I wasn’t at Bolotnaya (Bolotnaya Square in Moscow, the site of a major protest), so I have nothing to compare it to. I had never seen that many people in my life.
(source) Of course I admit that I exaggerated when I said in my speech that there were 200,000 people. From the stage, all you could see was an enormous street completely packed with people. The tail end of the street curved off into the distance, and it was obvious there were people standing there too, even if you couldn’t actually see them. But the point isn’t even the number. The point is that it became clear that the people who gathered there, having stated their lawful and simple demands, are not going to back down. They won’t get tired of it. And the weather won’t stop them. Congratulations to everyone. And huge thanks to everyone who came. Personally, I have a clear understanding of how events should develop from here. The necessary political changes can and must be carried out peacefully and without any upheaval. The main preconditions are there: 1) the protesters’ firm but peaceful resolve; 2) the Kremlin people’s declared readiness to evolve in order to survive. For now, that readiness still has the character of manipulation and trickery, but that’s normal: everyone wants to save face. Tomorrow I’ll write about this in detail, but for now, a few things specifically about the rally. For me, it began with having to spend two straight days in nonstop organizing-committee mode. But that couldn’t be helped: it’s impossible to hold a huge event with such broad political representation without a pile of complicated negotiations beforehand. C’est la vie. The idea of a popular vote to determine the speakers was absolutely the right one. The problem was that there were actually two votes: a Facebook vote, where participants were at least verified through their accounts, and an online questionnaire vote, where there was no verification at all and people could pump in thousands of votes from dynamic IP addresses. All you had to do was write a bot. You remember what it was like for me—5,000 comments an hour were coming in. The people hurt by the vote-rigging were political activists who clearly would have made the speakers’ list even without it. In the end, we had to combine the voting results with political quotas. Where there are quotas, there is always endless infighting. But I’m glad that almost everyone showed political wisdom by accepting unpleasant and sometimes hurtful decisions for the sake of the common cause. That’s wonderful. I’m convinced that in the future we need to keep making decisions like this through direct voting. Immediate, direct democracy. Then there won’t be all this talk of "who do all these people represent?" There should be just one vote, and it should be as thoroughly verified as possible, to rule out bots and vote-stuffers. Modern technology makes this possible, and we will set our legitimate decision-making system against their crooked, thieving system of fraud. For example, the "Democracy-2" platform is perfectly suited for this. Open all the code. Let doubters join oversight and monitoring groups—and then it can be used. The organization of the rally was simply excellent. Events like this, where the speakers are a little bit of everything, are usually monstrously chaotic for objective reasons. Yesterday, that was avoided. The part of the organizing committee responsible for this deserves every possible praise. There was, of course, no VIP stand. I don’t understand why this is being discussed so much. Speakers, the press, and organizers entered from the Garden Ring side. In front of the stage there were two barriers: in the first five meters, only media crews filming the event; in the second five meters, anyone could stand, but without flags, so as not to block the "picture" for everyone else. That is absolutely right: it’s time to finally stop this idiotic competition of "who can bring more flags"—the right with black-yellow-white ones, the left with red ones, or Solidarnost (a Russian opposition movement) with orange ones; who can wave them more energetically into cameras and people’s faces; whose flags will take the front rows, and so on. The people who gathered there were simply wonderful. It was genuinely a pleasure to look at them. Though some really did come for money... sadly, there were people like that. Posters.
(for those who didn’t get the joke. A link from Captain Obvious) Well, this is the main stroke of genius and simply the perfect symbol of what’s happening. And judging by the photo reports and comments, it’s clear how popular this creation has become.
Whistles. This was the rally’s main fail. Of course people can and should express their feelings about a speaker emotionally. By shouting "Boooo," "Bravo," "Ne treba" (roughly, "not needed"), "Bring back soap to the free market," and so on. You can even whistle, but only in the old-fashioned "fingers in your mouth and a cheerful whistle" way. But handing out three hundred whistles in an organized way and staging "nationalists whistle at liberals, liberals whistle at nationalists"—that’s nonsense, obviously. No one is interested in it, and it doesn’t even carry any real emotion. Just some nasty political stage-management. By the way, you can barely hear it from the stage. Booing and whistling should be an extreme form of dissatisfaction with a speaker; there’s no need to devalue it. I’m in favor of banning whistles. If you want to whistle, learn to do it without assistive devices. About my speech, the best line came from Bocharik: "Navalny passionately and excitedly retells the Mowgli cartoon". Well, that’s more or less what it was. As it turned out later, I spoke for 11 minutes, even though before that, listening to others, I had been angrily thinking that anyone speaking longer than four minutes should be kicked off the stage. My bad. Everything was very good, really great. Next time it will be even better, and we will definitely get back the votes that were stolen from us.
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