Hello, this is Collective Navalny. That is, even before this, Navalny in this blog was, in a sense, already collective, speaking on behalf of a fairly large group of people who had united around him to conduct anti-corruption investigations, campaign work, and, more broadly, fight the regime of crooks and thieves. But now Navalny here is collective in the literal sense: as you know, Alexei was illegally arrested, and that was then used as a formal pretext to place him under house arrest. The Investigative Committee’s go-to rubber-stamper at Moscow’s Basmanny Court, “judge” Artur Karpov, happily granted the investigators’ request to ban him from communicating with anyone, using any means of communication, and accessing the internet. He even added his own ban on comments and statements to the media.
Navalny enters the building after returning from the special detention center. The house arrest regime is already in effect. Source.
So for now, this blog is being run by staff of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Yulia Navalnaya. That really is the case, and any claims to the contrary are a provocation.
Navalny’s Twitter is run by Yulia Navalnaya.
Facebook — by ACF staff.
VKontakte — by ACF staff.
Important: in order not to change the style of this journal, we have decided to continue writing it in the first person. So if it says here “I said,” “I decided,” or “I immediately had a drink,” it is still not Navalny writing it — he is banned from using the internet.
Obviously, the posts will be different. Of course, we’ll try to come up with the same kind of strange jokes Navalny used to make and to supply every entry with a heap of insulting epithets inciting hatred and hostility toward the social group known as “corrupt officials,” but we don’t know whether we’ll manage to make it sound the same.
How do we know what to do and what to write? It’s like the old joke about the guy handing out blank sheets of paper instead of leaflets (“Well, it’s obvious anyway!”): the ACF has been conducting investigations and continues to do so, and we have plenty to talk about. We publish a newspaper (we’ll write about it soon), conduct polling and sociological research, collect signatures, draft legislation, campaign, raise money, build the best political party — the “Party of Progress” (“now with flavor officially registered by the state”) — and much more besides. That’s what we’ll be writing about.
And we’ll also be urging you to work together with us.
What’s more, we communicate with Alexei through notes he scratches onto the bottoms of aluminum plates (the prison service, FSIN, brings him food in them), then throws out the ninth-floor window. ACF staff try to catch the plates before the FSB officers on duty outside Navalny’s building do.
Let us answer right away: yes, we know things will get worse for a while.
We can see that groups supporting Navalny are being targeted for closure.
https://vk.com/wall-21239875_1377408 We are fully aware that the Kremlin riffraff fears him so much that, having already gone as far as imposing illegal house arrest with a ban on communicating with anyone, this is likely to develop in a very bad direction. Obviously, the next step will be statements from the Investigative Committee claiming he violated the terms of house arrest and should be placed in pretrial detention.
A suspended sentence could be turned into a real prison term. An additional sentence could be handed down in the fabricated “Yves Rocher” case. There is absolutely no hope in the courts: if here “judge” Krivoruchko managed to “see” “resisting the police, digging his heels into the ground, and shouting slogans”, then it certainly won’t be difficult for them to “see” another five years in prison for Navalny and his brother in some fake piece of paper from Bastrykin. We understand all of this; it’s nothing new. Everything you need to know in case “Navalny is imprisoned” is written here. To finish, here is an excellent phrase spoken yesterday by a certain gentleman. One word in the phrase has been changed: "This system in Russia, bound up with banditry, nepotism, and cronyism, above all in the economy, requires change". You can figure out for yourselves which gentleman it was and which word was changed. And we agree: this system requires change, and we will fight to achieve it. “Collective Navalny” will not fall silent as long as there are people willing to become part of it.
Join us.