Navalny: “We must crush the approval ratings of United Russia and Putin”

– After you got 27% in the Moscow mayoral election, did it become too dangerous for the authorities to leave you free, or too dangerous to jail you? – I have no idea how the percentage I got in the election could affect the possibility of my being imprisoned. Those kinds of calculations and gradations probably exist only in Putin’s head. But I have no idea what is going on in that head right now. There’s a view that the authorities allowed a relatively free election in order to “take the temperature” and understand what the real situation was. After all, the collapse of polling in this election was so glaring that it became obvious to absolutely everyone. No one understood the new political alignment. Now we can see some new outlines emerging; they are very important for us, and probably just as important for the Kremlin. What conclusions they draw from this—whether to jail me or not, whether to smear me even harder on television, though I honestly don’t know how they could smear me any harder, or something else—I don’t want to guess. I don’t know what’s going on in their heads. As far as I can tell, nothing at all is going on there. Or rather, something is happening in Putin’s head, but since Putin has centralized all decision-making in himself, by the time the executors get to that head, who knows how much time will have passed. As far as I can see, the Kremlin is just in a state of endless chaos: people there are not doing their normal bureaucratic jobs. They are either making money or expanding their own spheres of influence, waging a kind of bulldogs-under-the-carpet struggle. So I’m not inclined to overestimate expectations that they will seriously change their strategy toward me or the opposition as a whole. – So when you were running your campaign, you didn’t think its success might be your last chance to avoid prison? – That’s nonsense. For some reason, many people think prison scares me that much. Yes, it is obviously an extremely unpleasant thing. I have absolutely no desire to go to prison, but I have never tied, and do not tie, my actions to the odds of whether they will jail me or not. If I really wanted to avoid that, I probably would have acted in a completely different way. But I honestly don’t care what they come up with. I can’t control it. If tomorrow Putin decides to jail anyone—me, for example—then there is nothing you can do about it. – After the presidential election in March 2012, you ended up in the fountain on Pushkin Square together with Udaltsov, urging the other protesters not to leave. But that wasn’t your election, and there wasn’t even a candidate in it who represented your interests in any meaningful way. Now, when it was necessary to defend the result and, apparently, the second round stolen by the authorities, you told people to go home. Why did that happen? – What happened on March 10 was, in large part, a gesture of solidarity with Udaltsov, who had called for it all. That’s the first point. And second, yes, the result has to be defended. We know for certain that they stole those percentage points from us; we know for certain that they stole the runoff. The question is what methods to use to defend the result: which method will be most painful for City Hall, and which method is strategically in line with our approach. I can’t just call on everyone to stay or not stay for no reason. As a responsible politician, and simply as a sane person, I can feel the mood of the crowd. If I can feel that mood and understand that people do not want to stay at that moment, then it would be foolish to call on them to do so. Yes, perhaps a few thousand people would have stayed in the square out of solidarity with me. But I thought about it a great deal, discussed it with everyone, and it was a very important decision. I realized that people saw this campaign as a tremendous success and a victory. We did not have a scenario in which Sobyanin got 43% and I got 48% in the first round, where everyone would have had to come out and block everything. At most polling stations, our observers did not see any outrageous violations. We all understand perfectly well that the authorities stole our votes through at-home voting. My sense was that people simply were not ready for street action. They themselves did not believe that this was the right and adequate political decision at that moment. So I think I chose the right course of action afterward—at least that’s how it seemed to me then, and that’s how I still feel now. If three thousand people had stayed in the square and the OMON riot police had dispersed us, everyone would once again have been left with the feeling that this was a story of defeat. But that is not the case at all. We will use other methods that can be applied in this situation. We printed a newspaper with a circulation of one million copies, and I’m now working on distributing it. This campaign showed that some of the things we can do are very effective, which means we need to keep doing them. In particular, I mean grassroots campaigning by ordinary people: for example, 36,000 people have registered on the network “dom.navalny.ru.” Our political strategy has not changed—we must crush the ratings of United Russia and Putin. We do that through campaigning. Right now we are in a situation where neither Putin, nor United Russia, nor Putin’s government is capable of doing anything real to raise its approval rating. Well, of course, they could stage some terrorist attacks or start a war, but that is unlikely. To genuinely