Broadcast of "Full Albats" from October 22, 2018

Good evening. It’s 8:05 p.m. on Echo of Moscow radio. This is Yevgenia Albats, and I’m beginning our program devoted to the key events of the week—events that will affect politics in the coming weeks and months. Today I have one guest: the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), the leader of the Russian opposition, Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny. Over the past few months, we arranged several times for him to come on the program, but each time he was jailed. The last time, for a total of 50 days. Alexei Anatolyevich, hello.

Good evening, Zhenya. It’s true: every time you and I make plans, I get locked up. So I approached this broadcast with some caution. Because the last time, sitting for 50 days was exhausting.

Hard.

Not exactly hard—people serve years, my brother did three and a half—but exhausting. It’s time wasted for absolutely no reason, and you understand that you’re sitting there for nothing, and naturally all the court rulings and all those brazen people who look you in the eye and say completely absurd things are intensely irritating. Still, at least I used the time for self-education. I read a lot, and I met some remarkable people life brought me together with in that detention center.

And what kind of remarkable people were they? What charges were they in on?

Mostly hooligans, drunk drivers. Actually, jokes aside, it’s always pretty interesting, because first of all there are always lots of migrants and lots of foreigners. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz—many of them. So now, at least, in any political discussion about migrants—why they come, how much they earn, whether they rob people—I definitely know much more than any other Russian politician. In that sense it’s extremely useful for anyone to immerse themselves in that environment. There are also always lots of people from the North Caucasus. You sit with them too, drink tea together, eat together, talk, and discuss all these questions: what happened in Ingushetia, what’s going on in Chechnya, how people really feel about Kadyrov, how they really feel about Putin. You discuss it constantly. Of course it’s not representative—you can’t say I talked to all Chechens or all Ingush. But when you sit for 50 days, at least 10 people will end up in your cell one way or another, and you talk to all of them. So this may sound a bit pompous, but I’m a politician brought as close to the masses as possible.

By the way, I wanted to ask: who do you consider yourself to be, Alyosha? A politician, an investigator, or the head of a YouTube media holding?

I definitely consider myself a politician, because I’m fighting for change in our country. I’m fighting for power in order to change the state of affairs in our country, and everything else I’m forced to do. I’m building this media holding, as you quite rightly and ironically put it, because…

I wasn’t being ironic.

I’m ironic about it myself. We all are. Because I’m forced to make these YouTube videos—something I of course would never have done if there weren’t censorship in the country, if I could appear on normal television. Why would I need YouTube then? And the investigations, the journalistic work we do—I think we do it well—we’re forced to do it because in this country you can count on one hand the number of media outlets left that can do such investigations, that can speak out against corruption. So all these things—the media holding, the investigations—are still just means. The goal is to achieve a normal situation in the country, one our people deserve.

So the goal really is to come to power.

Absolutely, yes.

Your video response to Army General Viktor Zolotov has been viewed 4 million 852 thousand times—I checked today. I have to congratulate you on an absolute success. It is, without question, a brilliant piece of political commentary. I say that without any irony. A brilliant piece of commentary. The general’s response was the strangest thing. First he said he was a fool because he rushed to say something or other. Then he said: first the courts, then everything else. No, actually his first response was that he hadn’t invited you for that at all. So what had he invited you for then? An army general, the head of a law enforcement structure.

You see—and sorry to interrupt—the very fact that an army general and head of the country’s largest law enforcement structure does not understand the meaning of the words he says is itself deeply regrettable. He says things, but he doesn’t understand what they mean. Let’s put Navalny on a polygraph. Test him—to determine whether I’m lying when I say I consider him a thief and a crook. Is that what it’s for? Besides, it shows his basic disorientation about who he is and who we are. He really thinks he owns this country and can order people around: these ones through a polygraph, those ones through a gauntlet or something else. He sincerely does not understand that he is a public official accountable to the people, paid with money from our pockets, and therefore he owes us explanations about certain things. From the price of cabbage he pays for the National Guard to where exactly his family got real estate worth 3.5 billion rubles from. But his answer is very clear: he refused a debate.

He refused.

As far as I can tell, I said it plainly: a duel in the form of a debate. The clock started. One week. So by Thursday he was supposed to say whether he agreed to the debate or not. The court stuff is nonsense, because it wasn’t even Zolotov who sued me, but the Crimean Meat Processing Plant. A ridiculous lawsuit. And there’s nothing in it concerning Zolotov. In that suit they’re trying to prove to me that the higher the fat content of meat, the better the meat is, and therefore I was wrong to say they supply the National Guard with lower-quality meat. It’s just a set of tricks and a pile of nonsense designed to distract us from the essence of the corruption in which both Zolotov and all of Russia’s top leadership are mired.

I wrote on Facebook that you’d be coming on the air and asked people to send questions. I’ll mix them in, because there are a lot of substantive, good questions. Vasily Kimovsky asks: “Maybe you should agree to fight Zolotov. Of course Alexei would lose, but even that kind of defeat would have a stronger effect than no fight at all.” What do you say?

The maximum effect will come from getting answers to the questions we’re asking. Zolotov’s task, like Putin’s and everyone else’s, is very clear. What matters to them is turning politics into a carnival. They do it during elections, and we saw it in the last presidential election, and now they want the same thing again. In response to substantive accusations, there’ll be some kind of fight, people in different-colored underwear, and we’ll all discuss it, and it’ll be so funny and entertaining. And of course there is the great Putin, serious, sitting in the Kremlin, while below him there’s some riffraff doing ridiculous things and amusing the Russian people, amusing the public. It’s very important not to fall for that trick and to demand answers to our questions. Because these people not only steal billions themselves, they’ve condemned the whole country to poverty and degradation. And I’d like to stop that somehow. I’m 42 years old. I’ve lived almost 20 years—half my life—under Putin. Half my life. My child has lived her whole life under Putin. So what matters here is finally getting a substantive conversation, especially when we see that they’re losing gubernatorial elections—United Russia is—and still they keep dodging all of this.

Did Zolotov’s people contact you in any way? Any proposals, anything behind the scenes?

No.

Nothing at all. Okay. Alexei, do you understand how serious the risks are for you? Today Novaya Gazeta published an investigation concerning people connected to the well-known so-called “Putin’s chef,” Prigozhin, which among other things discusses the attack on—an attempted murder of—the husband of your colleague Lyubov Sobol.

Yes, absolutely. A stunning investigation. It’s very important for all of ACF. We had no doubts and said from the start that Prigozhin’s involvement in the attack on Lyubov Sobol’s husband was the primary version. But now I believe we have facts showing that a person connected to Prigozhin did indeed carry out the attack. He injected him with a syringe—not just any attack, but a syringe with an unknown liquid into the thigh of my colleague’s husband. He lost consciousness. As I understand it, that person was killed after he carried it out.

That’s what Novaya Gazeta writes.

Yes, exactly. And all this is confirmed by Novaya Gazeta’s source in Prigozhin’s circles, who, as I understand it, has now also disappeared. There are grounds to suspect he may no longer be alive. We understand these risks. We always have.

You directly accused Zolotov of essentially being behind the murder of Boris Nemtsov, since in February 2015, when Boris was killed, Zolotov was commander of the Interior Ministry’s Internal Troops. And Boris Nemtsov’s killers came from the Sever battalion, stationed in Chechnya, and it was proven in court that men serving in that battalion killed Boris.

