Maltsev and Navalny. Bad News at 9:00 PM. 08/25/2016

of an era. Good question. Come on, you need to

turn it on. You didn’t turn everything on.

Hello.

Today is August 25, 2016, on the channel

Artpodgotovka, the program Bad

News. I’m Vyacheslav Maltsev, and with me in the

studio are Alexei Navalny and Sergey. Over here we

have Dmitry, and Edik is sitting over there. There are

a lot of people here, right? There are a lot of people here. And we’re

visiting Alexei, that is, we’re not actually in

the studio; we’re in his office,

at the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Judging by

the sign, you’ve occupied this office

pretty thoroughly, yes. That’s how it is. Which is

a great honor for me. How much time is left

until the new historical era? That is

436 days.

436 days. So now, I guess,

Alexei and I will talk, go over

the news, and then, well,

after that we’ll answer questions. Right away: “Oh,

cool, Lyokha did great.” What are they writing here?

[ __ ] Well, I apologize, I don’t

swear, but, well, that’s that. Yes. Hi,

Navalny. Well done, Alexei. Great job. Hey,

oh, can you see us? Of course we can see you. How

could we not?

So then, Maltsev, junta, revolution? Well,

fine, a good slogan. First of all, I wanted

to thank you for coming.

Thank you very much. It’s very

pleasant for me to take part in this truly legendary

program. I’ve heard a lot

about it. People very often wrote to me:

“When are you finally going to come on

Maltsev’s show?” So here I am. Maltsev came

to me instead, and many thanks to him

for that. And I’m glad

to have the opportunity. I have a question right away,

Slava, for you. This sign,

for many people—please explain it. I’ve got

everything from Marina covered in this sign.

Explain to those who don’t get it, what

will happen on 11/5/17,

what will happen

on the fifth of November. Why does everything for you revolve

around this sign? Edik,

who is here, Babudzhanyan,

grabbed me by the lapels and said:

“Slava, tell me, when is the revolution?” Well,

because we were all writing, we had to

name some date. Well, I don’t know, I

understood that if I said November 7,

2017, then somehow

many would say: “Why tie it to the

centenary of the communist revolution?” Well,

not everyone is a communist, right? Besides,

the centenary of the revolution

is still an important milestone. And somehow,

besides that, we calculated some

economic things—not just us,

specialists calculated some

political things. It was a long time ago; back then

there wasn’t even a war yet, but we

foresaw, generally speaking, that there would be one, and

we talked about it. And so we named

this date. It’s metaphorical, after all. Well,

that is, it’s a symbol, not that—

because many joke that, well, on the sixth

they’ll all go home, because

nothing will happen on the sixth. It’s

just a symbolic date. Yes, we

think that maybe it could

even happen earlier, if everyone is ready.

Imagine, you and I

will be. Come on, well done. Let me

shake your hand for that. There. Yes, this is a very

important moment. A historic moment.

There. And when all our enemies, including

those in power, are ready for the fifth

of November, then that’s it. But we need

every last

hardened scoundrel invested with power

to know that it’s the fifth of November, and say:

“Damn, we need to fight them, because

they’ll come out on the fifth of November. That’s it.”

As soon as that happens, if they

say: “Nothing’s going to happen there

at all, we’ll go to the dacha (country house) on

November fifth.” But if they say: “We’ll

all stand there like a wall and not let them through

on the fifth of November, well then,

that means we’ve won.”

That’s it, I get it, yes?

that was the idea. Yes. And another important point,

the fact that November 5, 2017,

is a Sunday. Yes, of course. Well, we

said Sunday, that November 5,

2017, there would be, well,

fireworks,

yes, a night of fireworks and so on. Well,

lots of different things. After the fourth, yes,

after the Russian March (an annual nationalist demonstration), the fifth, well,

all sorts of things. So, what’s interesting.

Seryozha, tell

our people—they’ll also be curious—about the dislikes. That

is, we always, until

yesterday, always had, well, 200 dislikes,

with 10,000 or more likes and about 200

dislikes. It rarely got up to 500.

Yes, rarely to 500. Well, yesterday we had

such a

troll attack. We got 5,500 dislikes.

We’re very grateful to those these people. It

still boosts the rating. Of course,

of course, of course, everyone knows that. That

even if, for example, this

broadcast today gets zero likes and

10,000 dislikes, we’ll still make it

into YouTube’s top rankings and maybe even get,

by the way, into even higher positions. It’s

a complicated system there. By the way,

today we had the same funny thing

happen. We posted a video where we

flew over the dachas (country houses) of the leaders of the United Russia

party list, Neverov and Volodin, and it

was going normally, fine. Lots of likes,

few dislikes, because nobody

likes United Russia. And then within 5

minutes they put 3,000 dislikes on it.

That is, they simply have a bot machine. And

it’s interesting that this bot machine

is controlled by United Russia. They

don’t turn it on for Putin, but they turned it on

for themselves. So they made use of their official

position. Got it? That’s exactly

what I was telling you, and you were saying: “No,

United Russia can’t do that.” You

said it was those Olgino trolls and so

on. Yes, it’s all the same thing. You were saying

that the party does it, and I’m saying that, well, in the party lived

will create people who know how to work with

this. That’s what I’m talking about. So,

let’s go over the news then.

Here they write: “The right hand of Russia

splashed Russia with mud.” By the way, do you

have footage of you smearing people in a TV broadcast? I did not

sling mud at Russians. Is it because I called Putinism

gonorrhea? Can you imagine? I watched that

broadcast, as I carefully watch these

broadcasts. By the way, I want to say that

I’m very pleased that both you, Vyacheslav, and

Mikhail Mikhailovich performed excellently in the

debates, because, well, the election

campaign isn’t very active, but

the center of this election campaign has become

the debates, and you did very well. And

many people wrote to me, people who are,

well, completely of a liberal

persuasion—even they were pleased with these

performances. Cool, yeah. And here we

have the news, we’ll talk through the news. I’ll

ask your thoughts on many things. Here in

Tyumen Region, two

teenage lovers hanged themselves. Actually,

the boy died by suicide first, then the girl,

who loved him. I don’t think he

hanged himself because of love. And here our

young people are ruining their lives with suicides,

in batches, just in batches. It’s страшно,

it’s monstrous. I worked as a local police officer. You

know, Alexei, in all that time I wasn’t

fortunate, so to speak, to see it,

because back then youth suicide was a museum-level rarity,

so to speak. Well, there was this fourteen-year-old

teenager—he hanged himself. I was shocked. I still

remember it with a shudder. There were all kinds of corpses

I had carried around. I wasn’t afraid

there. Here, I was terribly afraid. Even now

as I speak, my eyes well up with tears,

you understand? And now it happens

so casually that if I

worked there now, I’d probably shoot myself,

because, well, it happens eve

there are special statistics per 100,000

population. Russia is in second place in the world

for the number of murders. I think Japan is the only one

we need to mention. But they have that kind of cultural

feature, that kind of depression. But here,

it really is some kind of

nightmare—among teenagers in the world. We are in

first place for suicide. And the paradox is

that you are 52 years old and, while serving as a

police officer, only once were you

a witness—as a militiaman (Soviet/Russian police officer). Yes, pardon me.

As a militiaman. What are you saying? Only once were you

a witness to a teenage suicide. I,

not being a militiaman or police officer, have been

a witness three times to suicides of people

under 20 years old. Well, that is terrifying.

It’s telling, and I think that, well,

to speak frankly, this fifth

eleventh and and because of this as

well, because this needs to be changed,

because this kind of depression

comes from people not seeing

a way out. First of all, there is a general

hopelessness in the country, and secondly, well,

there is a complete absence of any system

to support all these people. Formally,

colossal sums are allocated to

health care in terms of some kind of

social and psychological assistance. In

practice, though, none of this exists. It’s simply

absent. And there were a huge number of

articles on this topic, saying that a teenager

who has run into problems in life

simply has nowhere to turn, no one

will help him, there are no

professionals who could

do it. Right, I heard it, our microphone is crackling.

That happens. I’ll

fix everything now. All right. Again, someone is

writing to us, someone is, uh, fiddling with the microphone. Well,

Seryozha says we have

a special person who gets

paid to fiddle with the microphone. So

that’s not true, right? A microphone-fiddler,

like what is it, a lifter. I don’t know, our

microphone is positioned like this. We’ve already

discussed here that we look like

those two elderly people in the

famous Macarena video. Well, probably,

we’ll save our singing for the next

program, so there was some kind of suspin. Here

in Bashkortostan, seven people were poisoned with

brake fluid, four died.

Can you imagine? This is the same

situation, that is, anecdotal. You

say we had a similar

situation in Saratov, when—well, tell it then. Seven

people sat down to drink vodka on Friday, and by

Monday not one of them woke up. And

afterward, forensic experts concluded

that they all died at different times. In other

words, first one person died, and six

people ignored it; then two people died, and five

people ignored it; and it got to the point where

the last one, surrounded by six corpses,

didn’t even think that maybe

it was time to stop drinking. Well, listen,

it seems to me that, first of all, no, well, it’s not

funny, right, well, you can’t, well, it’s not

anecdotal, it’s tragic, and most

importantly, these are those cursed nineties

all over again. I spent my whole life living in military

towns. I remember how people died

from drinking some kind of

methyl alcohol, right. But that was the early 1990s,

and now the same thing is happening again.

That is, people are in such poverty that they

are once again drinking

some kind of—when it would seem that all

those jokes about how to clean a palette

were left far back in the Soviet Union. And

modern people don’t even understand those

jokes about fake alcohol anymore. And yet

it’s all coming back. Yes. And in the

nineties there was, remember, that joke

that Seryozha practically reproduced,

when, remember, three alcoholics found

some kind of spirit, one sniffs the spirit.

Well, one took a sip and died; he says, sniffs it, well, well,

it’s spirit after all. Bang. The second took a sip and died.

The third—well, it’s spirit after all—took a gulp,

help me. This is a very important kind of thing.

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result

at this moment. Yes, really, it’s not funny. And

we’ll see that things will get much worse. The fire

in a Defense Ministry dormitory in central Moscow

was brought under control. For some reason, the Defense Ministry

has been going up in flames a lot lately. So,

don’t you know, Lyosh, why you’re more involved

in these matters? Well, look, just look.

In what sense? Setting fire to the

Ministry of Defense building, or what? In terms of

fighting corruption. Of course,

of course. The investigation carried out by

our foundation together with Lyubov Sobol,

remember when the barracks collapsed, there

were several paratroopers killed, and we

uncovered those contracts as complete

fraud. People were simply stealing from

all of it. Though, by the way, they grabbed

random people there. Those random

people have already been released now. But overall, it must be

said that several

dozens of people died there. No one has been punished,

no one has actually been held

accountable. And most importantly, the graft

on those construction contracts,

which ultimately leads to casualties,

is continuing. And you know, about

this one that

collapsed — the building, right? Why did it

collapse in the center? Do you know? That

barracks, the very one you

investigated. I’m telling you. We

had a military school in Engels. I

ran for office from Engels in 1994.

