So there you go—and you still didn’t believe Murtazin and Novaya Gazeta: On Friday, one of Moscow’s major advertising agencies held a “brainstorming session” in its division specializing in “black” PR, under the working title “Stop Navalny.” Our source claims the meeting was convened on an emergency basis: the day before, the head of the agency met with one of the top figures in the United Russia party and received an order to discredit the well-known blogger, head of the RosPil project, Alexei Navalny. During that meeting, the campaign budget was also set: 10 million rubles (about $330,000 at the time). (The names of the negotiators and the name of the advertising agency are known to the editors.) I’ve read through this “hacked Navalny email” that’s been hyped all over the internet with unbelievable force. So, Yes, my Gmail account was hacked twice. The first time, about a year and a half ago, I even wrote about it on LiveJournal (though I can’t find the post now). The second time was this summer, when I was on vacation in Spain: they hacked my main email, my backup email—the one my LiveJournal account is registered to—my wife’s email, and my Facebook page. As you can see, I still don’t control the Facebook page. Who hacked it the first time—I don’t know. Maybe the FSB guys were looking for spies, maybe the security service of some Gazprom or VTB branch was trying to find something out. They broke in, looked around, and gave it back. I don’t really care—let them read. Now it’s clear that the second hack was political—that is, commissioned by Kremlin crooks. I can’t say exactly who did it. I suspect it was that same “hacker Hell,” there are some signs pointing that way (I saved screenshots and other information), but I can’t say for sure—I don’t understand all this internet proxy-hacker nonsense:
Is the email published here http://navalnymail.kz/ actually mine? I can’t say I studied it super closely—that would have taken too much time—but yes, I looked through it. About 90 percent of it is mine. It’s a selection of emails that the Kremlin crooks apparently considered the most scandalous, plus some small insertions. Some of them are fairly easy to spot, both in terms of content and style. The most obvious, of course, is the letter from a mysterious stranger in whom one can easily recognize Stas Belkovsky, writing something like: "a reminder that you owe your entire career to me, I made you famous. Now publish three paid-for posts and receive $50,000 for it; tomorrow my man will hand over the first 20." And all of that in a single email. Apparently they decided people would have a harder time grasping the point if they were subtler and spread it across several messages. Judging by how quickly this particular part was interpreted and neatly laid out,
pushed to the top by anonymous blogs, 80% of whose posts are devoted to my supposed villainy, and even tied to the “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” campaign, then that is the main PR concept—the whole reason this was done.
There are some less obvious additions and alterations. And there are some changes that are completely pointless: meaningless edits in meaningless emails. I don’t understand what the point was.
The rest of the kompromat mostly consists of:
correspondence with foreigners (especially from embassies). For example, my email to a U.S. Department of Justice representative is repeated several times, in which I ask him to pass along documents for our investigation into the “Daimler case.” What’s new about that is unclear—I wrote on LiveJournal a hundred times that we would request those documents.
correspondence in English in general, which probably seems suspicious to people who don’t know English.
evidence of my luxurious lifestyle. Hotel reservations, for example. There’s an email where I sign up for golf lessons at Yale (a bourgeois! he plays golf!). There is indeed one truly scandalous episode connected with that email: I write to the coach, “Do you available”? That, of course, is embarrassing.
piles of documents containing personal data (passports, vehicle registration papers, etc.), mine and other people’s too.
personal correspondence between me and my wife.
What I want to say about all this:
First of all, I apologize to everyone whose emails—and especially whose personal data—ended up on public display. I’m very sorry this happened.
When I hire people, I immediately warn them: “Be prepared for your email and all your social media accounts to be hacked and everything dragged out into the open.” I myself thought I was completely ready for this, and that when my email was exposed to everyone (which was obvious after the second hack), I would smile a cold smile.
Well, I am smiling, of course, but reading my wife’s letters posted on some Kazakh server turned out to be far more unpleasant than one might have expected. I feel bitterness—just like Vladlen Stepanov.
It’s disgusting to think that three assholes in the presidential administration sat there looking through emails with photos of your children and scans of documents, wondering: does this go into the “kompromat” folder or not?
Still, nothing all that terrible—if you’ve chosen this path, then show everyone your email.
To read or not to read? A lot of people wrote to me: “Sorry, I couldn’t resist and read it,” “I would read it, but my upbringing won’t allow it,” and so on.
Go ahead and read it. I permit it. http://navalnymail.kz/
Better to read it yourselves than through the interpretation of these blogger brigades posting nonsense everywhere they can.
Read it and you’ll understand why, disappointed by the results of the operation, the Nashi activists (pro-Kremlin youth movement) started pushing a new line: “N*avalny published it himself to show that there’s no kompromat on him*.”
And journalists write to me in disappointment: there’s not much compromising there...
What did you think would be in there? That I eat children on Berezovsky’s orders?
I don’t eat children. And like any ordinary person, there’s nothing extraordinary in my email.
But now I have no secrets from you. Almost (sinister laughter)
Life is easier without secrets, and especially so in politics.
That is, without a doubt, the upside of what happened.
As usual: thanks to the crooks for being such crooks.
They cut corners, of course, and stole the money. It doesn’t take much intelligence to cobble together a “counteraction” like this: pull all my posts tagged VTB, then fabricate an email saying, “We’ll hand over the money for the publications dated such-and-such on Wednesday; please publish on such-and-such dates. We’ll pay in heroin; involve the Israeli embassy in the campaign.” But it does let you write off the budget. Which is clearly what happened.
I have a rough idea who is handling the creative side and the online promotion of this story (I have no direct proof, so I won’t name names). These people have already skimmed so much money off “Kremlin internet projects,” and every time so incompetently, that one can only sympathize with the crook Surkov over his staffing crisis.
This badminton racket is the symbol of what’s happening.
A symbol of a worthless, cowardly, thieving government that neither wants nor is able to do anything except protect itself. It has nothing substantive to say in response. It cannot win elections honestly. It cannot do anything for the country. But to protect themselves, these badminton players will do whatever is most vile. The politics awaiting us in the near future is pure Pelevin-esque absurdity, straight out of his latest book: they’ll install cameras in bathrooms and toilets, rummage through trash, steal private correspondence—both from those they see as threats and from their relatives. So we need to be ready for a truly enormous amount of filth and slime to be dumped on us. Especially since all those highly respectable university rectors, TV hosts and artists with delicate souls, “clever economists,” and other fans of the Skolkovo Foundation are eagerly joining in the dumpster-diving. Medvedev is leading them into the election with the Party of Crooks and Thieves, and for the sake of this whole gang of hangers-on in Digital October with their iPads and dreams of a “Big Government,” the headquarters of Medvedev’s United Russia is organizing all this nastiness described in *Novaya* and now unfolding before our eyes. 6. Immorality and meanness are destroying this government even faster than corruption. Let them keep at it. Medvedev with a badminton racket, installing a spy camera in someone’s bathroom, is unlikely to be seen as a representative of legitimate authority—however titillating the resulting video footage may be.