Of course, I need to report back to the sponsors. Over the past few days, it has finally become clear who those "influential groups financing Navalny’s team and rocking the boat" really are. It’s you. Officially: so far, we have raised about 20 million rubles for the campaign. I say "about" because the figure is still being finalized. But all of this is completely formal and official, goes through the campaign account, and will be available for public scrutiny. Of that amount, we raised 12 million in the 5 days following my post saying we needed money. That means we set a record not only for the speed of political fundraising, but also for its total size. Naturally, the Kremlin, City Hall, or various oligarchs throw around several times that amount every day to "feed" their tame political projects, but no one has ever raised this much openly, in small donations, directly from citizens. This is yet another example of how this so-called "political apathy" mostly consists of us constantly talking about "political apathy." The people are there, and they are ready to give money—just ask, and prove through your work that it will all go where it should and nothing will get "lost" along the way. A huge thank-you to everyone who contributed. Thank you to everyone who helped spread the word about the fundraising campaign. The fundraising continues. We still very much need the money. Instructions for making a bank transfer are here. Yandex wallet: 410011270217317 Audit for monitoring this wallet: http://yaudit.org/yaudit/410011270217317 Now, about what we’ve been doing over the past few days. I’m very pleased to report that our wonderful headquarters team successfully carried out "three big cube days." We were testing what genuinely large-scale volunteer work would look like and checking whether anything would break. There were minor issues, but they were resolved quickly. Overall, nothing broke; the team did an excellent job.
Friday:
http://cube.navalny.ru/#cubes/26-07-2013
Saturday:
http://cube.navalny.ru/#cubes/27-07-2013 Sunday:
http://cube.navalny.ru/#cubes/28-07-2013
If a campaign cube is marked with the number "1," or with no number at all, that does not mean only one person was campaigning there—this almost never happens. We always try to send additional volunteers to support any such cube right away. It simply means that, unfortunately, not everyone registers in the system. On the other hand, some people come with their whole families:
Over those three days, a total of 659 heroic volunteers worked with us, and we are immensely grateful to them—these are the people who will change the country. The "three big cube days" distributed more than 200,000 leaflets at 160 campaign cubes.
Campaigning at a cube is real politics in its pure form. It’s incredibly important, and we really need you. You can sign up to organize a cube here: https://podio.com/webforms/4779360/373947 You can sign up as a campaigner here http://cube.navalny.ru/ or by coming to headquarters (22 Lyalin Lane). And on Saturday, we also tried out a "volunteer party" format. Everyone works so hard, and we thought: why not relax together too? It’s a great chance for everyone to get to know one another, find like-minded people, and talk in an informal setting.
Everyone liked it, but we’ll keep refining the format: we simply don’t fit anywhere. We’ll probably have to do some kind of outdoor barbecue/shashlik (grilled skewers) gathering.
One more piece of great news: on Friday, we tested and launched a super-mega-important campaign project: "Meetings."
That is, literally, meetings with voters in residential courtyards. Until the end of the campaign, they will take up almost all of my time. On weekdays—three meetings a day. On weekends—five.
We believe this is exactly how a real election campaign should be built: by talking to people. And, honestly, we don’t have many other options. The zombie box (a sarcastic term for television) is occupied by Sobyanin, I’m not invited onto TV talk shows, so instead I talk to grandmothers in courtyards. It’s actually very interesting. The first time was scary: what if nobody came? In fact, nobody really did. I started the first meeting (Friday at 12:00, in the Zyuzino district) with an audience of 3 (three) grandmothers. By the end of the meeting, there were 30 to 40 people.
We’ll experiment with meeting times and fine-tune the notification formats—everything will start working properly. What’s especially interesting is that the crooks at City Hall seem to be most enraged by our courtyard meetings. At every meeting, some kind of provocateurs showed up. The usual-looking "Nashi" activists (pro-Kremlin youth movement members) or "young United Russia" activists with iPads, running over to consult some guy from the local district administration sitting in a parked car nearby. At one meeting, they even sent a couple of homeless men who started throwing tomatoes (!). In this particular case, it turned into a spectacular failure for Sobyanin’s "political strategists": tomato splatter landed not only on my shirt, but mostly on the white T-shirt of a mother with a child who had come to the meeting. Naturally, everyone present was furious at the provocateurs, and the mother herself walked to the two remaining meetings, telling people at each one what idiots were working for City Hall. Here, even Vedomosti wrote about the incident. Another very funny thing is that Sobyanin’s campaign headquarters instructed district and prefecture offices to literally collect all of our campaign materials:
This immediately took on a comic form: people in municipal utility uniforms come up to the campaign cubes and literally beg for "half a bundle of leaflets" so they can hand them in to the district administration and report that they’ve done their job. At one cube, a woman from the district administration simply stole a stack of leaflets. One activist even had a "For Navalny" banner stolen from her balcony by an Uzbek janitor, who lowered himself down from the roof on a rope!
I’d honestly be curious to see the meetings where Sobyanin and Rakova plan their "countermeasures": how about we pelt him with tomatoes and steal his leaflets! So there you have it—my short report to you, the sponsors. Join us in any form and in any way you can. We really need you. And now I’m off to prepare for another meeting with voters.