Interview with Alexei Naryshkin and Olga Bychkova

Good afternoon!

Let us remind everyone right away that besides being heard on Echo of Moscow, we can also be seen on Setevizor. We’re also streaming on YouTube and Facebook, on Echo of Moscow’s account. Naryshkin and I are streaming somewhere too. In short, watch us wherever you can, wherever it’s most convenient for you. And of course we’ll begin with the main topic: renovation, and everything happening with the five-story apartment blocks and beyond.

Yesterday, for various reasons, you didn’t get a chance to speak at the rally on Sakharov Avenue. So do it here and now.

Yes, thank you very much. It’s no big deal. I’ll probably even be speaking to a larger audience here. In general, I have several main points about renovation as a whole. I didn’t have any special plan to speak there.

By the way, were you planning to speak?

I wasn’t planning to speak, and that’s exactly why I came in through the regular entrance with everyone else. And when the organizers asked me to come closer to the stage, it took me a whole hour to make my way there, because I had to get through that wonderful crowd…

It was packed, yes.

It was very packed, and especially near the front it was really hard to move. But I got there—though I was immediately escorted out. Still, that’s not the main thing. I think what matters more is to talk about renovation in general. And my main point is that this is not just about the residents of five-story buildings, so reducing it to a problem affecting only them is completely wrong. Because the renovation program will require at least 2 trillion rubles—the figure was voiced by Sobyanin himself. That’s an enormous amount of money, and it will be taken not only out of the pockets of all Muscovites, but of the country’s residents as well, because this colossal sum is, if you like, the oil and gas margin, the national wealth pulled in from across the country; and now Moscow City Hall is pouring it into the renovation program, and a significant part of that money is simply a handout to Moscow’s construction sector. A gigantic handout to Moscow’s construction sector. And a gigantic corruption scheme. That’s point number one.

Point number two is that voting has already begun within the so-called Active Citizen system. Sergei Sobyanin launched it just yesterday evening, right after the rally, which surprised everyone because it was only supposed to start on the 15th. But apparently that was a political gesture: “There’s a rally? Then I’ll launch everything even faster.” I’m not even going to criticize the Active Citizen system right now, although we did an investigation into it showing that it’s basically all falsification. How many people do you think—how many Muscovites—are registered in the Active Citizen system?

A. Navalny: I wasn’t planning to speak, and that’s exactly why I came in through the regular entrance with everyone else

How many?

Ten percent. Look: 10% of Muscovites. Well, say another 10–20% register urgently before June 15. And the main trick in this vote is that everyone who does not vote is counted as voting in favor of demolition.

Alexei, you’re missing an important point here. Olga Bychkova and I carefully studied the document this morning on the Razvorot program. It’s called the Mayor’s Decree of May 2 of this year, and it deals specifically with voting on the five-story buildings. If not through Active Citizen, people can also go to an MFC public services center, My Documents, and vote there.

And how many people do you think will actually go?

You’re saying only 10% at most, or a little more, will take part…

Active Citizen is the main voting tool. Some number of people will go to the MFC. But we can see that the whole system is designed to create as many “silent ones” as possible. We know how the Moscow real estate market works. Some apartments are rented out, somewhere someone is living in their grandmother’s apartment while she stays at her dacha, elsewhere the owners moved away long ago and relatives are living there. It’s always very complicated. Sometimes it’s quite hard to get a power of attorney for someone. There will be a huge number of “silent ones.” Based on what’s happening now, the “silent ones”—those who don’t vote—will be the majority. And that majority will automatically ensure that every building votes for demolition. So this is simply a gigantic fraud. There are many other normal mechanisms for measuring this, but for some reason Moscow City Hall refuses to use them.

Then tell us right away: how can public opinion be measured properly in a situation like this?

First of all, there is a legally established procedure for general meetings of homeowners. It can be done according to the law.

It can be done. The mayor’s decree mentions that too.

But it’s unclear why the mayor does not want to hold this vote on a building’s fate through a homeowners’ meeting, and instead wants to do it through his Active Citizen system.

That’s one of the options.

And what’s your explanation for why this method was chosen?

