Navalny Became Reality

38 Nekrasova Street is directly across from the offices of Pskovskaya Guberniya. In the same block, at 23 Nekrasova Street, is the regional administration building. Across the intersection are the pre-trial detention center and the regional prosecutor’s office. In short, you could hardly find a better location for Alexei Navalny’s campaign headquarters. The authorities responded to his visit cleverly: they ignored it. There were no attacks with green antiseptic dye (a common form of harassment in Russia) and no Cossacks, while a lone picketer whose sign quoted Lev Shlosberg on Navalny’s lack of a program merely added some local color to the event. Many people wanted to speak with the politician; more than a hundred showed up. It was literally hard to breathe inside—the air conditioner couldn’t cope. And that was despite the fact that the Pskov office is one of the most spacious, as Leonid Volkov put it. Opening the office, Alexei quoted Governor Andrei Turchak’s Instagram post following the March 26 rally: “In fact, the ‘zero generation’ now stands at a crossroads, facing a very harsh and urgent choice: either the tiresome slogans of outsiders with zero prospects, or to think for themselves—without tutors and ‘youth affairs’ specialists—and present the country and the world with THEIR own Great Future.” “I read that and thought: what an audacious man you are! This is what you call a Great Future? Someone came up to me and asked, ‘Alexei, have you managed to see anything in the city of Pskov?’ And I thought: well, I saw something through the car window, but I couldn’t make much out because my head was being tossed around like this”—at this point Alexei Navalny demonstrated exactly how his head had been bouncing—“because the roads in Pskov are atrocious! “‘These are actually the good ones,’ one of the volunteers objected. ‘We’re in the city center right now.’ Navalny laughed along with everyone else. “‘One of Russia’s oldest cities,’ the politician went on describing Pskov. ‘It ought to be polished to perfection, a model showcase city, the kind of picture-postcard place we should, in theory, show to foreigners as proof of this government’s favorite thesis—that we have a thousand-year history. But you’ve bombed that thousand-year history into ruin! What Great Future? That’s why I came here: so that, as Turchak says, we can all make a very harsh and urgent choice—either all of this, or a genuinely normal future.’” Before the office opening, the editors of Pskovskaya Guberniya spoke with Alexei Navalny in more detail about what that normal future should look like and how to get there. “We’ll try to make a glowing sign for Turchak” – What are your plans for this headquarters? Is it being set up indefinitely, until the presidential election, or until you’re denied registration, for example? – This is a presidential campaign headquarters. Of course we’ll be registered, and of course we’ll take part in the election. This is a fully functioning office, exactly the kind a candidate should have during a presidential campaign. We’ll invite volunteers here, coordinate them from here, there’ll be piles of campaign materials here—this is part of our real election campaign. No one in Russia actually runs real election campaigns. Usually presidential candidates say a few things on television and, at best, travel to the biggest million-plus cities. But nobody does the rest, partly because they don’t have volunteers, and because it’s generally assumed they don’t need them: at best, you can hire paid canvassers. We have lots of volunteers, so we need spaces like this for them to work in. What happens after that? We’ll decide later. We’re not making long-term guesses right now. An election campaign is coming, and we’re working. Are we in the city center now? – More or less, yes. The regional administration is on this street. – Turchak will be driving past our headquarters. We’ll try to make a glowing sign for him so he can see us in the evening too. – I wanted to ask about new methods in this campaign. Volunteers are one thing, obviously. You’ve placed a big bet on YouTube. But I’m also curious about Telegram: do you have some personal hatred of Telegram? – No, I use it as a messenger. What I don’t like are anonymous Telegram channels. First of all, because I subscribe to a few non-anonymous ones, and sometimes people send me funny stories about myself from anonymous Telegram channels, so they annoy me: they write nonsense there. But there are a few smart people—Smirnov or Chikov—I follow them. When people write on Facebook, at least you can share a link and say, “Read this,” or find the post later. But everything sent into Telegram is like a black hole—it just disappears in there. So when random idiots from anonymous channels write stuff, fine, let them write! But when normal people leave Facebook or VKontakte for Telegram, that’s a