Alexei Navalny’s Interview with Sports.ru

All of them—footballers, hockey players—they all trail around with Putin like idiots.

That wasn't my heaviest. Here I'm just fat.

A role model for children.

Putin is close to senility.

I think that's incitement.

Now the stupid questions have started.

Sit there and keep quiet.

Alexei is in great shape.

How are your legs afterward?

Nothing hurts?

I'm not an experienced runner, of course.

I've only been training consistently for five months, and I'm basically an invalid.

Can you describe your impressions?

Because, for example, I can't even imagine it. The last time I ran was at school.

What were you feeling while you were running?

I hated running.

Your whole life?

It wasn't just that I didn't like it—I hated it.

I was good at short distances.

But at school,

and whenever it was more than 800 meters, I'd basically just take the failing grade.

I'd turn around and leave.

But then, kind of under pressure from people—really, pressure from the environment around me—

everyone started running, and they weren't all especially athletic—just nice, fit-looking people.

And looking at them, I started running too. But...

I still haven't come to love running.

My main running goal, really, is

to learn to enjoy running.

I'm moving toward that, but I'm still a long way off.

Usually during a timed race, I really, really hate it.

Everyone, by name.

Everyone who talked me into running—my coach and so on.

But somehow it came relatively easily to me.

The Moscow half marathon was relatively manageable for me.

Do you have any running goals—like a half marathon, a marathon, a triathlon?

Maybe? No? No.

My real main running goal is to learn

to enjoy running.

That's all.

I wanted to break

I had this romantic idea that after a few months of training

I'd be able to run 10 kilometers in under 50 minutes.

But that was too ambitious.

The goal was to come in under an hour.

And so now it turns out that

among this whole running crowd, I'm, roughly speaking, somewhere in the middle,

even though I've only been doing it for five months. Maybe it's not a great thing to say

about the running crowd as a whole, that people like

me are already somewhere in the middle of the pack.

But yes, I did make it.

How much weight have you lost over those five months of running?

I haven't lost any.

What do you mean? You...

What about those photos from November where you had a belly?

Well, right now I'm sitting here sucking in my stomach with the last of my strength.

So otherwise I'd be sitting here with a belly too.

I lose weight when I'm under arrest.

That's it.

The only chance to lose weight is when

they lock you up.

I can't recommend it to everyone, but still.

Because there are restrictions there,

you can eat less there, because there's no refrigerator for you to

open,

in the evening and eat everything that's in it.

I mean, not during house arrest.

On the contrary, under

house

arrest, when I was stuck at home, I ate terribly, because you have

all this wonderful, delicious food.

My house arrest conditions were such that I was forbidden

from taking any walks at all or having any contact with anyone.

What else was there to do?

Even though I specifically bought myself an elliptical machine, it just

ended up with all my clothes hanging on it, of course.

Mostly, I just ate.

But when they actually put you in a cell, then

there are restrictions, and there you can lose weight from running.

Well, no, I wouldn't say I lost weight.

And how much did you lose at most in a cell?

I don't know. Maybe about 7 kilograms.

But that also takes some effort, because the kinds of foods they allow into a cell

tend to be high in carbohydrates.

I mean, there are plenty of cookies in a cell.

There are loads of them, and you can live on them if you want.

But if you give up the cookies, you can lose weight. But

it's not like I'm setting myself some kind of

super-goal of specifically losing weight or getting into shape.

I like running as a mass-participation sport.

And how much do you weigh now?

What was your maximum weight?

I assume

that a photo is about to appear on screen showing your maximum weight from back then.

No, of course not.

Not here.

Here you're just showing that I'm fat.

That's me under house arrest, and here I'm just fat.

But I

weighed maybe 101 or 102 kilograms.

But I used to lift weights in my first years at university.

My maximum weight was 106 kilograms.

So only about 6 kilograms more than here—not 120, I think.

Here it looks like 120.

So yes, fat, obviously.

But do you agree that it's not a very good look for a public politician to appear like that?

It's not a very good look for anyone.

Of course I agree.

You said you worked out at university—you were going to the gym all the time.

I mean, I wasn't some kind of super-mega bodybuilder or anything.

But for two or three years—three, probably—I was going to the gym four times a week.

What was your max bench press?

143 kilograms. One time. Not 43 times.

So you really did have some... not bad numbers, actually?

Well, yes. I mean, I wasn't unique—especially at university.

Why do people go to the gym at university?

That was the whole spirit of the 1990s.

Well, girls like it.

Naturally, hanging over my desk—over my

bed—was a poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the movie Commando.

I mean, all those wonderful things that are familiar to anyone

my age, or even a bit younger.

What other kind of sport was there to do back then?

You go to the gym—great, your gym-bro friends are there.

And in general, you bulk up, then you walk around kind of like this, kind of

with your arms held wider than they need to be.

Wider than normal.

In this room we've got lawyers sitting around, whom we chased away

while we were recording the interview.

And right here there is

this thing that was bought especially for me because I was in a special detention center.

How do you get the hang of doing pull-ups?

And then I quit so I wouldn’t give up completely.

So I asked

some kind people to take this thing in.

There was nowhere else to put it. Could you at least demonstrate it a couple of times?

A couple of times, sure.

One will be enough.

And how many can you do like that?

Nine, ten.

If I really push myself.

Do push-ups in the morning, maybe work on your abs.

I do work on my abs, but push-ups—I can’t really do them, my shoulder hurts.

When I do push-ups.

We’ve got all sorts of people sitting here.

Really, absolutely everyone.

All kinds of people, really.

What do they all do?

And how many people work in the office overall?

It depends very heavily on what we’re doing.

If it’s an election campaign,

then we hire people, and the number grows.

Those are volunteers, after all.

There are volunteers here, and there are also people whom we simply

bring onto the staff, hire, because you have to

—to manage volunteers, you need more people working.

So right now, we probably have about 40 people working in total.

I heard about someone who took up judo not just in order

to fight, just to defend himself

from some bad guys, but to understand Putin’s logic, his ideology.

Have you ever had that thought?

No, I haven’t had that thought.

It seems to me

that I understand Putin’s logic and ideology quite well without any judo.

It’s just that

the man’s ideology is obsessed with money.

In reality, he’s an utterly cynical person.

There’s nothing new about it—most of our

oligarchs from the 1990s, officials from the 1990s, are people with the same

exact same logic, without any judo or really any sport at all.

Just maximum self-enrichment.

I love myself, and I don’t care about anyone else.

Have you ever tried playing hockey?

No, I haven’t. I never had the time or the place for it.

I spent my entire childhood in various military towns.

What does a sports club in a military town amount to?

Some captain guy shows up.

He sets up a boxing club.

I go to it, to that boxing club.

Then that captain gets transferred.

To another military town, and the boxing club shuts down.

All through my childhood, I was terribly jealous of kids who studied in big cities

and went to schools that looked like the one in the film The Adventures of Elektronik (a famous Soviet children’s movie).

They had all these clubs and activities, and the friends

of my parents who studied somewhere like Moscow—they went skiing

in the mountains or trained and went off to sports camps.

In most military towns, that kind of thing is simply unavailable.

We even made a video about hockey, about the Night Hockey

League and Putin’s friends.

Am I right that you hate the president so much

that you use any opportunity to go after him?

I don’t like the president.

I consider him a crook and a thief.

But in that particular video, I supported him—well, not supported him,

I didn’t directly accuse him.

I said that he’s gone senile. But.

Excuse me.

When you’re playing with stars

of hockey and you keep scoring 10 goals, eight goals, and everyone sees it.

And they laugh when the defenders peel away, when the opposing defenseman

changes his mind about defending at just the right moment, and the goalie simply lifts his pad

so your puck can go into the net on the other side.

The goalies there literally lift their leg on purpose to let the puck in.

Well, that’s absurd.

I mean, sure, it’s understood that he’s the boss, so you’re supposed to lose to him,

and it’ll please the boss.

But the boss himself ought to know there are limits.

It’s one thing when people lose to you by

two goals; it’s another when you arrange to score 10.

It just looks strange. It really is absurd.

That’s what I made the video about, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

The man likes playing hockey.

The Rotenbergs let him win.

If they want to go easy on him, let them.

There’s nothing wrong with him playing hockey; that’s great.

He’s over 60, he plays hockey, he’s in excellent physical shape,

he promotes a sporty, active lifestyle.

That’s wonderful. I have no issue with that.

My objection is to two things.

First, this whole Night Hockey League

gets an enormous amount of budget money spent on it, and we’re being lied to.

They tell us that some oligarchs are paying for it.

And the second thing is

that it’s broadcast to the whole country and turned into part of a personality cult.

Look, Putin scored 10 goals.

Come on, it’s genuinely ridiculous.

A role model for children.

A role model for children because Putin plays hockey—but also a role model for children that

a bunch of grown men suck up to Putin by letting his shots through.

That’s a bad example for children.

But they don’t understand that yet. They just see that the president is playing.

Of course children understand perfectly well.

They watch it—kids don’t watch television, by the way, where Putin is glorified.

Kids watch YouTube, where they show the funny parts of this match,

where the defenders run away from Putin in the opposite direction.

You mentioned budget money.

What do you mean?

The hockey league received

400,000,000 rubles (about 4 million USD) by government decree.

These specific

events in Sochi are paid for by the administration of Krasnodar

Krai (region), and so on and so forth.

It’s a giant black hole

into which a huge stream of state budget money flows.

And by the way, these oligarchs—

Potanin, who skates there, and the rest of them—

they don’t pay any significant

contributions at all.

It’s paid for by the state company Transneft.

And in that sense, what outrages me is that

a whole bunch of millionaires and billionaires

have literally set up

an entertainment for themselves.

It’s broadcast to the entire country, and I’m supposed to pay for it.

No—this is corruption, not the promotion of sport.

You wrote about the 400,000,000 rubles (about 4 million USD) that Medvedev allocated to the Night Hockey League.

From that video, one might think the money goes directly to his friends.

They bankroll Putin and pay for this whole banquet. That’s the entire system.