Because everyone would vote against it. Well, not everyone… I have a very specific personal example. My wife’s grandmother is 90 years old, she lives in a five-story building in Preobrazhenka, and they all want it demolished. But their building was not included in the program. There are huge numbers of other buildings like that. Yesterday Konstantin Yankauskas talked about this at the rally. These five-story buildings have been in an аварийное состояние—dangerous, dilapidated condition—for years, but they weren’t included in the program. Those residents would have voted 100% in favor. But this program includes a huge number of buildings that are simply located in attractive investment areas. They’re just good land plots. And that’s why the voting is designed in such a way that the result will always be “yes,” because otherwise residents would vote “no.”

A. Navalny: City Hall is pouring major money into renovation. It’s a gigantic handout to Moscow’s construction sector

Alexei Navalny is on the air on Echo of Moscow. Let me remind listeners that you can watch the broadcast on the Echo of Moscow website and in Echo’s group as well.

What would you do in Sobyanin’s place? There is a certain stock of unsafe housing. You have the authority—what do you do?

I have a pretty clear plan on that. I ran for mayor, after all, and I devoted a huge number of meetings to residents of five-story buildings. There are unsafe five-story buildings whose residents want to be rehoused. Their addresses are very well known. So let’s direct the program there first, instead of to the Khamovniki district, where the land is expensive and residents categorically do not want demolition.

But Khamovniki was excluded.

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. It’s not written anywhere that it was excluded. That’s only been said.

It’s not on the published lists, for example.

Under the federal law that has been passed, any building can be demolished. That’s what we know. In its first reading, the law says exactly that. When they show us the final version of the law, then we’ll be able to trust something. But voting has already started. And people in different buildings can already vote. Yet the law itself has not been passed. And we do not understand why voting has begun when the law has only passed its first reading. It’s far too early to talk about this with certainty. I think there will be many different surprises.

Besides, look, there’s another thing that is simply impossible to carry out: Sobyanin is now saying that everyone whose building is demolished will get an apartment in the same district. If we’re talking about the Central Administrative District, that is practically impossible. Luzhkov couldn’t do it. And now there are even fewer land plots available. There is simply no land to build these new houses on. And besides, it would mean infill development. Other residents would oppose that, and so on.

Again, you criticize Sobyanin, but you’re not laying out your own alternatives.

I am laying them out. I’m saying: first of all, you need to begin by rehousing the buildings whose residents have been demanding relocation for years—that’s step number one.

And based on the data you had when you ran for mayor, do you have any sense of how many buildings that is?

Hundreds of buildings. Under Luzhkov’s program…

So not the 8,000 previously mentioned by Sobyanin, and not the 4,500 being cited now.

There are several hundred apartment buildings that need immediate rehousing and have needed it for years. There are several hundred more—or at least dozens—that are in a truly dangerous condition. That’s where the renovation program should start. That’s program number one.

Second: the vote should be nominal, with each person able to verify how their vote was counted. An open, named vote. So that anyone—Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov or Nikolai Vasechkin—can log in and see how he voted: for demolition or against demolition.

A listener told us this morning that you had to enter a huge amount of data there…

In Active Citizen.

All those pension insurance numbers, registration details, passport data. And she was told it would take four days to verify.

Exactly. I organized several votes in a similar system, only federal—the Russian Public Initiative system—where we also had to collect 100,000 verified signatures from across the country using pension insurance numbers. It’s very difficult. I spent months persuading people: “Guys, go get your pension insurance number.” It’s hard. A huge number of elderly people live in these five-story buildings, and it won’t be easy for them to do this. That’s why I say the “silent ones” will amount, I think, to over 65%, and all of them will formally be counted as voting for demolition. Of course that’s fraud.

So in effect, you’re saying it doesn’t matter how the voting is organized—how it’s organized in Active Citizen and how people vote there—because these 60-plus percent of “silent ones,” as you assume, will produce the desired result.

Yes, yes. That is outright fraud.

You had a third point too. You started listing them and we interrupted you.