bit irritating, because something interesting gets lost. As for YouTube, I’m very glad we got into it. For a long time we were afraid, hesitant—it felt intimidating. Even now, hosting Navalny LIVE is still pretty scary for me; every time it’s stressful. But it gives us audience reach. Through it we’ve reached large audiences that are already comparable to television. Still far behind TV, yes, but comparable. So we’re doing it and constantly trying to invent something new. We’re very proud that Navalny LIVE is not even three months old yet and already has 350,000 subscribers. Our main channel is somewhere around 1.1 million and will probably hit that soon. The audience is growing quite fast. And probably our main achievement isn’t even that we built up the channel, but that we brought politics to YouTube. On the way here from St. Petersburg, I was watching: blogger Nikolai Sobolev had a huge 12-minute video about politics, Sasha Spielberg, the rallies; Sokolovsky has a video about Usmanov sitting at number one in the trending list right now. They’ve started discussing politics, and that’s wonderful—we’re pleased with that. I don’t know how directly it will help us in the election campaign, but overall I think it’s a good thing. “He’s some kind of lout and crook” – Do you believe you’ll be registered for the election once the signatures are collected? – The problem comes before the signatures. As I understand it, their plan is not even to accept the documents, not even to begin the signature collection process. But we believe that if we really create strong public pressure from everywhere, across all of Russia—not just Moscow and St. Petersburg, but any city, even small ones—then the pressure will be real. Pressure they know is not YouTube, not Twitter, not Facebook, and not Moscow. In fact, any public opinion poll shows that if people say, “Register him, we demand registration!” they won’t be able to ignore it. – Your answer about promoting YouTube made me think more broadly about promoting personalities. Yury Dud, who’s very trendy right now, partly thanks to you has already gained 800,000 subscribers. – I think he’s almost at a million, but still not thanks to me. My interview is his most popular video, yes. He has lots of interviews with me out there, but 3.5 million views—that’s still down to his particular style of presentation. – But do you realize you’re promoting certain projects? Who even knew Shariy before (a Ukrainian video blogger. — Ed.)? Why mention him at all?! – Well, what can I do? It’s impossible not to! He’s constantly making videos about me now. – He’s delighted, you understand? – There’s no getting away from it. That’s the downside of YouTube. I can’t do anything about it. He’s some kind of lout and crook, and I have absolutely no desire to engage with him polemically, but he caught onto this whole thing, and now at every meeting people come and want to ask something about Shariy, record it, post it, get their own likes and views too. But that’s how it works—I can’t say, “I’m not going to answer those questions.” I’m probably different from many politicians, including opposition ones, in that I answer all questions. You ask where to go from here? This is precisely an element of public pressure. He managed to organize it somehow, so I answer, even though it annoys me. But there’s nothing to be done. “Turchak is a dangerous man” – Do you follow what’s going on in Pskov at all? Our dear governor, for instance? – Well, of course I follow Turchak! I can tell you some exclusive information about him. Do you know after what incident we introduced secrecy in our office and stopped referring to officials by name? Alburov brought me Turchak’s villa in Cannes, and we sat there discussing it. We discussed it and discussed it—and the day before we were supposed to publish it, they revealed it themselves in Kommersant. And damn it! The post was already written, the graphics were ready, everything! I simply don’t believe in coincidences. After that, the investigations department was forbidden from mentioning the names of targets or investigations at all. So Turchak is one of the people we keep an eye on. I believe he was involved in the attack on Kashin. I believe all the facts and witness testimony show that he was involved in the attack on Kashin, so of course he’s not just corrupt, in my view—he’s a dangerous man who may actually have tried to organize a political murder. – Well, at the very least, to maim him for sure. – You can see from that video that the intent was clearly murder. I mean, come on—40 blows to the head with a metal rod! – What do you make, in that light, of his receiving the Medal of the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland”? – It’s offensive, just like all these demonstrative [awards] are offensive in that context. Awarding police officers who beat people... They always do this; it’s not