The holiday season is coming our way.
The RosPil website took first place in the Best Use of Technology for Social Good category (which translates as "Using technology to undermine the constitutional order") in the international The Best of Blogs competition. What is especially gratifying is that RosPil was chosen as the winner both by the international jury and by internet users who voted for the nominees. My congratulations to Pasha Senko, our man in Silicon Valley, who somehow finds the time out there in faraway California to run the site all by himself. And of course, congratulations to all the participants in the project, without whom none of this would make any sense. In the national category—best Russian-language blog—I won. Or rather, not exactly me, but the navalny blog. Without any false modesty, I can say that navalny has already become a collective creation. I’m not sure this could have happened on a standalone blog without the comments and LiveJournal (a popular Russian blogging platform). So congratulations to all the readers, commenters, and, well, a little bit to myself too. The total prize fund for everything altogether came to €230,000. Part of that will have to be paid in taxes. Another part (I promised to give forty thousand euros to Plushev, who was on the award jury). We’ll spend the rest on fighting corruption. P.S. I don’t understand why everyone is calling the payment of forty thousand euros to plushev a bribe. It’s not. We’re doing everything officially: the money is being paid for consulting services to an offshore company owned by Plushev. Everything is legal. All the winners paid him that much too.... for consulting. Update 2 I’ve just been told that plushev is demanding an additional payment—to bring the total to sixty thousand euros. One of the winners—a girl from Tunisia—refused to pay him. She was immediately stripped of the award. I don’t know what to do now.
People