Exactly.

Do you understand—again, I want to be clear, I’m not asking about everyone else, not about the various people in ACF. I’m asking about you personally—Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny. Do you understand your own risks?

Zhenya, honestly—sorry—but your question is even a little insulting. At any point in all the years we’ve known each other, have I ever seemed afraid? Or like I failed to assess risks? I understand everything about the risks. I understand everything about Zolotov and Kadyrov. And I’ve repeatedly said directly that I believe Kadyrov is involved, and I believe Zolotov is involved. The court materials and the investigative materials point directly to that.

Have you hired security?

Why would I need security when I have you—Echo of Moscow—and Alexei Alexeyevich Venediktov was just protecting me. In that sense, the multiethnic people of the Russian Federation stand behind me, and I’m not afraid of anything.

Even so, it still seems to me that quite a lot of people in this country—and I’m one of them—would be ready to help fund your security. Because this is too serious.

I’m glad you’re ready to fund our work, and I urge you to go to donate.fbk.info and send your money to support ACF.

Okay. On to the next block of questions. ACF published data on the palaces and incredible apartments of the heads of major corporations—Sechin, Chemezov, Miller, and so on. You showed the palaces and apartments of the Zolotov family worth several billion rubles. That undoubtedly compromises the authorities. Do you have an explanation for why President Putin allows such ostentatious luxury?

Because he’s the same way. Because he’s exactly like that, and they all do it by looking at Putin. Just look at Putin’s palace in Gelendzhik. By every standard it’s a luxury building. It was designed by an Italian architect, the marble was smuggled in from Italy, FSB officers received it at the port—Gelendzhik or Novorossiysk, probably Novorossiysk. And those materials were brought in past customs, and Sechin, Zolotov—they were all involved in it. And of course…

I don’t remember Zolotov being involved there. Shamalov was involved in that.

Sergei Kolesnikov, who spoke a lot about it and who for a time was part of that Putin group and handled financing for the Gelendzhik palace, pointed to Zolotov’s role as well. Because many of the communications there were tied to the Federal Protective Service and personal security, and Zolotov was involved in that too. So they simply look at him and see that Putin is obsessed with a luxurious lifestyle. He is consumed by money and financial interests. He makes his friends billionaires not just because the Rotenbergs are dear to him. All these billionaires—the Rotenbergs, the Kovalchuks, whoever—they’re quasi-custodians, they hold Putin’s money. People often ask me: why don’t you investigate Putin? Where are Putin’s millions? Well, there they are—Putin’s millions and billions. They’re sitting in Rotenberg’s accounts, in Surgutneftegaz’s accounts, with this whole group, all these classmates, former colleagues, judo sparring partners who became billionaires. All of it is money—Roldugin’s money in that account… Of course that’s Putin’s wallet. And all his subordinates look at him and do the same. And it benefits him, because they all enter this vicious corrupt circle. Each of them knows he’s compromised up to his neck. And each of them knows he can be jailed to public applause. Because you can jail any one of them and show his apartment, his palace, and everyone will say: well of course, give him life. So they’ve closed ranks. It’s like in action movies: you join the mafia, and you have to shoot someone in the head, take part in a collective murder. For them, you have to buy a palace in order to become part of the mafia and understand that you’re so compromised you can never leave.

When you talk about Putin’s inner circle on Navalny Live and in separate videos, you present specific documents. This is Sechin’s first wife, this is his second wife—or third, whatever, doesn’t matter which is correct. Or Miller’s. But with Putin, there’s none of that. How is that possible?

Because Putin’s form of corruption is more sophisticated; it all runs on trust. The mafia boss keeps his money in the common fund. What are Roldugin’s accounts? A sort of common fund, Putin’s wallet. He says: Roldugin, go on, they’ll open you an offshore account in Panama, the guys will put $2 billion into it, you hold it, and later I’ll tell you how to use it. And it’s like that with all of them. You just have to understand how Putin’s corruption works. That’s exactly how it works. Of course we won’t find—at least not now, and I don’t yet know of one—a specific Swiss account labeled “Putin Vladimir Vladimirovich” with a billion or a trillion or a brazillion in it. He does it differently. He registers it in the names of his closest circle.

But in that case, he can’t leave power.

Exactly. And he doesn’t want to. And he won’t. That’s why he’s been sitting in power for 20 years. The logic is very simple. You’re confirming my point yourself.

The well-known film critic Yuri Gladilshchikov asks you: “Roughly how many clans own Russia?”

It’s hard for me to say how many clans, because they’re all intertwined already. It’s a mafia, close to the Italian model—they’ve all married each other, divorced, remarried. Godfathers, in-laws, all that. It’s hard to say, but I think overall all of Russia belongs to 500 families. Five hundred families at different levels. There’s a super-top tier—20 families. But overall, 500 families own almost everything in the Russian Federation.

Political scientist Alexander Morozov from Prague asks: “In your view, are there people in the civil service who could become your potential allies? Or are they all thieves?”

Of course there are. The civil service is something enormous. If we take public-sector employees alone, whose salaries are regulated by the May decrees—they’re not formally civil servants in a legal sense, but in Russian terms they’re still seen as public-sector workers and state employees—there are six million of them. That’s millions of very different people. I assure you that most of them—or at least a substantial part of them—know a lot about this corruption, are irritated by it, and have no opportunity to participate in it, because not everyone sits in a position where millions are distributed. There are normal people there. But they’re afraid. They work, they live, unfortunately, by the proverb: live with wolves, howl like a wolf. So they howl, but they’re not very happy about it. Undoubtedly many of them will be our supporters in some way. I have an interesting story about that. I think I may even have told it on Echo of Moscow: during the 2013 Moscow mayoral election, we specifically analyzed voting levels in the districts and even the particular buildings where various Moscow city officials live compactly. I won everywhere there, on all those precincts and in all those buildings.

So officials vote for you.

Among others, yes, because they keep a fig in their pocket against their bosses. I don’t know whether you noticed this poll or not, but there’s a VKontakte community called “Police Ombudsman.” It’s the largest online community where police officers gather. I think it has 80,000 people. There was a poll, and 25,000 of them voted. Who was more convincing: me or Zolotov? Ninety-three percent voted for me. Not necessarily because they love me, but because Zolotov is, first, insane, and second, they’re rational people who go to the store, and if they see that Zolotov is buying potatoes at four times the store price, you can’t convince them otherwise. Because the authorities are now literally pointing at white and saying it’s black, and vice versa.

Did people from the National Guard contact you? The officer corps, for example?

People write to us, including about the food issue. They say they’re outraged and express some support. They write cautiously, because in the National Guard too, Zolotov has all kinds of internal security services that carefully monitor the mood inside, and they won’t tolerate dissidents. But I can say this: they were constantly transporting me during those 50 days, convoy one way and then the other. Everyone watched those videos, and everyone agreed with me. There are some political differences, but everyone, without exception, said: well, what is there to say, Zolotov is a crook. And then when he released his address—and I hadn’t seen it yet—everyone said, just wait till you get out and watch it, he’s absolutely insane. He’s just insane.

If it’s not a secret, were you tipped off about this issue, or did you deliberately start digging through procurement related to the National Guard?

