main thing is

education, investment, optical

capital in people, and basically we need to give

everyone in Russia the opportunity to get

a good education.

And somehow everything immediately clicked, and the whole

rest of the program fit this idea

perfectly. No, just go to the website

2018.navalny.com — everything is laid out very clearly there

about what he proposes, and we will

invest in people. Yes, I’m very proud

of that, and very pleased that we can

now say: look, back in 20

18 we wrote all this down.

Because really, back then our

program essentially came down to this:

education and healthcare, first

and foremost. We focused our attention

on education. Everything we can achieve —

economic growth, higher

wages, longer life expectancy,

everything good that awaits us somewhere

out there on the horizon — it only awaits us

if we go through education, that is,

if we simply put a lot of money into it, and

in 10 years we will get a completely

tangible effect specifically in rising

wages. And by the way, yes, on the one

hand, this is a long game; on the other

hand, we see countries that have gone

down this path and succeeded, and this

isn’t a story that takes a hundred years. It’s not like

how to get perfect English lawns:

mow them twice a day for 400 years

and you’ll get there. With education,

it’s still easier. We see how countries

like Singapore

simply import certain practices and

build universities there from scratch, on a blank slate, and

basically managed to achieve it.

We answered that fairly well. More

sadly, there’s no need to do that — after all,

we do have more, Yulia, especially if

we believe, again, that in engineering

education, technical fields, and

mathematics, we still have

everything in very good shape, and all the potential is there.

More than 6,000 people are watching us.

The traditional length of my Sunday

stream is an hour and a half, something like that.

It just kind of became a habit that for an hour and a half we

talk with dragons race through

Sundays live on air with Alexei Navalny.

But we promised to answer questions.

Let’s look at a couple of things people are writing in the chat and

we’ll take a couple from there before wrapping up.

We’ll take a couple now, just some

points — and meanwhile in the chat we’ve started

a discussion about programming

languages.

Someone asks: well, I’m learning

Python — so can I say that

Python is the easiest language, and that people like

humanities types like me, who

are bad at math, are only capable of learning

Python and nothing else?

It’s simpler, and that’s enough, to my

regret, because unfortunately I spent my entire

professional career

programming in C++. That was

a very, very long time ago, and I haven’t programmed

anything in a very long time. If you’re asking me,

here we are sitting together,

things are developing very fast, unless

I don’t know, maybe try Olympiads in

literature — only then would I risk competing

with you. But if the chat

suggests something on that, great.

So, guys, when will

the isolation and restrictions end? We’ve talked about that,

it should be in about two months, but unfortunately

in reality, apparently ending it

too quickly could cause major

problems. In that connection: how is Alexei learning

Python, someone asks. Well, I’m learning Python, I

learn Python like this: at one point I

bought a course on Coursera and completed it.

It’s practically the most popular course there, everyone

takes it. I mean, they were telling everyone

all sorts of nonsense, like

if you learn Python, you’ll become a cool

programmer,

artificial intelligence, your salary will be

huge, and on top of that they told me it was

the easiest language. I took the course,

learned something, then dropped it, and a month later I

had forgotten absolutely everything. Then several very

good people — one of them our former

programmer Dmitry Larionov — he, well,

basically gave me tasks and taught

me, really breaking it down in practice: now we’re going to

parse VKontakte, and he taught me how

to do that. Burov helped in the same way,

and there were a couple of other people who simply

gave me that kind of help — Ivan Shukshin from

Krasnodar (a city in southern Russia),

taught me how to, like, parse YouTube.

I found it interesting. So that’s basically

how it goes. Then sometimes I quit and

forget everything again. Right now I’m sitting here and

working through some tasks again, like how to

do this or that. I don’t know how both of you feel

about Nassim Taleb. I’ve got a lot of

questions here, they’re flying by on the screen,

I’m just pulling them out at random. His books — I mean,

you definitely should read

*Antifragile*, and about those black

swans — what’s it called, his most

famous book? I forgot the title.