I understand that the Night Hockey League includes many different teams.

I was just reading the government decree,

and it says there that this money goes toward prize payments for the winners

of the All-Russian Hockey Festival, Champions League, in the 40-plus category.

And according to this decree, another 120 organizations will be provided with

equipment, open-air rinks will be built, and four hockey centers will be constructed.

Can you say what’s wrong with this money going toward the development of sports?

Even if it is for sports, still, no.

Sports for the 40-plus age group are wonderful; I’m in that age bracket myself.

But specifically here, what we mean is

Putin’s strange hobby.

And the fact that Putin is building some kind of incomprehensible pyramid around this hobby of his.

If we want to fund hockey or any other

sport, then let’s fund it properly.

We have a ministry specifically for that; there is a system.

A system for hockey and training.

A hockey training system that, in the Soviet Union, was actually built quite well.

Quite well, as you know yourself.

Let’s use that system.

But just as under

Yeltsin, everyone suddenly rushed to play

tennis, so under

Putin, everyone has now rushed to play

hockey—some Night Hockey League, obscure

officials, obscure state contractors out on the ice.

These strange things that happen in Sochi.

And the culmination of all this is

the altered federal TV schedule,

where these commentators are shouting, “Go, go, the president has scored another goal,”

I’m in favor of normal, honest, transparent funding for sports.

If we simply want to support children’s hockey or any mass-participation sport,

I believe we should be developing mass sports, of course, not elite sports.

If we want to allocate money, great—let’s allocate it.

Do you agree?

First of all, about the commentator.

As it turns out, he always shouts like that.

I mean, that’s just how he shouts. But I don’t want him to—

And I don’t want federal television, which is subsidized out of my

money, out of my pocket, your pocket, everyone’s pocket,

to broadcast these matches where Putin scores 10 goals,

with his friends skating alongside him.

That’s not promoting sports; it’s sheer absurdity.

This particular match is Putin’s perversion, not the promotion of sports.

The rest of the hockey league—

Are you sure only Putin’s friends play there?

Of course, in the rest of the hockey league too,

all sorts of people play, many of whom don’t know Putin at all.

But when I was preparing this video, for example, I went to the YouTube channel where

matches from this whole Night Hockey League are posted, and they get tiny numbers.

Have you seen them?

One view for a match, two views for a match.

So this isn’t mass sport; it’s some kind of elite pastime.

And it’s among Russia’s elite at that; once they rise to the top,

a deputy governor sees that Putin plays hockey at night.

So they think: let’s do it too, in our

godforsaken region, and play hockey at night.

I don’t understand why that match should have lots of views.

It’s ordinary amateur sport.

Because if we’re allocating 400,000,000 rubles (about $4.4 million) somewhere,

I’d like that to be done transparently.

I’d like it to be very clear.

There should be a clear decision explaining why we’re giving 400 million here rather than 400 million there.

I think there are quite a lot of sports federations

in Russia that wouldn’t turn down 400,000,000 rubles (about $4.4 million), right?

I’d like there to be some transparency in decision-making.

And here I see very clearly that

after scoring his 10 goals,

the leader of the country and a bunch of people who, in order

to entertain him, start yanking

federal budget money back and forth.

Well, specifically regarding this money, you don’t know exactly who it went to.

400,000,000 rubles (about $4.4 million), 400,000,000 rubles went to finance

the entire Night Hockey League system.

A strange system.

Because there is

a normal system for training hockey players.

Well, you would know better.

I’m not claiming to be some great expert on federations and all that.

But the regular system probably needs budget money too.

It’s being built up.

They’ve set up some parallel—again, strange—system and are throwing

hundreds of millions into it. I don’t like that.

But this strange system and the 400 million weren’t the main point of your video.

The main point was that playing hockey with Putin is a way of getting state contracts.

You said that in the locker room they’re all pleased—

the winner signs a state contract: 10 billion for this one, 20 for that one.

Here, approval for a little bench by an apartment building; there, a contract

to build military housing complexes at three times the market price.

Alexei, what state contracts in the locker room?

You do understand that they’re not signed there, right?

You have to understand the point of my video.

The point of my video is that there is Putin, and there are his friends.

The biggest billionaires—the Rotenberg gentlemen among them—

Timchenko, the king of state procurement; the Rotenbergs, kings of state procurement,

who play hockey with him, have received contracts

worth 1,000,000,000,000 rubles already. Of course, this friendship of theirs—this

corrupt friendship—is expressed in the fact that they hang out together, including

playing hockey in full view of the whole country.

That’s why I don’t like the fact that the president of the country

stages these private get-togethers together with the biggest contractors.

They know what goes on there, in the locker rooms.

But I have no doubt that they played their game,

letting Putin win first in some kind of hockey, or imitation of hockey, fine,

and then went off to settle business.

Whether that happens in the locker room or at a bank

after the locker room doesn’t make much difference.

If hockey is something that brings people together, then why are the last three sponsors

of the Night Hockey League currently under arrest?

I don’t know—who knows why they devour one another?

Maybe Transneft alone wants to be that sponsor?

Maybe. I don’t know.

Maybe they didn’t let in enough pucks.

I mean, it’s pointless to analyze.

We can see that there are just a bunch of crooks there,

they steal colossal sums, as happened with the Magomedov brothers,

and everyone knew perfectly well that they were crooks and thieves.

And I put out a video and said directly that, for example, they paid for the vacation

of Putin’s press secretary, Peskov, on a yacht, but then at some point they were devoured.

Why were they devoured?

Maybe it was Sechin, maybe it was—

Tokarev. Well, spiders in a jar eat each other.

Each of these families,

each of these people has some number of billions of dollars.

Obviously, the others look at those billions of dollars and want to take them for themselves.

Just like in Game of Thrones.

It’s all the same.

Exactly the same, really.

Only here do we finance everything with our own money.

What am I getting at?

Don’t you think this particular video about hockey comes off as populist?

No, that’s beneath your level.

You made such great films, and then here you are talking

about some government contracts and locker rooms.

You didn’t find out where that money is going.

I think that’s the wrong way to look at a video that has two valid messages.

First: Putin is close to senility, and we’re heading for Brezhnev 2.0 (Leonid Brezhnev, late Soviet leader associated with stagnation and decline).

Brezhnev had his medals; this one wants to score 10 goals every game.

I showed that descent into senility directly.

That’s the first point. Second.

I showed that these strange

little insider get-togethers, including

those on the ice, are an element of corruption.

It is, essentially, a system—a shadow government.

If you like, more important decisions are made there—on the ice, in the locker room, wherever—

than at government meetings,

where people are supposed to sit and formally say for the record,

“Let’s discuss who we’ll award the road construction contract to.”

That isn’t decided at government meetings.

But in the locker room it’s more like, “Ol, let’s give this to you, and in return you’ll give us…”

That’s where it all gets decided.

That’s why it’s a great video.

It’s not really about hockey; it’s about senility and corruption.

And who writes the scripts for these videos?

I write them myself.

And you gather the information yourself as well?

Well, the investigations department looks for the information.

I find some things myself too.

Most often I just say:

“Let’s look for

information in this direction.”

Or I say, specifically with this video, here’s how it all happened.

I saw that the whole internet was laughing at this hockey game.

I said, “Let’s do something about the Night Hockey League.”

The people who work on public procurement went to check how much state funding

it had received.

The investigations department started digging, and it turned out

that this entire Night Hockey League is registered to an offshore company.

So

there’s a division of labor in that sense.

Well, I’m sort of

the person on screen; the larger

part of the work is done by other people.

I mostly organize it.

In the video, you gave the example of Mao Zedong, who at 71 did it.

He claimed he came first.

You said that the width of the river in Wuhan is 1,600 meters.

And that he swam across it in 1 hour 50 minutes.

And you say that would mean his speed had to be 14 kilometers per hour.

He had himself photographed in the water and announced

that he had crossed the Yangtze River in 1 hour 50 minutes.

So that would mean he swam at an average speed of 14 kilometers per hour.

Try not even swimming, but running on land

for two hours at that speed, and you’ll immediately understand whether it’s true or not.

I didn’t say what the width was.

I read about it.

It’s all in Wikipedia and other

reference sources.

And everywhere it says that he claimed an average speed—

people calculated it, it was widely discussed, that the average speed was 14 kilometers per hour.

Alexei, I checked the width of the Yangtze.

Near Wuhan it really is 1,600 meters, but if you swim for 2 hours, that’s 800 meters per hour.

So the average speed is 0.8 kilometers per hour.

It’s 14.

Well, what I can say

in my defense is that I didn’t

measure

the width of the Yangtze in Wuhan.

I think I read all the reliable sources on it.

On this subject.

And in any case, I have no doubt—just like 1,000,000 other people who studied this whole situation—

that this was, of course, a propaganda stunt.

And Mao Zedong did not swim across the Yangtze at age 72.

It was staged. It’s like Putin’s hockey.

It’s a kind of fairly advanced, aging senility.

The national leader is trying to show the nation that he’s not senile.

The national leader swam, crossed rivers there and back.

By the way, Mao Zedong—he

several times during his political career made a point of presenting this.

For him, it was an important

way of showing that he was still a tough guy.

And that he could still swim across a river.

But everyone understands that it was fake.

But don’t you agree that these mistakes in the numbers—

I don’t have any mistakes. Wait, but there was obviously a mistake there.

I need time to look into all of this.

But at the very least, the Wikipedia article and other

sources say that.

Of course, I

could be mistaken in the numbers. I don’t think I was, but I need to check.

I could have made a mistake.

But the essence of the matter is the key thing here.

In essence, yes.

But because of mistakes like that, trust in your videos—

There are no mistakes.

And no trust in my videos is being undermined.

Because the main figures in my video are there.

There’s the example I gave of Mao Zedong; it’s a well-known one.

After that swim, there were

dozens and hundreds of mass swims in China.

In that sense, to swim across—or supposedly swim across—

by Mao Zedong

the Yangtze River was a hugely important political move.

