“Full Albats” broadcast, January 8, 2018

Good evening. You’re listening to Echo of Moscow radio. I’m Yevgenia Albats, and as always I’m opening our program—the first one this year—devoted to politics, to the political events of the week, and to those events that will affect politics in the coming weeks and months. My apologies for the tautology. Happy New Year to all of you. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season, and I wish you happiness. And I wish the same to my guest, Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny. Alexei, hello.

Hi, hello, Zhenya. Thank you very much. And the same to you.

Thank you. 2017 was your year, of course. Your presidential campaign was a personal success for you. It was also a success for the country, where public politics returned thanks to you. Congratulations on that.

You see how interesting this gets right away. You say it was my year, a big success. And here I am, sitting here as an unregistered candidate. And still I keep hearing people call it a success. That says a lot about how rotten politics is in our country. But it also says that you shouldn’t give up and you should keep doing what you do. That’s all.

Did you really expect to be registered?

That was our openly declared goal. We understood perfectly well that they didn’t want to let me run. That became clear back in 2012, when they started opening criminal cases against me and then immediately passed a law that everyone wrote was “Navalny’s law,” under which convicted people can’t run for office. But we openly said that we would try to build political pressure strong enough to force them to let me run, as happened in the Moscow election in 2013. Maybe we built too much pressure—they saw it, they were horrified by the scale of our campaign, by the number of volunteers. The fact that this campaign was real, not virtual, worked against us—they finally decided it was too scary to let us into the election.

What happens to the campaign offices now? They’re in 84 cities, I think. Or 81 cities in Russia.

In 84 cities, including the so-called people’s offices, which we don’t fund and which people open themselves. They’ll continue working in the mode of a voter strike. The main thing we created over this year—more than a year—is a real political structure of influence. It’s not exactly a party, more like a proto-party, a movement; in practice it’s a large opposition movement, the biggest and the only one created in recent years. So of course we don’t want to lose it, and we’ll keep engaging in all kinds of politics. But right now our main task is organizing a voter strike—that is, an active boycott and a call for people not to go to these elections. And at the same time to deploy more observers than anyone has ever deployed before.

The Presidium of the Supreme Court rejected your lawyers’ appeal against the Central Election Commission’s refusal to register you as a presidential candidate. Is that the end of it for you, or do you think there’s still a chance to force the issue?

I didn’t go to a single one of those hearings. When the appeal happened, I didn’t even follow it. Our lawyers did excellent work, the best work they could possibly do. The law, justice, fairness—they’re all on our side. But I understood perfectly well what this judicial system is. I mean, these are the same people who overturned my Kirovles verdict following a ruling by the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) and then sent it back for retrial. These are the people who in Soviet times jailed people for anti-Soviet activity, and now they jail people who speak out against our obscurantism. So I have absolutely no illusions about either the Supreme Court or the Constitutional Court. We do all this because truth is on our side and, as I said, the law is on our side. And we’ll keep doing it. But we have no illusions. We’ve entered the voter-strike phase. We are going to boycott the election. That is our one and only strategy.

You announced that on January 28, 2018, there would be a strike. What exactly will that be?

It will be a public action. A strike is really a process, from the moment the Central Election Commission made the decision that…

I’d say—sorry to interrupt you—that a strike movement is a process. But a strike itself is still some kind of one-time act, isn’t it?

A strike is a one-time act. You’re at a factory, they don’t pay your wages, and you say: I’m not going to work anymore. Same thing here. We are citizens of Russia, and they’re forcing us or persuading us to go vote. But they aren’t giving us political competition, there’s no one for us to vote for. So we say: we won’t go to the election. And that becomes a process in which we discuss it, argue with our opponents—or strikebreakers—who say no, you still have to go. Or: we’ll go instead of you. So yes, it’s a process, a difficult political process, and we’ll take part in it. And specifically on January 28, let me once again use this opportunity to call on everyone to take part in this action. We’ll call on people to come out into the streets and, in the streets as well, show their attitude toward these elections, which are not elections. They are “elections” in quotation marks. And to demand real elections. Because a situation in which there have been no real elections for 18 years has led not only to political problems but economic ones too. People are getting poorer.

In 2011, when you came out with the slogan “vote for any party except the party of crooks and thieves,” it was clear—completely clear to everyone—how to act. I remember that I myself voted for Mironov’s A Just Russia, and afterward I was asked ten times: was that really right, look who this Mironov is. And I told them: look at Dmitry Gudkov, at Gudkov senior, at Ilya Ponomaryov, who were the only force of resistance in the first year of that State Duma’s existence. Now, frankly, I don’t see what the concrete action is. People still need to understand: one, two, three. So tell me: one, two, three.