win broader public support, they would need to begin institutional reforms. They are not doing that. That is precisely why GDP growth is falling, why there is recession, and so on—they cannot do anything. They have reached their ceiling. What’s more, they brought exactly their own electorate to this election. Everyone they were capable of dragging to the polling stations, they dragged there. And that’s it—they’ve hit the ceiling. So now our task is rather to tell people about our victory and use the forms of campaigning we have invented that are painful for the authorities. – And then what? Say United Russia’s rating falls to 20%—what happens after that? – If, say, on June 1 someone had told you that Sobyanin would get 48% in the election and would have to falsify the vote in order to win in the first round, you would have laughed. But political reality turned out to be exactly that—this election recorded a different balance of forces. Now we have to make sure that in the next election, say for the Moscow City Duma, United Russia has to resort to major tricks just to get even 25%. Putin’s regime rests on the level of his personal popularity. If his personal popularity falls, as it has now in Moscow, to 40–45%, that is a fact we have to reckon with. His popularity is based on television and propaganda. We have seen that we can counter that popularity. Now we have to turn that into results. – When you still did not call on people on September 9 to light flares and overturn cars, naturally there were people who decided that the Kremlin had struck a deal with you. – Those people say that kind of thing all the time, about anything. Most often they are not even the people who were on Bolotnaya Square, but rather Twitter warriors who are constantly demanding “hardcore” and dismissing everything else as nonsense. That is why they never leave Twitter. I understand that some of my supporters probably expected more aggressive action from me. But I got 27%, and that creates major expectations; I have to act in the interests of a much larger number of people now. I understand why a third of those who came to vote voted for me, so I have to choose a line that corresponds to the expectations of all my voters. Of course, there is a core group of my supporters who went through the campaign with me—people who were personally insulted by the theft of the runoff. In terms of mood, they were ready to fight the police. But you also have to understand, sorry, the technical reality. You announce that we are staying only when you understand that 50,000 people will stay in the square with you. No fewer. In this case, I understood that would not happen. – Do you understand how to create a group of 50,000 supporters who would want to stay in the square with you? – You can’t create them. They will appear on their own when United Russia’s real rating is 25%, but it tries to draw itself 45%. Then people will come out into the streets on their own. The thing is, people keep telling me: “You brought them out, you led them away, you didn’t go far enough, you dispersed them...” That’s nonsense. I don’t bring anyone out. People come or they don’t. The conclusion I drew from all the mass demonstrations is that this process is practically impossible to control. For example, all my turnout forecasts for rallies were completely wrong. Personally, I don’t know how to forecast at all. – Well, as it turns out, even sociologists here don’t know how to forecast turnout in elections. – Sociologists analyze data. They’re just incompetent, they can’t count, and their questionnaires are filled out almost automatically. But when we predict turnout at a rally, it’s purely based on gut feeling. You see it yourself: everyone on Facebook writes “we’re going,” and then—bang!—10,000 people show up. And when we had the event on the 9th at Bolotnaya, I thought maybe 3,000 would come. But a huge number of people came on a weekday, and the mood was absolutely terrific. So I do what I think people want to do and what they would want from me. As a politician, I try to pick up on those moods. It doesn’t always work. If I picked up on them 100%, we would already have won. – Going back to the people who might have made deals with you—did you ever get calls from the presidential administration? – Not once. I’ve never spoken to any of them in my life—I only see those people on television. – And they didn’t offer to meet with you? – Honestly, I don’t particularly want to meet with anyone. I don’t see any subject for such meetings. – A year ago, Olga Romanova wrote that you had supposedly been seen in a restaurant either with Putin or with Volodin. – That’s nonsense, of course. I’ve never seen Volodin even once, and I’ve seen Voloshin twice in my life. I’ve only seen Putin on television; I’ve never had dinner with any of them. To be honest, I don’t even really understand what I would have been supposed to discuss with him. What would Putin have said to me? “Alexei, please stop criticizing the Ozero dacha cooperative”? What could Putin really give me, in the final analysis? – Well, for example, you wouldn’t be jailed. – I’ve said many times: if they’re going to jail me, then let them jail me. I’m not afraid of it. It’s an extremely unpleasant thing, but it’s not something that will scare me off. If someone said to me, “We’re going to sort out the corruption scheme involving Yakunin at Russian Railways.” Or at Transneft, or VTB—now that would be something I’d be interested in discussing. I’d say: fine, I’ll stop going after you over Russian Railways if you start investigating Yakunin’s