As many people know, Saturday’s episode of Real Politics featured a segment about our debates. The segment was quite positive. In particular, Maxim Kononenko said that the debates are a Moscow landmark on a par with Lenin’s Mausoleum. I’ve already had 104 people call me asking how much we paid for the segment. Under the circumstances, I think an explanation is necessary. Real Politics was accredited to attend our most recent debates. I went up to them and asked whether, since they were filming anyway, they could show not just excerpts from the participants’ speeches, but also run a general segment about the debates themselves. They replied: that sort of thing has to go through the PR department. As is well known, we received a grant from the Civic Chamber (a state-backed public advisory body in Russia). This included funding for the debates. The grant application had a special section called "direct promotion of the project," with a subsection for "television." After discussing it, we decided to throw all the money from that subsection into buying airtime on R.P. An OFFICIAL contract was signed with NTV. We gave them our preferences for the segment, and it aired more or less exactly as we had requested. The only thing they cut was the line: "Among young people, these debates are far more popular than televised ones — even those hosted by our colleague Vladimir Solovyov." We made no payments to Real Politics, to mrparker, or — God forbid — to Pavlovsky. As soon as NTV’s accounting department returns our financial paperwork, I’m ready to publish scans of the invoice and everything else. There’s no need to shame us. We fought for this grant and got it. This is taxpayers’ money, not money from the bloody gebnya (slang for the Soviet/Russian security services). We spent it in accordance with the application. No under-the-table cash whatsoever. If more money comes in, we’ll pay for advertising on ORT too.