Echo of Moscow broadcast from May 15, 2017. Interview with Alexei Naryshkin and Olga Bychkova

It’s 12:07 in the Russian capital. Hello, everyone! You’re listening to Echo of Moscow. In the studio are Olga Bychkova and Alexei Naryshkin. And our guest for the next nearly 40 minutes is politician Alexei Navalny, a presidential candidate. Good afternoon!

Good afternoon!

Let us remind everyone right away that in addition to being heard on Echo of Moscow, we can also be seen on Setevizor. We’re also streaming on YouTube, on Facebook, on Echo of Moscow’s account. Naryshkin and I are streaming somewhere too. In short, watch us wherever you can, wherever it’s most convenient for you. And of course we’ll begin with the main topic: renovation, and everything happening with the five-story apartment blocks and beyond.

Yesterday, for various reasons, you didn’t get a chance to speak at the rally on Sakharov Avenue. So do it here and now.

Yes, thank you very much. It’s no big deal. I’ll probably even be speaking to a larger audience here. In general, I have several main points about renovation as a whole. I didn’t have any special plan to make a speech.

By the way, were you planning to speak?

I wasn’t planning to, and that’s exactly why I went in through the general entrance with everyone else. And when the organizers asked me to come up to the stage, it took me a whole hour to make my way through, because I had to get through that wonderful crowd…

It was packed, yes.

It was very packed, and especially in the front rows it was really hard to move. But I made it there, though they immediately escorted me out. But that’s not the point. I think what’s actually more important is to talk about renovation in general. And my main point is precisely that this is not only about residents of five-story buildings, so reducing it to a problem affecting only those residents is completely wrong. Because the renovation program will require at least 2 trillion rubles—Sobyanin himself has named that figure. That is an enormous amount of money, and it will be taken not only out of the pockets of all Muscovites, but of people across the country, because that enormous sum is, if you like, the oil and gas margin, the national wealth that has been pulled in from all over the country; and now Moscow City Hall is pouring it into this renovation program, and a significant part of that money is simply a handout to Moscow’s construction sector. A gigantic handout to Moscow’s construction sector. And a gigantic corruption scheme. That’s point number one.

Point number two is that voting has already begun within the framework of the so-called Active Citizen system. Sergei Sobyanin launched it last night, right after the rally, which surprised everyone, because it was only supposed to start on the 15th. But apparently that’s the political message: “There’s a rally? Then I’ll launch everything even faster.” I’m not even going to criticize the Active Citizen system right now, although we did an investigation into it showing that it’s basically all falsification. How many people do you think—how many Muscovites—are registered in the Active Citizen system?

How many?

10%. Just look: 10% of Muscovites. Well, maybe another 10–20% will urgently register before June 15. And the main trick of this voting system is that everyone who does not vote is counted as voting in favor of demolition.

Alexei, you’re missing an important point here. Olga Bychkova and I carefully studied the document this morning on our morning show. It’s called the Mayor’s Decree of May 2 of this year, and it deals specifically with voting on the five-story buildings. If not through Active Citizen, people can just as well go to an MFC office—My Documents—and vote there.

And how many people do you think will actually go?

You’re saying that only 10% at most, or a little more, will take part…

Active Citizen is the main voting tool. Some number of people will go to the MFC. But we can see that the whole system is designed to create as many “silent ones” as possible. We know how the real estate market works in Moscow. Some apartments are rented out, somewhere someone is living in their grandmother’s apartment while she’s at the dacha, and the actual owners moved away long ago, and somewhere it’s relatives. It’s always a very complicated situation. Sometimes it’s quite hard to find a power of attorney for a particular person. There will be a huge number of “silent ones.” Based on what’s happening now, the “silent ones”—those who do not vote—will be the majority. And that majority will automatically ensure that every building votes for demolition. So this is simply a massive deception. There are many other normal mechanisms for measuring this, but for some reason Moscow City Hall refuses to use them.

Then tell us right away: in a situation like this, how can public opinion be measured properly?

First of all, there is a legally established procedure for general meetings of homeowners. It can be done according to the law.

It can be done. The mayor’s decree mentions that too.