And I had

good relations with the commander there. I walk into

the school and look around. In the center, everything

had been cut out. Right in the center of a building just like that. It’s

a classic Soviet barracks. And I

say, “Listen, what are you doing?” He

says, “We’re replacing everything here.”

He says, “In 30 years,” he says, “they’ve

pissed all over everything. The toilets and showers were there, so

everything had rotted through.” And what did they do in

that particular barracks? They just

spruced everything up and moved the toilets and showers.

But it was completely

rotted through. And any military man knew that. I

even without being some kind of, well,

officer. I served in the army at a border outpost, and I’d

never seen anything like that. And even then, I saw something like it once.

Can you imagine? That’s how low

the standards are, really, how much

nobody gives a damn, right? Because nobody cares,

the main thing is money. Yes. We’ve seen

the same thing with the Emergencies Ministry (EMERCOM) so many

times. Right now everyone’s

running around, saying what a wonderful Shoigu is, but how many

contracts were there where they built

a hospital once, and then allocated

money a second time for a hospital

that had already been built. We had all of that, well,

they were irrefutable proofs. Here’s

a photograph of the hospital — it exists. How

can you bastards allocate money for it again?

And they do allocate it, and there’s no criminal

case. And everyone runs around shouting, “How wonderful our

EMERCOM is with this kind of hospital!”

And Navalny is a State Department

agent. Yes. The Defense Ministry published

a video of a snap inspection of the armed

forces. That’s it. They’re taking

a cue from you and me. Meaning everything has to be — yes, yes,

yes — on air, everything has to be. So they’ve got it

on air too, except we show what

we actually have, while they, well, they shoot

feature films about precision

bombing. Remember that funny situation

when they literally, well, instead of those beautiful shots

where a cruise missile flies somewhere,

they took footage from some

computer game and passed it off as their real footage.

Yes, yes, yes, they saved money there too. Someone

must have allocated money to make that video.

They used a computer game. You wanted

to tell us, Vyacheslav Vyacheslavovich, how

you were joking around? Ah, no, yes,

joking around. No, that’s, all right,

some other time, next time.

He keeps remembering how I told the story of

how we were once put on combat alert by command

at the outpost, yes, because once that signal

is no longer given as a drill, because

it’s understood that the enemy is already on the unit’s territory

and is killing everyone.

So the signal is only played for people to hear.

It is given only for actual combat

purposes. Well, so they don’t kill each other.

I made that joke on April 1 — I was

on duty then. Well, I’ll tell that story

another time. Right now we’re with Alexei, yes. And

athletes from the capital

have arrived in Saratov to take part in Moscow Days

(a promotional event for Moscow). Yes. Here’s

an interesting thing. Yes. Nothing

paradoxical. I actually wanted to ask

you, Alexei, look,

the wonderful, so to speak, friend of children

and everyone else in the world, Slava

Volodin, is now in Saratov. And

suddenly all sorts of Sobyanin people

and various ministers rush there too. They’re

holding Moscow Days there, all the

athletes are going there. And do you know where

the athletes came to? You’ll find this

interesting: they came to the village of [__],

my ancestral village, so to speak. Why they

came there, I don’t know. To lower

PARNAS’s result. Well, it’s clear why I’m

saying that — Volodin is leading the regional

group. So that’s why United Russia,

and the authorities in general, care enormously

that Volodin gets a high percentage, higher

than everyone else. They’ll pour in any amount of

money just to artificially inflate

the percentages there, right. Well,

they could simply redraw them,

you know? But imagine,

there are some observers,

they’ll start posting videos showing how, where

Volodin is running, they’ll be

redrawing everything, but they just don’t want

it to be redrawn on such a

scale that it becomes obvious. After all, he

wants to later declare that he

was elected honestly, that he has the right to be

speaker of the Duma (lower house of parliament), and that’s that, though hardly.

He wants to be prime minister, and later even president. So it seems to me, well

So now, as I understand it, his

goal is to become Speaker of the Duma and

go around shouting: "I’m this, I’m a legitimately elected

deputy." That’s exactly why they’re now

bringing in athletes, I don’t know, whoever

they want. Uh-huh. Another version. I think

he’ll get 90%—they’ll just rig it there. Yes, he

goes around courtyards, and then he’ll come back

and say: "Look, Vladimir

Vladimirovich, I went around the courtyards. But why

didn’t little Dima go around the courtyards?"

United Russia didn’t get 90% either, and

so on. And it’s not a given that after the elections,

when the Duma starts voting for a new

prime minister, it will vote

for Medvedev. Most likely, Volodin

will become the new prime minister."

That’s my view, anyway.

That’s what I think. And those people

who are going there probably

know this. In any case, it’s obvious that they

don’t just fail to respect Medvedev—

they have absolutely no respect for him. He’s absent, he

isn’t present, they’re pushing him aside. And

he’s the lead candidate on United Russia’s list, the leader of the

United Russia party. But there’s not a single quote from him, he

isn’t used in campaigning at all. Well,

obviously he only hurts them. He

he’s first not only first, but in the

only federal part of the list. And

at the same time, the mass media

rebroadcast every idiotic thing

he says everywhere.

And they’re hiding him very aggressively. There’s

some strange intrigue there. A question

to both of you. What do you think—will there, uh,

will there be debates involving Medvedev and anyone else,

since this is so crucial? Of course,

not. I’m not even going to listen to the rest. 100%

no, because, well, they could set him up with

some coached people

who will just sit there in silence, yes, or

give him the question in advance. But I think,

I assume that even in that situation

they’re not sure Medvedev would

look good. And if you put

Medvedev up against Slava, against Kasyanov,

or really against anyone

who asks him a couple of normal

questions—for example, about teachers,

yes, the same teachers Medvedev told, if you want

to live well, go into business—then they’ll

trample him and destroy him there, 100% it

won’t happen. We actually had the idea,

I think we’re going to carry it out,

to have Kasyanov come out there, beat his chest,

and shout: "Hector, come out

to Medvedev." Because he’s a former prime minister.

This is the current prime minister. He’s at the top of the

list. This is the top of the list. So come on,

let’s talk. By the way, Medvedev

even, I think, once said

it would be good to pass a law on

mandatory participation in debates. That is,

he, uh, at some point in his career

spoke positively about debates, but

I’m 100% sure—and I’ll be glad

to be wrong—that of course they won’t

let him do it, and he’ll be afraid himself. Still, we’ll

try. We should, we should maybe

start all this tomorrow,

so that Mikhail Mikhailovich writes some kind of

letter saying, Hector, come out. Well, that’s

normal. No, he should challenge him publicly

and say that I want

to debate the leader. Of course, I

have a prediction—or rather, not a

prediction, a different assumption. We

know that Medvedev is our

biggest democrat. And when he was, uh,

acting president, as it is now customary

to call it, temporarily replacing Vladimir

Vladimirovich, he was basically playing at all that

internet democracy stuff. Well,

we all remember those swarms—that was his

brainchild. Not swarms—that was Putin’s.

Putin’s, yes. In 2012, Putin

wrote an article saying that 100,000

people should be able to introduce

a bill. That’s specifically Putin’s

thing. But you’re absolutely right that Medvedev

was their main IT guy,

right? And at the same time, there are now

certain forces that really

would like to set Medvedev up. We’re

sure of that. And I think

there will now be a lot of people

whispering in his ear and

saying: "Dima, you’re the chief democrat,

you’ll tear them all apart, you’re the hero

of all women and children. Go out to the people and

so on." Some Misha 2%

is challenging you. But the other question is, will

Medvedev have enough sense not to fall for it? I

think Medvedev won’t fall for it. But why

set him up at all? Well, look at his two

last public appearances. One

time he says: "There’s no money, but

hang in there." The second time he tells

teachers: "You’re never going to get anything."

He’s just a man

who grew up in a greenhouse,

doesn’t understand what politics is, and spouts

all kinds of nonsense. So if he ends up

in a circle of people who simply

ask him a question, he’ll immediately

lose. At the same time, today I was driving around

Moscow, and all of Moscow is covered with posters

featuring Putin’s statements saying that tea tea

a teacher is the most worthy profession.

should be paid very highly. They’re

just trying to compensate. Uh, someone writes,

Mals, you have a provincial inferiority complex. But I

am provincial. Why would I have a

complex? I mean, how can you say that,

if, uh, to some little animal, I don’t

know, say to a zebra: "You

have a zebra complex." But I am a zebra. Well,

what is there to say, what are we even talking about? Actually,

Putin promised to hold competitions for

the Paralympians who were not allowed to go to Rio (the 2016 Rio Paralympics). Well, I

don’t even know how to comment on that. So

that’s like a little candy for them. Why

didn’t they get to Rio? Well, because Vova’s (diminutive of Vladimir/Putin)

whole system is built stupidly. Here, I,

you know, will tell you a story—you’ve heard it...

you’ve probably never heard of it. I had a buddy

Krokhin is dead now. I called him one

day and said: "Listen, I mean, what

is even going on? It’s ужас (a nightmare)." That’s the kind of

news it was.

So, the Swifts aerobatic team crashed, and some other

plane crashed too; they crashed into a house, so

into a house. No, no, no, no, yeah, and oh,

those Swifts, the Russian Knights aerobatic team, and all the news,

everyone killed, everyone slaughtered there, and so

on. In Berlin our race walker, right,

got first place. Well, there you go, one

good piece of news. Then, on the

second day, the Sayano-Shushenskaya

hydroelectric plant exploded, everyone got

wiped out. So there, well, basically, it was a

complete disaster, yeah. Our race walker flew to Moscow and

they met him and applauded him. On the third

day, they’re evacuating people from a mountain somewhere

near Abakan,

because the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant

had exploded. Everyone died, the ones the

Russian Knights fell on. Well, basically, everything there was

bad. Everyone was killed, everyone was slaughtered.

Medvedev gave a medal to that race walker. I

said to Krokha: "Can you imagine,

I mean, if not for those 3 days, there wouldn’t have been the race walker, there

wouldn’t have been any good news. The most

paradoxical thing, you know, is that they took that medal away from the race walker

in April. Yeah, in

April. They took that medal away from him.

Can you imagine? Anyway, look,

I want to say the following about the Paralympians.

First of all, well, of course,

collective punishment is

wrong, but on the other hand, you have to

understand who the main villain is here.

The main villain here is Mutko, damn it. And

Putin, who gave orders to

Mutko. They tampered with those samples,

they set everyone up. Yes, you can say

that, of course, the Americans and the Germans,

they were happy to take advantage of it and remove the team,

remove the athletes. But the main point is: the villain,

the main bastard, is Mutko. He should

be removed from office immediately.

There should be an investigation. I,

of course, am sure that Mutko was hardly capable

of organizing the FSB (Russia’s security service) and all those people

in order to swap the samples. So,

in effect, Putin kicked our

Paralympians out of the Olympics,

which is why they’re throwing a fit now.