It has been reenacted many times in film and so on.

So I considered it right to cite it, and entirely appropriate

to include it, even if I made a mistake in a number somewhere,

though I don’t think I did—but I’ll check,

even if I did get a number wrong somewhere, it doesn’t matter.

Because when it comes to the numbers related to state funding for hockey,

who owns the hockey league, and who siphoned off what money where—

I am not

mistaken.

Over here we have

the designers

from Fond Dreiser.

There’s a legendary sign here that everyone

loves photographing.

I won’t quote it.

And do you usually do this yourself? In your head?

No, a woman named Lena Moroz worked here.

She sat here.

She was almost my height.

And they sort of made the sign for her. We have

a wonderful cooperative.

We have portraits of Putin; they’re just all tied up in negotiations right now.

One is called Ozero, and the other is called Sosna.

And there's a portrait there.

If you have a portrait of Putin on the wall, then yes, it's there in the dacha cooperative.

Why is there no eye? Did you

just

glue some extra eyes on top?

So, here we have...

This is where our video production team and various other departments are based.

This is where we assemble our spy equipment for wiretapping.

Now this is the CIA office.

If you do a bad interview with me.

And here, right here, this is where we...

dismantle those...

those very videos that...

that you...

dare to criticize.

And I see a nameplate here.

Lyubov Sobol. So she sits right here. SOBOL. She found violence.

She's with Navalny Live now; she's also our producer at Navalny Live.

She sits in the neighboring building, about 300 meters away.

And the sign is just a promotional sign.

Apparently one of Lyubov's fans...

put up her sign here.

So Yuri from TV Rain (an independent Russian TV channel) has competition now.

A couple of years ago, we made a video about Putin

Team and about the creator of that team, Ovechkin.

Don't you think that was weak?

No, it was an excellent video.

It was excellent.

A video about the hypocrisy of all these wonderful hockey players.

They are wonderful hockey players.

But they all live abroad.

They are all multimillionaires.

And unfortunately, they all allowed their names to be used.

By this corrupt elite, which simply robs people,

which has turned 20 million Russian citizens

into paupers—literally paupers.

They live below the poverty line.

And of course,

it was disgusting for me to

watch all of this. I...

I'm not a big

hockey fan, but of course I still

know who Ovechkin is.

And a couple of other names, but it was quite unpleasant for me that

these people, whom everyone around the world loves and respects,

agreed to take part in these utterly vile things.

Alexei, well, it's simply not the level of someone who aspires to be president

of the Beautiful Russia of the Future, someone who made films about Medvedev,

about Chaika, to show Ovechkin's house and say:

look, he bought this for $5 million, even though his annual salary is $12 million.

And he can afford it.

He can afford to live in America, where he moved from comfortable Russia.

He could easily have played for SKA or CSKA, but he went to Washington

to a more competitive league, the premier league of his profession, and glorifies Russia there.

Fine, let him glorify it.

Good for him for playing and achieving sporting success.

But I believe it is important for a politician

who is fighting for leadership positions in our country

to say: pay attention to this absolute hypocrisy.

Because yes, he left; he has every right to do so; he has enough

money

to

buy whatever houses,

whatever houses he wants.

But he campaigns for a man

I was talking there about Putin with him; he joined Putin Team,

he campaigns for a man who is the leader of Russian

corruption, who robs 1,000,000 of our fellow citizens every day.

Besides, you talk about Ovechkin as perhaps such a wonderful person.

But there's also this.

A less wonderful person, Fetisov, who is a famous, celebrated hockey player.

No question about that.

The whole country knew him when we were kids; I knew who Fetisov was, and so on.

But we found an undeclared apartment belonging to this man

with an area of 1,000 square meters.

And despite insisting that we were wrong,

the following year he admitted it and listed it in his declaration.

And I did the math.

Maybe now, as with the situation in

the city of Wuhan, try to dispute my calculations. But

fortunately, Western hockey players' earnings

are widely published.

And the earnings

Fetisov made over his entire hockey career

do not make it possible for him to own the real estate that he

has.

Most likely, he acquired all of that when he headed

state sports

organizations that at the time also issued casino licenses

for the gambling business. And in that sense,

sports—if he's a celebrated athlete, even if he's loved by

100 million people, a trillion people,

if they all love him and applaud him—

if he rides around with the biggest trophy,

still, if this person

is involved in corruption, I will talk about it.

Don't you think Ovechkin and Kovalchuk may sincerely support Putin?

I don't rule it out; of course they can, of course they can.

And let them support him.

But let's not have all this nonsense, you understand?

Putin Team, and telling us that this

whole movement was completely sincere.

But we understand perfectly well that it was nothing of the sort.

It was simply an election campaign move.

And even if they do sincerely support him.

Even if—even if they sincerely support Putin, I have every right,

just like any other person in the country, like any Ovechkin fan,

to say: Ovechkin, you're doing this for nothing, and your position is

hypocritical.

Because you cannot support a man

who is destroying and robbing our

country, including robbing

I don't know, athletes, sports fans—depriving our sports of a future.

Why did we show the real estate

owned by Ovechkin, which he earned and bought with money he honestly earned? Because

I

wanted to show what Putin and Putinism are.

They are legal and illegal billionaires and millionaires.

Ovechkin represents the

legal kind—a millionaire within this Putin system.

But there is this kind of screen.

Look, Ovechkin.

He's a funny guy, he's missing a tooth, and he's kind of amusing.

We love him.

And then there are people like Kovalchuk and others, but behind that screen

stand the Rotenbergs, Timchenko, and all the rest.

A real gang of crooks and killers.

And I was saying that

They should not be used as this smokescreen.

And if they are being used as a smokescreen, then let’s also remember that

they are all millionaires,

while our country is a poor one.

And I would like everyone to take that into account.

It seems to me that this is incitement.

Look, they have palaces, and on top of that they support Putin.

Here I absolutely agree with you.

That is incitement.

And I wanted to draw the attention of those very

20 million people who are living below the poverty line, those people

who are not below the poverty line but are following the situation.

I wanted to draw attention to this corruption.

To this hypocrisy, to call attention to it.

And you know, I’m often confronted with this criticism.

Maxim Galkin says to me, “How can you, Alexei,”

“go around showing Solovyov’s palaces? He could have bought them himself.”

“That’s incitement, some kind of Bolshevik maximalism, tra-la-la.”

That is exactly what incitement is.

Yes, I show this bunch of thieves, I show their lifestyle.

Solovyov: Of course.

And Ovechkin is a completely different kind of person, but nevertheless,

I show their lifestyle in order to stir people up.

So that everyone hates this government, so that everyone hates it.

Solovyov and the rest of the propagandists are absolutely part of this.

I fully support your ideas against illicit enrichment.

I just don’t understand why Ovechkin and Kovalchuk

should be compared with Timchenko, Sechin, and Rotenberg.

I’m not comparing them.

I’m simply pointing out that they are very rich people who earned their money legally.

Their money. And they

are helping ensure that the man

who is making our country poor,

stays in power as long as possible.

That’s my complaint about Ovechkin. I don’t care about his house,

let him build a house three times bigger.

God bless him, may he score more goals and earn

all the money in the world.

What I object to is Ovechkin

making money in America

while helping keep Putin in power here and prolonging his cursed

years in office.

So, basically,

this is my office. My YouTube plaques are hanging here, along with my father’s.

And is there anything more impressive than that?

I mean, the gold one, if—

It’s called the Diamond one, but they give it for 10 million.

If you reach that.

Right now I have, I think,

2.5 or 2.7 million; 10 million seems pretty unrealistic to me.

I mean, for that you need to be some kind of

making entertainment

content.

Of course, there is an entertainment element in what I do, but

not the kind that gets 10 million views.

On average, though, you get, what, 1.5 million to 2.5 million views.

Do you think that’s basically the ceiling, and that only the very

biggest

videos can get a really huge number of views?

He Is Not Dimon to You got 30 million.

But everyone watched that one, roughly speaking—even my grandmother.

This year, for example, we released an investigation

that seemed fairly routine to me, about Karachay-Cherkessia.

It got almost 7 million views.

So it

depends very heavily on the topic, and very heavily on

whether it catches on or not.

Sometimes you think

it’s a great video, a really strong case, and the investigation was hard to do,

and nobody cares.

And sometimes you make something

that everyone supposedly already knows about, but it turns out well and people watch it.

So it’s one of those things that

is hard to calculate, hard to sit down and say,

“Now I’m going to make a hit.”

Alexei, moving on to a topic

you definitely know more about than hockey: Kokorin and Mamaev.

You commented on their detention in a pre-trial detention center (SIZO), which lasted six months.

They have now already been sentenced.

Can you explain why six months in pre-trial detention was excessive for them?

That should be obvious to anyone.

You don’t even need to be a lawyer to see it. But look, Kokorin and

Mamaev are hooligans.

What they did really looks disgusting.

An aggravating circumstance is that they were drunk,

and another aggravating circumstance was that, as celebrities,

they were shouting that nothing would happen to them for it.

But let’s assess the real gravity

of their criminal act.

So, the criminal act was that they beat people up.

Well, this kind of crap happens every night in every other bar in this country.

And most of the time it doesn’t even end in a criminal case; at most it’s treated as an administrative offense.

They took part in an ugly brawl, and for an ugly brawl

you should be taken to the police station,

given 15 days in jail, and if there were consequences from the ugly brawl,

if they smashed a car or broke someone’s jaw,

then maybe there should be a criminal case, maybe compensation.

What happened with Kokorin and Mamaev?

This was not punishment of Kokorin and Mamaev for an ugly brawl.

It was the staging of a vile TV show that lasted for many months.

But you saw the kinds of questions they were asking there.

The kind of nonsense they were asking in court.

You mean in court—the things the prosecutor was asking, the things the judge was asking.

Well, they dragged in these stars—good-for-nothing stars—and basically started mocking them.

“Aha, you thought you were tough? Now we’ll show you, we’ll put you in a cage.”

“Your wives will come here.”