But it’s unclear why the mayor does not want to hold this vote on a building’s fate through a homeowners’ meeting, and instead wants to conduct it through his own Active Citizen system.

That’s one of the options.

And what’s your explanation for why this particular method was chosen?

Because everyone will vote against it. Well, not everyone… Again, I have a concrete personal example. My wife’s grandmother is 90 years old, she lives in a five-story building in Preobrazhenka, and they all want it demolished. But her building is not included in the program. There are a huge number of other buildings like that. Konstantin Yankauskas talked about this at the rally yesterday. These five-story buildings have been in dangerous condition for years, but they weren’t included in the program. Those residents would vote 100 percent in favor. But this program includes a huge number of buildings that are simply located in investment-attractive areas. They’re just good land plots. And that’s why the voting has been set up in such a way that the result will always be “yes,” because otherwise residents would vote “no.”

Alexei Navalny is on the air on Echo of Moscow. Let me remind listeners that you can watch the broadcast on Echo of Moscow’s website and in Echo’s group as well.

What would you do in Sobyanin’s place? There is a certain stock of unsafe housing. If you had the authority, what would your actions be?

I have a fairly clear plan on this. I ran for mayor, after all, and I devoted a huge number of meetings to residents of five-story buildings. There are unsafe five-story buildings whose residents want to be rehoused. Their addresses are very well known. So let’s direct the program there first, rather than to the Khamovniki district, where the land is expensive and where residents categorically do not want demolition.

But Khamovniki was excluded.

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. It’s not written anywhere that it was excluded. That’s only been said.

It’s not on the lists, for example, the published ones.

Under the federal law that has been passed, any building can be demolished. That’s what we know. In its first reading, the law is exactly about that. And when they show us the law in its final form, then we can trust something. But voting has already started. And different buildings can vote. Yet the law hasn’t even been passed. And we don’t understand why voting has begun when the law has only passed its first reading. It’s far too early to talk about this. I think there will be many different surprises.

Besides, look, there is one thing that is simply impossible to carry out: Sobyanin is now saying that everyone whose building is demolished will get an apartment in the same district. If we’re talking about the Central Administrative District, that is practically impossible. Luzhkov couldn’t do it. And now there is even less land available. There is simply no land to build these new buildings on. And on top of that, it will mean infill development. Other residents will oppose that, and so on.

Again, you criticize Sobyanin, but you’re not laying out your own alternatives.

I am laying them out. I’m saying: first of all, we need to start by rehousing the buildings whose residents have been demanding rehousing for years—that’s step number one.

And based on the data you had when you ran for mayor, do you have a sense of how many such buildings there are?

Hundreds of buildings. The Luzhkov-era program that existed…

So not the 8,000 Sobyanin mentioned earlier, and not the 4,500 being cited now.

There are several hundred apartment buildings that need immediate rehousing and have needed it for years. There are several hundred more—or at least dozens—that are in truly dangerous condition. That’s where the renovation program should begin; that’s program number one.

Second: the voting must be nominal, so that everyone can verify how their vote was counted. An open roll-call vote, directly. So that any ordinary person—Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov or Nikolai Vasechkin—can go in and see how he voted: for demolition or against demolition.

A listener told us this morning that the system required entering a huge amount of data…

In Active Citizen.

All those pension insurance numbers, residence registration details, passport data. And she was told it would take four days to verify.

Exactly. I myself organized several votes in a similar system, only a federal one—the ROI system—where we also had to collect 100,000 verified signatures from across the country using pension insurance numbers. It’s very difficult. I spent months persuading everyone: “Guys, go get your SNILS (Russian pension insurance number).” It’s hard. A huge number of elderly people live in these five-story buildings, and it won’t be easy for them to do this. That’s why I’m saying the “silent ones” will make up, I think, over 65 percent, and all of them will formally be counted as voting for demolition. Of course that’s deception.

So in effect, you’re saying it doesn’t really matter how the vote is organized—how it’s organized in Active Citizen and how people vote there—because those 60-plus percent of “silent ones,” as you assume, will produce the desired result.

Yes, yes. That is outright fraud.

You also had a third point, I think. You started listing them, and we interrupted you.