But they’re the ones guilty of all this. They shouldn’t

have tampered with the samples. At least

not on that scale.

So what else do we have there. And

the head of VTB stated, the head of VTB stated, that

Putin has no secret wealth.

Well, people call VTB "Vova’s shadow bank".

Kostin should know everything

about Putin, right? He says: "No, he’s

that kind of unworldly, selfless man." Well,

come on — the whole country belongs to the guy. Uh, I even

took a little part in preparing

that article. Max Sedon wrote it for the Financial Times.

He interviewed me,

because I’m a minority shareholder in

VTB — I’ve got 10,000 rubles’ worth of shares there

(about 100 euros / 110 US dollars). I’ve

sued them many times, argued with them. Well,

it really is an absolutely gangster

bank that uses dirty money to

finance all these officials,

who constantly receive billions of rubles

(tens of millions of US dollars). Those billions of rubles

get squandered somewhere,

and then they get more. And

well, it really is just

the Kremlin’s slush fund. Well, one of the

big ones.

So this statement by Kostin,

which he made while preparing that

article, that there is no secret wealth.

First of all, all of Russia belongs to him.

He is effectively trying to become

an absolute emperor here,

with absolute power. That’s the first thing.

And there is, of course, secret

wealth too — the palace in Gelendzhik,

just look at it: Italian marble,

a gigantic structure. This is

in fact a man who is enriching himself

in the literal sense. Not even just

in some metaphysical one. The whole of Russia

belongs to him, and in reality

he’s building a huge palace

worth many billions. There is secret

wealth.

Well,

Putin’s secret wealth includes

the wealth of his friends too,

the Rotenbergs, for example. As my

friends from St. Petersburg tell me,

they used to drive around, excuse my language, in a shitty Zhiguli-6

(a Soviet-era car),

even when Vova was already Sobchak’s

deputy, and the two of them shared

one car between them, and now they’re billionaires because,

it turns out, they’re genius

businessmen. So why couldn’t they be genius

businessmen in the 1990s,

before Putin became presi—? Well, take

all his friends — Timchenko,

the Rotenbergs — the graph of their

enrichment coincides 100%

with Putin’s rise to power. He came in, and suddenly

everything started going great for these people. It just

shot upward diagonally. Yeah,

absolutely.

The Foreign Ministry called reports of the failure of the

tourist season in Crimea commissioned propaganda. Yeah. But

what if — what if it didn’t fail? That’s

the question. The people in Crimea write to us

saying no, not at all, everything, everyone got burned,

and it turns out it’s a commissioned report. No, it

may be a commissioned report, but

the fact itself, as Ostap Bender (a famous satirical literary character) said,

is a medical fact, right. So, what

can you say about that? Also

well, well, it’s obvious. Even now

these loyalists who fully

support everything that happened in Crimea,

the local residents — well, it really is, I

agree with you, a medical fact:

there are far fewer tourists. Nothing

is developing there, so, well, at the same

time, look, nobody is going to Turkey.

And people aren’t exactly traveling back and forth to Greece either,

because prices have gone up. In other words,

outbound tourism has dried up, while domestic tourism has also shrunk. So then the question is, if people aren’t vacationing there, where are they vacationing? At their dachas. Why is that? Because they have no money.

There’s just no money, right? Hang in there, okay.

Right. And speaking of money, that brings us to parliament.

Did you want to say something? Yes, I did.

I wanted to say that, um, a well-known article

appeared on one of the pro-Kremlin

websites, um, claiming that

everything is great in Crimea, and they even posted

photos. And people laughed about it for a long time

because those were actually photos

of the beach in Rio de Janeiro, which was completely

packed with people. And those photos were

presented as an example of just how

great everything is in Crimea. And they were campaigning there—

paradoxically—urging people not to go to Crimea in

that article, because there was no room. In other

words, they were saying that it was absolutely

impossible to rent accommodation there because of

the huge tourist flow, with so

many people on the beach—you shouldn’t

go there. But in the end, apparently, apparently, it

worked. Nobody went there. Here’s a

news item that really infuriates me. I’m

just angry, honestly. So. Parliament

approved a document allowing the

government to request up to

$5 billion in loans from Russia. 5

billion dollars. The last line says 2%

per year. Before that, we approved a loan for

Bangladesh—$18 billion, and there, I think, it was

even less than 2%. At what interest rate can

people in Russia take out a

mortgage? 17%, 15%, and I think

some subsidized one is 12%. Well, I

can’t get one anywhere at all—I have a suspended sentence,

so they won’t give me one. But this is just

mockery of the people. They take

our money, they give it to some people at

2%, and we’re told to borrow at 15%. But

that’s just abuse.

Putin has written off $100 billion

in debt altogether, in dollars. So here’s the question.

I just don’t remember, I don’t know—has this state ever

forgiven anyone even a kopeck here

inside the country? Even a single kopeck, even

for one person? You’ll owe

a bank 20 rubles, and debt collectors will simply drive

you insane with their calls and visits,

and they’ll be drawing all over your door

with some kind of cartoons or whatever. But all of them

just get everything forgiven. Besides,

for example, the construction of the Turkish nuclear power plant

was also given enormous sums of money, interest-free.

And everyone has already calculated, including

market professionals, that

this is, generally speaking, a loss-making

project, that it might

support Kiriyenko’s Rosatom (Russia’s state nuclear corporation) a little,

but overall it’s unprofitable, and yet

they keep pouring money into it. Well, let

Russian citizens live a little, for heaven’s sake. Let

some person living somewhere

build a house and get a

mortgage at 2% annual interest for it. But no—go

borrow at 17%. What exactly are you supposed to

do, how much are you supposed to earn,

to pay a loan at 17% a year?

And on top of that usurious loan,

you still have to keep paying people off. And you, as the

head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation,

know how big the corruption

component is. Remember when Ethic and I recalculated

the price of a bottle of milk? We

got more than 100%. In other words,

it’s unprofitable. The loan was 66%, right, and

there was also some insane

amount of corruption built into it. In other words,

it turned out that, well, somehow,

you basically have to steal through corruption.

Corruption and monopoly, of course. Well,

and then, look, right now the

government has told us that inflation

is approaching 4%. Fine, 4% inflation,

2% to the bank—that’s still only 6%. So give us

money at 6% annual interest. But no, they

issue it at 17%. So why is there

such a gigantic difference? Well, monopoly

and mafia—that’s the only way to describe it. They don’t

issue it at 18. To get 18, you’d have to be some

honored employee of Sberbank or

United Russia (the ruling political party), an honored employee of

Yedi... Yes. Right here in Izmailovo,

when I told a Pole that our loans go

up to 40%, which is fairly average, he

didn’t believe me. I opened my online

banking app and showed him that they were

offering me a loan at 3,000. Well, these guys

in electronics stores,

they give loans with an effective rate of,

I think, something like 2,000%

per year—these short-term

microloans, that whole thing. 72. And

before the broadcast, um, I decided

to look into whether there is a practice in

Europe of credit amnesties. When

Vyacheslav Maltsev talks in his

streams and on television about how

we will carry out an economic amnesty,

everyone twirls a finger at their temple and

says that it’s completely impossible.

And yet for some reason in Italy there has been a

regular practice of it

for the past 15 years. And in Russia, are bankers forgiven? What does

Italy have to do with it? Not bankers, no, not bankers

are forgiven—state bankers are forgiven. Well,

of course, that Rosselkhozbank, which is headed by

the one whose license was revoked, they weren’t asked for anything. And

that guy yesterday, the one who took hostages—he was exactly

on this issue, as I understand it; he basically lost

his mind over the fact that he had simply

gotten buried in debt and been ruined. And

we feel sorry for him. We went there yesterday

because we were afraid he would be shot.

But thank God, he wasn’t shot. We

went there, but the worst thing is that he

appeals to Putin—Vova (a familiar form of Vladimir) will find out everything and

solve all the issues. That’s what scares me,

that a person already driven to the edge

believes that. Well, basically, the person understands

that the only person

who makes decisions in the country is Putin.

But unfortunately, he accepts that. He

appeals to him like to some kind of tsar-father,

instead of asking himself

the question: “Why is he a tsar-father?” And

maybe the reason for his problems

is precisely that, that this is how things are.

that this is how things are.

that this is how things are.

for some reason, among 140 million people there isn’t

another one,

there’s supposedly no alternative. The same

person sits there, and for 17 years now we’ve been saying, if

not Putin, then who? Who? By the way, the Airborne Troops

(VDV, Russian paratroopers) refused to work on the construction of

"Zenit Arena".

It was a funny news story.

Yes. Yes. Can you imagine? So,

they had this proposal from some

little oddball, the vice speaker,

uh, the vice governor of St. Petersburg, he’s

Albin now, but he used to be Slyunyaev and

worked in the Kostroma region,

changed his surname. And so he said that,

basically, now the paratroopers would come and finish

"Zenit Arena," and then one of the

VDV guys for some reason shared this." He said:

"Now we’ll carry out the order and come,

finish it." Well, fortunately,

apparently they don’t want to accept the role of

a construction battalion. What other even more

paradoxical structures do we have that could

finish building it?

Let’s send the Federal Protective Service (FSO, the agency guarding top officials) and the presidential administration

over there and let them finish it.

They’ve poured so much money into Zenit Arena

that their average salary,

by the way, I think, is now around 220,000

rubles. These

construction squads could perfectly well be sent

to build the

Zenit Arena. Yes.

And one of the latest stories is that

Zenit Arena will be finished

at the expense of schools and kindergartens.

Then I suggest sending schoolchildren there too

instead of

instead of having them mix concrete

with little shovels. What difference does it make to them,

they play in sandboxes anyway, they’ll be pounding out

concrete. Fine, everything’s great. No, but

seriously, as for predictions, will this

Zenit Arena be completed or not, I

have some doubts. They’ll finish it with whatever

money it takes, because the World Cup

is the sacred thing for them. He

actually doesn’t care about the citizens of

Russia. What matters to him is that foreigners

who come there

appreciate it. So the image,

what they call the image, yes, for their World Cup

they’ve already

spent hundreds of billions and will spend

more and pour as much money as they want into

this Zenit Arena. Of course they’ll build it,

then close it and start rebuilding it. Well,

why are you laughing? That’s exactly what happened with the Olympics.

The biggest stadium, Fisht

(the Olympic stadium in Sochi). There was

one event there after the

Olympics, then it was immediately closed. Go

to Sochi now, to what’s

called the lower cluster, and there stands this

giant closed stadium,

they’re rebuilding it there. We went in summer

to the ski resort. Uh, that’s Krasnaya

Polyana, of course, yes. And, well, I ski

myself and understand how

it’s supposed to be organized. But what shocked me

was that nothing worked anywhere and everywhere

there were Tajiks sitting around with bare dirty feet,

looking miserable. And they weren’t

doing anything anymore either. So probably

the money had run out and they couldn’t keep building.