In 2011 our strategy was clear. In fact, it didn’t matter who you voted for—the important thing was that you voted against United Russia. There’s no need to justify yourself by saying you voted for the Communists, for A Just Russia, or for Yabloko. It didn’t matter. You voted against United Russia in order to reduce United Russia’s control over the vote enough that those pitiful, feeble parties could revive and oppose United Russia in the State Duma. And that’s what happened. Only thanks to falsification was the Kremlin able to preserve United Russia’s majority in the Duma. Those falsifications then led to the protests of 2011–2012. So it was the right strategy. But we have to understand that in all the years since, the Kremlin has been preparing to fight that strategy, because with that strategy we were beating them. That’s exactly why the most disgusting laws, for example, were introduced by the Communists and A Just Russia. That’s why people made the criticisms you just mentioned. In other words, they arranged things so that you no longer had a second-choice candidate or party. So now trying to think in terms of the 2011 strategy is simply pointless. Here and now we have a specific political situation in which the Kremlin has programmed the election so that Putin is guaranteed to get 73 to 76 percent. That’s my forecast. And nothing can happen in this election to prevent that. So the best strategy now is: first, don’t go to the election; second, urge everyone not to go; third, lower turnout by every possible means; fourth, organize monitoring so they can’t falsify turnout. That’s exactly why the Kremlin is now working so frantically on turnout. You saw the video Roizman released just the other day, didn’t you?

Of course I did. Leonid Volkov tweeted it.

And rightly so. After all, the mayor of Russia’s fourth-largest city is saying very clearly how they’re going to drag up turnout. We now have quite a lot of insider information and documents, and I’m sure all the documents will soon be published showing how, through methods like door-to-door canvassing, voting outside polling stations, absentee certificates, the Kremlin will frantically try to pull up turnout. Because they understand perfectly well that nobody wants to go vote. And they need to stage legitimacy. And yes—just to anticipate your next question—what level of turnout would deprive the authorities of legitimacy? There is no answer to that question. Because legitimacy isn’t measured in percentages, it’s measured in feelings. Right now a man is walking down New Arbat and saying to himself: well, a lot of people voted for Putin, I still don’t like him, but let him stay. And tomorrow he’ll be walking and saying: no, he can’t stay there, it’s all fake. That’s the moment legitimacy collapses. But it can’t be measured in percentages. So right now we simply have to act—sorry for the banality—according to conscience. And if these elections are shameless and indecent, then you must not go, and you must actively persuade everyone else not to go either.

Electoral behavior theory says that when a voter chooses whom to vote for, they are more likely to vote for someone who can actually reach the goal. What you’re offering voters is something irrational. You understand that.

No, Zhenya, I’d say you’re contradicting yourself. Right: when a voter decides whom to support, they want to vote for someone who can reach the goal, or at least declares that they are trying to reach it. But everyone except Putin has said publicly, many times, that actually they do not want to be president, they understand their own insignificance, they will lose, and they don’t want to do anything. They’re running in order to—and then comes some set of excuses—say some important words, or get something, or whatever. So why should a voter participate in that? What happens is that we start persuading ourselves and trying to find some pretext, some rational explanation, some mathematical formula for a simple political fact: this is not an election, and the result will be 73–76 in any case. I can tell you right now how this election will end.

Go ahead.

I will.

We’ve written it down. Shall we bet on something?

We’ll bet when you invite me back next time. We’ll conduct our first poll in January, and then I’ll give you a substantiated forecast. For now, my forecast is: first place, Putin—73 to 86; second place, Zhirinovsky—10 to 13; third place, Grudinin—12 to 10; everyone else—between 2.5 and 1 percent. Yavlinsky, Sobchak, and Titov.

So you reject the Levada forecast? Gudkov, the head of Levada, was on my program, and their forecast for Sobchak was around 7 percent.

That’s just ridiculous. I mean, come on—Prokhorov got 7 percent in 2012, when there was enthusiasm, when you went to the polls and voted for Prokhorov. People didn’t talk about him the way they talked about A Just Russia. I went to the polls, we all said, urged people: let’s go vote. And since then, first of all, it became obvious how we were deceived with this Prokhorov business—what nonsense it all was. But the country is different now, the regime is different. Of course the candidates now—except for Zhirinovsky and Grudinin—have absolutely no chance of getting anything above 5 percent.