My third point was precisely that many of the promises Sobyanin is making now—I gave the example of apartments “in the same district”—are simply impossible to fulfill in practice. Oddly enough, that’s actually a good thing—I want to give Moscow City Hall some credit—that it is reacting publicly in some way. They have made some concessions. They announced certain things after the rally… But many of the things they are promising cannot actually be carried out. And I’m saying this not just because I suspect it, but because we have many years of observation of the Luzhkov-era rehousing program. We’ve studied quite well how it all works, what scandals surrounded it, what problems came with it. So providing an apartment in the exact same municipal district is very difficult, especially in the center.

And if the vote is conducted honestly in some way, how do we decide a building’s fate: how many people have to vote for the building to be resettled and demolished?

Two-thirds.

So that’s the right proportion chosen by City Hall?

First of all, this is laid out in quite some detail in the Housing Code. There are different thresholds there. I believe the fair threshold is two-thirds. But at the same time, the remaining one-third must still receive an equivalent property and equivalent market value. After all, the land under the building belongs to them by law. It’s their apartment. It’s their only one. And they should leave that apartment not having lost anything, but having gained something. That would be fair.

But is it possible to get something that is both equivalent in kind and equal in value now, especially in the same district?

The main thing is equal value. It has to be worth… the market price of that apartment must be no lower. Because the market price of an apartment is a complicated thing. It may be the same district, but for one person it’s a five-minute walk to the metro, while for another it’s a 10-minute bus ride.

But listen, a new apartment in a new building will probably be smaller for the same price, won’t it?

Again, take any five-story building in Khamovniki. Its market value is three times higher than my apartment in Maryino, even though mine is close to the metro, simply because it’s Khamovniki and close to the metro. And there are many other factors there: a school, a good park nearby—those are things you cannot replicate in other districts. That is exactly what Muscovites are outraged about.

I’ll say again that Khamovniki has been excluded.

Fine, Khamovniki has been excluded. But there’s Presnya, there’s Taganka, there are excellent neighborhoods in Kuzminki, buildings in Sokolniki. In other words, there are places where people live in so-called non-demolishable building series: high ceilings, everything is fine for them. But even where people live in awful-quality five-story buildings, there may be an awful-quality five-story building that is three minutes from the metro. And there may be a new building that is a 15-minute bus ride away. Their market value… excuse me, in that case the five-story building may actually be worth more.

And an important question: after all this, who, in your view, should bear political responsibility, and what political and personnel decisions might follow?

The answer to that question is obvious. There are two people who informed Muscovites that the renovation program was beginning. Let me remind you that just a month ago, maybe a little more, the news simply showed us a pleased Putin and Sobyanin saying that Moscow would undergo a large-scale renovation costing 2 trillion rubles.

Putin said he would not sign the law until everything in it was properly observed.

He said he would not sign the law because, naturally, pro-Kremlin pollsters had already brought him polling showing that all of Moscow was up in arms. And they are forced to react to that polling. But the idea itself is, of course, a Putin-Sobyanin one. It’s a pre-election scheme, just badly executed. I think they already regret trying to ram it through with such a cavalry charge. But without question, this is the country’s largest construction project. And the president and the mayor should bear responsibility for it. Because again, 2 trillion rubles is an enormous amount of money. In every other city in the country, people are not being rehoused out of barracks and slum housing. Even in the Moscow suburbs there are simply horrifying buildings, so of course the whole country is watching this. This is a matter of federal importance.

Am I understanding you correctly that, in the end, the mayor and Putin are less concerned with the fate of Muscovites and more concerned with the fate of certain developers?

It seems to me that on the part of Moscow City Hall… As for Putin, that’s obvious. What are developers to him? He has plenty of money already; he has the Rotenbergs and Timchenkos. But on the part of Moscow City Hall, they are implementing this program in such a way as to save the construction sector first and foremost. It’s important to understand that Moscow City Hall is the largest developer. That is, they build themselves. These aren’t just private developers—the city itself builds a huge amount of housing. It doesn’t build very well, and that housing sells very, very poorly. They inflated a bubble in the construction market, and now, naturally, they are afraid that bubble will simply burst, so it’s important for them now to pour money into it and buy housing from themselves on the secondary market in order to help those builders keep real estate prices up.