“We’ll laugh at you.”

“Your girlfriends or whoever will come too.”

“We’re putting everyone in line now, and we’ll be showing this all day long,”

turning this whole situation into a TV show, and so on.

But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the law.

You cannot keep people

in detention for six months over an ordinary drunken brawl.

That’s the first point. And second, basically,

what was there to investigate for six months?

The entire case file is just video of the fight.

This case was investigated for more than six months, as if there had been

a murder.

As if it had involved some complex fraud scheme.

And that is why I maintain

that this had nothing to do

I don’t know Kokorin or Mamaev, I don’t even know which

teams they play for.

Well, yes, I was told, but I’ve already forgotten—I’m not very interested.

I’m not really into football, but to me Kokorin and Mamaev

are people who have the right

to the same justice as everyone else.

Within that system of justice, they should have been convicted

and find them guilty, but they should have done it quickly.

A reasonable judge would have watched the video recording.

Two drunk troublemakers — 15 days for each.

Apologize to the victim and pay him compensation.

Compensation, if they tore something there, damaged his clothes, and so on, up to...

visitation rights. Next case.

But as it turned out, you and I were paying for even more.

It's all a clown show.

You mentioned 15 days several times.

So usually, that's what people get 15 days for.

Well, a criminal case gets opened — a criminal case.

But I assure you, and you can look up the case law,

for all similar cases it's either an administrative penalty,

or a suspended criminal sentence.

But nobody actually goes to prison.

Nobody sits in pretrial detention (SIZO) for half a year over this, that's absolutely certain.

That's out of the question.

That just doesn't happen.

This happened to them because they're celebrities.

And someone decided — I don't know who it was — some person decided, let's...

Just because they're such big stars, let's make an example of them and humiliate them.

Well, okay, celebrities do bear greater responsibility for everything.

But you can't treat anyone like that.

And in your view, who was it, and who organized this whole TV spectacle?

I don't know.

But the entire power structure was already involved in it.

Look, who was making all these decisions there?

The famous Judge Borovkova, who dealt with your case too.

The person who directly made the decision.

The judge. But she got a call and was told what sentence to give.

But of course, the extension of their detention by the prosecutor's office and the investigators —

since it was a high-profile case, of course all of this was decided

at the level of Chaika and Bastrykin.

It couldn't have been decided at any lower level.

I absolutely rule that out.

So this was clearly at the level of the country's top leadership.

Why the hell would the country's leadership need to keep Kokorin

and Mamaev in a cell?

I don't know, maybe

I certainly wouldn't rule out such a cynical move.

But they're simply distracting public attention.

People need to be given a show.

And there was a show: watching these cocky, rich, arrogant footballers as the system

crushed them, instead of discussing corruption or the increase in the retirement age.

Look at this instead.

It's insanity. I'm telling you, they're all senile over there.

That's the romantic

version.

There was also a theory — sports journalists discussed it too —

that it was better to stay longer in pretrial detention, where one day

counts as one and a half, so that later you'd get out earlier once sent to a penal colony.

But that's what people say who

have never been in pretrial detention.

Let me tell you what it was like when I was in a criminal SIZO.

I've been under arrest many times; in a criminal SIZO

I was there when, in the Kirovles case, we spent one night there.

But when you're serving administrative detention,

it's actually very similar.

It's a cell, an enclosed cell — you sit in a cell, you...

have very little

ability to move around, to put it mildly.

For these people, that mattered a lot.

I mean, it's

harsh conditions.

Especially when you spend not 30 days there but half a year, you...

people come out green.

It's when they bring you in from the prison van at 05:00,

and then take you to court at two in the afternoon, and you sit the whole time.

It's a tiny

just, I don't know, some kind of bug-infested

cage within a cage, or a pencil-case-like compartment they keep you in.

They shove you into it.

But in any case, you spend hours in these metal

booths with the light on, then they take you to court

and put you in another concrete booth, and you sit there again for two hours.

In that sense, people actually try

to get out of SIZO as quickly as possible.

Even if it's to prison. Despite the one-for-one-and-a-half calculation, because

in SIZO you lose your health.

When you're in a penal colony, at least you can walk around there normally.

You can eat, talk to people, exercise — there are pull-up bars and things like that.

They have those there, but SIZO is just a death trap.

A Russian SIZO is endless torture, absolutely guaranteed.

So there was nothing good about them being held there.

The degree of their guilt was completely disproportionate

to the punishment they received.

Even just during the investigation, it was a death trap.

Even the detention facilities where people are held for administrative offenses.

That's not a SIZO; it's called a special detention center.

Right. Of course, it's a death trap. I mean, it's

a pretty harmful, unpleasant,

dirty place where you pretty quickly

come down with something and get no medical help at all.

It's a place where this whole system of humiliating people and senselessness

some endless kind of it, is always highly developed.

It's unclear why certain things happen at all.

All sorts of strange things,

starting with a radio that's always playing and simply can't be turned off.

Just can't.

And ending with it being on all day — well, not literally 24 hours, they turn it off at night,

but during the day you take soap and newspaper, and then somehow

make a plug for the radio, or stuff wet bread into it.

And then the guards come and pick the bread out.

Then it starts blaring again — and it's impossible to listen to Russkoye Radio,

day after day for 30 straight days.

Once, I did 60 days.

For 30, 20, 50 days, I listened to the radio every single day.

It makes you want to jump out the window — except you can't even do that.

There are bars on it.

And by Russkoye Radio, you mean the radio station?

Yes, the Russkoye Radio station plays, and sometimes they switch on Radio Dacha too.

You can't stand that kind of music?

It's not that I can't stand it — I even like that kind of music, like on Radio Dacha.

It's great.

I'm happy to listen to all those songs — you know them all.

At first you lie on the bed and cheerfully tap your foot to the song.

But then, when you've heard it 40 times, 140 times, it all

stops being so fun.

What was the worst thing that happened to you in the special detention center?

Nothing like that happened to me there.

Maybe they tried to pin something on you, or something like that.

Well, if the presidential election were held in a

special detention center, I saw clearly enough,

everyone likes me in the special detention center,

the cops too, and everybody else.

That sounds like a very self-confident thing to say.

Of course, they're all different, some don't like me, but overall

the detainees there treat me with quite a lot of sympathy.

In general, everyone likes me very much, because even those who,

quite rightly end up there for drunk driving,

once they see the judicial system and how it works from the inside,

even a drunk person understands that they should get 10 days in jail.

But then he comes out and says, “Listen, I never even saw a judge.”

“I was sitting in the hallway, a cop went in, a cop came out,”

“handed me the report, and said: ‘Ten days.’ That’s not how it should work either.”

So they understand that the system is so rotten

that they start supporting me simply based on their own experience.

When you were talking about Ovechkin, you spent a long time discussing Putin and his ties to him.

Why didn’t you pay attention to that in Kokorin’s case?

The fact that he supported Putin.

I don’t care whom he supported.

I condemn him for supporting Putin, but...

But did you see those photos?

Well, yes, I saw them,

Good Lord, they all do it—all those football and hockey players.

Unfortunately, they all parade around with Putin like idiots.

But just because he walks around like an idiot in a T-shirt with Putin on it,

does that mean he no longer has the right to expect justice?

I’ve heard that view: if you put on a Putin T-shirt, then sit down and shut up.

You backed this regime, didn’t you?

No, that’s the wrong position.

It’s completely wrong, and it won’t lead to anything good.

Well, let’s think—who is the most vile person

in the country?

Vladimir Solovyov. Dmitry Kiselyov, yes.

But even if tomorrow he were to be

subjected to completely illegal repression, I would say that it was wrong.

I would still despise and hate him just the same.

But if a person is imprisoned

for nothing,

that means the abuse is being committed not against

Kokorin, not Mamaev, not Kiselyov, not Solovyov, but against the judicial system.

And I, like everyone else, need a normal judicial system.

After all, I could easily end up there myself.

I want the courts to be fair, I want the courts to be fair

both to these idiots who walk around in Putin T-shirts and to normal people

who wear anti-Putin T-shirts—they should all be equal before the law.

And would you be glad if Kiselyov or Solovyov were detained and jailed?

I wouldn’t just be glad,

I actually expect that someday, in the Beautiful Russia of the Future,

there will be an investigator

who opens a criminal case against them and detains them,

sends them to the dock after conducting an honest investigation,

and then an honest judge will sentence both of them—Kiselyov

for illegal enrichment and tax evasion.

And Solovyov, apparently, for the same thing.

They are people who have committed criminal offenses.

But all of this must happen through the courts.

I want both of them to be punished,

to be held criminally liable.

But do I want them simply to be, well,

grabbed by some equally corrupt judge or corrupt investigator

and thrown in prison for no reason? No.

Lawlessness in response to lawlessness—of course

I don’t want that, because that kind of lawlessness can affect anyone.

And will Putin stand trial?

Remind me—in the Beautiful Russia of the Future?

In the Beautiful Russia of the Future.

If Putin ensures a peaceful transfer of power,

this is my most unpopular answer.

If Putin ensures a peaceful transfer of power, I believe

that he and his immediate family could be granted immunity.

But that all depends on him.

If you were to run in

an election now, under current conditions, and you were allowed to participate,

you wouldn’t have nationwide TV airtime; you’d only be communicating through YouTube

with people.

What percentage would you get? A million votes? Would you win?

That many.

Why take part in an election if you’re not planning to win?

First of all, YouTube is huge.

Second, my campaign doesn’t run only through YouTube.

In 2013,

and in 2017, when I wasn’t allowed to run, I traveled all over the country and spoke in

every major city where we managed to hold a rally.

If

I had been allowed to run, I would have spoken in every

city.

Given that I wasn’t allowed to run, I still had

from Kerch to Pskov—how many rallies did we hold where I spoke?

Twenty or thirty?

It was 27 large rallies.

I mean, speaking from a stage in a city with several thousand people in attendance.

If I had been allowed to run—if they had let me in—

I wouldn’t have held 20

seven, but 127 or 227.