Pavel Grudinin is the only one you’ve spoken positively about lately. At least, I watched your Thursday program on the Navalny2018 channel…

On the Navalny Live channel. Navalny at 20:18.

Sorry. You spoke about Grudinin quite warmly. Though he, by contrast, has spoken rather sharply about you…

He’s not allowed to anymore. That’s an interesting fact too. Before his nomination, when he was asked about me—which wasn’t often—he’d say, I don’t know him personally, I know a little about what he does, but he always spoke sympathetically. Now he’s not allowed to, so he’s stopped speaking sympathetically. That’s pretty telling. But I can say that his recent public appearances before his nomination struck me as fairly appealing. He was really speaking blunt truths, as they say. His biography overall, of course—he was a United Russia deputy for 12 years. But at least he looks like a living person. Still, unfortunately, it doesn’t look like he’s actually running a campaign. Because if he were, he might be able to compete for second place. As it is, I’m afraid he’ll even lose to Zhirinovsky. We actually want to conduct a separate poll on whether people even know that it’s not Zyuganov who’s running, but Grudinin. My assumption is that to this day nobody knows. He’s simply doing nothing. What date is it now? The 8th. And our plan had been that if I were registered, then starting on the 1st I’d go full speed—we even calculated whether we could afford a plane so I could fly around and hold two rallies in every city. Because this is your moment.

What do you mean, whether you could afford a plane?

We wanted to know whether we’d have enough money to charter one. Because flying on regular commercial flights…

Right, with white leather seats.

No, we couldn’t even afford it without seats. So we dropped it…

Chubais and the 2003 campaign.

But if you want to campaign in a country this size, you need a plane. We couldn’t manage it, so we flew everywhere on regular flights. But that’s not the point. One way or another, starting January 2 I would have gone into a mode of speaking twice in every city. Endless rallies, because this is your chance. Until the 15th, everyone is sitting at home. Catch them while they’re there. Collect signatures, campaign, drag them to rallies. They’ve got nothing else to do. Does it look like any of the candidates are doing that—Grudinin, for example? No, it doesn’t. That tells you what kind of percentages they can hope for if they’re not even taking the most basic steps.

Sobchak is actually going door to door collecting signatures, I think in Samara.

A candidate shouldn’t be going door to door. We recently watched how a wonderful, highly competitive presidential campaign in the United States worked—where the outsider actually became president. They held meetings with voters, they held rallies. Big rallies. And you know, one reason people say Hillary Clinton didn’t become president is that she didn’t hold enough meetings in Wisconsin. She writes that in her book.

In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Philadelphia.

Exactly. So…

But above all in the Midwest.

It’s the candidate’s job to visit cities intensively and hold big—or at least fairly big—meetings, depending on what they can manage. Not go door to door just to get photographed somewhere. That also has to be done, but in between the big meetings. Otherwise there won’t be any real campaigning. And the most important thing—since we started talking about Grudinin, toward whom I still feel some sympathy—is that he isn’t a real candidate. Besides the fact that he also…

Why do you feel sympathy for him? I watched him on Solovyov’s show, and he came across as an absolutely left-wing populist.

Right now he…

The only thing that might bring you together is the slogan “I’ll jail them all”…

I haven’t heard him on Solovyov’s show, so I can’t comment on his latest public appearances. But I listened to him at all those forums—the Moscow Economic Forum. There it was him, Potapenko, and several other vivid figures, including the farmer Melnichenko.

Yes, he was saying there are no real food products anymore, that everything is made from palm oil.

They were quite good, and Grudinin in particular spoke very well in defense of business, small business—that was quite interesting. He was one of the entrepreneurs who wasn’t afraid to criticize the authorities, though he avoided criticizing Putin personally. Still, based on the fact that he did engage in some political activity in recent years and did express views, I do feel some sympathy for him. But why are none of them real candidates now? If you want votes, you have to criticize Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Because his power in Russia is a personalist regime—did I pronounce that right?—that he established. If you want percentages, you have to bite those percentages off him. That’s the only way even in theory to aim for a runoff, for double-digit support, for major backing. It’s not about trying to mobilize someone on Facebook or through Solovyov’s show. You have to—excuse the expression—go after Putin hard so that voters peel away from him and come to you. But not one of them is doing that. That was the main condition for their being allowed to run. So the campaign is fake, and going to these elections is shameful.

The only concrete action you’re proposing is observers.

There you go again—what do you mean, the only action I’m proposing? I’m proposing a boycott of the election.

I’m one of the slow ones, Alexei Anatolyevich.