The third point was precisely that many of the promises Sobyanin is making now—I gave the example of apartments “in the same district”—are simply impossible to fulfill in practice. Oddly enough, this is actually good—I want to praise Moscow City Hall here—that they are reacting publicly in some way. They’ve made some concessions. They announced something after the rally… But many of the things they are promising are impossible. And I’m saying this not just because I assume it, but because we have many years of observing Luzhkov’s rehousing program. We’ve studied quite well how it all works, what scandals surrounded it, what problems arose. So giving people an apartment in the same municipal district is very difficult, especially in the center.

And if voting is somehow conducted honestly, how do we decide a building’s fate: how many people need to vote for the building to be resettled and demolished?

Two-thirds.

So the mayor’s office chose the right proportion?

First of all, this is described in considerable detail in the Housing Code. There are different thresholds there. I think a fair threshold is two-thirds. But at the same time, the remaining one-third must still receive an equivalent and equal-value replacement at market price. After all, the land under their building belongs to them under the law. It’s their apartment. It’s their only one. And they should leave that apartment not having lost something, but having gained something. That would be fair.

And can you currently get both an equivalent apartment and one of equal value, especially in the same district?

The main thing is equal value. It has to be worth at least as much—the market price of that apartment must not be lower. Because the market price of an apartment is a complicated thing. It may be the same district, but for one person it’s a five-minute walk to the metro, and for another it’s a ten-minute bus ride.

But listen, a new apartment in a new building will probably be smaller for the same price, won’t it?

Again, take any five-story building in Khamovniki. Its market value is three times higher than my apartment in Maryino, which is close to the metro, because it’s Khamovniki, close to the metro. And there are many other factors: a school, a good park nearby—those are things you cannot replicate in other districts. That is exactly what Muscovites are outraged about.

I’ll say again that Khamovniki has been excluded.

Fine, Khamovniki has been excluded. But there’s Presnya, there’s Taganka, there are wonderful districts in Kuzminki, in Sokolniki. In other words, there are places where people live in so-called non-demolishable building series: high ceilings, everything is fine for them. But even where people live in awful-quality five-story buildings, there may be an awful-quality five-story building that is three minutes from the metro. And there may be a new building that is a 15-minute bus ride away. Their market value… excuse me, in that case the five-story building may actually be worth more.

A. Navalny: The whole system is designed to create as many “silent ones” as possible. That’s why the vote is a gigantic fraud

And an important question: after all this, who, in your view, should bear the political responsibility, and what political or personnel decisions might follow?

The answer is obvious. There are two people who informed Muscovites that the renovation program was beginning. Let me remind you that just a month ago, maybe a little more, we simply saw on the news a satisfied Putin and Sobyanin saying that Moscow would undergo a large-scale renovation costing 2 trillion rubles.

Putin said he would not sign the law until everything there was properly observed.

He said he would not sign the law because, naturally, pro-Kremlin sociologists had already brought him polling showing that all of Moscow was up in arms. And they are forced to react to that polling. But the whole idea is, of course, a Putin-Sobyanin project. It’s a pre-election scheme, just a badly executed one. I think they already regret trying to ram it through with such a cavalry charge. But without question, this is the country’s biggest construction project. And the president and the mayor should bear responsibility for it. Because again, 2 trillion rubles is an enormous amount of money. In every other city in the country, people are not being rehoused out of barracks and slum housing. Even in the Moscow suburbs nearby there are simply monstrous homes, so naturally the whole country is watching this. This is a federal-level issue.

Do I understand you correctly that, in the end, the mayor and Putin care less about the fate of Muscovites and more about the fate of certain developers?

It seems to me that on the part of Moscow City Hall… As for Putin, that’s obvious. What are developers to him? He already has plenty of money; he has the Rotenbergs and Timchenko. But as for Moscow City Hall, they are implementing this program in such a way as to save the construction sector first and foremost. It’s important to understand that Moscow City Hall is the largest developer. They build themselves. It’s not just some commercial developers—the city itself builds a huge amount of housing. It doesn’t build it very well, and that housing sells very, very poorly. They inflated a bubble in the construction market, and now naturally they are afraid that the bubble will simply burst, so it is important for them to pour money into it now and buy housing from themselves on the secondary market in order to help these builders and prop up real estate prices.

Let’s go back to yesterday’s rally. Regardless of how it ended personally for you, how do you assess the whole thing?