I’m exactly the kind of

politician who has no problem meeting with people, whether in large

or small numbers.

So even without television,

I’d still be able to talk to a great many people.

This sounds a bit like Maxim Katz right now,

who says that we’ll always win.

But actually, no—this isn’t about printing 20 million newspapers for Yavlinsky.

Twenty million newspapers for Yavlinsky.

I’m not talking

about a million newspapers for Yavlinsky; I’m talking about what I did in 2013.

I held

100 courtyard meetings: I would come into a residential courtyard and speak to the local grandmothers.

Sometimes there were five of them, sometimes there were 1,000 people.

But I held all those meetings, everyone saw them, and huge numbers of people were there.

Back then I got 30 percent. Officially, 27.

I got 27 percent according to the official figures; in reality,

I got 30 percent.

And there would have been a runoff, because Sobyanin officially got 51 percent.

If there had been a runoff, I would have

won that mayoral election, of course.

During the World Cup last summer,

you posted photos with fans, but said you didn’t have tickets.

I still didn’t understand: did you get to a match or not?

I got a FAN ID.

Yes, that’s true.

There was that whole issue that they weren’t issuing them to people who

were on lists of extremists, offenders, and so on.

So partly out of curiosity,

I got the FAN ID.

But then, after I got it—again, I don’t really understand football, I don’t follow it closely.

I don’t keep up with all that, but I

just told some guys I know, “Come on, I’ve already got the FAN ID.”

“Buy me a ticket, I’ll give you money for the final.”

They just started laughing at me loudly.

We’ve got a lot of football fans here.

They said that, first, everything had already been bought up, and second, everything was terribly

expensive, and third, you’d still have to travel somewhere because that’s where the good matches would be.

So I had the FAN ID, but I wasn’t especially eager to go anyway.

To be honest.

I don't really understand how you got it, because you couldn't do it without buying tickets.

So first you buy the tickets, and then...

You bought some ticket from someone in Mordovia, something like that.

I mean.

As I understand it,

a lot of people got it that way: they bought some insignificant,

the cheapest possible ticket to a stadium in Mordovia in order to get it.

That's exactly how I did it.

So in the end, you didn't go to Mordovia for the match.

And why didn't you want to?

I'm not a big football fan.

There was some match between national teams.

Some country and some other country.

I won't say which.

Which countries exactly? They were some strong football countries.

I was interested in that, that's all.

I really liked what was happening in Moscow.

During the World Cup.

I absolutely loved what was going on on Nikolskaya Street.

I went there too.

All those foreigners and our guys too—it was the whole atmosphere.

Well, basically, I like this whole football

culture and

mindset in all its forms, from things like,

from hardcore fans to just guys drinking beer in bars.

It's cool.

What I don't like is watching football for 90 minutes.

So that's why I just don't like it.

Do you like it?

But at the

same time, do you think the World Cup was just a huge money-grab in Russia?

In Russia, the World Cup happened

in such a way that we were building, as you know as well as I do,

the most expensive stadiums in the world.

Like the stadium in St. Petersburg.

And the cost of all the other stadiums, the contractors, and the methods

used to award the contracts raised more than just very serious doubts.

It was obvious that it was a mechanism for corruption.

I mean, I...

I'm not against the football World Cup, I just don't understand why

these things have to be linked here, why they come as one package,

wrapped together: the football World Cup and stolen money.

How much was it—300 billion rubles (₽300,000,000,000)?

I'd like to separate those things.

Let there be a championship, but let there be no stealing.

Don't you think that for the sake of the friendly atmosphere,

that came back last summer?

For God's sake,

for the sake of the fans who came to Saransk,

when people in Saransk finally saw that foreigners aren't spies,

living off Soros Foundation money, but ordinary people just like them, open and approachable,

for the sake of the investment that went into the stadium, for the sake of the urban improvements that remained

after the championship.

Can you turn a blind eye to the fact that money was spent on it illegally?

No, I really can't.

And that's because I'm looking at the bigger picture: how many matches in Saransk

could possibly fill that stadium?

Hardly more than one.

Why was it done?

And I know that in Saransk, in Mordovia, there are huge numbers of people who

live below that very

poverty line.

A nurse there earns 11,000 rubles.

And my approach to this is very simple.

Do I want people in Saransk to go to football matches?

Yes, I do.

But do I want a nurse there to be earning 11,000 rubles?

No, I don't.

That's why I say: come on, guys, let's build in Saransk

a stadium for, say, 10,000 people—or not build one there at all.

It's a small city—with all due respect to Saransk, it's a small city.

Why not hold that match in Krasnodar,

where there's already a huge stadium built by Galitsky?

I don't have answers to those questions, and I'm not prepared to sacrifice

one thing for the sake of another, because it's a false choice in principle.

We shouldn't, for the sake of a good atmosphere,

sacrifice public money, because somehow other countries

manage to host World Cups just fine without stealing a billion.

Football is a very

corrupt sphere everywhere.

But nowhere do they steal on the scale they do here.

Could you clarify what exactly you're proposing?

So, not to build

in Saransk, hold it in Krasnodar—and what should be done with Saransk's money?

Spend the money meant for Saransk in some better way.

Healthcare is underfunded, we have underfunding

in education, and, after all, underfunding

for all these children's football schools. If we want to spend that money on sport,

then let's spend it on grassroots youth football.

We have plenty of places to spend money other than building

giant stadiums in Saransk.

They aren't needed there.

Everyone understands that.

The World Cup budget—

all the stadiums and transport infrastructure—was 683 billion rubles (₽683,000,000,000).

If you distributed that money among the population,

each resident of Russia would get 4,900 rubles.

So for an amount of money with which

you couldn't even buy your wonderful shirt, we held an event of this scale.

So what?

All right, but then let's do the math.

And Rotenberg stole only 1 trillion rubles from us.

If we divide that among everyone, it still won't amount to much.

You couldn't buy a car with that money.

And Chubais gets 20 billion a year for Rusnano.

What nonsense!

Divide it among everyone and it comes to 4 rubles each.

But that's exactly the point—it's all connected.

I'm not prepared to give even 0.01 rubles to a stadium

in Saransk that will be too big for a city like Saransk.

I'm not prepared to give even 0.01 rubles to Chubais, or Rotenberg, or anyone.

Even taking into account that I earn much more than any nurse,

I will fight both for my kopek and for the kopek

of that nurse even more, because that is what

the state budget is made up of.

If we say, oh well, 300 million here, 300 million there,

we're a poor country.

I'm citing the official figure: 20 million people below the poverty line.

And the real numbers are much higher.

Just look at what's happening: everything is falling apart, there isn't a single decent road,

and yet we start putting on the Universiade (an international university sports event).

Come on.

By the same logic, let's talk about the Universiade they held in Krasnoyarsk.

How much did it cost—80 billion?

What nonsense!

If you break it down per person, compared with some grand world-changing cause, it's nothing.

Let's do the math.

Per resident of Russia, they just took 80 billion and burned it, basically.

it's unclear what to spend it on.

Have you estimated, in your view,

how much was skimmed off in total during the FIFA World Cup?

We had a video where we made some estimates.

Specifically for the stadiums.

I'm afraid of getting it wrong right now, so I won't give a figure, but listen,

on any major construction project here, no less than 40% gets stolen.

So just look at the cost of the stadiums.

Besides, there's this figure that.

You cite 800. 680.

683 billion rubles, but it's obviously understated.

There were a huge number of expenses there.

A lot of them weren't included directly, because there were regional expenditures,

targeted ministry programs—not to mention all the security spending,

the amount of money that had to be spent on the police, the National Guard (Rosgvardiya), the FSB (Russia's security service),

and everything

else—it was just unimaginable.

Absolutely unprecedented spending.

So if you count absolutely everything, the total would be at least

twice as high.

If money is being siphoned off somewhere, then obviously someone is getting rich from it. Have you figured out

who got rich off the World Cup?

The contractors. Who built the stadiums? Putin's friends.

We have a very small group

of people who take all that money.

It really is quite a small group.

In principle, even

within a corrupt system, they could have created some kind of

competition, the way it was in South Korea.

Where there are at least some major structures

that compete with each other in some way, siphon off

money, loot budgets—but at least there's some competition in that sense.

In Russia now, even corruption has been monopolized from the top.

Just open any ranking of state contractors and you'll see who occupies all the top spots.

Putin's associates, the Magomedov brothers, built the stadium in Kaliningrad,

and later they were accused of embezzling 2.5 billion rubles.

I think that was pocket change for them.

Their assets are worth far more.

They're rich people—2.5 billion rubles, some

Obviously, that's not the kind of money they would be jailed over.

2.5 billion rubles.

Especially in cash, cash in an account.

Money as actual money, not as asset liquidity.

But in the form of money.

That's an enormous, colossal sum, and it matters a great deal

to the Magomedov brothers. It's one thing when you have

a stake in an asset—that's your potential money,

and another thing entirely to have cash in an account that you can actually use.

But of course, that's not why they were jailed.

Then what was it for?

Well, I think they fell out with Rosneft, and they were jailed because

they tried to.

Putin's associate Tokarev.

Who heads Transneft—to sell him a stake in the Novorossiysk port.

For much, much more than it was worth.

And as I understand it, they were blackmailing him.

And despite being, so to speak, our crooks,

they were still these wild brothers with their fighters, sports clubs, and so on.

Whereas we here are, so to speak, former

colonels from Dresden—had they completely forgotten their place?

Well, now we've crushed them, plain and simple.

Why didn't Peskov protect them? Who is he, really?

He can't.

He's not at that level.

He's just a crook, a major crook.

A bribe-taker, and so on.

But he's not a figure of that scale to

protect anyone there.

At that level, when all these former colleagues

from Dresden

and former judo partners sit around after a match dividing up contracts, Peskov

is just standing by the door holding the tea.

Something like that.

You said that 2.5 billion rubles was a significant sum for them—2,000,000 dollars.

ULYUKAEV: A significant sum.

Cash measured in millions is always a significant sum.