Let me explain. Fine. Since you say you’re one of the slow ones—though I know you’re not, but since you’re pretending to be, excuse me, slow—I’ll explain. Compared with all the other candidates, who have done absolutely nothing and did absolutely nothing over the past year, I’m proposing a boycott, active campaigning, putting leaflets up in apartment buildings, printing newspapers, and running this campaign—organizational work so people don’t go to the polls. We’re going to organize not 20, not 30, not 1,000, not 5,000 observers, and not only in major cities the way everyone else does. We’re going to do it across the whole country, with tens of thousands of people. That is a gigantic organizational effort.

On March 18, 2018—those observers will all have to be registered. That’s not exactly simple.

Of course. Logistically it’s an incredibly difficult task. In reality, no matter what anyone says, no one has ever fielded more than 20,000 real observers. Never, no one. The Communists claim, “We covered 90,000 polling stations,” but we know how that works. They just hand over papers to the local administrations, and the administrations put teachers there, United Russia people, whoever. We want to place real, genuine observers, including in places where they’ve never existed before—in the Volga region, even in the North Caucasus, including Dagestan in particular. It’s an astonishingly difficult task. Astonishingly expensive. We understand that the Kremlin and the wonderful Ella Pamfilova will resist this with all their might. But we’re going to do it. So when you say we’re only proposing monitoring—no, we’re doing all the work for all the candidates. And for the entire political system.

I’m glad you used the word “we,” because in your interview with The New Times I kept reading “I, I, I.” So you’re not alone after all, Alyosha. You really…

It seems to me maybe your correspondents changed “we” to “I.” I say both “I” and “we,” but of course now, especially in the voter-strike phase, it’s “we.” It’s the people who have been thrown out of the political system. I’m just one of those publicly representing their interests. I come to Echo of Moscow on their behalf and speak here. But of course none of this—our whole campaign—would be possible without the people doing the work all over the country, in the overwhelming majority of cases, 99.9 percent of the time, completely free of charge.

Do you have any sense of the sociology of the people who make up your volunteers, those who were ready to sign for you, those who work in the campaign offices?

Educated residents of large cities who have access to the internet.

And age?

Most often 25 to 34—that’s the core—but there are also quite a lot of older people. It’s hard to count all this because many of these people aren’t registered in any databases at all. We have 200,000 people registered as volunteers. And now that we have a little more time, we’ll conduct a detailed study of who they are. It’s interesting to understand: are they center-left, center-right?

Very interesting.

What are their views on different areas of life besides Putin and corruption? We’ll do all that and understand them better. But for now…

Somewhere you said that Sobchak is a classic representative of expensive, successful, overfed Moscow, whereas you are the candidate of the country. That after traveling around the cities, you now understand much better…

I didn’t say it like that, but you’ve formulated it well.

So tell me: how are the people you met across Russia—at your rallies, in your offices, and so on—different from that overfed Moscow?

First of all, I didn’t say “overfed Moscow,” and there is no such thing as…

That’s my interpretation.

…there is no such thing as overfed Moscow. This is important. I understood that before, too. After all, I’m from the outskirts of Moscow, and in that sense I certainly never belonged to any elite or Moscow bohemia. So I always understood that wasn’t true. And now it’s even less true. Moscow, despite the fact that all the money is concentrated here, is full of people living paycheck to paycheck. Renting apartments with their last money and not having enough for anything else. City Hall tells us the average salary in Moscow is 60,000 or 80,000 rubles, but that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Not in the slightest.

And your figures?

We’d be more likely to say 35,000 to 40,000 rubles.

And how do you know that?

Through the same opinion polls we conduct. But I’m not claiming I can give you a representative figure right now. What we do know for certain about the regions is that they differ from Moscow in that, first of all, they’re much poorer. Rosstat gives its average salary figures based effectively on 38 percent of the population—employees of the biggest corporations and public-sector workers, whose salaries are easy to count. Everyone else is hidden from them to one degree or another. And their salaries are much lower. I know for a fact: you go to a region where the official average salary is 31,000 rubles, you start asking people, and they’ll tell you 22,000, 20,000, 19,000, 14,000, 15,000. So the regions, unlike Moscow—even the biggest cities like St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk—are defined first by poverty, and second by hopelessness. There are no prospects. In Moscow there are still some prospects. You meet people earning good salaries—100,000 rubles. You understand that maybe, if you try hard enough, you can find a job like that, if you’re young and active enough. In the regions that doesn’t exist. No matter how hard you try, no matter how smart, educated, and hardworking you are—ready to work three jobs at once—your ceiling will be 45,000 to 60,000 rubles, and that’s it. No prospects at all. That’s the most important thing about the country and about our election campaign. Because we were talking precisely to those people, and relying on those people, who realized that the lack of economic prospects in their lives is connected to this disgusting, hopeless political regime.