just about Turchak. They always like to throw it in the face of public opinion, of the buzzing Facebook crowd: deliberately summon them and reward them. It happens quite often, and we’ve seen many examples. And it works: it implants in people the idea that nothing can be changed. That’s exactly why it’s done—so people think: “Damn, how is this possible? We all went crazy over Turchak: evidence, recordings, witnesses—and he gets decorated. So that means nothing can be changed for sure. What change, what rallies, what elections, if things like this happen?” It’s a pretty rational move on their part. “The dialogue with Usmanov is useful, but there has been no breakthrough” – Usmanov and “Phooey on you”: what was worse—when you were banned from being mentioned at all, or now, when every dog thinks it’s important to comment? – The thing is, I’m still banned from being mentioned on television. If he were saying “Phooey on you” on TV, I’d be much happier, you understand? They came onto our territory, where I can be mentioned in any context as much as they like, and here they say, “Phooey on you.” But over there—it’s all calm and quiet. Find me a mention on any federal TV channel, even one, that there’s some kind of debate going on with Usmanov. So from that point of view, there has been no breakthrough at all. I fully understand that this is being done to distract attention from Medvedev and from the investigations in general, to shift everything into discussions of some rape allegations. But the dialogue with Usmanov itself is useful too, because he is one of the symbols of the Putin regime and one of its foundations—its economic foundation. – And Medvedev’s response: do you think he was ultimately forced to answer because of those events? People were saying it was supposedly connected to the terrorist attack in St. Petersburg and an attempt to divert attention from it. – No, of course not—they saw the rallies. First, they understood that the terrorist attack had already swallowed up a large share of the attention—that’s one thing. And second, that many people taking to the streets in so many cities simply couldn’t be ignored. If it had just been a Moscow rally, fine. But when we had 84 cities... And everywhere—you had some kind of rally here too, didn’t you? Maybe a small one, but it happened. – Small? A hundred people is a lot for us. – And it was the same in every city. Yes, they say there was a rally of 300 people, but it was the biggest rally held in our city in the last thousand years. And that’s why they were forced to respond. – Are you planning anything on the 12th? Will there be a mass action? – Well, we’re about to find out: are you having something here? – We’re planning a rally on the 12th. – Then I’m planning one too. This is perhaps the most interesting, the most important thing—about the rallies on the 26th and, if it works out, on the 12th as well—because they organize themselves. We aren’t organizing anything. We organized things in 20 cities only in the sense that our headquarters filed the applications. But otherwise we didn’t really do anything. This is a real grassroots movement, so whether something happens here in Pskov or not is not my question—it’s a question for all the people here. And that’s what’s wonderful about it: that’s exactly why they respond, exactly why they’re so afraid of these rallies, exactly why they’re now running around universities showing videos. You have that too? There you go. “I didn’t understand the ‘Fed Up’ rally” – On April 29 there was the “Fed Up” protest, and it was announced immediately after the March 26 rallies. Was that a kind of indirect competition? – Well, I don’t know. Maybe it was competition, but I don’t see anything especially bad in that. It was a strange action—I didn’t understand it, so I didn’t support it, because I didn’t understand what it was about. It just doesn’t work. That’s not politics—it’s political technology. If you want to hold an action, then say: “I want to hold a rally with these slogans on this date.” People understand that; that’s called political action. But when you say, “We want to hold an action, but we won’t say what it’s about,” that’s rather strange, and it doesn’t work. People aren’t idiots either—they don’t want to take part in flash mobs, they want to do something real. That’s why it didn’t work out. But there’s nothing bad in the fact that they started doing something. They saw people taking to the streets and wanted to do something too while the wave was there. They tried—somewhere it worked, somewhere not so much. – It created the impression that they wanted to compete not only in holding a rally, but in the number of detainees—as if the instruction was: “Come on, let more of you get detained, we’re martyrs. And we also have human rights lawyers who’ll help you.” – Let’s put it this way, and I’ll be politically correct: I didn’t understand that