This is our main long-running anti-corruption project—RosPil. One of the RosPil staffers came to me and said: “Listen, I looked at National Guard procurement, and they’re buying something strange. They switched procurement to a single supplier, and prices immediately shot up compared with the previous year.” I said: “That seems odd. It’s unlikely they’d act so crudely and openly.” Because they did that a few years ago, but now corruption has become more sophisticated. I said, let’s take a look. And that’s when we found Medvedev’s secret decree, which, despite being secret, was sitting on the public procurement website. So through ordinary monitoring of open sources, we established everything.

I don’t doubt for a second that Zolotov coordinated his response to you with Putin.

I don’t doubt it either.

He had to get approval for it. So what happened now, after all? I keep coming back to this.

I don’t know, but it all looks very strange. I don’t know any of these people personally, and to be honest I’m curious myself about what happened there. Because over the last three months we’ve seen several absolutely insane things. These two, Petrov and Boshirov. Putin himself said we’d show you Petrov and Boshirov. Then they show them, and it’s an epic failure—for intelligence, for Kremlin PR, for everything. Putin’s address on raising the pension age, with the famous “please understand our position”—completely out of character for him. Then these hysterical-looking addresses by Zolotov, in such a bizarre and comic setting. They didn’t usually do things like that. It seems to me degradation leads to this. Twenty years—twenty years without any competition—and they’ve simply lost their minds. They kept losing them gradually, gradually, gradually, and now it’s reached the point where they’re doing strange, absurd, insane things.

I spoke with people who were at the Valdai Forum, people who speak English but understand Russian well. I asked them about Putin’s famous statement that we’ll all go to heaven while they’ll just drop dead. Some people had already started writing that the president might have some kind of brain dysfunction. And the answer I got was: nothing of the sort, he thinks very clearly and understands perfectly well what he’s doing.

Well, let’s look at the results of the latest elections. And let’s look at their actions in general. Raising the pension age makes no economic sense, it won’t lead to higher pensions—that’s a fact, and we can see it in the next budget. It’s harmful from every angle, it’s insulting, it makes people poorer, and yet they pushed it through like tanks and raised the pension age. But with these Petrov and Boshirov characters—who forced them to do that? Who told them to drag them onto television?

But if everything is corrupt, how can one expect that some segment, some institution in society—the GRU, for example, or intelligence—would not be corrupt too?

I agree with you, but that still doesn’t mean they had to drag them onto TV and publicly disgrace themselves. In that sense it’s like a person who is normal sometimes and senile at other times. They do have some deliberate actions, of course—they’re still in power. These are cunning, vicious, cruel, lying people who hold onto power effectively. So you and I can sit here and talk about what fools they are, but they’re the ones sitting in the Kremlin, and the police could walk in here at any moment and jail us under any article they like. So we shouldn’t puff ourselves up too much either. They still think very well in many ways, but at the same time we do see obvious signs of degradation. And even outright senility.

We have to break now for the news and commercials, and then we’ll return to the Echo of Moscow studio.

Good evening. It’s now 8:25 p.m. on Echo of Moscow radio. Today in the Echo of Moscow studio our only guest is Alexei Navalny. Anatoly Anatolyevich, hello again. And I want to warn you right away—thanks to the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, our airtime has been extended because so many questions came in. I really had no idea…

For all the times I didn’t make it to your show.

Yes, for all the times Alexei was sent to a detention center instead of coming to Echo of Moscow. A question from Boris Zimin, a citizen well known to you: “What should be done in the beautiful Russia of the future with the Federal Penitentiary Service and the many millions of security personnel whose sense of right and wrong has been damaged?” More broadly, Alyosh, the question is: what will you do with these people when you come to power? These questions keep recurring.

First of all, security personnel are of course very different. There’s the police—the most numerous—and again, they’re very different too. Some are desk officers, others are precinct officers. The question here was specifically about the Federal Penitentiary Service. I believe it is one of the few Russian agencies that cannot be reformed at all; it must be dissolved and rebuilt from scratch, because it is the Gulag. It is a completely senseless system for consuming and destroying people. Officially it is called the penal enforcement system; it is supposed to rehabilitate people, it is a correctional system, and it performs no corrective function whatsoever. In that sense—well, torture by staff against prisoners is officially accepted and encouraged there. The encouragement of prisoners torturing other prisoners is also accepted. What’s more, they publicly state that this is their method of control: to torture and torment people. Yes, these people may be criminals, and most often they are criminals. But excuse me: for being criminals, society has sent them to prison; society has not ordered their fingernails torn out or their heels beaten with a baton. So the Federal Penitentiary Service specifically must be completely dissolved and completely reformed, and we understand how to do that.

And Lubyanka (the FSB headquarters)? How, forgive me, is that any better?

Again, there are different divisions there. But what we’re seeing now—the FSB as the country’s security service—is a pointless body. What security does it actually provide us? Does it help us fight corruption? No. Does it ensure some effective anti-terror system? No. We see a completely insane number of terrorist attacks. So it’s a giant bureaucratic body that serves itself. Of course, the security services as a whole should, first, be reduced in size; second, new people should be recruited; and third, those involved in crimes should end up in the dock. The archives must be opened, absolutely. In that sense, everyone should get what they deserve. As for the Interior Ministry system, of course the main funding should go to the rank-and-file level—to those who work on the ground. The people who solve crimes—85% of crimes are solved by the people who interact directly with them: district officers, operatives sitting in local departments. A proper federal police force should be created. Instead of this Investigative Committee, which no one even understands. The prosecutor’s office should be stripped of its general oversight function. In its current form, the prosecutor’s office could be disbanded altogether; it isn’t needed in principle. It’s just people sitting there, retiring at 35 with enormous pensions. In general, millions of healthy men—smart, healthy men—who could work in the market economy and benefit themselves and their families are instead sitting around doing nothing. So overall: cut the numbers, significantly raise the salaries of those who remain and are ready to work professionally, retrain the rest where needed, and simply dismiss some of them.

Another question from political scientist Morozov: “Whose property rights will be preserved after Putinism collapses?” The reason these questions are being asked is that authoritarian regimes are known to collapse eventually, but they collapse when coalitions or alliances are formed between the old elite and the new incoming one. So the question is: with whom would you be prepared to negotiate?

If the question is whether I intend to cozy up to oligarchs and build alliances with them, the answer is no. And you know, this whole logic—let’s be nice to the oligarchs because they’re supposedly for the market economy, and yes, they grovel before Putin, but deep down they’re sort of a little bit on our side—so any politician, and you, Navalny, please go on Echo of Moscow and swear that all the oligarchs will keep everything they have. While I was in jail I read the book The Time of Berezovsky—I wanted to tear that book to pieces. It’s interesting, there are many remarkable interviews in it, but it describes the utter vileness and amorality of that whole group, which for some reason is referred to as major entrepreneurs. Some of them are in fact fairly decent. And there’s an absolutely astonishing interview in it between Aven and Chubais—Aven is the author of the book. Aven comes across there as some kind of Western-style democrat, while Chubais—who was supposedly the man in the 1990s deciding that property should go to private, effective owners—just spouts utterly disgusting things in the spirit of, I don’t know, the early Supreme Soviet of 1993. These are absolutely hypocritical people. I have not the slightest sympathy, not the slightest warm feeling, for that whole disgusting gang.

And yet, property rights.