Let’s go back to yesterday’s rally. Regardless of how it ended for you personally, how do you assess the whole thing?

Well… It was a good rally.

Did a lot of people turn out?

I would have liked more people to come. After all, this affects hundreds of thousands of people. Yesterday was a very large rally: there were between 20,000 and 25,000 people. The atmosphere was amazing. The people were wonderful and, overall, I really liked the mood. But the goal is a big rally. Let’s put it this way: for non-political reasons, it was probably the biggest one. I’ve never seen a larger one. For many years I worked with the Committee for the Defense of Muscovites, and I’ve been to hundreds of different rallies, including rallies by residents of five-story buildings over renovation and rehousing. But there had been nothing even remotely like this. So it was a big, successful rally, and it passed a resolution of no confidence in the Moscow authorities. And that was important. So I think it was a fairly successful event.

How do you think this whole story will develop from here?

We can see how it’s developing: Sobyanin announced voting in his Active Citizen system. From here, the authorities will simply use polling methods and social media monitoring—which they do very well—to assess political threats. If they realize there are political threats—for example, a drop in the number of votes Putin can get in Moscow; a threat to Sobyanin’s chances in the next election after the presidential one, namely the Moscow mayoral election—then they will start backing down, and they will steer this program more toward Muscovites and less toward the construction sector. If they do not feel such a threat—if, in particular, there are fewer rallies and less outrage—then they will bulldoze ahead. That’s basically what they always do, so there’s no real need for elaborate forecasting.

Alexei Navalny is on the air on Echo of Moscow radio. Please explain something: why, it seems to me, were you not pushing this rally very actively? In my view, you only said once or twice that it was, in principle, a good idea…

No, I think I was pushing it… In that sense, do you know who the main organizers of the rally were? Echo of Moscow radio. Because the largest number of Muscovites learned about the rally from these broadcasts, of course.

Let’s not shift this onto us now…

But I’m praising you, though I’m not sure you like that compliment very much.

No, it’s wonderful that you’re praising us. But I’m criticizing you, because using your own resources—even just your Twitter followers—you said very little…

I’ll tell you that I used another resource, a more important one. Our main resource now is our YouTube channel. I had four programs, four broadcasts, and in each of them I spent about 15 minutes talking about the five-story buildings in considerable detail. In the last one, when the details were already clear, I actively called on people to come to the rally. And each of those broadcasts had between one million and one and a half million views, so that’s a very large audience, much larger than Twitter or anything else. In other words, that is our main information resource right now, and we used it very actively. The rally organizers also came onto our channel. That got, I think, around 200,000 views as well. So I think we tried to make, and did make, quite a substantial contribution to turnout at yesterday’s rally.

Don’t you think this issue is now overshadowing many others, if not all the rest, and rising to the very top of the political agenda and of what politicians—say, you—ought to be talking about?

For Moscow—yes. For the rest of the country—also yes, but in the sense of, “Just look at how they’re gorged on excess.” But this issue contains everything. It contains gigantic corruption. It contains total lack of transparency. It contains falsification of voting results. Everything is reflected here. So yes, of course, you’re right. I’m talking about it, everyone is talking about it. And that’s why there was this conflict around the rally yesterday, because the authorities feel this just as sharply and are trying in every possible way to avoid politicization.

What conflict are you talking about? Please explain.

A whole squad of OMON riot police escorted me and my family out of the rally. The conflict is that Moscow City Hall, acting fairly rationally—as it always does with certain rallies devoted to development issues—tried to take charge of the protest and somehow imposed on the organizers the view that no politicians should be allowed to speak. And when the organizers took, or tried to take, a step to the side, they simply started physically removing people, including me. This incident shows how terribly afraid they are of specifically political protest becoming involved here. And that is the main thing: either the issue is framed politically and threatens the ratings of Putin and Sobyanin, in which case there will be some movement; or once again…

What does it mean to frame the issue politically? How should it be framed?

Roughly the way Yankauskas spoke yesterday—he’s a municipal deputy…

But not everyone heard him.