Yeltsin’s electorate, when he entered big politics in the late 1980s, had a very female face. Women loved him. They desired him. When you look out at the crowd standing before you in cities, what kind of faces do you see? Young, male…

Women do like us, but not quite as much. The research we’re doing—as I said, we’ll do it in more detail—but for now the statistics the internet gives us, the traffic figures, show that we do have certain problems with the female audience, simply because the channels we use to deliver our message and information are very skewed toward…

Alexei, sorry, I don’t want us to get cut off. News and ads on Echo.

This is Echo of Moscow. Yevgenia Albats at the microphone. In the Echo of Moscow studio is Alexei Navalny. Alexei, I interrupted you when you were talking about the demographics of the people standing in front of you. You were saying that the female component…

There are fewer women. Because in terms of outreach methods, we rely primarily on YouTube, and there’s generally more of a male audience there. I’ve spoken with various channel owners and authors, including non-political ones, and there’s a male skew in the audience. That has an effect. But what’s also very encouraging is that we saw the situation changing over the course of the year. I started—my last tour lasted from September 15 until the final days before registration—and you could really see that the female audience was growing, and there were also many more older people. That’s great. It’s working really well.

I was going to ask you this at the end, but since we’re already talking about your channels: you’re building television, that’s completely obvious. Are you planning to do that professionally after March 18—to create some kind of TV holding company on YouTube?

I don’t want to do that, and I would never do it in my life if…

Meaning?

If there were other channels. But where else can I hear news about myself now? If we’d been discussing this three years ago, we could have named 20 media outlets that might report on the ACF’s latest investigation. A year ago it would already have been 10. Now you can count them on one hand. And among them, in terms of major outlets with an immediate reach of 100,000 people, there’s only Echo of Moscow, where I am right now. So the information space around us has narrowed, and that’s why we were forced to create all these channels. I record videos, which I’m not especially good at. We’re constantly experimenting, and our experiments aren’t always successful. But I’m tremendously grateful to the people on YouTube who are watching us right now and supporting all our experiments. We’re certainly not going to build some kind of holding company. That costs money.

But you are doing it—you have programs running.

Well, everything we do looks…

Dud is already the face of Alfa-Bank. We can assume we’re talking about a fee of a million dollars. So…

As you understand, it would be rather difficult for me to become the face of some bank, and I have no desire to. Starting this year, we’ll cautiously begin experimenting with advertising on some programs. We don’t know how to do it, but we’re forced to.

Hire someone who does.

We will. Of course we will. 2018 will be the year when this direction of ours—creating different kinds of, I’m even afraid to call it television…

Communications.

Communications. We’ll be experimenting very actively. But you remember how at one point our experiment was stopped when FSB officers came and carried absolutely everything out of our office—every electronic device. And only thanks to the people who watch us did we raise the money and buy it all again. So we understand that they’ll most likely keep doing that. But we simply have no other choice. We’re forced to make these programs and all these things. We don’t know how to do it, we understand that it looks terribly clumsy and strange. But we do it.

You know, we’ve known each other for so long, Alyosha, that I remember when you and Masha Gaidar were doing debates at the Bilingua club…

That happened.

Then they were even going to invite you onto TV Center, and you were ready to go there…

They did invite me, but after the first pilot episode I was fired.

And Vladislav Surkov was categorically against it, they say. He immediately…

Which is precisely why I was fired.

You were seen as dangerous. So listen, the progress is enormous—from the Bilingua club to a million-subscriber YouTube channel.

You know the saying: necessity is the mother of invention. We have no money and no means of communication, so we’re inventive. We have to be.

You’re always playing poor. Judging by the investigations you do…

No, I’m not playing poor when it comes to investigations. We do them better than anyone else in the country, that’s absolutely certain. In fact, people criticize me for bragging too much about that. But our television product, our video product, our livestream channel—I’m very proud that we created it without being professionals. But frankly, there’s still plenty to improve.