What’s it called? Anyway, *Antifragile* is like his second most

famous one, and number one is that one

about swans. He’s hugely popular

in Russia — he often comes here, he holds some kind of

seminars all the time. Well, he has

a rather distinctive way of speaking, pretty

bold and vivid, so he’s very

He is apparently valued all over the world, though not in Russia.

Not everything there is necessary, and not everything is something you can be enthusiastic about,

but unquestionably

two of his books are worth reading. They are not just

good—they are interesting and useful.

Durov—there are a lot of questions here about Durov.

The Gram cryptocurrency, his article, his

column about America, and so on. I really

regret that Durov never launched his Gram. I

was really waiting for it. I hoped it would be some new thing,

because as a young programmer, I too

tried to keep up with progress there and

program a bot that could

trade Bitcoin on an exchange. Well,

it was basically just some kind of exercise, and

I discovered that Bitcoin is some kind of

hellish

It’s funny, right, that everyone keeps endlessly writing about it,

as if we’re supposedly doing something there

with bitcoins, but I honestly have no real

clear idea of how it all works.

Nobody really used Bitcoin, including because

it is very complicated and

super tedious, extremely cumbersome—just

some kind of mess. I opened a wallet, forgot

the password—well, all that stuff. I was hoping

there would be some cool cryptocurrency that was simple to

use. I’m terribly

disappointed that the Americans banned

Durov from

making it, and we can see that this is connected to

his seven-point response explaining why he does not

agree with Helen—apparently Duddy Baba on UT-1.

He’s criticizing the Americans, but it would have been

great if he had launched it. Probably

in that form already

it won’t work now. He probably already

couldn’t make it happen with investors, and those same

American regulators

won’t allow it. I regret that. A couple more.

What do you think about universal

basic income? I think it is, overall,

a good idea, and I’m glad that in different

countries they are running experiments on this topic. I

have spoken with various economists,

and the general opinion is that

an experiment with basic income

really needs to last several years. What

they did in Switzerland was

a referendum, and in Finland, as far as I remember,

there were some limited

experiments. But overall, this idea

has potential. Somewhere—I may be mistaken—

I think in some African

country there is a long-term

experiment on this topic underway. In India, they ran one for two

years. Well yes, but

that was still not a long-term experiment, and

it showed very little.

At some point, as it were, television cameras

showed people doing creative work, engaging in

creative activity that otherwise would not have

produced any practical results, so

the point is that here you need to run

an experiment lasting 10 or 15

years. But unquestionably, I think this

idea has prospects. Labor productivity

is rising, as in that song or film

*The Adventures of Elektronic* (a famous Soviet children's sci-fi film): “robots do the work, not humans.”

People are freeing up time, so

in general, humanity’s future is probably

moving in the direction where there will be a reduction in

both the number of working hours and the number of

working days. We were talking about this—human

capital—and it is

very important. In the end, it is entirely

possible that it will turn out you can pay

a person some small income simply

for being a person, and that once

freed from the daily

fear of, say, ending up on the street tomorrow

with nothing to eat, they will do

something worthwhile, and the number of simply

idle people—or, for that matter, drug addicts—

will not increase at all; people will simply

actually devote themselves to something good. Yes,

of course there are a huge number of questions.

But I want to draw the attention of our respected

chat to the fact that questions

about law, about Vorontsov, about police reform,

about Rakova, about rallies—Alexei covers all of that

every Thursday in the program

called, what is it again, *Russia of the Future*

(*Russia of the Future*)—that’s the name, right?

Don’t you watch my program? I do, I just

forgot the name. Anyway, he discusses it

every Thursday in great detail on the program

*Russia of the Future*. Subscribe

to Alexei Navalny’s channel, and to mine as well.

Also, do you think the Police Ombudsman

will be released or not? In my opinion, he will not be.

No, I think he will not be released, judging

by the absolutely lawless way they have

fabricated a case against him, with such blatant

abuse of power—how they stormed his

apartment.

I mean, those guys from the

ministry have it in for him, and they are already

at such a level of

lawlessness that they cannot roll it

back. So I’m afraid he will not

be released. But I do see the campaign in his

support; I’m also participating, passively. I

see that even cops are actually standing up for him.