Well… It was a good rally.

A lot of people turned out?

I would have liked more people to come. After all, this affects hundreds of thousands of people. Yesterday was a very large rally: there were 20,000 to 25,000 people. The atmosphere was amazing. The people were wonderful and overall I really liked the mood. But the goal is a big rally. Let’s put it this way: for non-political reasons, probably the biggest one. I haven’t seen a bigger one. For many years I worked with the Committee for the Defense of Muscovites, and I’ve been to hundreds of different rallies, including those by residents of five-story buildings over renovation and rehousing. But nothing even remotely close to this had happened. So it was a big successful rally, which passed a resolution of no confidence in the Moscow authorities. And that was important. So I think it was a fairly successful event.

How do you think this whole story will develop from here?

We can see how it’s developing: Sobyanin announced voting in his Active Citizen system. Next, the authorities will simply use polling methods and social media monitoring—which they do very well—to assess political risks. If they conclude that there are political risks—for example, a drop in the number of votes Putin can get in Moscow, or a threat to Sobyanin’s chances in the next mayoral election after the presidential one—then they will back down, and they will steer this program more toward the interests of Muscovites and less toward the construction sector. If they do not feel such a threat—if there are fewer rallies, less outrage—then they’ll bulldoze ahead. That’s basically what they always do, so there’s no special need for forecasting here.

Alexei Navalny is on the air on Echo of Moscow radio. Please explain something: why, it seems to me, were you not pushing this rally very actively? As far as I remember, once or twice you said that, in principle, it was a good thing…

No, I think I was pushing it… In that sense, do you know who the main organizer of the rally was? Echo of Moscow radio. Because the largest number of Muscovites learned about the rally, of course, from these broadcasts.

Don’t try to shift this onto us now…

But I’m praising you, though I’m not sure you like the compliment very much.

No, it’s wonderful that you’re praising us. But I’m criticizing you, because using your own resources—even just your Twitter followers—you said very little…

I’ll tell you that I used another resource, a more important one. Our main resource now is our YouTube channel. I had four programs, four broadcasts, and in each of them I spent about 15 minutes talking about the five-story buildings in quite a lot of detail. In the last one, when the details were already clear, I actively called on people to come to the rally. And all those broadcasts had between one million and one and a half million views, which is a very large audience, much bigger than Twitter or anything else. So that is our main information resource now, and we used it very actively. The rally organizers also came onto our channel. That got, I think, around 200,000 views too. So I think we tried to make—and did make—a fairly large contribution to turnout at yesterday’s rally.

Don’t you think this issue is now overshadowing many others, if not all the rest, and rising to the very top of the political agenda and of what politicians—like you, for example—should be talking about?

For Moscow, yes. For the rest of the country too, yes, but in the sense of: “Look at how they’re going crazy from having too much money.” But this issue contains everything. It contains gigantic corruption. It contains total lack of transparency. It contains falsification of voting results. Everything is reflected in it. So yes, of course, you’re right. I’m talking about it, everyone is talking about it. And that’s why there was this conflict around the rally yesterday, because the authorities feel this just as sharply and are trying by all means to avoid politicization.

What conflict are you talking about? Please explain.

A whole squad of OMON riot police escorted me and my family out of the rally. The conflict is that Moscow City Hall, acting fairly rationally—as it always does with certain rallies devoted to development issues—tried to take over the protest and somehow imposed on the organizers the view that no politicians should be allowed to speak. And when the organizers took, or tried to take, a step to the side, they simply started physically removing people—me, in particular. This incident shows how terribly afraid they are of political protest becoming involved here. So that is the main thing: either the issue is framed politically and threatens the ratings of Putin and Sobyanin, in which case there will be some movement; or once again…

What does it mean for the issue to be framed politically? How should it be framed?

Roughly the way Yankauskas spoke yesterday—he’s a municipal deputy…

But not everyone heard him.

Not everyone did. But this deputy from the Zyuzino district spoke very fiercely, because for several years he has been trying to get unsafe five-story buildings in his district rehoused. He hasn’t succeeded, and those buildings were not included in the renovation program.

How should the issue be formulated?