It is, of course, a large amount.

But when it comes to Ulyukayev, it's also obvious that

we did an investigation into Ulyukayev, showed his real estate, and the point was

we understand, and everyone understands, that he's corrupt—a major corrupt official.

It's just that they handed him that suitcase with 1,000,000 dollars, and for that

they formally jailed him.

But of course, the real reason

is that, well, he did something

something

wrong.

He went against Putin's instructions and insisted on his own position.

So they devoured him and put him in prison.

So you think he didn't consider it beneath him to take

those 2 million, even though his real estate is worth many times more?

That's just how it works.

For these people, there's never such a thing as too little.

Have you seen those videos from the search of the FSB colonel who oversaw banks?

It's just bags full of cash.

They carry bags of cash to one another.

2 million is a large sum.

For a foreign official, yes. For one of ours, it's nothing.

That's simply their custom.

In fact, the Ulyukayev case is very interesting—it showed us that this is

just some ordinary episode in their lives.

Nighttime, a suitcase.

Ministers and heads of oil companies carry them to each other.

Here you go, congratulations—here's some sausage, and here's another 2 million for you.

Thank you very much.

And we'll bring you 4 million at Christmas too.

And that's how they carry things back and forth to each other.

If in the Kokorin and Mamayev case the decision was made no lower than

Chaika or Bastrykin, then who made the decision on the Magomedovs and Ulyukayev?

Putin, of course.

Personally, directly. I have no doubt about it.

It's said that around Putin there's some kind of council, a sort of

council of elders, including Patrushev, a few others, and Chemezov as well.

Do you believe that, or does Putin ultimately rule alone?

But you can't rule alone and

know everything.

There are still people who bring you red folders,

and inside those red folders there's a sheet of paper marked 'secret'

with some nonsense at the bottom

copied from the internet—there is still an entire infrastructure behind those red folders.

There are people Putin trusts, there are people

with whom he conducts his personal corruption,

There are cellists who hold 1,000,000,000 dollars in their accounts.

That's Putin's money, and

then there are people like the Rotenbergs and Timchenko,

who get gigantic contracts and are told, in effect, 'this is yours.'

Then there's Usmanov, who performs a certain function—buying the newspaper Kommersant.

Firing journalists over it, and so on and so forth.

In any case, it's all fairly.

Some kind of

significant circle of people within which interaction can take place.

There are lots of all sorts of clueless

political analysts who list the people in that circle.

I don't know, I haven't seen it myself, so I can't really say.

Well, I mean, there are obvious things.

It's clear that this circle includes the Rotenbergs,

Timchenko, Kovalchuk, and bankers are part of it too.

Bortnikov, Patrushev, Sechin, the gang's close members, the people we know

became fabulously rich thanks to Putin's regime.

But that's probably not all.

There are probably some people there we don't know about.

But the final decision rests with Putin.

And the final decision, of course, is Putin's.

But naturally, that's how the mafia works,

there still has to be someone who drives the spear in here.

In a particularly disputed situation.

Can we

I mean, yesterday he was playing hockey with us, and now we've decided with the guys to lock him up.

Well, of course not.

The boss has to say, all right, him.

His offenses are serious enough to warrant it.

They threw him into Lefortovo (a notorious Moscow prison).

And now what, is he facing 20 years?

You've probably already been asked a hundred times

this question, so could you answer in just a few sentences

why you don't just leave, and why you stay here instead of going

to Montenegro, Italy, or the States, and just lie by the sea there.

I have a great job, the best job you could possibly have.

I'm surrounded by wonderful, very brave people, and it's a pleasure to work with them.

There are also lots of people who support me,

who send money to keep this office running.

I'm doing what I love, and people support me for it.

Some people respect me for it, some hate me for it.

Of course they do.

So in that sense

things are going very well for me.

I'm very happy with what I'm doing and with where

life has taken me.

Why would I leave?

Let them leave instead.

So you're happy that, for now, you can't run for office?

No, I'm unhappy that I can't run for office.

But I am happy with my work.

I'm achieving more this way.

Of course I'd like to be shown on

the federal TV channels, not just on YouTube.

Sure, I would, but

at least this means I can still say something on YouTube.

What I

want to say.

Most importantly, I believe in what I'm doing.

There are many people around me who share that belief and support me.

That's really great.

Very few people manage to achieve something like that in life, to do this kind of work.

So I'm quite a happy person.

Do you believe you're a happy person?

And yet there are two idiots following you around, you're constantly being filmed,

There have been attacks on you—people have even splashed you with brilliant green antiseptic.

Well, look,

this morning two idiots were following me, but that was offset by the fact

that right now I'm being followed by one, two, three, four—

five pretty smart people.

Film crews, security people—it's great.

So you have to pay for everything in life?

Of course, yes.

And yes, idiots follow me around.

They put me under arrest, they search my apartment.

My family lives under constant pressure of some kind.

Yes, absolutely.

But that's the price of what I do.

For doing the right things. And for the fact that I

have the courage to tell the truth.

But I pay that price.

And I still think I'm doing something great,

and I'm very happy that this is what I do.

Alexei, you studied at Yale University for half a year.

Can you recall that experience—what it was like?

Actually, a little longer than that.

It was a really great experience.

I'm very glad I got in.

The program is very simple.

You arrive there, and your program consists of the following:

you can take any course you want.

I'm a lawyer, so I went to

law school and

I was interested in investigating

our corruption abroad.

So I took corporate governance classes.

People who worked on

climate change took those kinds of courses.

We had a girl from South Africa who was studying

AIDS, so she attended the medical school.

You simply take the courses

that interest you.

But it's great because you see how Western education is structured, you see

a truly enormous university with a very wealthy endowment.

At places like Harvard and Yale, it's $1,000,000,000.

You see how all of it is financed.

And in general, you just

get enormous pleasure from the fact

that you find yourself among very smart people from all over the world.

There are many people there—though unfortunately fewer Russians now—and a huge number of Chinese students.

Lots of Koreans, Indians, all kinds of people.

They come from all over the world.

The biggest American universities are basically set up like a giant

vacuum cleaner—they suck in

both professors and the smartest students from around the world.

It's a pretty cunning strategy. A very smart strategy.

And being inside it, seeing how it works, is very interesting.

And you studied there for free, if I understand correctly?

It was a special program. They even paid me a stipend.

They pay everyone $5,000 a month there.

And how did that work—how could you go there for free?

Anyone who passes the exams and is admitted goes there for free.

You can't go there on a paid basis.

All these programs are organized in such a

way that they're specifically for people my age.

The university understands perfectly well that a

person

my age has a family and children, so they cover your family too,

your children, and they give you housing, some kind of apartment.

And they give you a stipend. Otherwise no one would go there.

I mean, why the hell would I have gone if I'd had to pay?

That's just how it's set up.

And the universities, in fact, aren't stupid.

But I often went to speak with students there who were interested in Russia and studied it.

You come in, and they ask questions.

Do you teach in that sense?

And that’s what they get for that money.

But something more practical.

A teacher who explains how things work in Russia.

Can you name the three main things you brought back from America?

It doesn’t matter whether it’s related to studying or just everyday life.

The main lesson is a sad one.

It’s that no one is going to help us fight our corrupt officials

through the American legal system, or the Western system in general.

Basically, they don’t care that

they say they’re concerned about Russian corrupt officials.

They steal $1 billion in Russia and invest it in the West, but no one is going to help us fight them.

Fight them at all.

No one will.

No one is going to solve our problems except us.

That’s the main lesson.

That’s what I took away from it.

The second lesson is sad too, though that was back in the ’60s.

Things have changed a little now.

I was surprised to learn that Russia is not nearly as

interesting to the rest of the world as people here tend to think.

Sitting here, we think Americans can think of nothing else

but Russia.

And then you go there and end up at some

international discussion of world affairs.

A whole crowd of students, a hundred people, well-known professors.

And the word “Russia” comes up twice.

Everyone is discussing China, everyone is discussing Brazil, everyone is discussing Indonesia—countries

with huge and growing populations—and no one is discussing Russia.

And you realize: my God, we really are on the margins of the world.

But the third thing is probably, more broadly speaking,

an understanding of how the education system works.

That made a huge impression on me, of course.

This whole university system.

The professors, all of that.

Professors from all over the world—how it’s all organized there.

For me, for example, it was a shock, a revelation.

That 80% of Yale students—actually even more—study there for free.

Because our idea of an American university is usually different.

That you have to be super rich.

But the university pays for them itself.

If you pass the exams.

And if your family doesn’t have enough money to pay the university,

then in fact your tuition payment

isn’t that important, because the university already has plenty of money.

Some former graduates

are constantly donating—one gives $100 million, another gives $200 million.

In that sense, it wants to

educate you so that you become successful.

And then, when you’re old, you donate to the university

$100 million or $200 million.

It’s very interesting to see how that works.

Did America change you in any way as a person over those six months?

No, not in that sense.

I like speaking Russian; over there I felt like

well, maybe I’m still a bit of a Soviet-type person (with habits shaped by the Soviet era), but what really irritates me is

this American friendliness.

At a certain point it’s genuinely hard to take,

when people keep endlessly asking, “How was your weekend?” What business is it of yours?

I mean, they’re constantly asking you things like that,

what kind of weekend you had, how you spent it.

But those are just ritual phrases?

You don’t really have to answer them. It’s just politeness.

And you realize that it is politeness.

And, all in all, it makes society kinder and better.

But for a gloomy Russian person, it’s fairly hard to deal with.

So I wouldn’t want to live there. It would be hard for me there.

To live there. Your daughter Dasha has just been admitted to Stanford.

How hard was it to get in, especially on a full scholarship, tuition-free?

They don’t really have a concept like state-funded places there.

It works differently there.

You get admitted.

And I’m incredibly proud.

I’m incredibly happy that she got in.

For ten years, my wife and I were drilling it into our child’s head:

come on, study, study, study, so you can get into a good place.

And in the end she did, after all.

She got into university.

She was admitted to Stanford and Cornell University, and she chose Stanford.

And you just submit the documents.

I requested bank statements and sent them in,

she sent them to the universities, they looked at them,

and said that your family income is under $100,000, so

we will cover the tuition, and you

will only pay for housing and food.

If the income is even lower, they’ll pay for housing and food too.

That’s a fairly standard arrangement.

It was hard to get in there; she applied to

several different universities and was admitted to only two.

The competition is enormous.

The whole thing was terribly

stressful and difficult.

She was taking exams, getting up

Of course, you take tests even before

you sit the Unified State Exam (Russia’s standardized school-leaving exam); you take standardized tests.

You write

essays and fill out a whole pile of documents.

I mean,

it’s a whole process, quite a major one.

And now

it’s especially strict, because over the past few months

there’s been a major scandal in America involving the children of wealthy Hollywood stars—they

faked test results.

They also falsified their athletic achievements, by the way.

So now they scrutinize everything under a triple microscope, so to speak.

I mean, maybe for some top super-mega elite there is such a thing as

getting in through connections, but at places like Harvard

the universities are so rich

that they don’t need anyone getting in through pull or influence.

I mean, they don’t depend on anyone; they’re

very wealthy, and getting in is extremely difficult.

Did you consider Russian higher education?

We did consider Russian higher education.

The idea was simple: apply in tiers of universities.

Try for the top ones; if you don’t get into the top ones,

apply to the middle-tier ones; if you don’t get into those, apply to some ordinary ones.

If you don’t get in anywhere, then you’ll figure out the next step.

Universities here in Russia were also under consideration, of course,

it’s just that their exams are much later.

She got into Stanford earlier, so at this point she still hasn’t even taken the Unified State Exam.

But it doesn’t seem all that important anymore.

I understand your mission and your concern as a father, but do you realize

that after Dasha got into Stanford,

your career as a public politician has essentially been destroyed?

No, that’s absolutely not true.

First of all, that’s completely untrue.

On the contrary, I think I showed everyone that I value education.

I’m the kind of politician who believes that investment in human capital,

Education and healthcare are the most important things.

And I said this during the

election campaign, and I’m saying it now as well.

And that’s what sets me apart from Zheleznyak, from Peskov,

whose children studied or are studying abroad, and from Lavrov.

Zheleznyak and Peskov.

And the difference is that they steal money here, and then that money

they invest abroad and send their families abroad to live.

My daughter studied hard and got into a proper university

to get an education and come back.

What’s more, I’ve said many times before, and I’ll repeat it now:

if I take up any leadership

positions in the country, we will do

what the Chinese do—namely, send tens of thousands of Russian students

abroad to study: to China, to America, and everywhere else.

Go into any American university.

You’ll see that there are literally thousands of Chinese students there,

whose education is paid for by the Chinese government.

Any Russian citizen who gets into a university like Harvard or

someplace like Skoltech, should have their tuition paid by the Russian government,

if they’re talented enough, because this is an import of knowledge; we should send them

there even taking into account that 10% of them may not come back, and then bring that knowledge

back here.

And they will bring us knowledge. Take doctors, for example:

this should be an absolutely massive campaign.

We should simply send thousands of

Russian

doctors to Israel, Germany, and the United States,

because our healthcare system is simply 50 years behind.

And in that sense, I’m a normal person who believes that Russian students

should, can, and will study abroad,

if they can get into decent universities.

And only in this

way will we be able to improve our education system.

That will happen in the future.

And what guarantee is there right now that Dasha will come back in four or five years?

There are no guarantees for anyone.

She’s a living person.

Dasha is going to study in order to get an education and return.

That’s exactly why she applied there.

And in that sense, I’ve always said: by all means,

let Zheleznyak’s children, or anyone else’s children, study abroad.

That’s not the problem.

No—the problem is when Zheleznyak, Solovyov, or Putin

first tell us about the terrible “Gayrope” (a derogatory propaganda term for Europe)

and about how awful the education system is there, and how everyone wants to come to Russia,

while secretly sending their own children abroad to study or live. We don’t need that hypocrisy.

But the fact that our education system as a whole is now very

far behind Western university education

is simply pointless to deny.

You talk a lot about brain drain.

About how our best people go there to work and then stay forever.

And all the while, do you remain an example—a monument—to the fight against corruption?

Don’t you think you could have set an example?

I don’t want to be some kind of monument or example.

Don’t you think you could have kept your daughter in Russia and shown everyone: look,

I’m staying in Russia, I’m not going anywhere.

I’m fighting corruption and Putin’s regime here.

And my daughter is staying here too.

Let’s stay here and make Russia better here,

instead of leaving for five years and then maybe coming back, maybe not.

And as for whether she’ll return—I’ve been telling my child for 10 years:

study hard.

So you can get into a good university.

She studied and studied and studied, took her exams,

runs up to me and shouts, ‘Dad, I got into Stanford,’

one of the best universities in the world, just like you wanted.

And I’m supposed to say, ‘You know what? You’re not going to Stanford. You’re going to

some no-name construction institute instead, so that I can—well, not some fence-building school,

but some other mediocre place—so that I can tell Aleksandr Golovin

in an interview that this is how I became a politician?

People—I mean, people are scared, but I have no problem talking to them.

I travel all over the country, and I tell people the truth:

our education system is falling apart.

I want it to be normal.

Russian children should study abroad.

If they can get in, we will pay for them.

I value education.

Have you set any kind of deadline for yourself?

Say, in 15 years,

if you haven’t managed to become mayor, a member of parliament, or president.

I’m leaving.

It’s like running—we started with that.

If in 15 years I can’t become a world champion in running,

does that mean I should give up running?

No.

I do all this because I believe in certain things.

I’m simply fighting corruption; I’m fighting for a normal judicial

system, I’m fighting for

equality and a fair distribution of wealth.

So that in our country there aren’t so many

poor people, and so that our country—a rich country—makes everyone prosperous.

I don’t think that in 15 or 20 years we’ll be able to

defeat all these problems.

The real question is whether I’ll still be able to fight them.

Whether I’ll be able to work for Russia,

whether as president or simply as a person in this office, as someone.

In any case, I’ll be where I belong.

I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing and try to be useful to people.

It’s just that stories like this often look very absurd.

Like Limonov, who kept going out to Triumfalnaya Square on the 31st—it became ridiculous.

An old man—it’s obvious he wasn’t fighting the way you do.

But let’s not talk about Limonov.

He’s an old man who is, on top of that, a sellout.

But there are

brave and courageous

people who go out alone with a one-person protest in their city and stand there.

And maybe some people laugh at that.

But I think they’re awesome, great people.

And there are human rights activists in the North Caucasus,

it’s scary to be one,

hard to be one, and not in your interest to be one.

But they still exist.

To me, they’re not local crazies; to me, they’re also

really awesome, admirable people who deserve every kind of respect

and who are doing something a million times more useful

than those people who formally seem successful but are just officials of some kind.

In their Mercedeses, looking impressive,

but to me they’re not impressive at all.

Alexei, about half of my Instagram follows you.

Even people who are completely on the other side,

even people who are absolutely not interested in politics,

I ask them, ‘Why do you follow Navalny?’

They say, ‘He has an amazing family, he runs an amazing Instagram,’

‘and his wife does the same.’

Can you remember how you met Yulia?

Can you remember? Of course I can.

I remember the exact moment I saw her.

It was in Turkey. I was sitting on a bus,

and we were on our way to some excursion.

She was staying at the hotel next door, and she came out and walked toward the same bus.

And I looked at her, and at that very

moment I understood that I would marry her.

So I don't need to remember anything.

It's right there before my eyes.

Did you go to Turkey alone?

At the time, I was working for a company.

I was working as a lawyer at a Moscow real estate development company.

And those were the boom years for construction, and they,

and our whole firm, during the May holidays (the long public holiday period around May 1 and May 9), at the expense of

those shareholders, would go to Turkey; Istanbul was included in the trip.

And Yulia went by herself.

Yulia was there with some group of people too.

And what happened next? I mean, the bus.

We went off, and the excursion was, you'll laugh, to a bowling alley—bowling alleys

were very rare back then.

There was one somewhere at the Central House of Tourists (a well-known Soviet-era hotel and complex in Moscow), the only one.

The only bowling alley in all of Moscow.

What year was that?

I was in my second-to-last year at university.

Well, maybe... ninety-five or so.

So we went on this bowling excursion.

That's where we all met, and we kept in touch afterward.

And very quickly we started living together.

Pretty quickly, we moved in together.

Then, about a year and a half later, we got married.

A big problem now,

though I suppose it has always existed, is that even young couples lose their passion.

People get married, and then it feels like they're not supposed to get divorced.

They've only just gotten married. They probably feel they should stay together a while longer.

Looking at you, it almost feels as if

your relationship is only three or four months old.

No, we just have a great relationship.

I'm very proud of it.

But how do you preserve that after 20 years?

First of all, it's

luck.

You have to find the right person, basically.

Some people get lucky, some don't.

The divorce rate isn't just high here.

Not only here—worldwide it's over 50%.

A lot of people are simply unlucky. They may

never find the right person.

And one of the things I'm grateful to fate for is that I simply found her,

that I met her, that I went to Turkey that

May holiday season—and if I hadn't gone, maybe by now I'd be

like everyone else, divorced three times already, remarried, and all that.

And everyone around me would be suffering.

But I was smiled on by that kind of luck.

And after that,

it was simply a совпадение of interests.

Political views, outlook on life.

Still, it's work.

We have a normal marriage.

One that runs into many of the things that exist in any normal

marriage, including conflicts, arguments, and all that.

But it takes work.

You have to make an effort so that

small conflicts don't turn into something bigger.

That's too simple an answer.

Surely there are some concrete examples.

Maybe you take a break from each other every month or something.

No, I don't do that at all.

I mean, I'm not interested in vacationing without Yulia.

We always travel together; she's both my wife and my best friend.

I like talking to her about politics

and about anything else.

In that sense, we don't vacation separately, and we spend all our time

together—a lot of time—and we go out to lunches with the family all the time.

