The main thing is to hate one another.

— Who came up with the debates, and why? NAVALNY: It’s impossible to remember now. Last summer, Kazakov, Masha Gaidar, and I got together and talked about what we could come up with to draw young people’s attention to political issues. Someone suggested holding political debates. I asked Kazakov to write up what that should look like. Naturally, he forgot, I forgot too, and then this winter things got really dull, and we remembered the debates. We put them on. We liked it. KAZAKOV: And the secret goal was simply entertainment. We’re the ones who were bored, not anyone else.

— Was relying on LiveJournal users built into the concept of the debates from the start? NAVALNY: That sort of happened by default too. LiveJournal was a scene that included plenty of young politicians, journalists, and simply people interested in coming to debates. Some people see that as a problem. Maybe it is. We tried to go beyond the LiveJournal crowd by putting up notices at universities, but if we can’t break out of those boundaries, we don’t see it as a big deal.

— And was Ksenia Sobchak’s failure to show up for the debate with Sergei Shargunov still a setback? NAVALNY: In the first few minutes after it became clear that Ksyusha wasn’t coming, we thought it really was a major flop, a failure, basically the end of the world. But when it turned out that those debates got three times more feedback than usual, and almost no one blamed what happened on the organizers, it became clear to us that it wasn’t so terrible. KAZAKOV: Every time, we’re afraid that this next debate will be the one where the losing streak begins. Obviously, the project can’t keep rising forever; sooner or later there’ll be a downturn. But so far, there hasn’t been one. NAVALNY: The downturn will come when we get tired of it ourselves. KAZAKOV: In other words, not anytime soon.

NAVALNY: A lot of people have long predicted that this format would become overused. And now there really is a fashion for debates in exactly the format we came up with—meaning with a jury and audience voting. Everyone and anyone is putting on debates. There are even going to be debates at the *Moskovsky Komsomolets* festival, and their press release literally includes our quotes word for word. That doesn’t upset us—let them copy it. KAZAKOV: Someone in Kyiv wants to hold debates, in St. Petersburg too... They’ve already held debates in Perm, though it didn’t really work out—what they had was more of a round table than a scene. People take part in what we do, and we’re happy about that.

— Do you see yourselves at the forefront of this process people talk so much about: politics moving off the streets and squares into clubs and discussion venues? NAVALNY: That’s a big myth. Politics can’t be leaving the streets and squares, because it was never really there in the first place. It’s just that after the 2003 elections, the parties that failed to make it into power were so demoralized—and they still haven’t really recovered—that even a picket of ten people was treated as “politics taking to the streets.” — Organizing debates costs money. Whose money is it, what kind of sums are we talking about, and who funds it? NAVALNY: Up to now, I’ve covered all the costs myself. We organized the most recent debates with help from Masha Gaidar. There’s no secret about what it costs. Over the entire life of the project, I’ve spent $4,000. The biggest expense is club rental, which usually comes to about $1,000. Though that problem seems to be going away now: before, we used to run around asking people to give us a venue, but now clubs approach us themselves and ask us to hold debates there for free. Recently, someone from Gogol called and suggested holding debates in their inner courtyard. But we’re afraid—if it rains, that’ll be worse than Ksenia Sobchak’s turnout.

— It would probably be worth holding one of the next debates outdoors after all. The main problem is that there are too many people, too little space, and it gets unbearably stuffy. Everyone complains about it.

KAZAKOV: That’s why we meet in different clubs. Anyone who’s been to Bilingua knows it’s stuffy there, but whether it’s stuffy at the Club on Brestskaya—they don’t know, so they come there next time. NAVALNY: Really, stuffiness and cramped conditions are signs of a good scene. If there are lots of people, if people aren’t leaving, that means they’re enjoying themselves and they’re interested. But yes—sure, it gets stuffy. It happens.