I won’t argue. I want to ask you about the people around you. You now have two sort of spokespeople: Vladimir Milov and Sergei Aleksashenko, who constantly appear as your representatives. Sergei Aleksashenko more on economics, though not only that. And Vladimir Milov, I see, will even debate Maksim Katz on Echo about whether to boycott the election or not. Both of these remarkable people are undoubtedly talented, but they have reputational problems. One of a moral nature, the other connected to the GKO era (Russian short-term government bonds in the 1990s), offshore companies, [inaudible] if that means anything to you, and so on. You’re someone who is very exacting about how people earn their money and what they do. And you’ve destroyed more than one reputation, including political ones. Yet you choose as your spokespeople people against whom, at least online, one can find plenty of accusations. Explain your choice.

Zhenya, you understand that online you can read more about me than about anyone else. And in that sense I’m very proud that both Aleksashenko and Milov…

I don’t remember anyone ever writing about you that you tried to steal someone else’s wife.

That doesn’t interest me. Honestly, radio listeners won’t be interested in that story—you know it, I know it. Unfortunately we all know it. But that concerns wives, husbands, and whatever they do somewhere. I’m immensely proud that both Milov and Aleksashenko, who don’t get a kopeck from us and never have, nevertheless became actively involved in helping our campaign. Milov, in addition to that, traveled around the whole country…

So reputation doesn’t interest you.

Reputation interests me very much. And of course our movement cannot exist without reputation. But I believe Milov and Aleksashenko are excellent people one can work with. Everyone has a difficult character. Everyone has a long history of conflicts.

No, this isn’t about character. I’m talking only about reputation—what you could find on the internet. Since you really do make the best investigations in the country.

I read all the information on the internet, and I believe Milov and Aleksashenko are people we can and should work with. I value them highly and I’m very grateful to them. They are in fact top-level professionals and they do these things. Milov—good Lord, how many years did I argue with him? Read how he tore into me in the harshest terms during the mayoral campaign, for example…

I remember his antisemitic posts very well.

I don’t remember that. In any case, there are all kinds of histories in my relationships with these people. We are building communication with all normal people. And our relationships are equal across the board. They don’t owe me reports, and I can’t give them orders. But those two, and many others, are helping us sincerely, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who works with us. That’s life: different people, different relationships. So as of today, let me repeat and emphasize: I’m very proud that both of them are working with us.

I see. Understood. Now my second question. In your program—since it is your program, and it doesn’t really matter who wrote it—you propose a presidential-parliamentary republic as the form of government in the future beautiful Russia. Georgia tried that, and it ended badly. All it took was for Saakashvili to be replaced by Ivanishvili, and democracy shrank dramatically. Ukraine tried it too, and it ended badly twice over.

The United States tried it, and everything has been going splendidly for several hundred years.

No, the United States is not—you’re mistaken. The United States is not a presidential-parliamentary republic.

It is.

That’s not true. The United States is a presidential republic. A classic one. And by the way, we are not a super-presidential republic, as you say. Constitutionally, we copied the model of France’s Fifth Republic, where the president is not the head of the executive branch but the head of state.

That is a super-presidential republic. But, Zhenya, thank you for the question. It’s important. Practical political science doesn’t mean much here. Constitutionally we copied something from France’s Fifth Republic. In reality, we are—I don’t even know which Latin American example to compare it to—not a dictatorship anymore, but an autocracy. Belarus on paper is one thing, in practice quite another. The Soviet Constitution, as we know, was also very democratic on paper, and the Soviet criminal procedure code was very advanced too, copied from the best models. That doesn’t matter much. The main thing we say in the program is that the president’s powers must be cut back and redistributed toward parliament. And the guarantee that the whole system won’t later break down and that power won’t be usurped by a new president—an evil bad Navalny or someone else—must be the judicial system. Georgia failed because, unfortunately, judicial reform was not carried out, and control over the courts remained with the president. For the sake of supposedly good intentions—jailing corrupt officials, jailing bad traffic cops, and so on—they kept the judicial system for themselves. So when another president came in, he simply used that same judicial system to jail the previous власти. And that is crucial. A new president—Navalny, for example, if things go well—must voluntarily give up control over the judiciary. That would make reforms much harder. It would make practical work much harder, because oligarchs and various structures would begin influencing the courts behind the scenes. But you’ve given it up—you can’t call anyone. Even if you pick up the phone and call, they tell you to get lost on the other end. That’s the most important thing. So based on practical experience, on many conversations with different people—and there’s always debate, you disagree, someone else agrees—I believe Russia now needs a parliamentary-presidential republic with a very strong independent judiciary that will create the balance.

Ukraine. It also went down the path of a presidential-parliamentary republic. Let’s spell that out.

You sound just like Putin. You always want to drag Ukraine into our conversation.