And if I want to go have lunch with someone,

I'll invite her.

She's my best friend.

What's the best gift you've given her, and the best one she's given you?

A silly question?

I don't know, it's hard to say.

You're stumping me.

As for the best gift from me, you'd have to ask her.

I don't know.

I'm a bit at a loss.

And what about the best gift she gave you?

Well, she gives me a gift simply by existing.

She gave me a gift by going to Turkey back then.

And when I saw her, she smiled back at me, because if she hadn't,

then maybe I

would never have met her.

That was the gift.

Still, women must hit on you even when your wife is around,

or send you messages on Instagram—girls writing to you in DMs and so on.

Oh yes, she really

loves laughing about it with me.

We read all sorts of funny messages.

What's the strangest message you've received lately?

Well, people write to me, call constantly, send jokes.

Things like, "Let's meet, I want to have your child."

But all famous people get messages like that, and most likely they're written by some

big, fat, drunk men just having a laugh.

There are lots of different funny messages.

You often post photos from trains.

How often do you go on vacation, generally speaking?

I read somewhere that it was seven times a year.

Any time I travel abroad, it's because I'm going to a hearing at the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights).

And the Kremlin TV channels say, "Navalny has gone on yet another vacation."

But in reality, this is just our hobby.

I don't have a dacha (country house); I live in a rented apartment,

though I do own an apartment in Maryino; right now I live near Avtozavodskaya.

At the moment I'm renting.

In that sense, I'm quite lucky—I walk to work.

And you don't disclose the figures, do you?

You don't say how much you pay in rent?

Well, I mean,

it's my main expense.

It's an expensive apartment.

Expensive, even though it's in Avtozavodskaya.

But it's a four-room apartment, because the children are of different sexes.

Dasha grew up, and we realized we needed one more room.

So I guess somewhere around 40,200?

No, less than 1,200, but still a lot.

It's a major expense.

What were we talking about, though?

Travel, trips.

Trips—since I don't really have any other major expenses,

travel is our form of entertainment, in that sense.

Something I was deprived of for almost six years, when I wasn't allowed to have a foreign passport.

Now I can travel somewhere, and so we do.

Can you name the top three most impressive places

you've seen in your life, including Cambodia?

To me personally.

Back then it wasn't nearly as touristy.

Now there are huge numbers there.

Tourists in Cambodia.

Back then it was really amazing.

And the whole area is mountainous jungle.

It's incredibly interesting.

Altai made a huge impression on me.

Going there is more expensive than going to Europe.

That was also during the period when I wasn't being issued a foreign passport, so I traveled around Russia

and discovered that traveling around Russia is much more expensive than traveling abroad.

Actually,

third place.

Altai in various places, and a Tibetan lake.

And the Katun River absolutely blew me away as well.

I didn't expect that such a huge river

could flow with such speed, roar, and noise.

It's practically like the sea.

I used to think that a mountain river

was some little trickle that, with a bit of effort,

you could wade across.

I found out that's absolutely not the case.

If someone is already fed up with Russia,

if they can't live under this Putin regime, this regime of corruption,

and, say, they've obtained citizenship in the Baltics, Israel, or Spain,

and want to leave.

What would you advise them: stay here and fight, or leave after all and live elsewhere?

The world is big now—do what you want with your life.

But I believe you should always remain connected.

But if your work or something else is tied to another place, you absolutely can

live in the Baltics, but

still remain a normal citizen of Russia.

And help make Russia better—you just shouldn't sever your ties, you shouldn't

think of yourself as cut off.

Like a slice cut away because you've left, and therefore

you now have to hate everything here, or

hate those

who stayed, or something like that.

You just have to be a normal Russian person, a person from Russia—whatever you want to call it.

This isn't the 19th century.

This is the 21st century, one global

big world. What difference does it make where you live?

I was there recently when I took my daughter to Stanford, in Silicon Valley.

Two hundred thousand Russians. They're perfectly normal.

Russian guys—they want to come back here.

And many live both there and here.

They're our people, and they

can and will pay taxes.

And they feel like citizens of Russia, despite the fact

that it's a 16-hour flight one way to get to them.

I don't see any contradiction in that.

In the fall, you launched your own store.

Whose idea was that?

We'd been thinking about it for a long time.

We just couldn't make it happen before.

We live on donations.

We collect them, we run the Aizerman Foundation,

we send out letters, and launching a store is one of the ways we raise money.

That's what keeps us going, that's what makes us

independent, that's why we don't give a damn about anyone.

I don't care about officials, oligarchs, anyone, because

it's ordinary people who send us money.

And that's exactly why we launched it.

And who designed these wonderful pink T-shirts and sweatshirts?

We have a wonderful guy named Vanya who runs the online store.

We also have,

there used to be Lena Moroz, and now Maria Mikhailova works as our art director.

Maria Mikhailova. No, I don't get involved in that, because just like with football,

I don't understand it—I don't understand design or any of those things.

So there are specialists,

people who do this professionally, and they handle it.

Does your wife Yulia handle that?

No, but she enjoys wearing these T-shirts.

And your clothes—does she take care of that?

Yes, she takes care of my clothes—I would even say much more than I do. And

there's this traditional

morning phrase of mine: “Please give me some clothes.”

And do you go shopping together too?

I hate shopping, so

unfortunately, my arms are too long.

I can't just buy standard clothes—I have to try things on.

If I didn't have to

because of the length of my arms, try everything on,

Why do you always roll up your sleeves?

Because most of the time

the sleeves are too short.

If it were possible,

I dream of the day when you'll be able to stand in front of a 3D scanner,

scan yourself for clothes, and order them online.

Because I hate shopping and try to do it as little as possible.

Surely you have a favorite brand.

Do you?

Everyone laughs that I have a lot of Brooks Brothers clothes.

But I really do.

First of all, their shirts have fairly long sleeves.

And in general, I like the brand. Unfortunately, there isn't a store

here; there is one in the States, but now you can order online.

I got scared for a second—I thought you were going to mention that

bear, but when we

go there, my wife just buys a ton of clothes.

You went to the support concert for Husky, and I saw a photo.

Someone wrote something like, “Damn, I came to the concert,”

“and Navalny is here singing along with a beer in his hand.”

How often do you drink?

Well, I do drink alcohol,

but fairly moderately.

Still, I do drink.

So if the question is whether I drink anything—I drink everything.

How often? About once a week.

It used to be less often, before, earlier on.

I'm actually a big fan.

But now probably a little more often than before, because I've started

drinking more wine,

and before I didn't appreciate it at all,

though in reality it's still pretty rare.

So wine and beer?

No, I drink anything, really.

If you had brought something with you and

if it were 4:00 p.m.—or later—right now,

whatever you brought, I'd have a drink with you.

When was the last time you got really, really drunk?

Well, some birthday of mine, when

when

I was in my twenties.

There was one episode—Yulia loves to remember it—when, apparently,

she was dragging me somewhere.

But it seems to me that happens a couple of times in anyone's life.

Honestly, I'd find it stranger if a person had never in their life

I had never experienced such severe intoxication.

You need to go through it once so that you simply never do it again.

And lately, when you drink, do you manage to hold yourself back, well,

I mean, so that you...

It just turned out that I didn't even...

need to, you do everything.

No, not really.

But if I go somewhere with, I don't know, friends, if it's someone's birthday,

in that sense, my, as you put it, pop today

it's absolutely standard alcohol consumption.

I'll go.

If it happens that I'll be watching football.

I'll have a beer. If it happens that I'm somewhere with friends,

having dinner or

lunch, I'll have a glass of white or red wine, while someone else will be drinking.

If there's a birthday celebration here, I don't know, with whiskey or vodka,

but only on that kind of scale.

There's no need to control anything.

Still, I try to restrain myself and

drink only to the point where the people running

around after me with a camera won't capture anything funny.

A contest.

How much money would you be willing to spare for this program?

How much money would you be willing to part with?

It depends on how many views this video gets.

If you...

If you get a lot of views,

and if you'll be gathering information too, then I'd send you something.

Can you give some rough range for the amount?

Well, I have a standard amount that I send

to projects I like—Mediazona and so on.

I send 1,000 rubles a month (about $11 / €10).

So 1,000 rubles (about $11 / €10) is the minimum, roughly speaking.

I'll transfer it to you if you have a good, useful

program, if I see that you're interviewing the kinds of people whom

federal television doesn't invite—in that way, you're fighting censorship.

If some important, interesting content is being distributed,

I mean, that's why I donate money to Mediazona,

but I don't donate to just some entertainment YouTube channel,

I donate to those who need the money and who are doing something useful.

Even if Alexei doesn't pay us anything, we'll still pay anyway, even so.

If.

We'll still give 5,000 rubles (about $55 / €50) from Sport, even without any contest,

that's what's needed to make this a contest, Alexei.

Well, to be honest, you...

I'm not going to start doing pull-ups or push-ups now, I'll say that right away.

You still haven't really convinced me with your arguments when it comes to

whether your videos about Ovechkin and Putin turned out to be useful.

It still seems a bit weak to me, too weak for someone

who aspires to the presidency and considers himself a politician.

You've made much stronger videos before, believe me.

I think that's how

most of your supporters probably see it too.

So we want to help you, and we want people who watch

this interview to write a story in the comments—a corruption story,

maybe,

about what's going on in their sports team, or maybe in their region.

Maybe they've heard about some kind of lawlessness or abuse,

and they should describe that story briefly in a few sentences in the comments,

and then perhaps together with you we'll even choose one.

Make me play ball.

Or Ovechkin will walk through that door right now and say that Alexei spoke badly about me.

said bad things.

It's a great contest—write things like that.

If you know of a genuinely corrupt story,

one that can be verified, we'll dig into it.

A lot of people write to me: investigate corruption in this team,

in that team.

Sports in Russia are very corrupt, and we've wanted to tackle this for a long time.

We don't understand this area very well.

As you know, but we want to learn more about it.

So write to us. It's a great contest.