criminal activity. But none of them would ever propose anything like that. – Speaking of those schemes, you are rather selective in choosing the targets of your investigations. For example, before January of this year you didn’t mention Yakunin on Twitter at all, and now he is practically your main target. Everything that has happened around Yakunin over the last six months looks very much like a planned campaign against him, one that you were also brought into. Though yes, it does seem that Yakunin deserves all of it. – Well, what do you mean, “brought into”? It’s obvious that when someone has enemies, they may gather compromising material on him and send it somewhere. I can say that no particularly special kompromat on this subject was dumped on us. For me, Yakunin started with the fur vault. With that post on the website “YaPlakal.” There were photos of his house; then I published them, we saw what an outrageously brazen character this Yakunin was, and we decided to dig around there and asked everyone to send us information about him. Maybe that first post on “YaPlakal” was uploaded by some of his malicious colleagues who wanted to push Yakunin out of his position. But why should I care? The fact that some ministers want Sechin replaced, some want Chemezov replaced, and someone wants Yakunin replaced—I honestly don’t care about that at all. They say Chemezov really dislikes Yakunin. If tomorrow Yakunin’s people send over a folder on Chemezov, I’ll be very pleased. – But it seems no one has sent you anything on Sechin for a long time. You haven’t mentioned him on your LiveJournal at all since 2011. – My work on Rosneft was connected with court cases over disclosure of information. No one sent anything on Sechin. As for Rosneft, there is the utterly brazen and outrageous payment of bonuses, and the strange story of buying shares on credit. Unfortunately, I have nothing on Rosneft that the newspaper Vedomosti hasn’t already written about. If Slon readers have such information, let them send it to me—I’ll check it and publish it. – Don’t you consider Sechin the greatest evil in this system of power? – I don’t know their internal alignments. From his work at Rosneft, I see Sechin as a man pursuing a mad policy that generates corruption. The company buys up everything in sight; now it wants to buy Uralkali. It’s some kind of absurdity and madness. Strange, thieving people with no real competence seized Russia’s largest oil company and are now buying up everything in the world, spending colossal sums on opaque investment programs. So for me, Sechin is one of the main embodiments of corrupt state capitalism. To what extent he is the chief villain, I don’t know. But of course he is one of the people closest to Putin. He is probably one of those most responsible for the fact that corruption has become the political foundation of the state. – Then let’s go back again to the election campaign. Obviously there were mistakes caused by lack of experience, but what exactly happened with the company in Montenegro? – I’ll write about it in detail when I have all the documents in hand. The situation was this: Kostin’s crooks (Konstantin Kostin, a former Kremlin administration official. – Slon.) dump some information about a Montenegrin company, and Volkov asks me, “What is this?” I tell him there was no company, I didn’t register anything. Just in case, I call Masha Gaidar: “Did we register a company together?” She says there was no company, so I tell Volkov: “I don’t know what happened there, but I didn’t register any company.” We both couldn’t have forgotten, could we? Then Volkov, together with programmers, started studying how Kostin could have fabricated documents about this company, found a vulnerability on the Montenegrin registration website, and concluded it could have been hacked. And he was mistaken. But in the near future I will give details about Montenegro and everything will become clear. At that point Volkov had to respond, because Dorenko, Limonov, and Solovyov had already joined in spreading the story about the Montenegrin company. – Do you think Limonov was being paid for that too? – I don’t know whether he was being paid for that, but he gets money from Izvestia. It’s all the same outfit. Kostin, Gabrelyanov—it’s all the same feeding trough. So I don’t know whether he’s paid only by Izvestia or also for blog posts. Or maybe the main motive here is some kind of jealousy, but I can see that he writes exactly the same things as Solovyov and Dorenko. – Why do you think he dropped out of the protest movement, but keeps referring back to December 2011, when the opposition together with you supposedly missed its chance for a revolution? – The answer is very simple if you read my posts or Limonov’s posts from December 2011—when the first major rally took place at Chistye Prudy. Read Limonov’s post: he says, “There’s no need to go to this old-ladies’ protest, no need to go to any rallies.” Then, when Udaltsov or someone else filed the application for the first Bolotnaya rally, he also wrote that it was nonsense, and so on. And now he writes that his protest was stolen from him. He had absolutely nothing to do with it. Those protests were the result of the campaign “Vote for any party against United Russia”—it all began with observers’ protests after the parliamentary elections. Limonov, along with a small number of others, lost what I consider the main political argument. He argued for a boycott, and that is the most self-defeating strategy. As time has shown, the supporters of a boycott were defeated. And then Limonov