— What’s the hardest part of organizing the debates? KAZAKOV: The hardest part is bringing people together in such a way that, at the last minute, no one announces that they hate their opponent or the person sitting next to them on the jury and refuse to be in the same room. That happened, for example, with Irina Khakamada, whom we wanted to pair with Alexander Khinshtein, but she flatly refused to debate him. At the last debates, I first invited Olya TT onto the jury, then Anatoly Malakov, and then it turned out that Olya and Anatoly had long been unable to stand each other. Thank God, they both turned out to be reasonable people and sat at the same table without any problem.

— Almost every time, the outcome of the debates seems more or less clear in advance—there’s a favorite and there’s a punching bag. Why is it all so straightforward? It kills the suspense. NAVALNY: I completely disagree with that. It actually seems to me that liberals are very easy to identify, and the fact that they’ve won our debates by a landslide several times is very surprising to me. Take any representative of “youth politics,” for example—you can destroy them with a single question: what exactly do you do? No one will answer. No one! Not Yashin, not Shargunov, no one. Why nobody asks that question, I don’t understand. I, for one, was sure Chadayev would beat Khakamada. But it turned out to be exactly the opposite.

KAZAKOV: Chadayev was just showing off too much. NAVALNY: He’s always showing off. By the way, after those debates Khakamada was so happy, it was as if she’d won a presidential election. In general, it feels good to win in our debates. KAZAKOV: And it feels good to take part too. Everyone leaves satisfied—the participants and the jury alike. Losing isn’t all that upsetting. It’s politics.

— Who else can we expect to see at the debates? Which participants do you dream about? NAVALNY: I dream of Vladislav Surkov agreeing to take part. Though I doubt he’d actually come to us. Unless in disguise. Something more realistic: we want Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Leontyev. Though for some reason Leontyev only wants to argue with Alfred Koch, and Koch doesn’t want to debate anyone. Kasparov, in turn, is very capricious, and besides, none of us has direct access to him—in my opinion, nobody really does—and Kasparov’s enormous entourage is even more capricious than he is. Sergei Dorenko has agreed to debate—it doesn’t matter with whom. Vasily Shandybin is ready too. Alexei Venediktov called himself and asked to be included; he wants to argue. Still, vivid participants alone aren’t enough for vivid debates. Chadayev’s debate with Khakamada, for example, wasn’t especially successful despite how colorful both sides were. One audience member wrote that their argument resembled sex between lesbians and a gay man—they’re lying in bed, panting, but nobody’s getting any pleasure.

KAZAKOV: The main thing is for the opponents to genuinely hate each other. Like Yashin and *Nashi* (a pro-Kremlin youth movement), or like Kashin and Shenderovich. Then it’ll be interesting.

— Do you have any sense of how long the debates will continue, how long they’ll stay fashionable? NAVALNY: It’s hard to say about fashion, but the debates will go on until we ourselves get tired of them. KAZAKOV: Until we fill Luzhniki (Moscow’s largest stadium complex).

Maria Gaidar was the only one of the debate organizers who at one point had to become a participant herself on the club stage. During the most recent debates, when Ksenia Sobchak unexpectedly failed to show up to argue with Sergei Shargunov, Gaidar had to step in and speak alongside the other young politicians. — It was very difficult. Not only had I, like everyone else, not planned to speak and not prepared for it, but during the debate I caught myself several times thinking not about what I was saying or how I looked to the audience, but about whether people were bored, whether the lighting was good, whether the banners were hanging properly. In general, though, I personally love arguing and debating. That, in essence, is a politician’s job—to communicate a point of view to people. Argument is the best format for stating your position vividly.

I think the debate format will continue to be successful—new topics and new names will keep emerging, and that’s great, because when there is no public discussion, for example on television, platforms for argument and debate arise on their own. The fact that our format is already being actively copied only confirms that. It seems to me that our debates would look quite good on television—of course, with the right lighting, sound, and set design. They would even be better than Vladimir Solovyov’s show, because unlike his program, we have a distinctive audience that is already fired up from the start, giving the debates extra energy.