action, it clearly didn’t go very well, but the fact that someone is doing some kind of actions is good. – Are Open Russia people generally your supporters? – Supporters, of course. They supported me in the election, after all. Of course they’re supporters. There are very different people there—really very different people—but in that sense I’m not going to look at who’s at the bottom; I’m interested in Khodorkovsky’s position. Khodorkovsky’s position is fine, and they supported me—so of course they’re supporters. – In our case, Open Russia has been taken over by nationalists. – Really? That happens. It’s a complicated, very eclectic thing. And nationalists are one thing, but in some places there are United Russia people sitting everywhere in many regions—that’s much worse. – Among the people who registered on the website, the ones who are supposed to sign for you when needed, are there many from Pskov and the Pskov Region? – Lenya (Leonid Volkov. — Ed.) will help me here. [Volkov]: We currently have 1,200 from Pskov itself and 1,400 from the region. So roughly 200 people are from the region outside the city; the core is from Pskov. – But those are people who went through all the stages: phone, text message. We don’t count just emails; we have far more emails. These are the ones who even filled out the questionnaire, right? [Volkov]: Yes. – The ones we know everything about. [Volkov]: Yes. You should know that we have formal criteria: we’re opening 77 headquarters—that’s in all Russian cities with populations over 200,000. There are exceptions—Grozny and Makhachkala—and also exceptions like Nizhny Tagil or Naberezhnye Chelny, where there’s a million-plus city nearby and we’ll collect the necessary signatures there, so there’s no point creating separate offices in Nizhny Tagil and Naberezhnye Chelny. There are 90 cities in Russia with populations over 200,000, and we have headquarters in 77 of them. Pskov, with a population of 208,000, is, if I’m not mistaken, the second-smallest city where we’ve opened a headquarters. – The smallest is Biysk. [Volkov]: The smallest is Biysk, and Pskov is still the second-smallest city to clear our cutoff. But by all performance indicators it’s far from last place—number of signatures, everything. We set targets like 7,500 for a million-plus city, a maximum of 5,000 for a city of around 500,000, and less for the rest, proportional to population. Our target for Pskov was 1,500, and we already have 1,400 provisional signatures. We can all go home. – It’s important to understand that this is still only the first stage of the campaign, when we’re opening just 77 headquarters in the main cities. In addition, we have quite a large number of cities where so-called people’s headquarters will be opened, where we don’t yet have money, coordinators, or anything else, but people write to us saying: “We have a space and we have me—I want to open a headquarters.” We created an entire track for that and say: “Well then, open one.” It will be called a people’s headquarters; we don’t pay for anything there, we don’t do anything—they do it all themselves. – Recently people from Echo of Moscow were offended and said, “Tut-tut, Alexei Navalny is reformatting all of journalism, he’s stopped answering questions and says: ‘Watch my channel, I won’t tell you anything.’” Are those made-up complaints? – It irritates me terribly, this Moscow journalism—they’re deeply absorbed in themselves. This is our 40th headquarters, and I’ve attended the opening of 31 of them. That means I’ve held 31 meetings where I answered questions, effectively held 31 press conferences, and given something like 60 or 70 individual interviews. I spend my whole days answering questions. And then of course some Moscow journalist who was told, “Leave us alone, we’re busy,” feels insulted and says, “Navalny has stopped answering questions.” But the issue is broader. Not even an issue, really, but the arrival of a new era. It often genuinely makes no sense to give interviews. Plushev, by the way, wrote an excellent article about this, which I’m still thinking through, on why video bloggers are reluctant to talk to the media. Because there’s no point. Because when you speak, you can speak to a million people. Why, on some hot topic where I myself want to put out a video, where I’ll do a Navalny LIVE broadcast and 400,000, 700,000, a million people will watch it—why should I give an interview to Echo of Moscow and spend all the hype there? It makes no sense. It’s a complicated thing. On the one hand, the media are basic social and political infrastructure. Without media, nothing at all will work. On the other hand, there’s this confrontation emerging now. But it shouldn’t really be a confrontation; it will probably evolve into something else—maybe you’ll all open YouTube channels, for example, I don’t know. Or they’ll start newspapers. Something else will happen. – But