crawled out from under the sofa and started shouting, “My protest was stolen!” I’ve said it before: you can’t steal a protest. You can’t lead people away. No one can take them away from me, just as I can’t take them away from anyone else. People are not serfs. But in general, Limonov is a creative person; he likes writing provocative texts and collecting negative reactions. If tomorrow people stop liking me, Limonov will love me again and write about what a great guy Navalny is, just to get scandalized comments. I take it calmly, philosophically. He’s an amusing old man. – Back in December 2011, had you already realized that you can’t just keep people there, that they are on their own, that you can’t build tent camps? – No, tent camps can be built. You can build tent camps if the mood exists among the people. One of the rallies I attended where there really was a mood for building tent camps was, of course, the rally on May 6. Of course, nothing came of it, but there were openly groups there united by the slogan “We will not leave.” But if people want to stay, they will stay. If I came and said, “Let’s all go home, I’ve made a deal with Putin, he’s going to make me minister of sports or transport,” people still wouldn’t listen to me. They understand what is happening no worse than I do. – Many people think your campaign was built around the message “Yes, We Can.” It turned out that yes, it really is possible to do politics even if you’re not a billionaire and you’re not backed by a parliamentary party. The main thing is that people believe in you. But that was more of a call to action than a substantive message. – No, that’s not quite right. That message could be described not even as “Yes, We Can,” but as “We Must”—it was very noticeable in the final stage of the campaign; you and many others wrote Facebook posts in that vein. People wrote: “We’ll go vote on principle.” People didn’t believe the election could succeed. They thought, there won’t be victory, but let’s go on principle. We used that at the end of the campaign, but at the beginning everything was different, and everyone criticized me for those funny photos where I’m standing in a tie in front of the word “Moscow,” and so on. But first and foremost, it was a campaign about a program. We proposed a program, and I think it was the best one. And all the ideas we carried in it were absolutely substantive. Right now we have six draft laws, and our next step will be to collect 50,000 signatures under each one and submit them to the Moscow City Duma. In other words, we have created a kind of “people’s deputy.” We have legislative initiative if we unite 50,000 people. We don’t yet have a deputy in the Moscow City Duma, and only United Russia sits there, but we can collect 50,000 signatures and introduce a bill. There you are—that is our concrete program. The other thing is that politically engaged people on the internet barely saw any of this; they are not interested in reading my draft laws. They are interested in Navalny versus Putin. – Yes, they think your program for mayor of Moscow consisted of one point: fire Kapkov. And that was it. – Many people chose not to notice the program. Probably that was our shortcoming, our mistake, that we failed to communicate it. When we said online, “Let’s discuss our housing and utilities bill,” people replied, “What is this nonsense? Housing and utilities? Come on, let’s go after United Russia!” So we tried to move in different directions with different messages corresponding to the expectations of different audiences. – Tell me honestly: do you yourself believe that a few vans full of lawsuits can produce any result and that the election outcome will be revised? – Let’s put it this way: since I deal with Russian courts all the time, I have no inflated expectations that our lawsuits will suddenly be considered according to the law. If they were considered according to the law, then of course a runoff should be declared. But we nevertheless hope that we will bring a large number of witnesses into court, and because there will be heightened attention to the proceedings, they will not reject us with the same lawless arbitrariness with which they previously rejected everyone who challenged election results. We will litigate better than people have litigated before. – As I understand it, your next concrete political task is the Moscow City Duma election. Tell me how you are moving toward that now. – We can see that right now 95% of the deputies in the Moscow City Duma are from United Russia. That does not correspond to Muscovites’ political preferences. United Russia should hold no more than 25% of the seats there—that would be its proper, lawful, and fair share. How do we make that a reality? First of all, we have to solve the question of who our deputies are and by what principle we choose them. Because as the election approaches, we will once again run into some incomprehensible lists with incomprehensible names on them. I believe we all need to find a system for making the right decisions, so that the core of politically engaged Muscovites—50,000 or 100,000 people—can determine these people through a primary process. The main political task is to select the right single-mandate candidates and come up with the right rules for how this list will be formed. I am sure that 50% of Muscovites will vote for a normal opposition list. But the list really does have to be the right one. – Are you prepared to build that list on the basis of RPR-PARNAS and with colleagues from there, since the People’s Alliance is not being