And yet property rights must be respected. It’s just that these people do not have lawful and legitimate property rights. Everyone who acquired property honestly—and that’s 90% of property—will keep it. But do I consider the loans-for-shares auctions sacred and something I must uphold? No. The answer is no. I believe all those people who acquired colossal assets should pay, at a minimum, a privatization tax, like the one that existed, for example, in the United Kingdom. It existed in the UK, and it can exist in Russia. So yes, property will of course remain, but as for someone like Zolotov’s property—should I guarantee that Mikoyan’s dacha, which is in fact a cultural heritage site, remains in Zolotov’s ownership? Yes, I guarantee that will never happen.

And yet in your video, I noticed this, Alexei, you said: look, this dacha was owned by Dzerzhinsky—it remained state property. Voroshilov—it remained state property. Mikoyan, who “served from Ilyich to Ilyich without a heart attack or paralysis” (a Soviet-era rhyme about Anastas Mikoyan surviving under Lenin and Brezhnev)—and it remained state property. But with Zolotov, you said, now it’s his forever.

It’s his forever as long as Putin is in power. And I hope—I don’t know whether I or people like me will come to power—but I’m sure that sooner or later, and I hope sooner, people will come to power in Russia who won’t just drive Zolotov out of that Mikoyan dacha—they’ll take him from that dacha straight to the defendant’s bench, where he’ll answer questions about how exactly he managed to privatize it.

It won’t turn into 1917 all over again? Shakhmatovo, Blok’s ravaged estate, and so on.

You just compared Blok and Zolotov. Nothing like that will happen. There won’t be any ravaged estates, because no one intends to take things away from wealthy businesspeople just because they’re wealthy. In fact, we know quite clearly—and there aren’t that many of them—which people acquired their property through corruption, through glaring major corrupt deals. Again, no one intends to drag these people out by the scruff of the neck just because they’re oligarchs. They’ll be told: you privatized this, let’s review it, and you will pay a tax. In a case like Zolotov’s—officials who cannot explain the origin of their wealth—criminal cases will be opened against them for illicit enrichment.

So there won’t be simple expropriation.

Not outside legal procedures, not outside court procedures. It won’t be: Navalny said so, I don’t like his face, out you go from the dacha, now this dacha belongs to someone else. It will be within judicial procedures, and by a court independent of the executive branch.

Okay. Fighting corruption is your trademark issue. But sociologists from the Levada Center have found that Russians have, in a way, adapted to corruption. More than that, their attitude toward one politician or another is not strongly affected by the fact that the politician is corrupt. The principle is: they’re all like that, they all steal. So the question is this: where do you go from here? You’ll do another investigation, and we’ll learn again that this one’s a thief and that one’s a thief, and in general we understand that the whole system of power in the country is built on theft. It’s vertical and horizontal corruption. And anyone who enters that system of power becomes compromised one way or another. What are you going to do next? What is your strategy?

I know very clearly what I’m doing and what my strategy is. I’m simply a politician who has a job. I’m not just a politician in the abstract—I’m a politician who created the Anti-Corruption Foundation and works at the Anti-Corruption Foundation. In that sense, I have daily work that I do for the public good. But if we look, for example, at my political statements during the presidential campaign and over the last several months, 90% of what I said had nothing to do with corruption and everything to do with raising the pension age. Before that, the main theme of my presidential campaign was not fighting corruption, but increasing funding for healthcare and education. In other words, investing in human capital, redistributing the budget—in that sense, creating a new Russia that spends money on people rather than on weapons or pointless security services. And in that sense I will continue to propose solutions and talk about the things that matter for the country. Including corruption, on a daily basis, because that’s my job. But what I talk about and focus on politically has long been not only, and not even primarily, corruption.

The questions that came in on Facebook from younger people are very interestingly different from the questions written by people over 50. Young people—human rights activist Nikolai Levshits, or Gleb Chudetsky, who is my daughter’s age—ask: what next, exactly? The party isn’t being registered, street protests have declined in turnout, YouTube views have dropped. “What should be done next?” asks Nikolai Levshits. “Are there new ideas and plans for the future? I understand life itself will suggest some. But besides new investigations and broadcasts, what else?”

Political work. We carry out political work in many different formats. We want to change the country, we want to change the government. Where there are elections, we take part in elections.

People are asking you: should you participate in municipal elections?

Of course we should participate in elections, and we will work on municipal elections, and in St. Petersburg, and on elections to the Moscow City Duma. In that sense we have no, you know, schizophrenia. Where there are no elections—where it’s a complete fake, like the presidential election—we call for a boycott. Where there are elections, we call for participation. On September 9 there were some of the few mayoral elections still left, including the Khabarovsk mayoral election—we participated very actively in it. Our candidate was removed and not allowed to run because he would have won. In these gubernatorial elections we supported Communist deputies. And although they, generally speaking, tried to distance themselves from our support, we invested resources, put out videos, and did investigations. And in Primorye now we are supporting the Communists; our штаб is actively supporting them. So in that sense we will participate in all elections, we will organize mass actions, we will do investigations, we will come up with new formats for consolidated voting. In other words, we do every kind of political work. Trade unions are now constantly reaching out to us, and we help them too, dealing with labor disputes. After all, we have a structure of 40 headquarters across the country, and they do all kinds of things.

And those headquarters have survived.

Yes, of course they have. It’s hard, heavy work, but the headquarters have survived, and despite constant inspections all day long, and arrests too, we keep doing it. And I can say with pride that we are the country’s leading real opposition political force that exists as an actual structure. And we will use every opportunity and every form of political work. There isn’t some one thing where I could tell you right now: we’ve come up with this brilliant trick, and starting tomorrow we’ll do this and this and that’s how we’ll win. There is no one such trick. There are traditional forms of political work, and we engage in all of them—more effectively in some cases, less effectively in others. Including building media. We now have several YouTube channels of our own with a reach of several million people. We want to make sure that in every region we have at least a small media outlet with a reach of several tens of thousands. In some places it works better, in others worse.

Not a cheap undertaking.

We’re making it almost free. They’re all YouTube channels. Not journalists writing articles. We’re trying to make it impossible to liquidate us. And of course the easiest thing to liquidate is whatever is expensive—where you can come in, arrest the editorial office and scatter everyone, or cut off the funding. We’re doing it so that people can operate on their own: set up a webcam and a computer and broadcast. It’s not simple, it’s all moving along with difficulty. But we’re working on it.

But at ACF, as I understand it, you have a proper studio. I can see that—you use special effects.

At ACF we have a proper studio, but we want some kind of studio in 40 cities. At least in all the million-plus cities. They already exist—our headquarters put out videos, and those videos get hundreds of thousands of views, tens of thousands of views. Some get a thousand views. So in that sense, as media, we have a very large reach. We’re constantly trying to improve the product, because of course it looks very homemade. Absolutely. It looks like some strange partisan people shot everything with one camera. That is a problem. But we try to make do—necessity is the mother of invention.

By the way, in the spring all your equipment was seized—twice. Did they return any of it?

They returned nothing, and it’s still not even clear who seized it. I mean, we know who seized it: the FSB. But in response to all our letters, lawsuits, and everything else, they say: but you don’t know who seized it. Therefore you can’t complain about anyone. And if you can’t complain about anyone—goodbye.

Classic. What’s happening with the registration of the party “Russia of the Future”?

We are demanding registration. We were refused, and we are demanding registration again. We have a case in the ECHR at every stage. When we were refused, first it was the People’s Alliance, then the Party of Progress—we sue everywhere and pursue it to the end. We know for certain that the party will be registered. We will definitely overcome the barriers at the regional and federal levels alike. And the Kremlin knows this, which is why they don’t register us. But we keep demanding registration.

