I published the post announcing the fundraising campaign for the RosPil project on February 2. Our stretch goal was to raise 5 million rubles (about $170,000 at the time) over the course of a year. Twenty-four days later, on Saturday, February 26, that goal was reached. So far, we have raised this much:
The smallest donation was one kopeck. The largest were 150,000 rubles and 100,000 rubles (about $5,000 and $3,400 at the time; both donors preferred to remain anonymous). In total, around 15,000 (!) people took part in the fundraising campaign. That is astonishing. Thank you all so much. I see this as our shared interim victory—still only an interim one, but an enormously important one in principle. We have smashed the tiresome stereotype of “social passivity.” A person willing to regularly donate 400 rubles (about $14 at the time) to a good cause—that is the real gravedigger of the vertical system of state theft now entrenched in Russia. I call this victory an interim one because it will become a real victory only if RosPil starts working effectively. Raising money is not an end in itself. Ahead lies the hard work of turning a fairly chaotic movement into a titanium crowbar. 2. The search for lawyers for RosPil is moving a bit more slowly than I would like, but I would rather not rush this issue. We have a lot of résumés, and we are reviewing them carefully. Here is the first result. Introducing: Lyuba
Lyubov Fedenyova is the first lawyer who will be putting the money we raised to work. She is 23 years old and this year is graduating (knock on wood) with honors from the law faculty of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov. She spent a year working at Moscow’s Presnensky District Court as a courtroom secretary, so she knows legal procedure inside and out. Lyuba is also actively engaged in academic research on relations between parent and subsidiary companies, affiliation, and dependency. She has presented at academic conferences for students and young scholars on these topics and wrote her thesis on “The Civil-Law Consequences of Affiliation and Dependency in Corporate Relations.” She has an excellent command of Federal Laws No. 94-FZ and No. 135-FZ, as well as the orders and letters of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), and so on. She speaks English and French. As a kind of “practical test,” Lyuba identified a procurement order through a request-for-quotations procedure by one of the federal state institutions in Tver Region and wrote an excellent complaint about it. The Tver regional office of the Federal Antimonopoly Service will review the complaint this week. She will report on the outcome herself. Lyuba comes across as driven, ambitious, and smart, and, in her own words, she has a personal hatred for the existing system created and sustained by the Party of Crooks and Thieves (a popular derogatory nickname for the ruling United Russia party). Lyuba starts work on Wednesday, so in a month we will make the first payment toward her salary. Everything Lyuba does will be published online. We will upload all her complaints, notes, and so on to Google Docs. Anyone will be able to follow her work. Like all other RosPil staff, Lyuba is expected to be as active as possible on social media: Lyuba on Twitter: twitter.com/#!/devo4ka_e Lyuba on VKontakte: vkontakte.ru/id31230 Lyuba on Facebook: www.facebook.com/profile.php Lyuba on LiveJournal: sobollubov There you have it. Please welcome her. And as for you crooks—be afraid. Lyuba will be coming for you soon.