It should be formulated like this: “Guys, if you do not radically change this system, if there is no transparency and clarity in decision-making, if there is no transparency and clarity regarding how the money is spent, we will vote against Putin and Sobyanin, we will do everything we can to bring down their ratings.” That is what the authorities fear.

And who made the decision not to let you take part in the event? Was it City Hall specifically?

It’s hard for me to say who the specific person was. The video is online. You can watch it—it’s all rather chaotic. Senior police officers were giving the orders. At least, they referred to the organizers. The organizers were standing next to me and saying the opposite. In any case, I was not demanding to be given the floor. I was removed from the rally.

Were you promised a chance to speak?

A. Navalny: It’s unclear why voting began when the law has only passed its first reading. There will be many surprises

When I arrived at the rally, one of the organizers, Yulia Galyamina, asked me to come closer to the stage. And I did. The organizers themselves let me inside that perimeter, where I stood quietly and waited for further instructions. But those instructions never came, because instead of the organizers, the police came running.

So the rally organizers had nothing to do with your removal from the event?

As I understand it, one or several organizers appealed to the police to have me removed…

Those organizers…

Well, Vinokurova…

Do you have any proof?

There is obvious proof that they were lying, for example, when they said I was trying to rush the stage and speak.

No, no, no, Alexei. Those are different things. Let’s clear this up before the news. Proof that Vinokurova somehow had you thrown out of the event, gave an order… I don’t know… to the police to grab this guy…

I certainly did not see any direct order like that, and no one saw one or could have seen one…

So these are your assumptions.

These are not assumptions. I’m telling you exactly as it is. I’m saying: as I understand it, based on what was happening there, based on the context of what happened. But of course I didn’t see any correspondence, I wasn’t present for the conversations, and I didn’t hear what agreements were being made. But there is what happened, and there is the context of what happened, from which a great many things are clear. Let’s not deceive ourselves and pretend to be naive here.

Wouldn’t you like to tell your supporters, your voters, to back off Vinokurova a little, because she seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

If you don’t want to be on the verge of a breakdown, then you shouldn’t enter into disgusting political deals, you shouldn’t make arrangements with Moscow City Hall…

She did?

I believe so.

Do you have proof?

If you ask a question, please wait for my answer. What has already been published, what was already stated—that Deputy Head of the Security Department Mayorov was standing there saying, “You are violating the agreements by letting Navalny in”—that means such agreements existed, right? The fact that some of the organizers were telling fairy tales that I was rushing the stage and were lying—that is also perfectly visible. And so on. There is a body of evidence—there’s a term for that—that clearly points in one direction.

Let’s take a short break for a few minutes. We have a brief news bulletin and a little advertising coming up.

Politician Alexei Navalny is on the air on Echo of Moscow. It’s 12:35. Olga Bychkova and Alexei Naryshkin are here as well.

So, the fine that was imposed on you again today—or rather upheld…

I learned from Echo of Moscow’s broadcast that I had a court hearing today and some kind of fine.

Will you pay it?

I will, otherwise the bailiffs will come after me. By the way, this goes to your previous question: do I have proof that I was fined again on the Kremlin’s orders, through an unlawful court ruling? I can’t show you a recording of someone giving the order, but it’s obvious that such an order exists. I’ll pay, but there’s nothing to be done about it.

The second main question everyone is asking us to put to you. The defining question of our time: what’s going on with your eye? Tell us. For listeners who can only hear this on the radio, I can say that there is still quite a black eye.

But the swelling has gone down. It’s better now.

Depends which eye. I see perfectly well with the left one. I’m giving Naryshkin a stern look right now. With the right eye, if I close the left one, I can see you, but more like silhouettes. But that’s how it’s supposed to be right now, because I had what’s called an amnioplasty, and they stitched a special membrane over it and there’s also a lens in place, so I’m supposed to see very little with that eye. They say that in a month they’ll remove all that and check whether I need a more complicated operation. And the idea of the amnioplasty was to try to avoid a corneal transplant, which is a more complicated surgery. Yesterday at the rally I was asked about my eye about 300 times. It was very touching. I want to thank everyone who has written so many supportive and sympathetic words.

So in a month you’ll be going abroad again?