“How do you see the situation with civic protest?” asks Gleb Chudetsky. “Given the tightening of laws, the development of surveillance technologies, cameras, neural networks, and so on. The strengthening of the National Guard, and so forth. How far can this situation go, in your view?”

While I was in jail, I read an amazing report—I don’t even know what to call it, a feature in Meduza—about China. About the Uyghurs, and how a system of total control has been created there, like something out of a wildly futuristic film. Phone monitoring, video cameras, everything, everything. So yes, it can go that far; it can go as far as North Korea. It’s just that the Russian political regime is so inefficient that it won’t be able to do it the way the Chinese do. Everything they can do—and will do effectively—is jail people for likes and reposts. They’ll keep jailing people for likes and reposts, they’ll keep preventing people from holding rallies. But there is no alternative. If you believe this is your country, then come out anyway. Because the moment you leave the street, that means their cameras have worked. And really, what do you risk? Fifteen days in jail? Fine, you can endure that.

And you don’t think that’s cause for concern?

Of course it’s cause for concern. We can see that they are intimidating people on a mass scale; people are afraid to come out. The size of rallies has fallen not because fewer people support us—more people support us now—but because they are being intimidated. Still, we’ll keep coming out. We’ll look for other methods. There is no magic button; we’ll use everything. But in some situations it’s a matter of principle to go out into the street. Because that is the most basic right. We can never and will never achieve free media, or access to elections, let alone fighting corruption or anything else, until we are allowed to gather in the streets of our own city. It’s simply ridiculous otherwise. That’s the first thing we will achieve. So yes, we will continue these actions and mass…

Well, you get feedback through your headquarters. What are people in the regions waiting for? What are they hoping for at all? I traveled this summer—I was in Irkutsk and Arkhangelsk—and honestly I just shake my head, I can’t understand why people put up with what they put up with.

That’s the main reason people join us. Because of total hopelessness. Because once they did hope; once there really were improvements. In Putin’s early years, real incomes were rising. But for the last five years, real incomes have been falling. And most importantly, there is a complete ideological and economic dead end. Oil prices are high, and still everyone is poor, nothing is growing, and it’s obvious nothing will grow. And that’s not my assumption—again, look at the federal budget, and we see that nothing is built into it. No wage growth, no pension growth, no economic growth—nothing will happen. Putin has officially told us in his own documents: guys, keep enduring me, but you will neither get richer nor develop. So people in the regions join us because they understand there is no other way out except to start fighting or speaking out themselves. In that sense, people’s despair brings them to us, because they expect no change from above. No miraculous enlightenment from Putin, from Medvedev, or recipes from the Skolkovo school, or some liberals in the government—we expect nothing good from any of them.

Look, a study by the Committee of Civil Initiatives on media authority figures has just been published. And the top ten are all propagandists.

Well, what other authority figures do you expect? Whoever is shown on television becomes an authority figure. How can people name someone they’ve never seen? If Leonid Parfyonov were on television, he would of course be in first place. But Leonid Parfyonov is nowhere near television; he exists on YouTube now. But Solovyov, it seems to me, is already on every channel and in a million different programs. So that’s who they name. That’s how it works; that’s how an authoritarian country works. They throw everyone else out, and people name the ones they see. Ask about politicians, and they’ll tell you: Putin, Shoigu. That’s it. Because no one else is visible. If you know there are four politicians in the country, from Putin to Shoigu, then those are the ones you name.

But do you think there is still demand in the regions for opposition and for new faces?

Of course. Enormous demand. Again, that’s not my assumption: in Primorye the United Russia candidate lost, in Khabarovsk the United Russia candidate lost, in Vladimir Region he lost. And in most cases they didn’t lose to some super-charismatic candidates running active campaigns. United Russia candidates simply lost to whoever happened to be there. People will vote for the devil himself as long as it’s not a United Russia candidate. That directly shows the mood and the demand in the regions. It just doesn’t always turn into mass rallies or something similar. Look at what’s happening in Ingushetia now. On the one hand, they tell us there’s 90% support for the authorities there, some unimaginable support for Yevkurov, but we can see the system has broken. The demand in the regions is enormous. It’s greater there than in Moscow. Because people in Moscow are, after all, much better off, and in Moscow you can at least try to find a job paying 60,000 or 70,000 rubles or more. In the regions, even in a large city, even in a city of over a million, go try to find a job paying 50,000 rubles—it doesn’t exist. That’s all. So of course the demand is much greater there. I sit with all these people, and they’re from different cities. They earned tiny salaries, came here to work as taxi drivers or at McDonald’s, or they worked as paramedics in ambulances. A working person in this country cannot earn more than 40,000 rubles. And on 40,000 rubles he cannot live decently with a family. That’s your whole demand right there.

We have to break now for the news and commercials, and I should note that our airtime has been extended. We’ll return with Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny on Echo of Moscow and continue answering our listeners’ questions.

Good evening once again. It’s 9:05 p.m., almost. This is Echo of Moscow radio. At the microphone is Yevgenia Albats. And here we are, tormenting Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny for a second hour—the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the leader of the Russian opposition—who, after serving 50 days and causing our broadcasts to fall through several times because of that, has finally made it to us. A huge number of questions came in, both to the Echo of Moscow website and to my Facebook page. And now we finally have the chance to ask them.

You’re not tormenting me at all—you’re giving me the pleasure of an interesting conversation.

Thank you, Alexei. You’re being asked to comment on the tragedy in Kerch, the split in Orthodoxy—the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church—the Skripal case, and the publication of the identities of his alleged poisoners, Chepiga and Mishkin. Are you ready to comment on that here, or will you do it on your Thursday program?

I can comment. It seems to me it would be hard to comment on everything that’s happened over the last two months, but ask whatever interests you. I have a view on almost everything.

Okay. What do you think about the tragedy in Kerch? We’re used to reading about the U.S., where people come in and start shooting.

It’s a monstrous tragedy that, unfortunately, could not have been prevented, just as such things often cannot be prevented in the U.S. What’s happening in Russia now, where people are proposing all sorts of idiotic bills saying we need to tighten this and tighten that—we know that doesn’t work. At the very least, we have extensive American experience, where these shootings happen. And we see how a state that is far richer, far safer, and has a much more developed law enforcement system tries various things and becomes more or less effective.

I believe that’s why we should look first and foremost at the American experience. But, sadly, there is very little you can do against the actions of a lone madman.

So you don’t see any specifically Russian element here?

No, I don’t. I’ve read a lot saying this is some kind of mass hysteria or the militarization of society. No, not really. I talked about this on my own program. Some of the biggest Russian shooting incidents of recent years include Major Yevsyukov…

In the store.

Yes, in a store. Then there was the Russian soldier at a base in Armenia who killed several people. But these are all lone individuals who snapped, decided to die, and committed horrific crimes first. And the first two, after all, were using service weapons. You can ban all civilian firearms, but there you are—they used official-issue weapons. The debate in America about limiting magazine capacity doesn’t really apply to Russia at all, because everything is already banned here, and yet someone still came in with a hunting shotgun and shot everyone. In that sense, I don’t see any specifically Russian angle here. It’s a feature of modern society: people lose their minds and do things like this. It’s horrifying, but we’re going to have to live with it.

Okay. Ariel Cohen, an American political scientist: “Relations with Ukraine. How do you end the conflict?”