It was an amazing sight. And now

FSB special forces searched the new contractor for

"Zenit Arena." As I understand it, that was

yesterday, and today there’s this news about

the paratroopers. So they’re no longer counting on

anyone. They busted the new contractor.

They’re dividing up the money, because one

wants to bring in his own contractor, another

wants his own contractor, because they

understand perfectly well that any budget will

be allocated. Closer to the championship it’ll go like

this: they allocated 30 billion, and they said:

"Not enough, we won’t make it, give us another 40, here,

just finish it, then another 50." That’s

how it was with the Sochi Olympics. When

the deadlines really start pressing, they’ll allocate

whatever money is needed and it’ll be possible to steal

as much as you want. Medvedev called for

the development of online education in Russia. Yes,

about Medvedev, there’s one good point. Actually,

when our state proposes doing something

online, I immediately

remember that state search engine,

Sputnik, on which they spent, I think,

how much? 50 billion rubles, and which

has traffic of something like 30 people a day

or 300 people a day. That’s exactly how

this development will go too. I can also say

that, uh,

basic education, so to speak, has to

exist, and online is supplementary

education. We haven’t gotten there yet.

The information world hasn’t become so

all-powerful that online education could be the main

form of education. Of course that’s how it will be

eventually, but for now it’s supplementary

education. He’s telling teachers to go

earn extra money somewhere, yes, everything there is a complete

wreck. And online education—what kind of

online education are we even talking about?

Well, I think online education is still

primarily for more or less

older teenagers and for students, for

adults. The main problem with

Russian education is that right now

even in elementary school we have complete chaos

going on. Yes, I picked up a first-grade textbook,

and I couldn’t solve the problem,

because I didn’t immediately understand that in

school problems, uh, well, there

can be more than one

solution. I looked at it and saw, well,

there are at least three solutions here. But that’s

a university-level approach, yes, and within the framework

of predicate logic, perhaps. I was

completely stunned. Sorry for the expression,

when they told me that here, well yes,

here there are, well, at least two possible solutions.

I found three. Well, well, well, this

is just absurd. This is for first

grade. I really need to bring it and

show it. Rotenberg received the full advance for

the construction of the Kerch Bridge

(the bridge linking Russia to Crimea). Oh, who

would have doubted it. Well, who would have doubted it. There was also a rather interesting calculation recently, when the government announced that it could not index pensions and could only make this one-time supplement of 5,000 rubles. And the construction of the Kerch Bridge is

exactly 5,000 rubles (about $55) for each of the 43 million

pensioners. In other words, simply

a colossal sum. Rotenberg received it

up front. Why? Because the money can be

put in a bank, the money can be

used. Capital generates more

capital. Rotenberg’s enrichment

goes on and on, among other things. And, well,

you would think, yes, the Crimean Bridge, Putin

would have had an interest in building it, well,

cleanly, beautifully, without corruption,

reliably and properly. But even here they

can’t manage it. And how could he

manage it? There, his nearest and dearest

friends decide everything, and he can’t

say anything to them. Just notice,

we talked about this yesterday too, right, and

we talked about it a long time ago. Putin, in

fact, they present him as

the alpha of some giant, but in reality

he folds for anyone, well, for

someone like Erdogan. And we were saying,

Erdogan gets from him everything

he asks for. And now, in the end,

he got a war with the Kurds. That is, we

are now going to war with the Kurds,

because Putin cannot say no

to those with whom he has whatever sort of

arrangements for foreigners, everything for them. For

the sake of

getting a call from

Obama, anything happens.

Today there was, by the way, the day before yesterday,

an RBC (a Russian business media outlet) investigation into these private

military companies. I don’t know whether you read it or

not. That’s where we conceal our losses

in Syria. RBC conducted an excellent

investigation. First of all, 10 billion rubles

(about $110 million) were invested not through the Ministry of

Defense budget, but through private military

companies. And around 200

people were killed there. We simply don’t know them, because

formally they are not serving in the

Ministry of Defense. They’re just

contractors of that sort. That’s how

all of this is disguised. And why is it

done? Well, simply so that

Obama would call the man, because

we got involved there, we have some kind of issue in

international politics, we are

getting in someone’s way there, and if we’re in the way,

they’ll be calling us up.

It makes me feel so good. Look,

Obama is asking me for something. For that,

for that, 200 people died. For that we

spent 10 billion rubles (about $110 million). AvtoVAZ unveiled

its first production raised sedan. Damn,

it actually scares me. Look, I saw

beautiful photos of how we were giving our

Olympians BMW X6s. And the question is:

why not a Vesta Cross? Well, probably,

so as not to insult the Olympians on the one hand,

but as for those

Paralympians, Olympians— Good,

but cruel joke. Ah, God grant them all

good health. But when this

kind of festival of wealth was going on, when these German

cars were being handed out to Olympians by the people

who are always shouting at us about how they

are fighting the West, how wonderful our

import substitution is, it’s

simply disgusting. And of course we

heard, um, literally what, 2 weeks

ago we were in Tolyatti and spoke, among

others, with people who had been laid off from

the Tolyatti automobile plant, who

talked about what our car industry

has now turned into, right? That is,

if earlier it was, to put it mildly, not

very good in Soviet times, then

now it has turned simply into

stamping out foreign cars,

whose production cost is three times lower.

And the quality is therefore

also three times lower. That is, we take

a foreign car, make it three

times cheaper, three times worse, and sell

it as something incredible and

interesting. Yes, it doesn’t turn out to be three

times cheaper. That’s the whole point. They

were saying that there is horrific

theft going on, that the workers are being robbed.

Absolutely, yes, absolutely. Everyone

is being robbed, and the buyers are being robbed too. In

the end, everyone loses out. And who

comes out ahead? Well, probably Vova

(a familiar form of Vladimir), probably this is his business after all.

Well, Rostec, this whole mafia. Well,

it’s obvious that it’s his friends; we’re not saying

that he personally is sitting there—Rotenberg,

that it was Putin personally who took money for the bridge.

Well, we understand what we’re talking about. Elon

Musk unveiled presented a new

battery for Tesla electric cars. Yes,

right away, as it were, an option. Two news items,

right. An alternative, yes. Musk, the one who

was once told to get lost, right, he

came to Putin’s people, wanted to launch rockets there

for some business. They

asked for a bribe. He decided they were

idiots, because he wanted to take from them

old launch vehicles that they were going to scrap

anyway and send something up with them, and

they wanted to get a bribe out of him. Well and,

all in all, it’s wonderful news for humanity and

very bad news for Russia, because, well,

let’s look at Russia’s federal budget,

what is 65% of the federal budget?

Oil and gas. Tesla will kill that oil

and gas. Well, we look, uh, in 20

years the number of electric cars will be

greater than the number of gasoline-powered

cars. I think in Norway already

even now there won’t be any gasoline cars at all,

believe me. Well, well, maybe even by

conservative estimates. Norway,

I think, became the first country where

more electric cars are bought than

[music]

uh than gasoline ones. So this is where

humanity is heading, and what about us? And we

will still be running around with this diesel fuel,

trying to sell it somewhere. And we have

nothing else. Yes, and it will

cost a lot, because no one will need it and it will be extracted in small

quantities. It’s like mumiyo (a traditional medicinal mineral resin) now,

they collect it. It costs a lot, but nobody

needs it. Right, once we thought that with hemp fiber we would go on like this for hundreds more years

to trade it, or, I don’t know, fish there

some kind of

frozen. When they tell us that

oil is something incredible. And that our entire

human history will

revolve around oil. I always

remember whale oil, which was considered

just as incredible. Millions of people died.

Well, Moby-Dick, yes. About what?

About that giant industry, the harvesting,

the hunting of sperm whales,

the extraction of oil there, and then oil was discovered.

Absolutely right. From the standpoint of history,

that was yesterday. From the standpoint of the Earth's

history. And what will happen tomorrow from the standpoint of

that history of the Earth, we still don’t know, but

it definitely won’t be oil. Therefore,

everyone who tells us that oil is

something unshakable, and that our entire

history on Earth will revolve around

oil, well, they are probably very naive.

We’ll do one last news item now, and then we’ll

answer questions, because, well,

people are interested in talking with Alexei and

we’ll answer questions. And the news

is this. So keep an eye on the questions,

so that this— Yes. In the U.S., a dog was

reelected mayor for the third time. I once

suggested electing my cat

president when I said: "If not

Putin, then who?" There was a typo made. If not

Putin, then the cat." Yes. And so I suggested him,

saying: "I have a cat, Basya, he’s a good one,

he doesn’t make a mess, doesn’t bite,

affectionate. He’s always watching. So I

think he’s probably sitting there right now, watching us

with you, such a wonderful kitty." I

proposed him and said: "In any

case, he’d be better. He

won’t steal. He doesn’t have any Rotenbergs

(wealthy Putin-linked oligarch brothers) and so on." Well, I look at some

Russian mayors. Your Basik would definitely

have been a better mayor, 100%. But

the Americans, you see, are going down the same

path. That is, a dog is the best mayor. Why?

Well, because local self-government

functions and doesn’t want any führers.

What the hell do they need führers for, right? If

the system is manageable, then let the dog

be the one in charge there. Well, there should

be some kind of symbol. A mayor is

a symbol. So there you go, a good dog,

handsome. It’s a shame you didn’t put up the photo.

A very beautiful dog, probably. There is no

news item that today was

more important to me than this one.

Forbes published a list of the richest

families in Russia. And on this list

of the richest families in Russia was the family

of Putin’s son-in-law Kirill Shamalov, with a fortune of,

I think, $2.4 billion. This is

about hidden wealth, about

the fact that, supposedly, he personally doesn’t

do anything, no shady schemes. But here,

please, he personally enriched

his own son-in-law. The son-in-law became the youngest

dollar billionaire in Russia. And now

he has one of the richest families.

Why? Well, because, first of all,

I even sued Putin over this at the time:

by his personal order he also transferred

an interest-free loan of $1 billion

from the state budget to him, yes, for 20 years,

interest-free, because they create these

schemes under which he can buy

all these Siburs and everything else. So,

there you have it, he gave our billions to his

own son-in-law. Many billions of rubles, $2.4

billion. This is something for which

a person can specifically be held

criminally liable and imprisoned. And

that needs to be done. And I have three questions.

We’re moving on to the questions. Right?

Well, here’s a question, Vyacheslav: how can you

comment on the fact that

Putin’s political decisions

on Crimea, Donbas, Luhansk, Syria, and these

decisions were preceded by talks with

Henry Kissinger? Yes. And we talked about

this, we noted it. And if you

open Putin’s encyclopedia, then you will

see that it says there that Henry

Kissinger

came with Sobchak. There was

such a commission, Kissinger’s commission.

And within the framework of this commission,

Kissinger came to St. Petersburg, as Putin

describes it himself. And he met with

Kissinger, met him at the airport.