Not everyone did. But he’s a deputy from the Zyuzino district, and he spoke very fiercely because for several years he has been trying to get unsafe five-story buildings in his district rehoused. He hasn’t succeeded, and those five-story buildings were not included in the renovation program.

How should the issue be formulated?

It should be formulated like this: “Guys, if you do not fundamentally change this system, if there is no transparency and clarity in decision-making, if there is no transparency and clarity in how the money is spent, we will vote against Putin and Sobyanin, and we will do everything we can to bring down their ratings.” That is what the authorities fear.

And who made the decision not to let you take part in the rally—was it City Hall specifically?

It’s hard for me to say who the specific person was. The video is online. You can see that it was all rather chaotic. Senior police officers were giving the orders. At least, they referred to the organizers. The organizers were standing right next to me and saying the opposite. In any case, I wasn’t demanding to be given the floor. I was removed from the rally.

Were you promised a chance to speak?

When I arrived at the rally, one of the organizers, Yulia Galyamina, asked me to come up to the stage. And I did. The organizers themselves let me inside that perimeter, where I stood quietly waiting for further instructions. But those instructions never came, because instead of the organizers, the police came running.

So the rally organizers had nothing to do with your removal from the event?

As I understand it, one or several organizers appealed to the police to have me removed…

Those organizers…

Well, Vinokurova…

Do you have any proof?

There is clear proof that they were, for example, lying when they said I was trying to force my way onto the stage and speak.

No, no, no, Alexei. Those are different things. Let’s clear this up fully before the news. Proof that Vinokurova somehow had you thrown out of the rally, gave an order… I don’t know… to the police to grab this guy…

I did not, of course, see any direct order like that, and no one did or could have…

So these are your assumptions.

They are not assumptions. I’m telling you how it is. I’m saying: as I understand it, based on what was happening there, based on the context of what happened. But of course I didn’t see any messages, I wasn’t present for the conversations, and I didn’t hear what anyone was agreeing to. But there is what happened, and there is the context of what happened, from which a great many things are clear. Let’s not deceive ourselves and let’s not pretend to be naive here.

Wouldn’t you like to calm your supporters and voters down a little so they leave Vinokurova alone? She seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown to me.

If you don’t want to be on the verge of a breakdown, then you shouldn’t enter into disgusting political deals, you shouldn’t make arrangements with Moscow City Hall…

She did?

I believe so.

Do you have proof?

If you have a question, please wait for my answer. What has already been published, what was stated—that Deputy Head of the Security Department Mayorov was standing there saying, “You are violating the agreements by letting Navalny in”—that means such agreements existed, right? The fact that some of the organizers were spinning tales that I was forcing my way onto the stage and were lying—that is also perfectly obvious. And so on. There is a body of evidence—there’s a term for that—that clearly points in one direction.

Let’s break for a few minutes. We have a short news bulletin and a bit of advertising coming up.

Politician Alexei Navalny is on the air on Echo of Moscow. It’s 12:35. Olga Bychkova and Alexei Naryshkin are here as well.

So, the fine that was imposed on you again today—or rather, upheld…

I learned from Echo of Moscow’s broadcast that I had a court hearing today and some kind of fine.

Will you pay it?

I will, otherwise the bailiffs will be chasing me. By the way, this goes to your previous question: do I have proof that I was fined again on the Kremlin’s orders, through an unlawful court ruling? I can’t show you a recording of someone giving the order, but it’s obvious that such an order exists. I’ll pay, but there’s nothing else to be done.

The second main question everyone is asking us to put to you. The defining question of our time: what’s going on with your eye? Tell us. For listeners who can only hear us on the radio, I can say that there is still quite a black eye.

But the swelling has gone down—it’s better now.

Depends which eye. I can see perfectly well with the left one. I’m looking sternly at Naryshkin right now. With the right eye, if I close the left one, I can see you, but more like silhouettes. But that’s how it’s supposed to be right now, because I had what’s called an amnioplasty, and they stitched a special membrane over it and there’s also a lens in place, so I’m supposed to have limited vision in that eye. But they say that in a month they’ll remove all that and check whether I need a more complicated operation. The whole idea of the amnioplasty was to try to avoid a corneal transplant, which is a more complex surgery. Yesterday at the rally I was asked about my eye about 300 times. It’s very touching. I want to thank everyone who has written so many supportive and sympathetic messages.