That’s quite a question. A small one.

Uh-huh. But you said you were ready to answer.

I am ready to answer it, absolutely. To end the conflict, you have to want to end it. The Russian leadership obviously does not want to end the conflict. It is trying to use it both as a bargaining chip with Western partners and as a way to turn Ukraine into a failed state, to prevent Ukraine from developing, to make sure Ukraine does not become a success story.

So for that to happen, first, there has to be the will; second, the Minsk agreements must be implemented; and we need to move forward according to the road maps and documents that Russia, represented by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, has already signed.

But do you think Donbas will become some kind of appendage of the Russian Federation, or should it remain part of Ukraine?

Russia—again, Putin has acknowledged, stated, and signed that Donbas is Ukrainian territory. That’s what he says publicly, more or less everywhere. The problem is that he doesn’t follow through in practice. He uses Donbas as a kind of strange territory where everyone suffers, and everyone around it suffers too. But it’s just a lever. You can tighten it a little so things heat up and shooting starts, or loosen it back and everything seems to calm down. Plus, of course, it’s a zone of massive corruption. It’s well known that salaries there are paid in rubles.

All transactions there are in rubles.

All transactions are in rubles. So let’s ask the obvious question: where do those rubles come from?

In white KamAZ trucks.

Exactly. KamAZ trucks leave the treasury carrying cash. And if there are KamAZ trucks full of cash, then one truck or another can probably disappear along the way. And who’s going to count it? It’s a war. Who counts during a war? What nonsense. A KamAZ here, a KamAZ there—that’s normal. That’s why Russia’s leadership, both at the top and at the middle levels where those KamAZ trucks get distributed, simply does not want to end the conflict with Ukraine.

Relations with America. We got four questions from Cohen. And again, several people on Facebook said: “Be sure to ask Navalny about geopolitics. Do you see the United States as Russia’s main adversary?”

In general, this is a unique and wonderful moment for Russia, because we have no major powerful enemies. As a matter of fact, with America, with Europe, and with China, we could be on excellent terms and make a great deal of money through trade. But for some reason we don’t do that, because we’re obsessed with geopolitical games and other strange things. In that sense, in America, neither at the establishment level nor among the general public do they view Russia as an enemy, and they are not our enemy. Right now we have far more common problems—radical Islamism, nuclear proliferation, North Korea, Iran. In that sense, we could live quite happily and prosper. There is not the slightest reason to be in conflict with these countries. At the beginning of the 21st century, they are all our natural allies.

What do you think of Trump?

When he was elected, people asked me a lot how U.S. policy toward Russia would change. I said: not at all, because the U.S. system is structured in such a way that the president by himself cannot change all that much. He can change some things, but overall—not much.

So yes, he really does have this inexplicable, mysterious affection for Vladimir Putin. And that truly is a riddle of riddles. Because essentially everything in Trump’s ideology, everything he says for domestic consumption in the U.S., is one hundred percent at odds with what Vladimir Putin believes in. The role of the state, healthcare, guns—I mean, everything. Migrants... Good Lord, I don’t understand how Putin and Trump can like each other when anti-immigrant rhetoric is the basis of Trump’s popularity. And at the same time Putin is bringing millions of migrants here and refuses even to introduce a visa regime with Central Asia. How these people can like each other is beyond explanation. But maybe one day we’ll get the answer to that riddle.

“What do you think of Trump’s slogan,” Cohen asks, “America First?” We could say “Russia First” too.

We can translate anything we like. Trump is advocating protectionist policies. In that sense, protectionism of that kind has been part of Russian reality for many, many years. Remember how we protected—and still protect—Zhiguli cars (a Soviet/Russian car brand)? In the 1980s and 1990s, there were insane tariffs so our AvtoVAZ carmaker could supposedly flourish. And did AvtoVAZ flourish? No. All it led to was very expensive cars. People were poorer because they had to buy expensive cars, and AvtoVAZ never developed into anything. They just stole a lot of money.

In that sense, I believe in free trade, in a free market, and there’s no need to invent pointless restrictions.

The U.S.—Trump said yesterday that they are withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

That’s a huge problem. And it’s something caused both by Trump and by Putin. Put it this way: the bellicose, strange, irrational rhetoric of the leaders of the U.S. and Russia will lead to both us and the Americans having to spend enormous amounts of money on an arms race. The Americans can afford it—they’re rich. Their budget is several times larger than our entire federal budget. But we, excuse me, are poor. And that’s not an exaggeration. Twenty million people below the poverty line—poor. And those poor people will be paying for these idiotic missiles, which we don’t actually need, because we already have strategic nuclear missiles sufficient, as Putin put it, to send some people “to heaven” and others “to drop dead.” And that will lead to a new arms race. We’ll be forced to become even poorer to pay for it. But how much poorer can we get?

But don’t you think Putin is a very pragmatic man, and the people around him are pragmatists too? They’re focused on getting richer. Don’t you think this will remain just rhetoric and there won’t be any arms race?

No, I don’t. In practice, that’s impossible. There will still be lots of made-up things like those ridiculous videos they showed, with some missile flying and hitting something. And either it doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t exist in that form, or at the very least it’s not ready for deployment. In any case, enormous sums will be allocated. Some of that money will be stolen, and most of it will simply be squandered—that’s what we’ve seen with our wonderful Dmitry Rogozins and everything else, like the Vostochny Cosmodrome.

We investigated a lot about how the Vostochny Cosmodrome was built. The same Lyubov Sobol, whom we mentioned earlier, worked on that. Just enormous sums wasted incompetently, and corruption where 10 rubles were stolen and 300 rubles were squandered. And the same thing will happen with all these programs, unfortunately—just as it did in the final years of the USSR.

By the way, I was struck by something. I was at the Mirny Cosmodrome—what used to be called the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. That’s in Arkhangelsk Region. It’s a magnificent cosmodrome. New launch pads. Everything is done brilliantly. And then we drove into town. And the streets leading to the apartment buildings of the officers of those space forces—enormous potholes! Everything flooded with water. It was such a complete mismatch: this ultra-modern cosmodrome, and at the same time absolutely terrible roads in the military town.

One of my favorite stories, which I tell everyone, is about the city of Arkhangelsk. There’s a cosmodrome nearby too. In Arkhangelsk, Putin holds a meeting on Arctic development. Great Putin, great Arctic development. Then you arrive in Arkhangelsk—and anyone from Arkhangelsk won’t let me lie about this—on Sovetskikh Kosmonavtov Street, people are carrying water in buckets. This is a city, the capital of a federal subject of the Russian Federation.

And the sewage goes straight into the Northern Dvina.

Exactly. When Putin held his meeting there, talking about how we’d spend lots of money on Arctic development—well, the city was covered in monstrous filth. The event was held at the local university, and to hide that filth they built a huge wooden walkway over it all. So Putin held his meeting, and the locals were delighted: at least the dirt was hidden. Then after Putin left, they dismantled the walkway. And that’s how it will keep going. We’ll keep throwing money away on all kinds of nonsense while carrying water in buckets.

Tatyana Shcherbina, the poet, asks: “What is your political forecast for next year?” One way or another, everyone asks this question: what should we expect—more tightening of the screws, things getting even harder?

There is no scenario involving liberalization. Sometimes when I read Facebook—this seems to come in waves—they start writing about some kind of thaw. There are no thaws under authoritarian regimes of this kind. There can’t be, because it contradicts their very nature. They don’t know how to create thaws, so of course there will be tightening to one degree or another.