Yes, in a month I’ll go again. I have a foreign passport now. I don’t know whether they’ll arrest me somewhere at the border if I try to go away with my children for a weekend—we’ll have to test that—but in a month I have a scheduled return visit to that clinic.

And what are the doctors saying in the end?

They said the operation was successful.

What are the chances your vision will recover?

They’re optimistic. An ophthalmologist from Moscow who is treating me went with me. She was present at the operation. She confirmed to me that everything went very well. And they are optimistic, but when I say, “Will I be seeing well in two months?” they laugh at me and say things like this take much longer to recover from. But I’d settle even for minus five, so I can at least see with glasses.

And right now you simply can’t see with that eye, but you can still look at a computer, read a book…

Of course I can. I write and read. It’s just that in everyday life, at first I got dizzy from doing everything with one eye, especially when the other one wouldn’t open. Now I’m just used to it. So when I need to see something clearly or look at a computer, I just squint.

Have law enforcement authorities already assessed the injuries inflicted on you?

As far as we understand, a criminal case has been opened, but absolutely nothing is happening. We see that no one has been detained. I still haven’t even been questioned. Our lawyers spend all day writing angry complaints: “Open a proper criminal case under a serious article.” Because a serious charge here would be moderate bodily harm. And in general, it’s obvious repeat hooliganism. It is hooliganism by a group of persons, plain and simple. But nothing is happening, and it’s clear why. Because we recently saw that one of the attackers is also serving as a kind of helper for the Investigative Committee: he is a witness in the case of one of the people detained at the March 26 rally, and, as far as I can tell, he is giving false testimony against an innocent person and performing an important function for the Investigative Committee.

Is it important to you that the people who splashed you with brilliant green antiseptic, or were standing nearby, face some kind of punishment?

It’s important to me that they end up in court, in the dock, and that the trial be fair. Of course it matters to me.

Why not try writing to the Kremlin the same way you did, for example, to get your foreign passport?

There’s no point writing to the Kremlin about this. Because when it came to getting my passport, I didn’t write to the Kremlin right away. I sued twice in Russia and lost both times. Then I filed a case with the ECHR. But when I urgently needed it, I wrote to Vaino saying, basically, “Stop this nonsense and stop illegally refusing to give me a passport.”

Write to Vaino. You understand that this channel works: “Vaino, find the bastard and lock him up.”

I’m saying to Vaino right now exactly what you just said—he’ll hear it anyway. So as for our constant demands to open a criminal case… In the passport matter, there was no longer any legally proper route left. I exhausted it completely and ended up with an unlawful refusal. As for the attack, there is still a proper legal route: you’re supposed to write to the police and to the Investigative Committee. We are doing that. If we get refusals, we’ll appeal.

So you just have to be patient, wait five years, and apparently…

We handle many corruption cases and investigations, and we constantly get refusals in them, so we have enough patience for stubborn investigations like this.

The best quality in a lawyer. Alexei from Primorsky Krai asks: what’s happening with your headquarters in Vladivostok? Leonid Volkov is there right now.

It’s complete lawlessness there. They practically declared a state of emergency in the city. Poor Volkov took several hours to get from the airport into town because he was pulled out of the car and had his passport taken away. As far as I understand, the headquarters is effectively open. But since they changed the locks on the premises, it all literally happened out on the street. Nevertheless, we are going to work very actively in Vladivostok, because we have a huge number of volunteers there. It’s an important region. A difficult region, being robbed by both the governor and the whole gang that staged this circus around our headquarters today. And there is also a lot of support there…

And by the way, if we remember March 26, Vladivostok had, I think, the first rally—maybe with 2,000 people—unauthorized and very angry in mood, precisely because of the lawlessness going on in Primorye.

Which number is this for you now?

I think the 29th or 30th.

A. Navalny: I think we tried to make—and did make—a fairly large contribution to turnout at yesterday’s rally

And all of them come with adventures?

No, I’d say most headquarters, even in difficult regions like Kazan or Bashkortostan—where we expected some kind of circus—actually went perfectly. It seems to us now that this is connected with the weakness of the governor. Where the governor is weak—like Miklushevsky in Primorye—they try to curry favor with the Kremlin and stage a real circus. Where governors are firmly entrenched, they may do petty nasty things, but they don’t conduct special operations.