So in a month you’ll be going abroad again?

Yes, in a month I’ll go again. I have an international passport now. I don’t know whether they’ll arrest me somewhere at the border if I try going away with the kids for a weekend—we’ll have to test that—but in a month I have another scheduled visit to that clinic.

And what are the doctors saying, in the end?

They said the operation was successful.

What’s the likelihood that your vision will recover?

They’re optimistic. An ophthalmologist from Moscow who is treating me traveled with me. She was present during the operation. She confirmed to me that everything went very well. So they are optimistic, but when I say, “Will I be seeing well in two months?” they laugh at me and say that these things take much longer to recover from. But I’d settle even for minus five, just so I can see with glasses.

And right now you simply can’t see with that eye, but you can still look at a computer, read a book…

Of course I can look, I can write. It’s just that in everyday terms, at first I got dizzy from doing everything with one eye, especially when it wouldn’t open. Now I’m simply used to it. So when I need to see something clearly or look at a computer, I just squint.

From the law enforcement perspective, has any assessment yet been made of the injuries inflicted on you?

As far as we understand, a criminal case has been opened, but absolutely nothing is happening. We can see that no one has been detained. I still haven’t even been questioned. Our lawyers spend all day writing angry complaints to them: “Open a proper criminal case under a serious charge.” Because a serious charge here would be moderate bodily harm. And in general, it’s obvious repeat hooliganism. It is hooliganism, plain and simple, committed by a group. But nothing is happening, and it’s clear why. Because we recently saw that one of these attackers is also acting as a kind of servant for the Investigative Committee: he is a witness in the case of one of those detained at the March 26 rally, and as far as I can tell he is giving false testimony against an innocent person and performing an important function for the Investigative Committee.

Is it important to you that the people who threw brilliant green dye on you, or were standing nearby, face some kind of punishment?

It’s important to me that they end up in court in the dock and that the trial be fair. Of course it matters to me.

Why not try writing to the Kremlin, the way you did, for example, to get your international passport?

It’s useless to write to the Kremlin in this case. Because when it came to getting my passport, I didn’t write to the Kremlin right away. I sued twice in Russia—and was denied. Then I filed a case with the ECHR. But when I needed it urgently, I wrote to Vaino saying, basically, “Stop this nonsense and stop illegally refusing to give me my passport.”

Write to Vaino. You understand that this channel works: “Vaino, find the bastard and lock him up.”

I’m saying to Vaino right now exactly what you just said—he’ll hear it anyway. So as for our constant demands that a criminal case be opened… In the case of the international passport, there was no longer any legally correct route left. I followed it to the end and got an unlawful refusal in the end. As for the attack, there is still a proper legal route: you are supposed to write to the police and to the Investigative Committee. We are writing. If we get refusals, we’ll appeal.

So one has to be patient, wait five years, apparently…

We handle many corruption cases and investigations, and we constantly get refusals in them, so we have enough patience for this kind of persistent investigation.

A lawyer’s best quality. Alyosha from Primorsky Krai is asking what’s happening with your headquarters in Vladivostok. Leonid Volkov is there right now.

It’s complete lawlessness there. They practically declared a state of emergency in the city. Poor Volkov was getting from the airport to the city for several hours because they kept pulling him out of the car and taking his passport away. As I understand it, the headquarters is effectively open. But since they changed the locks on the premises, it literally had to happen out on the street. Nevertheless, we are going to work very actively in Vladivostok, because we have a huge number of volunteers there. It’s an important region. A difficult region, one being robbed by both the governor and the whole gang that staged this circus around our headquarters today. And there is also strong support there…

And by the way, if we remember March 26, Vladivostok had, I think, the first rally there—maybe with 2,000 people—unauthorized and very angry in mood, precisely because of the lawlessness going on in Primorye.

Which number is this for you now?

I think it’s the 29th or 30th.

And are they all eventful?

No, I’d say most headquarters—even in regions that seemed difficult, like Kazan or Bashkortostan, where we expected some kind of circus—actually went perfectly. We now think this is connected to the weakness of the governor. Where the governor is weak—like Miklushevsky in Primorye—they try to curry favor with the Kremlin and stage a real circus. Where governors are firmly entrenched, they don’t bother with petty harassment, though they don’t exactly run special operations against us either.

