A rich vocabulary and a high level of culture. If you want to read an interview where words like "freaking," "trash," and "whack" come up constantly, while words like "by no means," "eclecticism," and "phenomenological" do not appear at all, then this is for you:
"First they’ll jail everyone, and then we’ll sweep them away" About everything. From Kirovles to the Coordination Council, from Adagamov to Kasparov. But that’s beside the point. I’m writing this post because of Tonya Samsonova, who, before the Coordination Council elections, latched onto me like a tick with the question: "Should members of the Coordination Council publish income declarations like government officials?" Just to get her off my back somehow, I said that no, not everyone has to: members of the Coordination Council are not civil servants, they do not receive money from taxpayers, but I myself would probably publish one. (If I had known then what a hassle preparing a declaration would be, I would never have said that.) People kept reminding me of that promise from time to time. Well, I promised—so here it is.
I’m not submitting this declaration anywhere; we just cobbled it together ourselves, with the help of accountants, modeled on the kind that people who are actually required to file one submit. So this is not a legal document, just an informational one. Still, the figures appear to be accurate—we checked them twice. Just in case, here is a note on my main income:
The large amount listed in line 1 of section 3 of the declaration is what you donate to RosPil if you use Yandex.Money or PayPal. Formally, you are giving that money to me personally, so it falls under non-taxable income. I immediately transfer those funds to RosPil’s accounts.
Let me answer the obvious question right away: what do you spend all that money on?
There’s no huge pile of money at all. If anything, I’d need three times as much.
I have two main categories of expenses: 1) family 2) our Anti-Corruption Foundation.
This year a third expense category appeared: all these bogus criminal cases, four of them in total, launched by the Investigative Committee (Russia’s main federal investigative agency). To put it plainly, our organizational and financial resources are not exactly comparable. They can carry out searches at a thousand homes if they want and seize every computer and phone in the house, and then I have to try somehow to help the people who suffered because of me. At the very least, help them get a lawyer to file a complaint about an illegal search.
Not to mention that now I’ll have to travel to Kirov, live there, and accommodate the defense team there as well. Expert examinations, this and that.
This third expense category has swallowed an unimaginable amount of money since July. If not for it, life at our foundation would be a bit easier, and we would have done a couple of interesting things we had been planning for a long time.
Well, we’ll still do them. When in doubt, immediately start a fundraising drive.
So there. Now my conscience is clear before Tonya Samsonova and the others who were eager to see the declaration.