Look at what’s happening to Yandex right now. We just heard it in the news. Good Lord, one of the very few successful Russian companies. Something we can genuinely be proud of in recent years. When people say, “You can’t create anything in Russia,” we say, “We have Yandex.” A national search engine. Young guys built it, became billionaires. Ordinary employees became millionaires. Everything was great. And now the state is trying to devour and destroy Yandex, inventing bills that simply destroy this national asset, created from nothing, from zero.

So yes, of course there will be tightening. There will be huge numbers of new, absolutely idiotic laws. The authorities will keep losing ground in elections—as we saw on September 9. And to compensate for the continued drop in their ratings, they will of course keep more and more people off the ballot and come up with new tricks to preserve themselves. Above all, this trend of fighting the internet, freedom of speech online, and the spread of information—it will keep expanding and expanding. That is their main front.

The internet specifically.

The internet, and in general...

And yet your video about Zolotov has been viewed 4.8 million times.

That’s exactly why they’ll keep trying to tighten the screws.

How?

Right now they’re sitting there thinking about how...

Come on, they couldn’t even block Telegram. We all watched it happen. The whole country was laughing.

They couldn’t today; tomorrow they may be able to. Telegram as a company, after all, is also a reflection of Pavel Durov’s position. It really did accept the challenge and fight them. First of all, not everyone has those kinds of resources. Not everyone has such charismatic, principled leaders as Pavel Durov, not everyone has that much money...

Then why isn’t Yandex fighting? Why isn’t Volozh?

That’s the question. Well... he isn’t fighting.

He got Maltese citizenship...

Well, because if they start fighting, they’ll simply be taken into state ownership tomorrow, completely. They already have Sberbank’s golden share. Durov is outside the country. Most Telegram users are outside the country. So if they lose the Russian market entirely, Telegram will survive. But Yandex is a national search engine. It’s for Russia, it’s for us. So they have nowhere to go. And so, unfortunately, they’re forced to operate under conditions where—there they are on Leo Tolstoy Street—and tomorrow some goons in masks show up, and that’s it. They say: “We’re taking this service.”

You’re being very accommodating toward Yandex. Alexei, let’s be serious. They chose censorship themselves. First there was censorship of the news. They started manually tweaking what appeared at the top and so on. Then censorship began on Yandex Zen. They surrendered on their own, didn’t they?

They blocked our accounts. Yes, they did surrender. I really am somewhat more loyal to Yandex. They’re people I like, billionaires and rich people I find likable, good guys in general. But yes, unquestionably, they surrendered. And those criticisms of them are justified. Because they themselves took the first step toward saying: “We’re cowards, we’re afraid of you, and we’ll give you whatever you ask for.” They are trying to balance things. At least they worry about it. In that sense I can’t compare Yandex to Channel One or to certain newspapers...

But does it really matter to you who gets down on their knees—good people or bad people?

No, I wouldn’t say Yandex has gotten down on its knees. That would still be an exaggeration. They simply remove certain things. When the Kremlin—there used to be a “Blogs” section, very important, important for the opposition and for the media in general, though maybe many people don’t remember it now—when the Kremlin tried to take control of it, Yandex removed it altogether. Still, Yandex—something strange is going on there with the news algorithm, but they don’t ban me from Yandex. I can use Yandex Zen. Sometimes I show up in Yandex News.

In that sense, it’s a platform that can be used. They don’t take the initiative, so to speak. They get pressured, and they retreat. I don’t like that. In that sense they’re weak and vulnerable people too. I can’t compare them with Channel One.

You’re much more critical when it comes to journalists.

Of course I’m much more critical, because, excuse me, journalism is a calling. A journalist is someone who came into the profession to tell the truth or at least to stop cheating. Yandex is, after all, a company that built a search engine.

And all that news and everything else is a kind of side product, whereas for a journalist it’s the main product. So yes, with journalists—I have excellent relations with them, I’m myself, in some strange way, a kind of journalist or editor-in-chief of a media outlet—but I give no one a pass... And if, Zhenya, speaking of criticism of journalists, your magazine The New Times were tomorrow to start writing... if it showed any weakness at all (and I’m sure that won’t happen with you), I would criticize you more harshly than I have criticized any journalist in my life. Because that would mean something had happened that shook the foundations of my faith in people and in journalism. But that’s the only way it can work.

That’s why I go after the newspaper Vedomosti, for example, because I worked with it more than with anyone else. I don’t care about Channel One—they never talked about me anyway. But when Vedomosti betrays freedom of speech, that really hits me hard. Absolutely.

You paint a rather bleak picture. We all more or less understand where we live. And the next group of questions concerns you personally. Vyacheslav Volkov asks: how far are you prepared to go? Where is the red line beyond which you would say to yourself, “That’s it, enough. To hell with it all... I’ve done everything I could”?

There is no such red line. I don’t see one.

Right now it’s 50 days. But what if it becomes a year, two years?

So what? It’s a choice I made many years ago. I’m a lawyer. And when it became clear that I needed to go into politics—if you believe in certain things and want to change the world around you—I made that choice. I discussed it with my family, and we all made that choice together. After that, I don’t think in terms of red lines. That’s not how it works.

If you go into politics and claim to be doing honest politics, but before going to sleep at night you think: well, the red line is probably over there, maybe I’ll move it—50 days is okay, but 55 is too much, or I’ll sit in jail for one year but not two—then it means you shouldn’t be doing this at all. In that case, draw the red line right here at your feet right now and don’t go any farther. I simply don’t think in those terms. I don’t think about red lines. I do what I believe needs to be done. I know I’m right. I’m supported by [a fairly large number of people], and I represent their interests. That’s all that matters to me.

Irina Demidova asks: “How does your fame affect your children, apart from the fact that Dasha Navalnaya has started her own YouTube show? Do they have problems at school because their father is against Putin?”

No, they don’t have problems at school because of that. On the contrary, as far as I know from the interviews Dasha now gives to various media outlets... The first few times I was arrested, teachers came up to her and expressed support. She was very little then, and at our school in Maryino (they go to a different school now), there was one minor episode when one of the teachers said something... But we have never seen anything involving aggression from teachers or students, thank God.

Another thing is not so much fame, but, for example, when I’m under physical surveillance, when my wife is under surveillance—I’m used to it, my wife is used to it. But the children are growing up. And when they start tailing the children, when people start following them around—of course I don’t like that. My children have a whole set of restrictions they’re forced to live with because of what I do.

For example?

Social media, for example. Until recently Dasha wasn’t allowed to have it. You always have to report where you are. You live in a family that’s a little paranoid all the time. In an ordinary family, if you disappear for two hours—well, you disappeared, no big deal. But here, if you disappear for two hours, people start looking for you, because God knows what might have happened to you these days. So yes, in that sense they are definitely forced to sacrifice part of their happy childhood simply because I do what I do.

We have to break again now for news and commercials. Then we’ll return to the Echo of Moscow studio.

Good evening once again! We’re down to the last 10 minutes of our broadcast with Alexei Navalny. So I’ll go straight back to the questions. Viktor Shklyarov asks: “Surely there are times when your hands drop, when you lose heart. What motivates you to get back up and keep going?”

I never lose heart...

Oh, come on.

Never...

You mean there are no times when you come home to your wife Yulia and say, “Yulia, I’m so tired!”?