So they’re simply confident in themselves.

I think so. We’ll see how it goes from here. I missed three openings because of my health. But I’ll go to the next ones myself…

And what’s the plan? What will these headquarters be doing now?

We need to open 77 headquarters, I think, in 75 regions in order to prepare the infrastructure for collecting signatures. Because when the nomination period comes, we’ll have to collect 300,000 signatures in a very short time. In practice, the deadline for collecting them is a prohibitive barrier. So we are preparing a very powerful structure that will collect those signatures in three days, and everyone will be convinced and will see that they are absolutely genuine signatures.

On Russia Day, June 12, you were planning to organize some more protest activity in the streets. Have you abandoned those plans?

Not “were planning”—I am organizing it. Right now more than 170 cities and regions are taking part in the anti-corruption actions on June 12. We will definitely hold them, because in fact no one has received a single answer to any question about corruption related to our investigation into Medvedev or any of our other major corruption investigations.

Do you really think that’s the most important thing right now—your anti-corruption investigations? I mean, everyone who wanted to has long since watched the Medvedev video, and then what? For Muscovites, it seems to me, the five-story buildings are much more urgent now, and yet you’re going back out with Medvedev again.

With the five-story buildings it’s the same thing, only on an even larger scale—2 trillion rubles. You, for example, as a host on Echo of Moscow, the city’s biggest talk radio station—do you know where the first apartments on the secondary market will be bought, and for how much? Ninety-five billion rubles have already been allocated from the Moscow budget. And I don’t know, and no one knows. That is what’s called murky water in which people will be fishing.

So June 12 will be a protest against “murky water.”

June 12 will absolutely be a protest against murky water in which officials will make money. Thank you very much for that excellent slogan for our rally.

Dmitry from Penza asks whether you will be increasing your security.

As we saw yesterday, there are natural limits to that. Yesterday I did have security with me. But how did the police do it? They pulled me out, took me somewhere beyond the barriers, and there we were only three people, because they had only taken out my family. Beyond those barriers, anyone could have been waiting for me, because they knew I would be brought there. So there is a natural limit to this. The attacks are organized by the authorities one way or another: either directly or through their proxy organizations, through intermediaries. So we do deal with security issues, but we have to understand that we can’t solve every such problem ourselves.

After the latest brilliant green attack, aren’t you afraid to walk around so calmly? To show up at the same kind of event right in the middle of…

No, I’m not afraid. I walked there. You could see it: I walked through the entire rally. And of course anyone who wanted to splash something on me could have done so, but instead everyone was shaking my hand. So I came here to you alone by metro, and nothing bad happened to me. The good thing was that several people took photos with me. So no, no, I’m not afraid.

I understand what I’m doing. I see many people in the regions… We were just talking about the Far East—there it’s hard to do this kind of work when the federal press won’t write about you and you won’t get to talk about yourself on Echo of Moscow. So when I see people who work and fight under much greater pressure, I understand that I have nothing to be afraid of.

And who are your volunteers in the regions?

All kinds of people. Mostly, of course, if you look at the demographic profile, they are younger people. But they are very diverse, including some very elderly people as well. Probably more young people physically come to meetings, but they really are all kinds of people. We’re even trying to draw up some kind of socio-demographic profile. So far we haven’t managed it, because they are so varied.

If you were allowed to run in the presidential election, who would you want to measure your strength against?

I am confident that we will secure my participation in the presidential election, and I intend to represent the interests of all those Russian citizens who are against corruption, in favor of normal development, and ready to challenge Vladimir Putin, who is dragging our country knows not where, who says—as he did yesterday—that Russians’ incomes are continuing to rise, when all those Russians know perfectly well that their incomes are not rising.

So for you, the worthy opponent from the authorities is Vladimir Putin.

For me, a worthy opponent is someone who is doing something bad. Right now, the one doing bad things is Putin. He is in power—so he is the one we have to fight.

Politician Alexei Navalny on the air on Echo of Moscow. Thank you!