They’re sending some photos—this is

really very important. In fact, I think the

only thing that will force the Ministry of Internal Affairs to

release him is if they understand that inside the

system there is resistance, significant

discontent. I completely agree. Well then,

that seems to be it for us. So, what do you think about the fights

with Ferguson? Haha, I don’t even know who that is.

Sorry if I’m saying something silly here, I

only read the headline today that

Tony Ferguson lost for the first time in his career,

and unfortunately that is all I know on the subject.

I know that Garyga, since he works at BKS,

even during quarantine, somehow manages to work very hard.

It works well, honestly speaking, well...

I was afraid it wouldn't, but so far it works great.

Very well — all the discipline and culture are there.

We run meetings clearly and efficiently.

The amount of time that I...

Alexei too, let's say, the amount of...

the time I spend there on Zoom,

or in any other remote-work services,

it's just awful, I mean.

It's like 6 to 8 hours a day, but still...

It works, but it's hard — people, you can see it, and I...

I hate Zoom.

I really hate Zoom, and I hate all of

these online meetings — they are

just...

I mean, maybe it's some kind of

boomer thing or something,

but unquestionably the organization works excellently.

It works, and for FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) precisely because, well,

because of the team's cohesion, because they're united,

and because of the specifics of FBK's work,

it's not hard to work like this.

Decentralized, scattered — but

personally, I don't like it. I can do it too,

and I'm doing it now, but still...

These Zooms drive me crazy, what drives me crazy is that

things are always glitching, disconnecting, and these

headphones — I'm waiting for all this to end.

I'm really waiting for it now. I'm sick of it, but...

apparently we'll still have to wait quite a while.

Quite a long time. All right, and the question...

This blitz will never end. When...

When are you getting ready to come to us...

Subscribe to our... Did you have

in your youth a ZX Spectrum? Or maybe even...

No, I didn't. I had this

Elektronika BK computer (a Soviet home computer), Elektronika.

The BK — I programmed on it in

BASIC. And Alexei, what about you? I don't know, I got

my first computer when I was already, I think,

in college.

If you count it out then... I didn't really

catch that. What's the latest with Ruslan Shaveddinov?

What are the latest updates?

Well, unfortunately, there is no real news.

Ruslan Shaveddinov is located

in some place so remote that you can't

call from there, or he's not allowed to call.

He's inside the archipelago — Novaya Zemlya (a remote Arctic archipelago in Russia).

It's basically impossible to get there.

There is no civilian

transport there at all. That is, if to

Novaya Zemlya, even if you got permission,

you could at least theoretically get there

by some kind of transport that's listed

somewhere in schedules, but after that

there is absolutely nothing, and clearly it's designed that way.

He is in complete isolation.

So we're worried.

All right, let's do this without so many questions, because I really...

My last stream ran for more than

three hours. I'm trying to keep things

within a format, because it seems to me that this is

somehow the right way to do it. All right, we've even

dropped below 6,000 viewers. The whole time

we were holding at 6,300, 6,400 — and now 5,907, a hint

that it's time for everyone to get on with their evening business.

After all, it's Sunday, and tomorrow is also

a day off as well.

It would be inhumane to keep this going, but we

will definitely repeat this format

of a free-flowing conversation — it's very

good and valuable overall, thank you.

Not even by analogy — just for the value of the conversation.

Say it out loud — I say thank you, thank you.

And subscribe to Leonid

Volkov's channel. There are lots of questions about

the next rallies — all right, we'll

save that for next time.

Definitely. Thank you all very much.

Huge thanks to you for this stream, and thanks to everyone

for your questions and for actively taking part in

our discussion. Friends, it was

fun and great. Subscribe to my

channel, and to Alexei Navalny's channel.

Subscribe, sign the petition "Five Steps".

Watch my program — tomorrow I'll have

a big video about all this coronavirus math and

statistics, so please be sure

to watch that too, and see you

on future streams. Bye everyone, thanks.