registered? After all, some Nashi activists or Sobyanin supporters in Moscow even managed to put up a billboard with you, Nemtsov, and Kasyanov. Your team, of course, called it a provocation, but in fact it was Nemtsov and Kasyanov who nominated you from their party. Doesn’t that company make you uneasy in an election? – It does make me uneasy. That is exactly why there are many complications. Ideally, I would like such a list to be formed on the basis of the People’s Alliance—a party with no negative baggage. RPR-PARNAS does have that baggage. But to tell the truth, RPR-PARNAS did not hinder me in any way in this election. Everything they could do to support me, they did. We simply have to proceed from political realities. Right now the registered party is RPR-PARNAS. Neither the December 5 Party nor the People’s Alliance is registered. Civic Platform has already said it will not unite with anyone. I hope their spoiler activity will be less noticeable than it was in this election. So yes, I will certainly negotiate, and I will do so with colleagues from RPR-PARNAS. But I want to emphasize that I am not going to sit down with Nemtsov or Kasyanov and draw up the list. That list must be formed through primaries. I have neither the task nor the desire to create five deputies personally loyal to me. Because they would be bad deputies. I do not want some endless Navalny and a few loyal people to him ruling everywhere. It’s not even that I’m tired of being the one and only Navalny; it’s simply politically ineffective—there should be a dozen of them. We need to find them now and nominate them to the Moscow City Duma. Even in our volunteer database there are 36,000 people—that means that if there are 22 single-mandate districts, each of our candidates can already appeal to 1,500 activists in his or her district and say: “Guys, help me.” If the candidate convinces them, those 1,500 people guarantee victory. You just have to work, and start doing it now. Because before every election, everyone sits around doing nothing (at best writing on Twitter), and then a month before the election they pop up and say: “Give us a deputy’s mandate.” That is what we need to avoid. Let them start working right now, let them gather volunteers and thousands of supporters right now, let them win the primaries by bringing in supporters. – So it wouldn’t bother you to end up on the same list as Kasyanov or Ryzhkov? – As far as I know, neither Kasyanov, nor Nemtsov, nor Ryzhkov is seeking to run in the Moscow City Duma election. But whoever is chosen is chosen. Whatever makes me uneasy, those are the rules. But I want to say that I am sincerely grateful to Nemtsov and Kasyanov for how they behaved in the Moscow election. They had their own story there, their own internal party intrigue. Of course, there were people who were against it. But they reacted appropriately: they urgently held all the necessary congresses and councils and nominated me; they behaved like responsible politicians. But yes, these are all people with history—they are older than I am. At this point, they are my political allies. The things they are declaring now are the right things. – And what about other people who also sometimes declare the right views? There is Ilya Ponomaryov, for example, an old friend of Surkov, a Skolkovo employee, and supposedly a participant in the white-ribbon protest movement. – I look not at someone’s history, but at practical activity. I don’t want to move to specific personalities right now, but yes, some people claim to be engaged in opposition activity while in fact serving as conduits or informants for the authorities. Other people, at the level of rhetoric or practical actions, take the right positions. It is вполне possible to work with them. I have never considered Ilya Ponomaryov a political ally of mine. He’s some kind of shady little operator. When it turned out that he had given some lectures for which he received $750,000, and then was even trying to prove that his lectures were worth that money, I just found it funny. Knowing what the best professors are paid for lectures, I understand that the best reward for Ilya Ponomaryov’s teaching would be to kick him out. He has never been an ally for me. Just some guy who shows up at meetings. As you may remember, he was simply thrown out of some of the organizing committees for the first marches, because there was no other way. But he keeps hanging around somewhere. Now he’s gone to see Putin at Valdai, where he walks around saying, “I’m the opposition.” I can’t do anything about it—I don’t have a button that controls Ilya Ponomaryov and can finally send him off to sleep. Maybe someone else has such a button. – But you still keep in touch with Varlamov, who, as is well known, worked for Yakemenko. – Varlamov is not an employee of my foundation. I am not carrying out any political projects with him. I have never seen anything bad from Varlamov. I know many people who were once connected to the authorities, and now I see that they help me even without my asking. There are all kinds of “murzilki” (paid propagandists or fake public figures) in different colors and shades. In what way is Varlamov a murzilka? So he once wrote some paid posts—he earned money that way. People are weak. One has to treat that with understanding. If I go looking only for some iron man in the opposition, or people who are absolutely pure and transparent, I will find very few of them. I do not want to work with people who are currently doing vile things or who were involved in crimes. With the rest, I can perfectly well cooperate. – How