For our readers, our listeners, let’s spell it out and say that a presidential-parliamentary republic is a republic in which there is a head of the executive branch and there is a legislature, a parliament, which can impeach the head of the executive branch, and so on. The clearest example is of course France, whose last French Revolution, as we know, was in 1830. It has gone through a long and remarkable path. But there is no other successful example like it. Ukraine tried to do this, and we can see how Poroshenko is now magnificently breaking the Rada over his knee.

And we can see the main reasons why it doesn’t work in Ukraine. One of the main reasons for the political failure of reforms in Russia, and of attempts to build democracy, is oligarchs. The fact that they control absolutely everything in Ukraine—in that sense they control an even larger share of the economy, and are even more corrupt, venal, and cynical than in Russia. Of course that is an extremely important factor that adds a very substantial shade to this abstract political science discussion we’re having.

It isn’t abstract. If you look at the 15 former Soviet republics, you’ll see that three republics—the former Baltic republics, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia—went with the parliamentary model, as did all of Europe except for one exception. And 12, including Russia, went down the path of the presidential republic, or a variant in which the president is head of state.

But they didn’t usurp power because they chose that path. They did it because they controlled the judiciary, they seized the media…

But that is the whole point of presidential power. The winner takes all.

That is exactly why, in the political section of our program, from the very beginning we emphasize that the president’s term and powers in general must be delegated away toward parliament.

Eight years would be enough for you to break everything, to jail Albats.

I wouldn’t be able to, and I have no desire to jail Albats. And if I suddenly wanted to…

What guarantees do I have? That you happen to like me?

…say, Zhenya, you dragged Ukraine into our conversation, and I wanted to jail you for that—I wouldn’t be able to. Because an honest court would acquit you, and I would be impeached for trying to jail an innocent person. That’s all. That’s how it should work. And that’s how it will work in a normal country.

I want to understand your views clearly. So you are a supporter of a presidential system after all…

A presidential-parliamentary one. I believe that at this stage of Russia’s development—we’re not discussing this abstractly, we’re discussing what to do the next day.

That’s what they said in Ukraine.

And now Saakashvili is running around the streets, as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin likes to say to me. Why are you so obsessed with Ukraine? There are many other examples. We’re talking about the concrete situation in Russia right now and how it should be solved. I’m saying it should start with radically reducing the president’s powers. But you don’t want to hear that. You’ve latched onto some piece of paper that says “presidential-parliamentary” or “parliamentary-presidential,” and all these pointless debates revolve around that.

Give me an example of a country…

I don’t want to give any examples. Because this is all abstract political science, Zhenya. Any example can be interpreted one way or the other. It’s all juggling geography and history textbooks. There’s no truth in that. I’m talking about the reality that objectively exists and how it should be changed for the better.

Okay. But if a rational voter reads programs—and you know that the goods you’re offering me, the voter…

Yevgenia Markovna…

I’m not buying it.

…When you invited me onto the program, I assumed there would be at least some level of personal safety for me here. But now you want me to die laughing. When you say that large numbers of voters read those sections of programs—nobody reads them. We write them, and our program is the best, but people are completely uninterested in these minimal distinctions and word games.

Okay. Bukarev Alex asks: “Alexei, unfortunately you were not allowed into the election, which was predictable. For that reason, for the first time I won’t go vote. What are you going to do next? Will you take part in other elections, for example for mayor or parliament, or prepare for 2024?”

Personally, I do not plan to run for mayor.

Why not, by the way?

Why would I do that? I want to use the remarkable political structure of influence we’ve created to force the authorities to reckon with us. Running from one election to another would simply be indecent toward voters. If I wanted to run for mayor, I should honestly say: guys, I’m running for mayor, I’m going there, I’m building some kind of system. That’s how it should work. But to pop up right before an election, the way things happen here, and say: oh, me too, take me, I can get 7 percent—what the hell for? I don’t want to do that. But I do believe we should take part in every election if they let us in. And if they don’t, then we should look for other options.

Alexei Venediktov suggested that you…

Ah, that Alexei Venediktov.

…in the mayoral election—well, he is the editor-in-chief here—that in the mayoral election you would support Ilya Yashin. Is that true? Do you think Ilya will run…

I think Ilya is doing absolutely tremendous work in Moscow right now, with Moscow voters. He’s not only meeting with people brilliantly and dealing with housing and utilities issues, pensioners’ benefits, and everything else—he’s really fighting. And he’s also doing amazing political things, like his recent festival when he went head-to-head with City Hall. But I haven’t discussed this with Yashin or with anyone else… I’m not even thinking about it. First of all, the election is still a long way off. I know I won’t be taking part in it. Everything else is secondary for me right now; I’m focused on the presidential election. But naturally I’ll support the candidate who is doing active work. I don’t want to support idlers or people who just make statements on Facebook. Yashin is working excellently. But as far as I understand, he doesn’t have such plans either. And I’d like everyone who wants to run to say so now, and to demonstrate through their work—not only to me, but to you and to everyone—that they deserve our support.

