This excerpt from the documentary project The Term captures Alexei in June 2012, at the height of a large wave of searches targeting opposition leaders after the Bolotnaya Square protests (anti-government demonstrations in Moscow). With his characteristic irony, Alexei describes the results of the security forces’ raid on the ACF office: after considerable effort, investigators forced open the safe and “discovered” only employees’ work record books and a fortune of 570 rubles. The video vividly conveys the absurdity of the authorities’ first attempts at pressure, as they tried to intimidate the team with pointless searches but only ended up revealing their own confusion.
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You
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are getting ready again. Let me follow behind you
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.
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What? Let's go. Alright, yeah.
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Bye.
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Alright, take care.
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LifeNews is over there. Okay.
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Well, it's very colorful, of course.
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That mask is really funny, of course.
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No, on the operative officer.
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I think they look really funny,
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of course, the way they get into the car wearing that
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mask.
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Well, the last one has just ended,
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I hope the last search, which
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took place at the Anti-Corruption Foundation's
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office. They searched our safe, which
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they were unable to search yesterday. Seized from it
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were cash—no, not seized, cash was found
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in the amount of 570 rubles. They also found
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our employees' work record books
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and my tax return.
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After some brief discussion,
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the investigators decided that none of it was
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of any interest to them. So
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they inspected the safe and left. So far I have
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not been summoned for any more interrogations,
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searches, or other investigative
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actions. And it seems, as far as I
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understand, that we're done with the searches too.
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What happens next is unclear both to me and to
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the members of the investigative team, who,
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there are a great many of, and who are not aware at all
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of the overall strategy of the investigation.
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So that's basically it.
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At first they said that they would probably
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take the tax return.
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Well, somehow they consulted by phone
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with their superiors and decided that the tax
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return was of no interest to them.
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Alright, thank you very much.
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Hey, Dima. Well, that's it,
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finally. Honestly, I'm really
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sick of them—this is just such a
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pointless waste of time. Terrible.
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Now I'll put everything back in the safe.
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Do you think we shouldn't publish a photo of the safe? What? A photo of the safe
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shouldn't be published? Yeah, they found nothing there. 570
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rubles.
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They didn't seize it. Yeah
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No, they didn't seize it. They just found it.
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Your work record books are very suspicious
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indeed.
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By the way, they found
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a magazine.
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And they didn't seize that either? Well, it was empty.
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It was from the non-lethal pistol that they found at my
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home.
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That's all.