It’s an awkward feeling when you’re supposed to write something very profound before tomorrow’s verdict. The problem, of course, is not making words and letters sound profound — that part comes easily to me. The issue is that how they’re received depends heavily on the verdict itself. A strange situation, isn’t it: if Putin loses his nerve and an innocent man gets a suspended sentence as the result of an unjust ruling, then that means I was “lucky.” if he finds the courage and the sentence is a real prison term, then I was “unlucky.” In the second case, everyone will love me and pity me. Someone will definitely make a video of me being led away by the guards and set it to this music. Against such a heart-wrenching backdrop, any post can only be commented on with “he said that exactly right.” Though I should note that I would very much like all my possible arrests and imprisonments to come with exactly this kind of visual and musical accompaniment. In the first case (“lucky”), nothing touching will happen — quite the opposite, in fact. Journalists will write: “After the verdict was announced, Navalny went to the café across the street and ordered himself a beer and some fried potatoes, which he drank and ate while staring at the television.” Can you really trust a man who, instead of living through a dramatic moment, eats fried potatoes? Hardly, obviously. Still. Here’s what I want to say. Or rather, let’s look at it all through the example of some well-known pictures. Is what’s shown here correct?
The main idea is right, of course — “stop whining and being scared all the time, and start organizing the work” — but it is completely wrong in terms of the proportions of those fish. We are not facing some huge fish that needs to be frightened by pretending to be even bigger. The current government is not a huge fish. It is more like a pufferfish, or some Latin American toad, puffing itself up at the sight of danger with the help of television — showing lying prostitute TV hosts or oddballs from the Investigative Committee (Russia’s main federal investigative agency) in blue uniforms babbling that they’re going to lock everyone up. And who exactly can they lock up? Twenty people? Fifty? A hundred, if they really try hard. That’s the full extent of their terrifying potential. Of course, it’s pretty unpleasant to end up among those 20, 50, or 100, but all sorts of things happen in life. Sometimes pianos fall on people too. So our task is actually simpler than the fish in that picture have it: we need to organize not against a shark, but against some Surinam toad, somehow perched on an oil pipeline valve and swelling up from its own fear — and at the same time from the pleasure of having that fear mistaken for menace and greatness. But the toad is not going to jump off the valve by itself. You have to keep poking it with a stick for a long time, or remove it by wrapping it in paper. That is what organizational work is for. For now, the toad is winning because we are too lazy to deal with it. All these years, together with you, I have been learning how to organize under conditions of state propaganda, intimidation, and lack of money. I’ve learned a few things. We now know how to raise money too. I am sure you will help raise it for our Foundation if events take a negative turn. By my estimate, the annual fundraising potential from citizens for political projects is no less than 300 million rubles (about 3.3 million USD at current rates). We just need to collect it, and right now only our Foundation and a couple of other organizations are doing that. We are tapping only a small part of it. We know how to conduct investigations better than any of the bodies that are officially supposed to conduct investigations. We know how to find the crooks’ real estate and assets, as well as their residence permits. We know how to create, fund in a decentralized way, and publish newspapers. The first issue alone has already circulated in more than a million copies, which means we can do 5 to 10 million every three months if we really try. We know how to organize large rallies. We know how to create parties. Parties so real, and so frightening to the authorities, that they refuse to register them, despite all the talk of “liberalization and a notification-based procedure.” We know how to collect 100,000 real signatures on petitions. We know how to hold fair elections online and now understand how to build strong candidate lists through primaries for any election campaign. Right now we are learning how to organize thousands of volunteers, and we will definitely learn how to do that too. Our headquarters is already something remarkable, nothing like it has ever been done in Russian politics. Many people are ready to help us, and we will fight for even broader support. In other words, we understand what needs to be done, how to do it, and what resources to do it with. The main thing is to find the courage, cast off laziness, and act. No special leadership is really needed, in fact. So our situation is much better captured not by the picture with the fish, but by this one:
The first is afraid, the second is even more afraid, and then for everyone else it is not frightening at all — it becomes easy, and it guarantees results. And that brings me to the main point, the reason I sat down to write this. A collective effort guarantees results, but the collective is made up of individual, personal efforts. This is not some kind of communicating vessel where you can step aside and sit on a bench while someone else does the work for you. Just understand this: there is no one but you. No one cares more about what is happening in the country and in your city than you do. There are no amazing volunteers who will come and do the work for you. There are no wonderful people ready to chip in 500 rubles (about 5.50 USD) at the exact moment when you are too lazy to log into online banking. There is no one who will rise up for you, like in the picture. If you’ve gotten as far as reading this LiveJournal blog, then you are the front line. There is no one more aware, no one more advanced. There is no one else the unhappy, frightened, and deceived millions of Russian residents can rely on. They have been less fortunate in life than you, and you are their hope. There is no mysterious underground whose leaflets you will be surprised to find in your apartment building entrance one morning. There is no person who will come and silently fix everything — someone is thinking of you as that person. No one is capable of resisting more strongly than you are. Your duty to others, if you have recognized it, is not something you can delegate to someone else. There is no one but you. If you are reading this, then you are the resistance.