At the organizing committee meeting for the December 24 rally, I met Boris Akunin, one of our finest writers. It was interesting to talk with him and hear his critical opinion of what I do, especially since Akunin had taken a few mild swipes at me in his LiveJournal blog on the usual grounds — "for nationalism and a right-wing bias".
He said to me quite directly: Navalny, we’ve got some questions for you. There’s something suspicious about you. I thought I had already laid out my position on nationalism in detail, explained it, and broken it down at least a billion times. But Grigory Shalvovich (as you all of course remember, Boris Akunin is also Grigory Chkhartishvili) said that this was absolutely not enough, and that if I had taken it upon myself to speak about such painful issues as migration, the nation-state, and so on, then I had to explain them not as much as I wanted, but as much as people asked. Makes sense. I’ve always said that if you discuss the issues on the "nationalist agenda" in a normal, calm, and sensible way, it becomes clear that these are crucial but at the same time ordinary, real, everyday questions in the life of the country and its people. Questions that can be talked about without shouting that "the nationalists have eaten the children" and "the liberals have eaten the parents." So we agreed that borisakunin — many thanks to him for this — would ask me the questions that interested him, and I would try to give clear and direct answers. The correspondence will be published in several installments over the holiday break, and we’ll try to draw a wide circle of readers into the discussion through polls and other interactive features. The first part has already been published — have a look if you’re interested. The discussion there is "friends only," but as I understand it, the polls are open to everyone. If you have something to say, write in the comments. We’d be grateful for any feedback on the value of this dialogue and how it should be continued. Of those polls, I’d like to repost one here. It will be interesting to compare the results: [Error: Invalid poll ID 1808081]