No, I can come home and say, “What idiots these people are, I don’t know... the representatives of the democratic opposition are doing the wrong thing,” or complain about journalists, or complain about the liberal intelligentsia, or the Putin people, or someone else. But to lose heart and say that... no. I get joy from my work, and irritation from specific things. I like what I do, and I like that people support me for it.

You mentioned the democratic opposition...

Damn! I shouldn’t have done that—I opened the gates of hell.

Yes, exactly. But a short question: are any tactical or temporary alliances possible with Yabloko, the Party of Changes, or Open Russia—or is that impossible even in theory, for example in the upcoming elections in St. Petersburg?

With Yabloko, with Open Russia—absolutely. In that sense it’s a rational position. It’s based not on emotion but on the sociological research we do. So yes, with Yabloko we can, with Open Russia we can. With Sobchak’s party—absolutely not, because that kills everything immediately. Nothing good awaits anyone connected in any way with her party. So there can be no cooperation there. But overall, I’m not planning to invest much effort in that direction.

Okay. Maryam Levina asks: “Where should people draw strength from, and how do you see the end of this struggle?”

The end of the struggle: I see the arrival of the Beautiful Russia of the Future—a normal European country that could be living much richer and much better right now, because we have people, we have oil, and there is no reason for this poverty, lawlessness, and injustice.

And for yourself?

I will live in that Beautiful Russia and know that I made some contribution to bringing it into being.

So you don’t want to be in the Kremlin?

I want to be in the Kremlin in order to help bring about those changes too—the arrival of the Beautiful Russia of the Future. I want to serve one term, or two if I’m lucky. Get re-elected and then leave to do my own things. And you’ll come visit me, and we’ll talk about how great it was back in 2018... and whether we knew then... and things like that.

Yury Samodurov asks: “What do you think about the desirability and expediency of convening a Constituent Assembly, if only to decide whether the country needs another president after Putin?”

In some form—I don’t know what to call that body, a Constituent Assembly, a Constitutional Assembly—but it is needed, because the current Constitution is completely unfit. It keeps producing one authoritarian leader after another. In a certain sense, we need to refound our country and make fundamental changes so that people don’t keep emerging who seize power for 19 years. So yes, in some form that needs to be done.

Okay. My favorite question, from Erik Stepanyan: “Let him explain how he is better than Putin, and what guarantees there are that he won’t cling to power the way Putin does. ‘I swear on my mother’ doesn’t count.” You have a few minutes.

Well, Erik Stepanyan, I’m not going to tell you “I swear.” First of all, I’ll show you my campaign platform—presidential, mayoral, whatever. I stand for a system in which Erik Stepanyan will keep writing comments to me, and no one will touch him for it. I stand for separation of powers, for a judiciary independent of me. [inaudible] Even if something extremely irritating to me happens—for example, in the Beautiful Russia of the Future, Zolotov suddenly wins a lawsuit against me—I’ll say: well, that’s the court’s decision, because I won’t be able to influence it in any way. And that’s exactly why, if I want to run for a third term or an illegal second term, Erik Stepanyan will sue me, win, and I’ll be removed from the ballot.

Would you guarantee immunity for President Putin?

In the event of a peaceful transfer of power—yes.

I remember our interview in 2008, when you said a peaceful transfer of power was no longer possible.

I said that power would not change hands as a result of elections. I still believe that elections alone will not be the reason power changes in Russia. There will be some combination of events. In Russia... unfortunately, Putin has made sure that power will not change through elections, because there are no real elections, at least not at the top level.

And?... So it won’t change through... then how?

That’s a rather pointless conversation—speculating. I do my work so that this power changes. And if, as a result of some events, Putin leaves without violence, without soldiers firing on the people, and without anything like that, then he personally and his family would need to be granted immunity, painful as that decision would be for everyone. But we must make decisions not because, say, I personally feel resentment toward him because he jailed my brother or imprisoned people close to me, but because it would be better for 145 million people.

Dmitry Vitushkin asks: “It would be very interesting to know what Navalny thinks of the regionalists’ program: transforming all federal subjects of the Russian Federation into republics, dissolving all federal government bodies, and concluding a new federal treaty on a voluntary basis?”

That is an absolutely utopian idea. Is Smolensk Region supposed to conclude a new federal treaty with Kaluga Region? Russia needs a federation, federal arrangements are necessary. What’s needed even more is local self-government. There should be real power in the cities. But let’s be honest: all this federalism in Russia is a completely invented construct. Most of the time we mean regions. So what—Smolensk Region is an independent state? Or Kaluga? Or Arkhangelsk? There are republics. Everything else is some artificial, strange construct, just random lines on a map.

What we need is real federalism, not utopia. Real powers on the ground, where people actually live, so that in the course of normal life in Novosibirsk, people there can make decisions about their own lives—tax, financial, legislative decisions. But not some scheme where we dissolve the federal authorities and start founding the country all over again—no, that’s nonsense.

But right now there is de facto no federalism at all. The country is unitary.

That’s not because there isn’t some proper treaty between Primorsky Krai and Kaliningrad Region. It doesn’t exist because the government and Putin’s group specifically took all the money and all the powers away from the regions. And the Committee of Civil Initiatives was mentioned here. Alexei Leonidovich Kudrin did a lot to make that happen. They adopted a tax and financial system under which the regions have no money at all and control nothing. No money—no powers. That’s it.

Another question: “How did he manage to fly a drone over Medvedev’s residence? Isn’t the airspace over such residences protected?”

It is protected. So what? We get around security. But you can launch a drone almost anywhere. It’s small, it’s fast, it flies... These are the kinds of questions people ask when they don’t do political investigations. I understand the listeners. Irina doesn’t know much about drones. But if she understood them a little better, she’d realize there’s no technical problem here at all.

So nobody shoots drones down?

They do. But you can launch one over Medvedev’s residence. Of course, after our investigations it has become harder to do now. But we also showed that Mikoyan dacha, right next to Novo-Ogaryovo. And right fence-to-fence with it is an FSO section. I’m not going to explain how we do it, but I assure you that we can. We do it, but we do nothing that would threaten real security. I’m not going to say too much about it, so that crazy people who might want to attach explosives to a drone don’t get any stupid ideas.

People are asking you to define what ideology you support. Well, obviously you’re not a communist. There are social democrats, conservatives...

In modern Russia, that is an entirely hypothetical and pointless exercise. Because if you’re in America, you can say you’re a progressive, or a right-wing conservative, or a left-wing conservative. In Russia, that doesn’t exist. Nobody here understands who is left and who is right. Our communists are called left-wing, even though in essence they are right-wing conservatives. Because in Russia, I’m just normal. I’m for a normal path of development for the country, for separation of powers, for a market economy, for freedom of speech. In practice, everything here is divided into normal people and lunatics. I’m trying to lead the faction of the normal people.

Do you have some image of an ideal politician, or a politician whose experience you find important?

I don’t have any role model. There have been and are many wonderful politicians in Europe, and in Canada now too—Trudeau, the prime minister, is remarkable. I look at all of them. Some of their experience is applicable, some isn’t. But I simply do what it is possible to do in my country right now.

Thank you very much! That was Alexei Navalny. A wonderful ending. With that, we conclude our hour-and-a-half broadcast—and then some. I thank all of you for sending your excellent questions, and I thank Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny for answering them. Thank you, all the best, goodbye!