So they’re simply confident in themselves.

I think so. We’ll see how it goes. I missed three openings because of my health. But I’ll go to the next ones myself…

And what’s the plan? What will these headquarters be doing now?

We need to open 77 headquarters, I think, in 75 regions in order to prepare the infrastructure for collecting signatures. Because when the nomination period begins, we’ll have to collect 300,000 signatures in a very short time. The deadline itself is effectively a prohibitive barrier. So we will prepare a very powerful structure that will collect those signatures in three days, and everyone will be convinced—and will see—that these are absolutely real signatures.

On Russia Day, June 12, you were planning to organize another kind of protest activity in the streets. Have you abandoned those plans?

Not “were planning”—I am organizing it. Right now more than 170 cities and regions are taking part in anti-corruption actions on June 12. We will definitely hold them, because not a single question about corruption related to our investigation into Medvedev, or any of our other major corruption investigations, or anyone else’s, has received a single answer.

And you think that’s the most important thing right now—your anti-corruption investigations? I mean, everyone who wanted to has long since watched the Medvedev video, and so what? For Muscovites, it seems to me, the five-story buildings are much more relevant now, and yet you’re going out again with Medvedev.

With the five-story buildings it’s the same thing, only on an even bigger scale—2 trillion rubles. You, for example, are a host on Echo of Moscow, the biggest city talk radio station. Do you know where and for what prices the first apartments on the secondary market will be bought? Ninety-five billion rubles have already been allocated from the Moscow budget. And I don’t know, and no one knows. That’s what’s called muddy water, where people will be fishing.

So June 12 will be a protest against “muddy water.”

June 12 is absolutely a protest against muddy water in which officials will make money. Thank you very much for that excellent slogan for our rally.

Dmitry from Penza asks whether you will be increasing your security.

As we saw yesterday, there are natural limits to that. Yesterday I had security with me. But how did the police do it? They pulled me out, took me beyond the barriers somewhere, and there we were only three people, because they only took out my family. Beyond that barrier, anyone could have been waiting for me, because they knew I would be brought there. So there is a natural limit to this. The attacks are organized by the authorities one way or another: directly or through their proxy organizations, through intermediaries. So we are dealing with security issues, but we need to understand that we cannot solve all such problems ourselves.

After the latest attack with brilliant green, aren’t you afraid to walk around so calmly? To appear right in the middle of a crowd at an event like that?

No, I’m not afraid. I walked through it. You can see it: I walked through the entire rally. And of course anyone who wanted to splash something on me could have done it, but instead everyone was shaking my hand. I came here to you alone by metro, and nothing bad happened to me. The good thing was that several people took photos with me. So no, no, I’m not afraid.

I understand what I’m doing. I see many people in the regions… We were just talking about the Far East—there it’s hard to do this kind of work when the federal press won’t write about you and you won’t be on Echo of Moscow talking about yourself. So when I see people who work and fight under much greater pressure, I understand that I have nothing to fear.

And who are your volunteers in the regions?

A. Navalny: One of the attackers, a witness in the case of a person detained on March 26, is giving false testimony and performing a function for the Investigative Committee

All kinds of people. If you look at the demographic profile, then yes, they are mostly younger people. But they’re very diverse, including some very elderly people. Probably more young people physically come to meetings, but they are all kinds of people. We’re even trying to create some kind of socio-demographic profile. So far we haven’t managed, because they’re so different.

If you were allowed to run in the presidential election, who would you want to measure your strength against?

I am confident that we will secure my participation in the presidential election, and I intend to represent the interests of all those Russian citizens who are against corruption, in favor of normal development, and ready to challenge Vladimir Putin, who is dragging our country who-knows-where, who said yesterday, for example, that Russians’ incomes continue to rise, when all those Russians know perfectly well that their incomes are not rising.

So for you, the worthy opponent from the authorities is Vladimir Putin.

For me, a worthy opponent is the one doing something bad. Right now, Putin is the one doing bad things. He’s in power, so he’s the one we have to fight.

Politician Alexei Navalny was on the air on Echo of Moscow. Thank you!