An episode from the documentary The Term. Alexei Navalny on the search of the ACF office: “They found 570 rubles”
This excerpt from the documentary project The Term captures Alexei in June 2012, at the height of a sweeping 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” nothing but employees’ work record books and a fortune of 570 rubles. The video vividly conveys the absurdity of the authorities’ early attempts at pressure: they tried to intimidate the team with pointless searches, but only ended up revealing their own confusion.
Text version
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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.