And he asked him there: "Where

do you work?" He says: "I work at

the Leningrad City Council." In fact, that was a lie.

At that moment Putin was officially unemployed,

but he went to meet Kissinger,

who was a former secretary of state, who

elected

not elected, but appointed

the only person as president

who was not elected by the people, by anyone, not even by

Congress. That is, he

effectively appointed a man from nowhere

president—Ford. Well, you remember, you know,

that story, when first

they ejected the vice president,

made Ford vice president without

elections, and then they ejected

Nixon and installed Ford. Well no, I

don’t agree with you there. That’s not really

just a matter of ejecting Nixon. It

was a huge story there. It was

massive. It wasn’t just some conspiracy

of three people. Well of course not three

people. And the consequences were actually very good

for the world. Why did Ford

sign the documents in Vladivostok

with Brezhnev? We’re not talking about

that, we’re talking about Kissinger’s

power. Of course, he is a powerful

man. Kissinger really likes

Kissinger in general. They constantly

meet with him. Kissinger praises him,

by the way, and he considers him such an

important negotiator. So they are

like that. And in fact, even in terms of

psychological type, they are very, well, it seems to me,

similar people. It’s just that Kissinger is very

cunning, but they are that sort of people, they don’t believe, uh, in

that kind of politics made by people. They believe

in schemes, arrangements, you know

it's all about some kind of chessboard moves,

behind-the-scenes maneuvering, all of that.

That's why they merged in a single

ecstasy. Realpolitik. After all, Kissinger,

as Putin writes, asks: "So where did you

work before that?" Putin tells him:

"In intelligence." He says: "Yes, all the

decent people started out in intelligence. It's

all about that

you know, intelligence, secret matters of some kind." Well,

all of that. Yes. Three questions. Go ahead,

or even 10. First question. Alexei,

tell us what the situation is now with

your criminal cases. As I understand it,

there are already quite a few. In a nutshell. There are

a lot of them.

There are several cases in which I have

already received guilty verdicts. There is

an unknown number of cases that are

still under investigation. I don't even

really understand their status. But,

for example, there is the defamation case brought by

that same Major Pavel Karpov,

who was involved in the Magnitsky case.

In that one,

I am a defendant. There was a search

of my home recently. There are also some

ongoing cases in which I do not have

the status of a defendant, and so I do

not know what is happening there. Maybe they

have been closed, maybe they are still open. There are cases

against my associates, my closest

colleagues. For example, in connection with my mayoral campaign,

Nikolai Lyaskin is involved, and Kostya

Yankauskas, who is also

running in Moscow right now. Leonid

Volkov. Ah, Volkov is involved in the case

known as the microphone case.

He is due to be sentenced on

September 1. There I am formally

just a witness. So, well, these

criminal cases are constantly

surrounding us. Here at the

Foundation, I don't think there is a single person

who hasn't had a search, a computer seized,

or something like that. These cases are used

to, well, of course, intimidate

everyone. And among other things, they are used

simply to conduct so-called operational-search activities

against me in a legalized way. That is,

if there are criminal cases against a person,

then they can

put wiretaps everywhere, follow him around,

monitor him, tap phones — all of that

formally becomes legal. Based on that,

the second question. Not long ago there was

sensational news that literally

blew up the entire Russian internet — and not only the

Russian internet — yet there was

nothing surprising in it, at least

for me personally: that Alexei Navalny wants

to run for president in 2018.

Well, you see, it didn't surprise you,

because apparently you follow things more closely

or your memory is better. I don't

understand what is surprising here. I have

said many times that I demand that my

passive voting rights be restored —

the right to be elected. I demand this.

I was deprived of that right after

I, well, performed relatively successfully

in the Moscow mayoral election and

proved that democrats can get

more than 2%. And proved that those who

are against United Russia, against Putin

openly and directly, can get not 2%,

but 30%. And I would have made it into the runoff

if the election had not been falsified, and I would even

have won that election against them. They stripped

me of my electoral rights, so I

demand that they be returned to me. And I

say, laughing, that they did this so

I would not run for president in eighteen.

I demand that they return them to me.

I am going to fight for leading

positions. Right now I would be taking part

in elections, and the Party of Progress,

my party, would also be participating, if it had not been

liquidated. So I am simply demanding

that they return what is due to me

by right, like any other citizen

of Russia. Uh, that's logical. I'll say this: I would

gladly vote for Alexei,

but I'll disappoint you. There will be no elections in

eighteen. Well,

on November 5, 2017. I

agree with that. I agree with that. But

on November 5, 2017, nothing

will collapse or evaporate. It

means that after Putin, the country will have

normal elections. With normal

competition, I will come to those fair

elections and take part in them. Maybe

I'll lose, but in an honest contest

I won't mind. Well, you know, uh, in fact, when the world is

normal and everything is arranged fairly and

according to the law and everything is clear,

then

whether you win or lose doesn't

matter, because, well, the stakes are not the same

here. Right now our stakes, in fact,

just look — I am occupying

the place of the late Boris Nemtsov. You have

a pile of criminal cases, your brother is in prison,

and so on. So here we are

sitting, joking around, but in fact

terrible things are happening. I mean,

in a normal world people come into

politics, they fight among

themselves over things and so on.

And it would never occur to anyone that you could shoot a person in

the back of the head or, for political reasons,

throw someone's brother in prison. That

is just... Yes. In Russia the price of politics

is completely different. And

well, the verdict in Belov's case — I can see

people writing in the comments right now: "Well, 7.5 years, well,

it's a fabricated case." I myself was summoned

as a witness. It is simply fabricated, and

even the narrative itself was made up. It's just

some set of nonsense, that he wanted

to overthrow some Kazakhs.

And that I was making some kind of website for him for this.

And that with the help of a website you can overthrow Kazakhs. When

that part about the Kazakhs started

falling apart, they invented some kind of extremism

charge against him. And everyone laughed at it,

laughed and laughed and laughed. But in the end, 7.5 years, of which he has already served, what, almost two years there already, almost two years.

absolutely illegal. And you remember,

how long the Russian government officially

acknowledged that a person had been held in prison,

in a Moscow pre-trial detention center (SIZO), I think in a special unit,

he was held in Matrosskaya Tishina (a well-known Moscow detention center), meaning it was hard

to be there. They offered compensation of 2,500

euros. That’s how they value one and a half

years of a person’s life, one and a half years

of someone’s life. Continuing on the topic of elections. Uh,

there are a large number of people, uh,

probably most people in Russia,

who believe that elections

are meaningless, that everything

will be rigged anyway. United Russia is forever,

there’s no point in fighting this, this. And you

have repeatedly encountered

election fraud. And, basically,

you probably don’t need

to have explained to you how it happens. Why

then, based on that, someone might ask, run for president, for

mayor, for the State Duma, for local

government, and so on, if everything

has already been decided? And basically nothing can be changed.

No, nothing has been decided. This is just

nonsense that different people keep repeating.

Elections only become elections when

they

allow candidates to take part. And I took part in

the Moscow mayoral election. Everyone told me

the same thing: "What nonsense, it’s all decided, well,

you won’t be able to say anything and

you’re guaranteed 2%, because you

have no money." You remember, it was an

early campaign. They suddenly

announced it, and the next day you’re sitting there,

you have nothing. Well, apart from

a few associates around you, you have

no money, no television, nothing. Well,

somehow we managed to get it all going and

would have won that election if they hadn’t

cheated. And even taking into account that they

didn’t cheat and we lost, it still

wasn’t all for nothing. So nothing is

predetermined. Everything is done by people and their

activity. And not even 100% of people, but 1%

of the active population. If just 1% wants

change, that change will happen,

because that’s a huge number. What is

1% in Russia? 15 million people. If those

155 million people tomorrow were to do

something simple every day

to improve the situation, everything would change. Well, and

here’s a philosophical question. Go ahead. Uh, right

now it somehow happens, for some

unthinkable reason, that Alexei

Navalny becomes president of Russia.

Everything stays in place. There are the Rotenbergs,

there is

Sobyanin, there is the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Your first day on the job. What do

you do? Do you hang everyone, or on the contrary,

or on the contrary do you declare democracy

everywhere and so on? What does it look like

for you? Nobody hangs anybody. Everyone is dealt with

under the verdict of an honest

jury trial. But as for the Rotenbergs and

everyone else, these people have committed so

many crimes that even the most honest

jury with the best

lawyers will undoubtedly

convict them. Well,

because their crimes, they

are obvious. And no one needs to be hanged and

no one needs to be shot. An honest

judicial system will fix everything. So,

as for everyone staying

in their places, the system changes if

the right signals come from the top of the system.

When the president is not

corrupt, then it becomes possible

that the prime minister will not be

corrupt, or a given minister, or

a given traffic cop standing

on the road. But if every teacher and every

traffic cop and every minor official knows

that Putin and his family are openly stealing

billions, then how do we convince these

people? How can you go up to a traffic cop

or a teacher and say: "You know, don’t

take any more bribes, please — for

admission to university. That’s very

bad, because you, well, give up

these 10,000 rubles (about €100 / $110) that you take

in order to survive. And don’t pay attention to

the fact that Putin is stealing

a billion right now, completely openly, but you

give it up." That is impossible to do.

So what am I getting at? This is

a philosophical answer to your

philosophical question. The system

has to change from the top. The right signal

has to come from the top. Then everyone

will readjust. We often like to say

things that, well, I believe are fundamentally

wrong — that all Russians are bad, that

by nature they are bribe-takers, that corruption is in

their blood, that they love disorder. That’s not true.

When the top of the government starts working

properly, all the systems will readjust.

We’ve observed this many times

in many countries. Mainland China,

terrible corruption; cross the road

into Hong Kong. Well, there is no such

deep-rooted Chinese urge for

corruption in Hong Kong or in Singapore.

Well, because the country’s leadership does

everything differently. And if I,

or someone else, do everything differently,

if we actually govern honestly,

yes, that sounds lofty. Though it’s

a simple thing: if the country is governed

honestly, then the whole country will work honestly

and the whole apparatus as well. Yes, you say, uh, on

one side of the border it’s one thing, on the other another. Well, that’s

how it’s accepted, right, that’s how things are done there. There’s

not only law, there’s also custom. In the

end, a society where

laws operate

forms certain

customs. And we are seeing that now.

And that’s the next stage. As a lawyer,

I can say this is unique, because

law and custom were always separated and

custom was placed first, whereas now laws

have begun to shape customs. Can you imagine?

And influence them. Exactly. It’s a kind of

normality. What is normality in

Russia? It’s when you need to process even just your own

an apartment with Rosreestr (Russia’s state real estate registry), you immediately have to shell out

money. That’s the kind of normality we have

in Russia. And when that becomes

abnormal, then everything will

start working. There are a lot of questions on

one topic, let’s put it that way. So let’s

probably group

them into blocks somehow. A lot of questions about your

Anti-Corruption Foundation. And I also want to say

to our viewers: you hear me

every day, that’s enough. We came to Alexei,

so let’s interrogate him. So yes, there’s

Maltsev sitting there. Tell me, and I’ll

say it — you’ll still hear plenty from me.

Yes, there are a lot of questions about the Anti-Corruption

Foundation. How did the idea come about? On

what money does it live? Do you receive

money from Obama and so on? From the Kremlin.

From the Kremlin. It’s all very simple. Uh, well, I

was just conducting some of my own

anti-corruption investigations, as, as

a shareholder, a small shareholder in various

companies. And then, uh, rather by chance

it turned out that there were several cases

when we investigated corruption in

public procurement and successfully got some

corrupt contracts canceled. And we were simply

flooded with these proposals. And I wrote

just a post saying, fine, if you want, I’ll

hire lawyers, but then you’ll have to

raise all the money so that I can

pay those lawyers salaries. And I simply

as a private individual opened a Yandex.Money

account. And right away people sent me

several million rubles. With those

several million rubles I hired people,

published all these reports showing how I

paid them salaries, how I, as a private individual,

paid them myself at first. And that’s how the

Anti-Corruption Foundation began, and gradually,

well, it just became impossible to keep

raising this money in my own name. We created

an NGO, and now we raise money that way. Right now the

Anti-Corruption Foundation raises

more than 30 million rubles a year. So we don’t need

either Obama or the Kremlin. We raise quite

a lot — well, we’d like more, but

thanks to these people we raise money.

That’s how we rent this office, here

a lot of people work, many also

work as volunteers; when we raise

more money, we hire more people,

when there’s less money, fewer people. But that’s

how we survive. And in fact, it exists

only thanks to

that. If we had to

look for grants or depend on major

sponsors, we would have been crushed long ago. But

since many thousands of people

send us 500 rubles each,

we can fend everyone off, and we’ve been

fending them off all these years. I can confirm

that not only I, but everyone present here

has, to one degree or another,

been a witness to the fact that wherever we

show up — and I think Alexei has the exact

same situation — Obama appears,

meaning, well, actually he’s not [__], as a

rule, female, more often female,

gives some money and

says, “Come on, guys.” Yes, that really is

a problem, because for us,

sorry to interrupt, judging by our audience,

we see that 85% are men, while

with women we keep trying to

figure out what to do for a female

audience. No, for us it’s strange, and

the donors are mostly men.

No, our main donors are women.

Our audience is mostly male too,

though certainly not 85%, but those who, uh,

give us funds are women. Well, it’s

different, that is, uh, and children, women,

children — somehow we, we’re interested

in studying that. The question for you is: with women,

what approach did you find?

Then this whole story started. For me

personally it’s very strange, but over the last

month the number of women watching

our channel increased from 23% to 35% in 1

month. And before that there had been no similar

dynamics even approximately. That

is, changes were 1, 2, 3%. Here we’re

seeing more than 10%. What that’s

connected with, I don’t know, but I’m just

saying it out loud as a thought. Can I make a joke?

What’s the difference between Navalny and Maltsev?

The beard. Yes,

the beard. I’m just, well, I’m looking at

the comments, there are so many of them, they’re

flying by here. So many comments about the beard,

I just keep seeing beard, beard. Why has it

hooked you all so much?

Well yes, maybe if they

start donating more, I’ll grow one.

Slava writes, glory, he’s taking your

bread and butter. You won’t believe it, this is the third time I’ve

really been pressing him

to do the same thing on air

and to take my bread and butter.

You understand, the more people there are

attracting an audience, the stronger

we’ll be. Especially people like

Alexei, and basically we’re persuading him

to do the same thing, so that he’s on more often.

I’ll say even more: we’re actually planning

to copy you outright. And you’re happy about that,

guys, you shared your experience. There’s

that little box standing there where we’ve already

started, there’s a microphone, we have a camera,

and we want to make the same kind of program, especially since

it’s cheap,

effective, and it can be done from any

place. So we, I hope that we’ll

be able to do something like that. And the experience

of Artpodgotovka (a Russian opposition political movement/media project), of course, is very

important for us. Very good. And we’re

happy to provide any

assistance. There isn’t any of that

kind of bread here that can be eaten up. The clearing

gets bigger. The more people there are — I’d be

very happy if there were 10 such

channels, and they wouldn’t take each other’s

audience, because, well, there are practically no

free media left in the country.

Television doesn’t exist at all. So,

uh, that means we have to broadcast on the internet, right?

Well, this is a real wave of change, when

people unite. You understand that we’re united both on air and here we

we’re uniting, and also some kind of hammer for the beard.

Well, that’s fine, yes. Actually, the way

I would like to, but

no. And most importantly, it has to be said that

at our first meeting, Alexei said:

"We are doing the same thing." Yes, of course, we

are overthrowing, yes, first and foremost, and everything

else aligns for us. Absolutely, and

he won’t let me lie. We immediately laid everything out here,

showed everything, turned everything on, how

everything works for us, because and what needs

to be done, yes. And for me it was

a great honor. I said this on air.

Navalny, who for me personifies

the internet. And Edik always used to hold up

Alexei as an example for me. He asks me: "So

how is this done?" And I’m like: "Like this,

yes, you have surpassed your teacher."

No, I’m, I’m very glad. That is, I very much

want to adopt this experience. I, I always,

generally speaking, am glad when someone does

something cooler than we do. Simply because,

well, we will take that experience. And if people

are doing the same thing, then everyone will be glad. I,

for example, am always ready to share, like how

to raise money, how to organize

something there, how to do an investigation. And

many people think that when some

journalist’s investigation came out,

some anti-corruption one, they tell me:

"Look, here are your competitors." And I keep

saying: "Yes, I’m happy, let them

be born, because there is so

much corruption that yes, there’s enough for everyone, just as

there are so many viewers on the internet

that there will be enough of them for hundreds of such channels."

Many are now recalling in the chat and asking

for your comment on the topic of the incredible

investigation by Russia. Uh, somehow Freedom,

I think, what was it called? Ah, yes,

Agent Freedom. That’s wonderful. Agent

Freedom. Well, Kiselyov released a film where

he wrote that I am neither more nor less than

an agent of all intelligence services. Well, that is,

it sounds like a joke, as if I’m

telling an anecdote. No, in fact they

said there that I am an agent of both British

intelligence, MI5 or MI6, and a CIA agent, ah, and

that I was sent into Russia in order to

literally destroy it, that it was

I who gave the order to kill Magnitsky in prison

and all that. We filed a lawsuit.

Naturally, we lost in court, because

the judge, well, there was a very funny

ruling. I even want to make a short

video where I read out this court decision.

It really is funny, but it

shows

simply that, like with you, why

they run after you and shout Obama, Obama there, I

can see it from the comments here. You write,

well, someone there writes uh that they work for

the Yanks and all the rest of that nonsense. Because they

essentially have nothing to say. Yes. Well, what

can they, what can they accuse you of

or what can they accuse me of? They

have already X-rayed us and our money, and

how we live, and our lifestyle, and who we communicate with.

And they understand that if they

tell some inside story about the

activities of Maltsev or Navalny,

there will only be even more supporters. So

they have nothing left except

to invent this nonsense. Well yes, as

they say, they even shook out grandpa’s socks,

yes, and found nothing. And here

there are two options. The first option is

to invent things. In the information world, when

someone invents something, it gets exposed immediately.

You can see it in, like, those debates, that,

what’s his name, Mitvol, yes, who

said that I, ah, defeated Ayatskov and

squeezed out Oleg M. Yes. From whom can one seize a private

structure? No, the funniest thing is.

Agro was created by me in ninety-

three or ninety-four and destroyed

by Ayatskov in ninety-... and I destroyed Ayatskov

in

2005. Yes. So, well, the difference is... If

I had known that you were going to debate

Mitvol, I would definitely have supplied you with

one simple fact: Mitvol

goes around telling everyone some fairy tales

about what a fighter against corruption he is, but

he has now launched a joint business venture

in Iran with whom? With Artyom Chaika, the

son of Prosecutor General Chaika. That’s it. I don’t remember

with Igor. They, they are making some kind of

water purification system, as I understand it, as part of... Well, that is,

it’s a big multimillion-dollar business. Where did

Mitvol get that money? Where did Chaika’s son get

that money? That’s it. Well, that’s what we should be talking about,

what a rich little Buratino (the Russian Pinocchio),

what a helper for Papa Carlo. Yes,

exactly. And by the way, I noticed

that in these debates they deliberately

put all sorts of freaks there so that they can

just interrupt you. In the first

debates there was that, that creep from

Civic, what was it, Civic

Platform. This time Mitvol

was deliberate too. Right. And the host was in on it too.

Yes. And we came up with something. But we won’t

say it, we came up with a military trick,

a little stratagem. Soon everyone will know about it. And

here a philosophical question is being asked by your namesake,

also Alexei. He asks: "Alexei, what

are you afraid of?"

Oh, oh,

that’s a good philosophical question. Well,

listen, I am a reasonable person, I am wary of

many things, yes,

uh, many unpleasant things

happen to people who engage in

independent politics. Well, it’s

unpleasant. Nemtsov was killed altogether. That’s

quite an unpleasant thing. A lot of

unfortunately, this is one of the, well,

tragedies of my work: people around

me are simply imprisoned. My brother is in prison.

Many activists are simply imprisoned,

random people are imprisoned to intimidate, in order

to show that, look, because of Navalny

we are imprisoning random people. Therefore, these are

the things I do not like and

that worry me greatly, but that is still not it. And I think about it constantly.

I reflect on these people incessantly,

who are sitting in prisons. Well, including the fact that

that’s it. Well, that’s what we should be talking about, what a rich little Buratino (the Russian Pinocchio), what a helper for Papa Carlo. Yes, exactly. And by the way, I noticed that in these debates they deliberately put all sorts of freaks there so that they can just interrupt you. In the first debates there was that, that creep from Civic, what was it, Civic Platform. This time Mitvol was deliberate too. Right. And the host was in on it too. Yes. And we came up with something. But we won’t say it, we came up with a military trick, a little stratagem. Soon everyone will know about it. And here a philosophical question is being asked by your namesake, also Alexei. He asks: "Alexei, what are you afraid of?" Oh, oh, that’s a good philosophical question. Well, listen, I am a reasonable person, I am wary of many things, yes, uh, many unpleasant things happen to people who engage in independent politics. Well, it’s unpleasant. Nemtsov was killed altogether. That’s quite an unpleasant thing. A lot of unfortunately, this is one of the, well, tragedies of my work: people around me are simply imprisoned. My brother is in prison. Many activists are simply imprisoned, random people are imprisoned to intimidate, in order to show that, look, because of Navalny we are imprisoning random people. Therefore, these are the things I do not like and that worry me greatly, but that is still not it. And I think about it constantly. I reflect on these people incessantly, who are sitting in prisons. Well, including the fact that

partly because of me, but that’s not something

that can scare me or

stop me.

May I finally ask the question I’ve been saving

for the end, for Vyacheslav. No,

no, I really did save it, but I’ll ask it

now. And Vyacheslav Vyacheslavovich, I’ve

never asked you this either. So

why do you do this, when

people are being killed, when your relatives

are being imprisoned? Why not just quit it all and

do something else, something calmer?

That’s a question a lot of people ask,

and I’d like to put it to you.

Well, I don’t understand how one could not

do this. For me, that

question doesn’t even arise. I don’t understand how one can

ignore everything that is happening in the

country. I mean, yes, I’d go mad

if I just sat on the couch, watched

all this happen, and stayed silent

about it, didn’t write, didn’t try

to resist it. That would be

the real problem for me. How do you not lose your mind

watching this monstrous

injustice, the looting of the country,

the imprisonment of innocent people, the obscene enrichment

of a bunch of utterly pointless crooks,

and stay silent about it? So for me,

honestly, that question has never even

come up. I just do what a person is

supposed to do. Two. Remarkable, yes,

remarkable. But here I absolutely can

agree, because I can put it even more

harshly: it disgusts me. Well, the thoughts are

exactly the same as back in

the nineties. I drew gangsters because

it disgusted me. How could it be that

I live here, my

relatives are here, and then people come along,

take things away from someone, and get away with it? To hell with him.

I can’t smash his face in.

Why? Because, well, they are the authorities, they are

the state. But in essence, they’re the same.

Gangsters, only worse. Much worse.

At least those guys had

some kind of rules, right?

some kind of code. These people

have no rules at all. So of course I

completely agree with

Alexei. Do

what you must, and let come what may. That’s

right. Two difficult questions. The first:

if right now this

question comes up—and, really, everyone here

present has asked themselves this sooner or later

or will ask it. If right now

a real situation arises where you

understand that, probably, yes, probably,

they’re about to send me to prison—that is,

not just another criminal case,

but a direct possibility

of ending up in prison. Would you go

abroad somewhere and continue your

work there against, broadly speaking, all the

lawlessness happening in Russia?

Or, well, I’ve already been in

that situation, and I’ve already been put in

prison. When people took to the streets

that evening in Moscow, which led to my

release, I knew nothing about it.

They took me to a pretrial detention center (SIZO). Well, I was put in

the SIZO, taken to

the quarantine cell. Well, what could I do—got settled,

lay down,

read a little book, and understood that for the

next five years you’d have a pretty

clear schedule, a routine

set by prison regulations. I mean, you still

understand that you know why you’re there.

And even if you’re sitting in that cell and

thinking about how to fight off the mosquitoes,

because there were a lot of them there, you

still know that inwardly you are right. And

I had a situation the first time, when

they announced they would open

criminal cases, that was back in

2010. I was studying in the States then. And

my course of study was coming to an end.

They understood that I would return, and they put out

several reports right away.

News agencies wrote that

a criminal case would be opened against

Navalny. Why?

So that I simply wouldn’t

come back.

And the first time, before they

put me under travel restrictions, they did

something they had never done before. They

announced it two weeks in advance, and I

was supposed to go on vacation with my wife, and

I would have been abroad. I already

had the tickets. They announced that Navalny

would be placed under travel restrictions. And

well, they waited.

Come on, come on, you’ve got tickets,

leave. But I, we, I returned the ticket and went

nowhere, because, well, I understand that for

me there is not the slightest desire to sit in

prison. There is nothing good about it. There’s

nothing romantic about it, and it would only

complicate the work. But I

weigh whether it would be right

or wrong to do that. And I understand that the right thing

is to continue doing my

work, because that is what people

want from me, and that is why they support me. I’ll

tell you that right now, in fact,

well, from a certain

mystical point of view, the question is being

decided: who will be the future president of

Russia, Navalny or Maltsev? And

Putin can decide

that question by imprisoning one

of us. Whoever gets imprisoned will be

elected president. That I can

guarantee you. Well, what can I

do? I guarantee that’s how

it will be. And everyone here in the studio

understands that. And everyone understands it.

Do you understand? This is the kind of trial balloon being floated right now.

Who will he imprison? Who will become the future

president? You’re not being very modest.

You’re not being very modest. I’m saying what—well,

it’s obvious, isn’t it? What, Edik? Why are you

raising your hand? Don’t make noise

with your question so we don’t— No, let there be noise,

right? A question. And the Roman thing, well,

there was a time like that, you didn’t have to tear

people in half either—there were consuls, right? Yes, of course. Well, that’s a form of government, like the Medvedev–Putin tandem. It’s happened before. I was only half joking when I said that. But you understand how much with

points of view — that’s how they write, they’ll write, they’ll sit down

all mystical.

Well, jokes aside, of course, uh,

no one wants to be in prison, but generally speaking this is

now somehow an honorable duty, yes,

an honorable duty. Or maybe you

could come to an agreement here somehow? Well, first

you, then Navalny will be president. Well,

actually, you know, among

ourselves we need to

agree about the presidency — who will be bringing parcels to whom

first. Alexei and I

will come to an agreement on that. For us the main thing

is to get rid of all of them, you understand?

Because, well, let’s be honest. He has

a 12-year age difference; the president’s task

is to make Russia free, yes, physical

condition and so on. Whoever is suited

for whatever place, so to speak, that’s where he

will be, because right now we’re talking about

one thing. We still need to, guys,

survive this. It may still

turn out — well, I don’t want to be there, but

it may turn out that here you won’t

see anyone except a black wall. Well,

because this is serious, actually,

you understand? Because the one who was

in my place is already in the grave, right? Well,

let’s proceed from that. Therefore

let’s not be alive

latecomers will be counted as

absent. Yes. Right. Well yes. So

here’s a question I can’t help but

ask. Go ahead. And it’s a one-word

question. Crimea.

What about Crimea? How should Crimea be resolved? Crimea,

like any part of Russia, like any

region, like any country,

belongs to the people who live there. I, uh,

haven’t changed my position. I believe that

the fate of it — that is, what was done —

was absolutely

illegal. Right now there are 2 million

people there, even more, who hold

Russian passports. And, unfortunately,

with Crimea we’ve gotten into a situation

that has no simple solution, just like

the territorial issues in Israel, like

the Falkland Islands, like the Japanese

islands. There are actually quite a lot

of territories on planet Earth

that are in exactly the same situation.

This is a problem

that will exist for

decades, and it will not be resolved

in any clear-cut way. Ukraine will demand that it be

returned, Russia will insist it not be

returned, and so on. In order to

start moving at least toward

solving the problem, first of all

a proper referendum needs to be held in order

to understand what the residents of

Crimea itself want. And from that point the solution to the

problem will begin. Well, we need to admit that that

referendum was no referendum at all,

that these were illegal actions. But we’ve

ended up — Putin has driven us into a dead end. In reality

Crimea will turn into something like

a version of Northern Cyprus. That’s another

good example, actually. It’s recognized

neither one way nor the other. Tourists don’t

go there. Everyone will suffer because of this.

It will be very bad and it will last

a very long time. But we need to start by

holding a referendum.

The key thing here is the subject that should

resolve this problem. The residents of Crimea themselves —

they should vote.

Excellent. Well then, what other questions are there?

Well, we’ve got 16 minutes. Let’s keep going and

wrap it up, because people are writing that

they like the broadcast, they’re not tired. We’re

not either. I can see Alexei has perked up

quite nicely. And he was telling me that an hour and a half

is very long. I want to prove to him

that an hour and a half is not long at all.

Yes, to be honest, I somehow thought

that sitting for an hour and a half and

saying something…

what is there even to talk about? Well,

you really are talking to people.

Just look at how it flows. The same thing

will happen with you. You’ll switch it on and

you’ll even try to stop it and

nothing works. There’s a question about

nationalism. Your attitude toward nationalists,

toward nationalism.

At one time you positioned yourself, and as I understand it, you still

position yourself as a moderate

nationalist — or not moderate, or what exactly

is your position? I haven’t changed my position here.

I believe that the nationalist

movement in Russia has enormous

prospects. Right now it has been driven into

absolute

uh, a kind of underground existence. And normal

nationalists, who oppose

imperial nationalism, who support

nationalism as a path to the development and

prosperity of the Russian people — they have been driven

underground. Well, take Belov, yes, there was

a nationalist who spoke out against the

empire, who spoke out against the idiotic war with

Ukraine that harms

Russia. For that he got 7 years. And

nationalism in Russia must be

demarginalized. And nationalists,

obviously, have substantial support. They

must create a normal legal

faction, they must run in elections. And

it is also the task of the democratic

movement to cooperate with them. I have always

called for that. Many people

branded me for it. I, uh, for quite a

long time found myself in a situation of being one of their own

among strangers and a stranger among my own. That is,

nationalists called me a liberal,

liberals called me a nationalist, but

I played and continue to play that role, and I

am ready to be one of those political

bridges

that connects these two

ideologies. Very good. A very

good answer. Here’s one from Maltsev — there’s

a proposal. Kozey wrote: Maltsev,

there’s a proposal — announce a rally for

the repeal of Article 282 (Russia’s anti-extremism law). Then lots of

people will come. That’s right, Article 282 is

criminal. The only thing is, unfortunately, there have been many

rallies against it already. And this

means that you and I should do it together, you understand, this whole thing. And

a huge number of people are imprisoned under Article 282 (Russia’s anti-extremism law). And right now these people are practically all

people convicted while completely innocent.

Over the past few months, we’ve basically

been seeing convictions for likes on VKontakte (a Russian social network) and

things like that. But here I want to

say something important. Recently,

the Reaktsii team and the Meduza editorial staff came here,

a major media outlet that now writes

about political prisoners, and we discussed with

them that, unfortunately, the whole topic

of political prisoners is one of the

least in demand. And I can

see it from my own blog: posts about political

prisoners get the fewest likes and readers.

Meduza says the same thing.

Right. Well, this is a related issue to Article

282. We need to talk about it more,

because for some reason the general public,

well, isn’t as interested in this

topic as it should be. Yes, it looks like our

chat froze here. Well, that happens. Nothing,

nothing страшного. Something

let’s do this. Uh, it seems to me it was

moving so fast that I really couldn’t

catch anything. It froze. Okay, okay, it accelerated to

the speed of light. Yes, go ahead. What’s

new

else? What? Mm, well, we talked about

the presidential election in 2018, or not

2018. So let’s probably

come back down to earth and talk about the elections on

September 18. What does Alexei Navalny

think about that? Ah, well, you know, it’s

no secret. I’m not exactly

enthusiastic about these elections. But how

am I supposed to feel about them? They won’t

let me take part in them. Yes, a lot of good people are running

in these elections. Starting with Vyacheslav,

who is sitting here, and ending with the people

who work here at the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation), who are running

in the elections. And so if I were to call

for a total boycott, well, that would be

stupid, because I’d be harming many

good people. But even so, I do not

consider these elections to be elections in the full

sense of the word. We have a rather

ambivalent statement from the Progress

Party, where we call, well, where we

describe these elections as not-elections,

but nevertheless do not call for a boycott and

believe that people should go vote for

single-mandate candidates and support a party.

Either Yabloko or PARNAS. But as for

my own personal attitude,

well,

I’m actually surprised that so many people

ask me: “Well, PARNAS, for example, is the

party that nominated me in the mayoral

election. I have a good attitude toward both Yabloko

and PARNAS, but while Yabloko fought against

me in the mayoral race, PARNAS

nominated me. PARNAS is the party with which

I built a political coalition. PARNAS

is the only party that

openly says everything I want

them to say, yes, about Putin, about

United Russia. Unfortunately, Yabloko does not

say these things in the debates.

So, choosing between Yabloko and

PARNAS, of course it’s PARNAS. Thank you.

Here someone writes: “Maltsev is a loser.” Well, my

relatives are from the village of [ __ ], yes, in the Noburasky

district. Well, of course, [ __ ] Why not?

Why not indeed? Yes. Attitude toward the Party

of Growth. May I answer that question?

It’s a disgusting party, just

a fake, disgusting party. Fortunately,

to our great good fortune, we

conducted polling across the country and across Russia,

and there is no such party.

It’s a nonexistent fake structure. They

dug up a stewardess, as they say.

Some Sergey Stankevich—what I’d really like to know is,

isn’t he ashamed himself

to be involved in this Party of Growth?

Some first-wave democrat, a very

well-known person, you could say,

a legendary figure—he was, I think,

chairman of the Moscow Soviet, right? Why does he

need this? I don’t even understand why

Khakamada needs to take part in this

fake, but fortunately it hasn’t been

noticed by people. I hope they get

nothing, and to hell with them. Ah, Dim Potapin,

what about you? Well, Potapenko spoke

well. I saw his video, I also shared

those videos, and he said the right things. He

says: “I’m surprised he’s taking part in

this,” well, it seems to me there’s just, ah,

some kind of combination there—they were played by the Kremlin,

or this Titov himself, the leader of the Progress

Party,” he went around to some people and

said: “Come on, let’s go, we’ve got money there,

and something else.” Ah, well, on the other hand,

people aren’t fools—how could they be played like that?

Well, for some reason they themselves decided

to take part in this fake project and

hoped that now the Kremlin would

open the tap for them a little, give them

a little television time, and they’d just

burst onto the scene. But the thing is that

opposition-minded voters may

want spoilers for

opposition parties, but they’re not such

idiots—they can tell the real thing from

this kind of surrogate. So, it seems to me,

the Party of Growth has no prospects. I’m

sorry that Potapenko is involved in it.

Alexei. The leader of the Progress Party is Alexei

Navalny, let me remind you. Yes. And you’re

saying Progress Party. The Party of Growth—

a slip of the tongue. Yes. My apologies.

Everything bad I said was meant

about the Party of Growth. The Progress Party—

vote for it when it manages to

get registered. It’s already become a kind of meme, right,

Demyushkin’s words about Yabloko militants.

Here, yes, he was saying that he had not

seen any militants. Well, something about

extremism and terrorism. He said that

he had lived his whole life and never seen Yabloko

militants, right, terrorists. Yabloko fighters. Well,

by the way, I was a member of the Yabloko party

for many years. Maybe that means

we’ve already seen one today, but

an ex—an ex-Yabloko militant, right?

Expelled. Expelled. What else?

How did that happen? By the way, here’s a question. Uh,

since we’ve started talking about Yabloko,

probably we shouldn’t, um, talk about anyone, but

still, an interesting question that, for us, for example, and

for Vyacheslav, I know, um, keeps

coming up all the time: why did people like

Yarovaya, Mizulina, if I’m not mistaken, and

a number of other odious, so to speak, figures

come out of it? Quite a lot of them. Yabloko (a liberal Russian political party) generally became

this enormous кадровым resource for

various structures. There are all sorts of people, but, well,

there really is also just a set of some

specific crooks and scoundrels who

were in Ya? I I don’t know, I have no

explanation. I remember this, well,

relatively

recently. I don’t remember, some seventh

congress was going on. I was still still in Yabloko, they hadn’t

expelled me, but maybe it was the sixth year. It

was the congress where she was elected deputy to

Yavlinsky, when from the podium she was proclaiming

how much she hated Putin, United Russia,

what fools they were, crooks and thieves, how

United Russia had offered her a guaranteed

seat in parliament. And she told them

back then, when she was in Kamchatka, that no,

absolutely not, you’re all bad and I’m good,

I’m not going with you. She worked at

Open Russia (Khodorkovsky’s organization) for

money, got paid there, and now

here she is, the main Putinist

attack dog. I don’t understand. Well, these are lying,

hypocritical, crooked people. Well, what

other explanation is there? Unfortunately, there were people like that in

Yabloko, but there they are, they

defected. An interesting topic. Someone writes,

Kadyrov met with Volodi... So,

that means he posted a photo, right? He came

to Saratov, remember, right? Well, that is

what it’s all about — swearing allegiance. If Kadyrov

came to swear allegiance, then everything is perfectly clear.

That is, Sobyanin went, Kadyrov

went, everyone went. And you’ll still see,

you’ll see how others come to Saratov too.

Can you imagine? So he — you should

know him well. After all, about Volodin. They lived

with him until 2006. You’re

the only one who doesn’t know that agent

Volodin? Why, you’re the only one. No,

sorry. What do you think, they let you on TV

for no reason? No, well, that’s how it is. Yes, we

ended up with a completely paradoxical

situation in the first convocation, yes,

we were, all in all, on very good

terms — Vyacheslav Viktorovich,

Valery Fyodorovich Rashkin, and me. And now

just imagine, it turns out

to be this kind of situation: Volodin comes in from

his side, Valery Fyodorovich from

his side. Rashkin is running in my district

on Marina... he’s running quite an

fiery election campaign.

Yes, he, he, he can do that, I know him well.

His office neighbor in the regional Duma building

was... well, yes, both of them, of course.

Well, that’s just how it is, and this goes back to the question of

what different kinds of people came out of

Yabloko, and what kinds came out of the

Saratov Duma,

that you’re a co-founder of the United

Russia party? Yes, I was in thirtieth place. When you

did a bad thing coming out of Ya, you know, I

you know what I thought? I was in

Fatherland. And Govorukhin and Volodin said:

‘Come on.’ And I helped Govorukhin

in the presidential election. Why? Because

he was the only one who declared himself against

Putin. I took my whole team, came over, I

hated Putin from the very beginning and

worked completely free of charge for

Govorukhin. Then he says, ‘Listen,

we’re creating a party now. It’s going to be United Russia,

well, we’re merging with Unity.

This will be an alternative to Putin, because

there are many serious people there who,

well, won’t tolerate that kind of power over themselves,

and in the end it will happen that this

party will devour him. That’s all.’ I, I didn’t just

agree, I rowed there with all my might.

And in 2003, when it was already

clear, yes, I left United Russia, of course, well,

that was in 2003. And I walk up,

after having had a fight at a meeting, there at

the gathering, I walk up to the door and they shout at me:

‘Vyacheslav Vyacheslavovich, the door is locked,’

I yanked it and tore it out with the

frame and walked through. I said, ‘I’ll walk through

closed doors.’ And I left them. And

do you know what the paradox is? When they were writing

United Russia’s program, it’s a very

funny story. I, well, nobody reads the programs,

but certain people write them.

I was one of those certain people,

well, you know, you write a lot of things too.

And I wrote ‘a share of the national wealth for everyone.’ That’s

what later ended up in the manifesto. It

hung there for three years until they saw it and

said, ‘Damn, what is this?’ Well at least, well,

about the road to the address of

St. Petersburg. You didn’t write that. No,

no, this ‘share of the national wealth,’

that’s mine, mine. I put it in there, moreover

in complete seriousness, because I thought

that this party would eventually... Well, I

didn’t think everyone would bend the knee. Well, well,

these are people who... Yes, Govorukhin. Well, I

understood everything, I understood who started this whole mess.

Well, and you’re the one dealing with the fallout from it. Yes, I’m

dealing with it too, among other things.

And well, all right, there’s

a lot one could say about this.

Someday, I’ll tell it somehow, but

you’re the only one who doesn’t know this.

And the man is conducting an investigation into

Volodin and doesn’t know his best friend. Well,

not best. If you’d built a dacha next to

his, I’d know everything about you. But I

have nothing, so that’s why you don’t know.

I’m like a Latvian, as I always say,

I have nothing. Vyacheslav Shlavovich, people

are writing: a joke. There were no jokes.

Alexei, do you have a favorite joke,

any kind? Oh, well, I love jokes. I

unfortunately can never remember

them. Everyone asks me: ‘Do you,

you know jokes?’ I say: ‘I don’t,

I don’t remember them.’ Here’s the joke that we

didn’t tell you today. All right, by the

way, yes? You, you say you like them, but

I like it. And I like it. So I

think Alexei will like it. The girl,

well, you know, she has certain

deficiencies, kind of feeble-minded. It’s

Krokhin’s favorite joke. She’s splashing her little hands,

once threw a goldfish onto the shore. Well,

it goes like this:

once she picked up a fish. It says: "Girl,

let me go, and I’ll grant three wishes."

He says: "Really?" He

says: "Really." She says: "I want

a tail like a rat’s,

bald and long." Well, so a tail appeared. She

walks around fooling about, finding it hilarious.

She says: "I want a nose like this, with a

wart." Well, so it made her a nose with

a wart. It says: "All right, give me the third

wish." She wanted boobs like

an elephant’s. Well, ears like an elephant’s, a nose,

a tail, walking around in the water, splashing. It was so

funny to her. The fish says: "All right, girl,

let me go now." Well, she starts

letting it go. The fish says: "Wait, wait, just

answer me one question: why didn’t you ask

me to make you

rich,

or smart and beautiful?" "Was that possible?"

Yes, and when we talk about Putin, right,

they say there that he’s eternal,

this and that, that he can’t be removed, right, and

when I went on air and said 'impeachment

for Putin,' all the others said, these

ones there, the ones around that monster, right,

to say not 'impeachment for Putin.' I

think that

it’s clear why they piled

those criminal cases onto Alexei, so that he

couldn’t say it, because I think

he would have said it much earlier, on

air. Well, if he’d still been able to run

back in, I don’t know, what year,

ages ago. So, on that positive

note. On a positive note. Thank you

so much for inviting me. Glad, glad.

A legendary program. Well, now I’ve

been invited on air. I’ll try to copy everything from

your show and make something no

worse than yours. Oh, I’m catching myself jinxing it.

That’s a must. For us, it’s truly

a great honor. Yes. Thank you very much.

Thanks to all the viewers of Artpodgotovka.

Thank you. Goodbye. Until the new

historical era, there are

435 days and an hour and a half left. Very good.

Very good. Okay, wait. Thanks for

watching us. Today I’m standing in for Vyacheslav

Maltsev. What? St