Yak007 asks: “When should we expect your film ‘He Is Not Your Vovan’? Haven’t you really dug up anything on the man who can’t learn your surname?”

That’s classified information. We’re constantly doing investigative work in different directions on different people. None of it is simple, and there can’t be any specific deadlines. And we never reveal any details of our upcoming investigations.

But you are working on such investigations.

Any investigation into major corruption in Russia is connected to Putin. Any one of them. Any film or anything about Rotenberg, Timchenko, Shamalov—it’s all about Putin.

Cherepovets asks: “How likely is the breakup of Russia along the lines of the Soviet Union? What could contribute to such a breakup? What would you do to unite the country ideologically and economically if you came to power?”

What Putin is doing now is certainly working toward the breakup of Russia. Taking all power away from the regions, squeezing everyone, driving everyone out—because when the pendulum swings back the other way, it will produce centrifugal tendencies. So yes, I really do believe Putin is working toward the country’s breakup, despite the fact that they are the ones who most loudly claim they’re supposedly holding together a country that is already falling apart. The economy—that’s what matters. No ideological foundation will unite our country. People need decent salaries if Russia is to be okay.

“Alexei, this is Makarov14 asking: do you have a clear plan for after March 18?”

I do have a clear plan for after March 18. After March 18, we will use every mechanism available to force the authorities to reckon with us. We will participate in elections and demand the right to participate. We will spread information, we will create new channels of communication, which we’ve already discussed. We are at least 30 to 40 percent of the residents of the biggest cities—people who have already realized that they’ve simply been thrown out of the political system. They’ve been told: guys, you are not supposed to be in these elections. You cannot nominate your own representatives. We will decide who your representatives are, and you can come and vote for them. Vote. All these people are us, and we will make sure they begin influencing the authorities in different ways—through elections, through information, through anything, leaflets if necessary. Politics has once again returned to its most primitive state. But maybe also its most honest one. Right now, meetings with voters and the distribution of newspapers and leaflets are the most important and central political processes.

But for you politics is a profession. What will happen to the Party of Progress?

We never stopped trying to register the Party of Progress. We haven’t abandoned those attempts, and we won’t. We believe we should have a party. It’s not the most comfortable form of political work for most people; as we know even from many opinion polls, parties are the most discredited institution of all. But it matters. And the question of participating in elections is tied to registering a party. Because people keep telling us: oh, go join PARNAS or go join Yabloko. And there you’re supposed to fall to your knees and kiss the ring, and then maybe we’ll let one person into your list. That’s unacceptable. And most importantly, it leads nowhere. So of course we’ll continue trying to register it. We’ll continue demanding registration for the Party of Progress.

On March 19, 2018, what will you say to your supporters?

I’ll give my supporters an assessment of my work and their work up to that point—whether we achieved anything or not. I’ll call on them to keep working. Because March 19 is not some super-date; it’s simply the technical date on which Putin’s reappointment will have taken place. He’ll get his 73 percent and keep waving those percentages in our faces. And on March 19 I’ll say: people, don’t believe that piece of paper—it’s fake. We will continue fighting to influence the political system. Because without our influence, nothing good will happen; without our influence, we will keep degrading and getting poorer.

There are all these predictions that after the inauguration the regime will become sharply harsher, since the leader is not getting any younger. What’s your forecast? Will things get worse?

Of course they’ll get worse. I don’t think something sudden will happen all at once. That’s the standard forecast of people who like making forecasts—that from such-and-such a moment…

You have a program on your channel called “Things Will Get Worse.” How much worse can they get?

There is such a program. So yes, I’m saying things will get worse. But that’s the logic of the regime. Everything keeps getting worse. The number of political prisoners is growing. Absurd criminal cases—we don’t even laugh at them anymore when someone is jailed for a like on VKontakte. It’s just routine news now; it appears every single day. So yes, the whole logic of this regime is that people will get poorer, corruption will grow, political prisoners will increase, repression will increase. Not in sudden leaps, but steadily. So yes, things will get worse. And that is exactly why we must fight.

That was Alexei Navalny. Thank you, and we’ll hear each other again in a week.