has your attitude toward Udaltsov changed after the whole Targamadze affair? Don’t you think he set all of you up back then? – No, of course not. Udaltsov and the entire Left Front are a rather strange organization that had no significant influence before the protests began and has none now either. Udaltsov himself is absolutely unmercenary, a good guy. That whole conversation with Givi was ordinary political chatter that anyone could have taken part in. If Udaltsov had said to me at the time, “Some guy is coming and wants to meet you,” well, good Lord, I would have come, and there would have been Givi Targamadze sitting there spouting some nonsense. Everyone would have sat there shrugging, and then left. And then it would have turned out that some crook, Konstantin Lebedev, had recorded it all on camera. Where is the crime in that? – Maybe there was no crime, but Udaltsov promised Targamadze things that shouldn’t be said even in a private conversation. – It was rather stupid, irresponsible political chatter. I still see no grounds there for criminal prosecution. There are things there that Udaltsov’s supporters should discuss, but there is nothing that violated the law. For me, Udaltsov is absolutely a political prisoner. – Would you go on stage with him now and speak at the same rally? – Yes. I do not think he did anything terrible. He is a sincere person who stands for fairly correct things in politics. – Do you have some kind of prepared political testament for your staff in case the court does not let you go free this time? – We have discussed it a million times—every time there was some escalation in the criminal cases around me. The testament is one thing: work. And it is not just a testament, but a call to everyone in general. The problem with politics is that nobody does a damn thing. Name me one political structure in the country that engages in basic organizational work. We achieved a stunning success in this election simply because out of 100 necessary actions, we carried out 25. In this election I was basically just the person who posed for photos, spoke to voters, and gave interviews. The work was done by people—I am not needed by them; they now know what to do and how to do it. Yes, my photo and my name are here, but there is nothing that could not be done without me. – Is there someone in your foundation whom you have already designated to take charge in case you are jailed after all? – Of course there is. I just don’t want to name that person, so as not to make it easier to fight my foundation if circumstances change. But we have a clear plan for how to work if I end up in isolation. – How has this campaign changed you? – Meeting with voters is the hardest work I have ever done in my life. I held 90 meetings with voters—which means I gave 90 concerts. I came to understand better what a “politician” is and how this job should be done. If all our people who claim the title of opposition figures held 90 such meetings, it would be more useful for everyone. Between 50 and 1,000 people came to my meetings—mostly pensioners. I understood that a public politician has specific tasks and specific work to do in an election. It’s just that nobody ever does anything. Most people became deputies by accident, and now they want to become deputies again in the future with one simple explanation: “We were deputies once, so we must be great.” That is why our politics has degraded. – I recently read Yavlinsky describing how tremendously he and Mitrokhin worked. – But you saw how they worked, didn’t you? They didn’t work at all. That was exactly the problem. Our task was not, say, to get three times more than Yabloko. The task was for everyone to get more percentage points. If Mitrokhin had gotten 8%, and Levichev had not been fooling around with that angle grinder and had gotten 6.5%, then a runoff would have been absolutely inevitable. But they did nothing. They got lazy and believe only in television. For them, all political work consists of going to Volodin and begging him for airtime on TV. Whereas I went to meetings, watched recordings of them, asked for advice on what I needed to change. At first it was rather awkward, but I worked. The guys at headquarters, the volunteers, were working their heads off, and I had to work too. – Do you think you’ll make it onto Posner’s show on Channel One now? – Of course I won’t! Posner has said a hundred times that he decides nothing, that Ernst won’t allow it. I watch that clown Kiselyov talking about how I’m a fascist, and I understand that nothing has changed. – In that case, since you think you still won’t get on Posner, I’ll ask you a few questions from the Marcel Proust questionnaire that Posner usually uses to end his interviews. Which virtues do you value most? – Honesty and consistency of position. – Your current state of mind? – Elated. – When you meet God, what will you ask him? – There is nothing to ask God; you simply have to thank him. – I would add one more question to the Proust questionnaire for you. What would you say as a parting word to Sergei Sobyanin as he takes office as mayor of Moscow – I would tell Sergei Sobyanin that if he really wants to increase his support among Muscovites, he does not need to steal 3% of the vote from me through at-home voting. He could, for example, adopt the six draft laws that we wrote and prepared—including for him. If he goes down that path and does what Muscovites are demanding, everyone will be satisfied. –** You wouldn’t even advise him to resign?** – I’m not going to give him advice that he obviously won’t follow.