My brother Oleg and his wife Vika, whose apartment was searched yesterday, send their regards to everyone and thank you for your support.
They tore the whole apartment apart and, as usual, seized the phones, computers, and anything that, in the investigator’s view, looked like “financial documentation” — meaning any papers with numbers on them. The investigators also found and confiscated all the cash in the apartment: 50,000 rubles (about $550 / €510). Which is, of course, especially vile given that Oleg was recently forced to leave his job — with the surname “Navalny,” working at Russian Post had become nearly impossible. Oleg’s lawyer even filed a motion on the spot asking them not to take the money — but no, “orders were to take all the money.”
Bastrykin and Markin (senior Russian law-enforcement officials) came up with a nice little mockery: they invent some monstrous nonsense about the “theft of 50 million rubles,” fabricate a criminal case, blast across all the state TV channels that “Navalny stole 50 million,” and then show up at Navalny’s cramped two-room apartment in a Soviet-era panel building and “seize” the 50,000 rubles they find there. They’re probably laughing back at their offices on Tekhnichesky Lane:* ha-ha-ha, and then we go and confiscate your 50,000 — the investigation will be studying it, ha-ha-ha*.
Well then, they should have shown this search too on Channel One, complete with the investigators’ “haul” and commentary from Markin’s talking head. This is where a search ought to be carried out instead: at the fur vault of one “staunch statist” and “consistent supporter of V. V. Putin,” living off state money. Oh well. We’ll get through it all, everyone’s in good spirits, and sooner or later we’ll get to the fur vaults too. Update. As the most attentive readers report, something did in fact escape the investigators’ notice. A criminal who stole 50 million rubles was hiding in the apartment; he can be seen in the photo: