"Go Ahead, Build" – It seems people asked you a thousand times to investigate the construction of Zenit’s new stadium, but you never touched that or any other sports-related story. Why take it up now? – For all the fantastically inflated cost of the Zenit stadium, the Sochi Olympics will cost us as much as 44.5 such stadiums, so the Olympics take priority. Whenever people discuss the Olympics, everyone juggles their own numbers in a truly astonishing way. I mean, for example, the figure of 214 billion rubles that Putin cited, after which everyone’s jaw dropped: so little! Critics cite much larger numbers. The authorities accuse the critics of being incompetent and not having calculated anything. So we spent more time than anyone else trying to calculate it properly—to gather open-source material and analyze specific facilities. Our project is a place where all the figures and data are collected. Say someone wants to know how much something cost or who the contractor was—they come to us and find out. In the course of our research, we discovered that the last official figures on the cost of Olympic facilities were published in a government decree back in 2006—that is, before Sochi had even been awarded the Games. After that, we see a consistent strategy of concealing any information at all. Olympstroy was an outfit specifically designed so that no one could get any figures out of it. I should note that the last publicly available Olympstroy report was for 2012. Since then, a year of super-intensive construction has passed, but all information about it has been classified. When investigating officials’ real estate—people like Pekhtin or Liksutov—you can get some things from open-data registries, some things through fieldwork. Here the situation is different. You couldn’t get anything from Olympstroy even through a parliamentary inquiry. The Accounts Chamber report on the Olympics is classified. Fieldwork doesn’t help either: anyone walking around and investigating things in Krasnodar Krai gets picked up by the police. All in all, it’s an interesting experience. It’s supposedly the construction project of the century, paid for by the whole country, and yet it’s impossible to obtain reliable information about it. – So your conclusion is that 1.5 trillion rubles were spent on the Olympics. How did you arrive at that figure? – We have two figures. The first is 1.5 trillion—ours. The second is 214 billion—Putin’s estimate. At this point we can say with absolute certainty: what Putin is saying is an insulting lie. Let’s go through it point by point. We have 822 billion—that’s the budget... – Where did you get the budget figures? You just said everything is classified. – From the federal law on execution of the federal budget. First they pass the federal budget law, then a year later the law on its execution, and there’s a note saying: as part of holding the Sochi Olympics, allocate such-and-such amounts to Rosavtodor, the Prosecutor’s Office, and other agencies. It’s not so much classified as arranged in such a way that an ordinary person—and even an expert—won’t understand anything and won’t find anything. We pulled out those lines one by one, and sometimes found very funny things: for example, the Defense Ministry received 580 million rubles in 2012 for the construction of military facilities as part of the Olympics. Departmental sanatoriums were also built under the Olympic program—the prosecutors, for example, got one for 3.2 billion. Next: 33 billion is the budget of Krasnodar Krai. Another 330 billion comes from state corporations—Gazprom, Russian Railways, and various energy companies. Putin and the government call this "private" money, but state companies fold Sochi-related spending into their tariffs. So when you buy a commuter train ticket or pay your electricity bill, rest assured: you’re paying for a little bit of the Olympics. 249 billion is in VEB loans issued to various oligarchs. Most of those loans have already been recognized as non-performing. There is already a special Russian government decree under which VEB will be reimbursed if the loans are not repaid. And they will not be repaid. And finally, 53 billion is genuinely private money. Putin talks about private investment making up the larger share, but that’s complete nonsense. Private money accounts for 3.5 to 4 percent of all Olympic spending. Everything else is either state money or money from state corporations. – Who are these private investors? – Potanin—14 billion, Deripaska—6, Makhmudov—3.4, Vekselberg—1.3. Makhmudov is the only one who quickly built his facility—the Shayba Arena—and quickly handed it over to the state. Because he doesn’t want to maintain it with his own money—it’s too expensive. – What was their motive for taking part in the construction? Were they forced? Patriots? Naively hoping to break even? – No one can break even there. VEB’s numbers tell us how these oligarchic investments were made. How is construction usually financed? You put in 70 percent of your own money and borrow 30 percent from a bank. At most, it’s 50-50. VEB was lending 90 percent of construction costs! Vekselberg got 92 percent of the money for the Azimut Sochi hotel from the state-owned VEB. We hear: "Deripaska built the airport." In reality, he used a state loan to renovate the terminal, while the runway and equipment were paid for directly by the state. Obviously, at some point they were leaned on: "You’re oligarchs, go build something." But they’re crafty oligarchic guys—all except Makhmudov built things at many times the real cost, using VEB money. – So the guys won’t pay the money back? – The Finance Ministry will. In other words, you and I will. – And why won’t anything happen to them for that? – Putin has declared that there was no corruption. As I understand it, the government realized that irritation over the cost of the Olympics had displaced the joy of the Olympics even in the minds of people who were happy about them and really wanted them. Putin would like to remain in the national memory as the man who once again made it so that Misha the Bear (the mascot of the 1980 Moscow Olympics) floated across the sky and tears of emotion ran down our cheeks. He is much less eager to be remembered as the man behind the Olympic railway, which cost more than the entire Vancouver Olympics. Any conversation, any investigation, will remind people how much was stolen there. Since the Olympics are Putin’s personal project, in the public mind that will become Putin’s personal corruption. He doesn’t want that. That’s why the Finance Ministry will pay for the oligarchs’ loans that they won’t be able to repay to VEB. The money will be neatly laundered and taken off to Swiss banks. Curling – You write: "The road to Krasnaya Polyana is overpriced by a factor of two compared with comparable projects." What comparables are you using? – People like to measure the cost of this road against all sorts of things, from Mars rovers to Large Hadron Colliders—which is understandable, because it’s astonishingly expensive. We approached the estimate with maximum care and broke the road into parts—we separated bridges from tunnels, the highway from the railway—and compared each segment with similar construction in other countries. We chose the most expensive comparables. We understood that this would give us a more conservative figure, but also a more accurate one. As a result, we found overpricing not by a factor of five, as everyone else did, but by 1.9. But excuse me: if the road costs $8 billion, then a 1.9-fold overpricing means $3.7 billion. That is an unprecedentedly fat slice of corrupt income that went to Vladimir Putin’s closest friends. – What future awaits this road? Many people are convinced the railway part will be dismantled—that it was essentially built for exactly three Olympic weeks. – It faces the future of being the most expensive and most pointless road in the world. A few numbers for ski enthusiasts: the Krasnaya Polyana resort can accommodate 30,000 people per day at absolute full capacity. The road from Adler to Krasnaya Polyana can carry 20,000 people per hour—several times more than needed. In peacetime, when there are no Olympics, there’s no one for this road to carry. The Krasnaya Polyana resort is too small; it’s no French Three Valleys. Even according to Russian Railways’ official version, if this road were used constantly, it would pay for itself in 20 years. In real life, that means it will never pay for itself at all. – In your study, among the Olympic facilities there is something called "Sochi Park." What is that? – Just as war writes everything off, so do the Olympics. During this construction spree, the authorities included in the list of Olympic facilities even things that had absolutely nothing to do with the Games. The most expensive was the Formula 1 track: 12 billion rubles, paid entirely out of the budget. It has nothing to do with the Olympics, yet money was allocated to it anyway. Rotenberg, Putin’s buddy, became the main contractor and profited handsomely. But an even more outrageous case is Sochi Park, costing 9 billion rubles, which you asked about. It won’t even be completed until 2020. So what exactly does it have to do with the Olympics? This: it is being built by Governor Tkachev’s 28-year-old son-in-law. The project originally belonged to Krasnodar Krai, but they shoved it into the Olympic facilities program, after which its shares were sold to an offshore company. As a result, an offshore company owns an amusement park being built by the governor’s son-in-law and financed through large state loans. If that isn’t corruption, what is? – According to your information, the curling arena is being built by Andrei Svishchev—the father of State Duma deputy and Curling Federation president Dmitry Svishchev. So you rule out the possibility that a deputy’s father might simply be a good builder who knows how to construct these strange facilities for stones and brooms? – We do rule it out. Because he got the contract by unclear means. Because this company had never previously built major facilities. Obviously, the father of Svishchev—a deputy, federation president, and head of the curling team—is an interested party. Obviously, there is a conflict of interest here. And it’s also obvious that this arena is too big—with all due respect to curling, 3,000 seats. What for? The idea was that after the Games it would be dismantled and taken to another region. But it turned out it couldn’t be dismantled, so they decided to repurpose it. There was one idiotic idea about turning it into a palace for beach sports. Now it seems they’ve decided to make it an "All-Russian Curling Center." How many people do you think in Sochi’s subtropics—or even in all of Krasnodar Krai—are into curling? A Brazillion Dollars – The Olympics are Putin’s lifelong dream. Explain this to me, an average resident of Holy Rus': why would he want to steal from this? This is about emotion, not money. It’s like Vanessa-Mae’s dream—she always wanted to compete in the Olympics, qualified for Thailand in alpine skiing, and went. – Suppose you dreamed of competing in the Olympics. And at the same time, you’re a trillionaire, which is what Putin is. Standing before you is your circle of friends—Rotenberg, Timchenko, and Yakunin. You tell them: "Guys, go into that room. There’s a brazillion dollars in there. Make it so I get to go to the Olympics." And then everyone fulfills their dream: you go to the Olympics, and your friends carve up a brazillion dollars. Of course, Putin is deeply irritated that this blue-sky dream, this monument he is building to himself, is being discussed in the context of theft at the Olympics. But the Putin system is structured in such a way that none of his friends will handle emergency construction projects without taking the fattest pieces for themselves. Why would they do any of this if there were no compensation? One of the purposes of our project is to show how our shared money was poured into one big cauldron, how it boiled there, and who was scooping it out with a big spoon. Something did come of the Olympics, but their main winners were not the athletes or the spectators, unfortunately, but specific operators who stuffed their already bulging pockets even further: Rotenberg, Sur and Kostylev, Shishov, and of course Yakunin. Putin deliberately uses corruption as a system of motivation. To get the guys to build, you have to give them twice as much. They’ll skim half off, but they’ll build it. He likes that; that’s how he governs. He’s not like Stalin—he doesn’t govern through repression. – Really? – Really. He governs through money. Yes, a few people have been jailed. Yes, we hear some tough rhetoric. But Putin’s main method is bribery and corruption. The best and most inflated Olympstroy contracts went to his closest friends and his money-holders. That cannot be accidental. – How do you know about the contracts? Which company that you know of tried to take part in a tender and lost? – We can say clearly that there was no real competition for these construction projects. The tenders were either completely formal or didn’t exist at all. Very often the contractor was simply appointed. For this whole gang, tenders and competition are some kind of nonsense invented in the West that only wastes time. In Putin’s mind there is the usual Soviet-Russian idea: "We know ourselves who’s reliable. We’ll give him the contract." A Trillion Cats – If these Olympics had been held not in the south but, say, in the Urals, would the spending have been just as wild? – Hard to say—let’s think it through. If they had built them not in the subtropics but in Yekaterinburg or Chelyabinsk, where snow is not exotic and the population is more interested in winter sports, then at least it could have been used for people’s benefit. It doesn’t seem realistic to me that residents of Sochi, Adler, and Krasnodar will suddenly start attending hockey, figure skating, and curling competitions en masse and enrolling their children in those sports. So what we’re dealing with is spending that is both wild and pointless. But I think that under the current system, wherever they built it, the total would have come out roughly the same. In 2010–2011, these guys figured out that the project was so politically important to Putin that they could name any price they wanted. They named it—the state paid. On the Iceberg arena alone, 12 supplemental agreements were signed. Put simply: the initial price was low, and through those supplemental agreements it rose fivefold. Because the crooks realized they could twist the whole country’s arm. – Why does Putin agree to all this? – What else is he supposed to do? His task is not to jail people or save money. His task is to hold the Olympics. And if the system he himself created is such that the only way to do that is to spend 1.5 trillion, then he’ll spend 1.5 trillion. There’s a reason Putin regularly gets called the most influential person in the world—even though Russia’s economy is an order of magnitude smaller than that of the United States or China. He’s the most influential because he’s the only one who can dispose of a huge country as if it were his personal property. Putin simply doesn’t care how much anything costs. The money is right there—flowing out of the ground. Today he decided to direct the oil stream toward astonishing the world with the most expensive Olympics ever. To him, the budget is what the money in our wallet is to us. If he wanted, tomorrow he could say: cut the military budget by a factor of three, and with that money buy cats for my house. The budget would be cut, they’d bring him three trillion cats, and start unloading them from KamAZ trucks. And United Russia would declare that anyone who doesn’t like the trillion cats is working for the West. – Let’s sum up the flows: the "guys" get the money, Putin gets a good mood and nothing more. Do I have that right? – The money goes to the guys. But at least three of them—Yakunin, Timchenko, and Rotenberg—we know as his informal money-holders, the keepers of his wealth. We don’t have legal proof, but we can see that these are very close associates of his. What arrangements they have among themselves is unknown. So I would put it this way: "Putin gets a good mood and money in a common fund controlled by his guys." Vladimir Yakunin – In your view, do people believe Putin’s words that there was no corruption in Sochi? – They do not believe that nothing was stolen—that’s absolutely certain. One of the main reasons Putin began publicly lying about the cost of Sochi 2014 is that they can see from opinion polls that the Olympics provoke more irritation than pride among Russians—precisely because of the inflated budget. People don’t live in outer space. They know how things are built in their region, in their district. They know that the richest people in their city are the head of the local administration, the police chief, and the FSB chief. The other thing is that not everyone imagines the scale to be this large. And it is fantastical. Olympics-80 – A fairly common reaction to all these figures is: "So what, we shouldn’t hold the Olympics? They’d have stolen the money on something else anyway. At least this way we get the Games." – That twisted logic really infuriates me as a citizen. The internet is full of images showing what could have been built with the money that was stolen. We also made similar calculations, though very carefully. We analyzed 27 facilities. Their total cost was 820.7 billion. We realized that not all 27 could be compared with similar facilities—some comparisons would be a stretch, and we didn’t want to be accused of manipulating the data. In the end, we selected 11 facilities (total cost: 442 billion) whose prices could be compared properly. We found that the overpricing on them amounted to 189 billion rubles. I feel very sorry about that money. We could have had the highest-quality Olympics—and still the most expensive—while saving a hell of a lot of money the country badly needs. Look. In the Imereti Lowland there are six stadiums and arenas (cost: 54 billion). Even if we strip out flood protection, utilities, and everything else, we still find an obviously corrupt price inflation of 42 percent. With that money, 98 ice palaces for mass-participation sports could have been built. In other words, one in every more or less major Russian city. Or there could have been a breakthrough in grassroots sports through the construction of 123 modern children’s sports schools. Build all that and still hold the most expensive, phenomenally beautiful Olympics. – Was there theft in the construction of the 1980 Moscow Olympics? – There was theft on the level of a foreman taking home a truckload of sand, electricians stealing a coil of wire for their dacha. But theft on the level of getting a contract and stealing a billion—that, of course, was impossible then. In our study, we have a scheme showing the construction of a Gazprom power plant built for the Sochi Olympics. We see that its initial cost was twice as high as power plants being built in the Far North, where construction conditions are even more difficult. But here’s the thing: the customer takes 6 billion rubles out of the 28 billion allocated for construction and passes the rest to the contractor. This company—close to Putin ally Timchenko—is just a middleman that simply pocketed 6 billion for nothing. After that, Rotenberg builds the remainder—also at twice the normal price. It would have been impossible to imagine all this in the Soviet Union. There were inefficient, foolish construction projects there. But for the head of a project to pocket a billion and siphon it off somewhere—that was impossible. – Will they steal the same way during the 2018 FIFA World Cup? – With this government? Of course. We can already see the signs: colossal cost projections that keep increasing. We should draw conclusions from our previous experience. Our previous experience is the Universiade, the APEC summit, and of course the Olympics. What tells us anything will change? If the budget law says 822 billion, and Putin comes out and says 214 billion and that nobody stole anything, how can we believe the World Cup will be any different? "Spartak" – Let’s change the subject. What did you think of McGeady’s decision? – McGeady’s decision? – Yes, McGeady. – Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. – That makes it clear. In the middle of the Moscow mayoral campaign, you said you support Moscow’s Spartak. The election is over—let’s be honest: that wasn’t true, was it? – It was absolutely true. At the same time, I admit I’m more of a theoretical fan. "I support Spartak" is, for me, a kind of Moscow self-identification. If you asked me right now, "Who is Spartak’s head coach?"—I couldn’t tell you. I don’t watch matches except the most important ones. But people divide into certain groups. Some live in Maryino, others in Tushino. Some support Spartak, others Dynamo. I’m one of those who lives in Maryino and supports Spartak. – Listen, but making statements like that with so little immersion in the subject is, at the very least, not telling the whole truth. – My campaign staff was категорically against me saying who I support. You never know whether you gain or lose by making statements like that. People often asked me about it at meetings with voters. And when they heard "Spartak," they’d say, "Oh man! How am I supposed to vote for you now?" In Sokolniki I was asked directly. I didn’t want to dodge so that both Dynamo fans and Lokomotiv fans would support me. So I said it as it was. – Don’t take me for some maniac in a stretched-out sweater, but supporting Spartak and not knowing the head coach’s name is about the same as having a wife and not knowing her mother’s name. – No, it’s not. People live in New York and support the Yankees, in Boston they support the Red Sox. Not all of them watch the games, but when they hear the team won, they feel good. For me, Spartak is a geographic marker. The most Moscow team there is. – "The Moscow Spartak smells of loserhood"—that’s a little verse you wrote in 2006. – There was a funny poetry contest. People were reworking Rodari’s famous poem "What Trades Smell Like," and it was supposed to end with "Only V.V. Putin has no smell at all." "Spartak" rhymed, and they had lost some match. There was no meaning in that phrase—it just fit the line. – So by generally accepted standards, you don’t really support anyone. – Then we just have different ideas of what supporting a team means. If someone tells me, "Pick a team," I will always pick Spartak. That, for me, is what supporting means. I think the truly mass fan is more like that, not like you. They don’t know who the head coach is. They’re just for Spartak or just for Lokomotiv. I went to American football a couple of times while studying in the States. Half the fans who came didn’t even go into the stadium—they were barbecuing right in the parking lot. Traumatic Pistols – You’ve had experience dealing with football hooligans, haven’t you? – When I was first arrested for 15 days at the end of 2011, I ended up in a cell with a Spartak fan who had also taken part in the protest at Chistye Prudy. I had never known how all those firms and so on were organized—it was interesting to listen. During the mayoral election, one of the so-called firms offered to help—not with security, but with what you’d call crowd control. Interestingly, they came to a couple of events, but after that the FSB got in touch with them: "Why are you hanging around with Navalny?" – You already have a suspended sentence, and in the Yves Rocher case you could get another one. I’ve always wondered: what does a person do when he knows he could end up in prison any day now? I always imagined he refreshes his old sambo, karate, whatever else. Do you? – As you know, my prison experience is very limited. But I think what matters more here is not physical strength but spirit and attitude. That’s only in the movies: you enter a cell and immediately have to fight everyone, jumping from bunk to bunk and using sambo moves. Physical strength doesn’t solve one hundred percent of the problems there. First and foremost, you need to be a normal person and observe the rules of communal life. Even if you’re a super-sambo champion, you won’t overpower everyone in your cell or colony, and there’s no need to—that’s not the task. Everyone sitting there with you is just an ordinary person. Sports matter in that situation because it’s a question of health. In my brief correspondence with Khodorkovsky, before the Kirovles trial, he gave one piece of advice on this subject: "Go get treated. Go get checked out." No one is going to treat you in prison. So the most important thing is to go to the dentist, get scans done, solve as many health problems as possible—not sit in the gym. – When was the last time you got into a fight? – If we’re talking about a real brawl with blood, then in 2007—after a debate at the Bilingua club, when football fans hired by the presidential administration staged a provocation. They came in, started throwing bottles, and shouting, "Come here." I said, "When the debate’s over, I’ll come." We went outside; there was a traumatic pistol, there was shooting, the shooting turned into a fight, blood everywhere, police, and so on. – Do you carry a traumatic pistol? – No. That very incident showed me how useless traumatic weapons are. If you’re not shooting at the head—which is prohibited—it all ends up as an ordinary fistfight anyway, where the pistol doesn’t decide anything. In Court – What would need to happen with your Olympic investigation for you to say: I’m satisfied? – I want those we exposed as stealing our common money to end up first under investigation and then in court. I want everyone to know and understand how much we could have built and achieved if not for corruption and not for this government, which rests on corruption. We could have boosted grassroots sports. We could have made a breakthrough in science. We could have carried out a new industrialization of the country. And I’ll repeat: none of that would have prevented us from holding the Olympics.
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