say your comment appears in Vedomosti—that carries a certain status. – It used to work that way. I remember very well that if I wanted to write a column, I wrote it for Vedomosti, because there was verification and it wasn’t just a post—it was a column in Vedomosti. But now even that is gone. And besides, what’s the real circulation of Vedomosti now—an effective 5,000 copies? So in that sense, giving an interview to a federal media outlet doesn’t interest me. Giving one to you interests me, because you’ll tell people here, whereas giving an interview to Vedomosti is sending a message to 10% of my blog’s readership. – Well, basically, yes. – That’s all. Here with you, the audience overlap is much smaller, right? Besides, you have your own distinct authority in Pskov. Moscow journalists—their strength and their problem is that it’s just the same audience repeated. “Moscow shouldn’t be getting this much money” – How much of a Muscovite are you? – Very much a Muscovite, even though I’m not from Moscow itself, I’m from the Moscow Region and didn’t live in Moscow for long until adulthood, because we were always moving from town to town. But when I arrive at the airport, I really feel like I’ve come home! I love all cities, generally speaking. We’ve just come from St. Petersburg—wonderful! I’ve wanted to get to Pskov and see the city for a long time, though I probably won’t manage everything this time. But in terms of feeling, Moscow is my home. – Do you feel the opposition between Moscow and the rest of Russia? – Of course. And in that opposition, even as a Muscovite, as someone who ran for mayor of Moscow, I’m absolutely on the side of the regions. – Do you realize the regions need more than Moscow does? – Yes, and my program is precisely about the fact that Moscow shouldn’t be getting this much money, because it’s enough to step outside here, turn your head, and understand how wrongly everything is arranged. But the thing is, it harms Moscow too. I’m not a nomenklatura Muscovite; I’m an ordinary Muscovite from an outlying district, so I can see what all this money flowing into Moscow has brought Muscovites: insane prices, nothing affordable, traffic jams, wild overdevelopment, and a decline in quality of life. So I believe that a proper federal policy, under which the regions get a fairer share of money and powers are returned to them, would actually benefit Moscow as well. – I’d like to ask about how you choose a headquarters chief: what is it based on, how many candidates do you usually have, and specifically in Pskov? – It varies. Our main principle is meritocracy. It’s not as if we decided that the chairman of the Progress Party in each region would automatically be our main candidate for the headquarters. That was never the case. We told everyone: “Send in your CVs.” The CVs went to Volkov, he made the choice, and I’m not involved in those personnel decisions because I have a different task. We divide responsibilities: I do political work, travel, speak, while appointments are handled by the person who will continue working with those people. – So you don’t really have any special ties with Democratic Choice? – We do. Milov supports us. Our relations with Democratic Choice are very good; several people from Demvybor work in the headquarters. Lenya, how many people from Demvybor are heading regional headquarters for us? [Volkov]: I’m not good at counting by political nationality... – We don’t care. [Volkov]: It’s like asking me how many ethnic Tatars work for us. In Khabarovsk, in Vladivostok, well, there’s Valentin Boldyshev. Probably about four people. – Honestly, and excuse me, we couldn’t care less. We have some nationalist somewhere, some Demvybor people elsewhere... very different people, and we really select them based on their CVs and interviews, without regard to political orientation. – And was there a choice in Pskov? – Leonid? [Volkov]: Well, I’m not going to say we reviewed a hundred CVs—that’s not how it works. Across the whole staffing grid we have 207 positions planned, and we’ve already received about 5,000 CVs, so there are often a lot of candidates. But the process works roughly like this: we start reviewing, then we begin scheduling interviews, we see that a person is suitable, and we stop, because we need to roll out the network quickly, and we proceed from the idea that the best is the enemy of the good and that it’s better to start faster. There are regions where we conducted five or seven interviews before finding our candidate. But with Valentin, we reached an agreement very quickly. – So he was the first candidate? [Volkov]: No, it wasn’t the first CV, it was just the first appointment, that’s all. “Macron has never spoken in a warehouse hangar at a wholesale base the way I did in Tambov” – What are the main tasks for the headquarters besides collecting signatures? – Collecting signatures, and task number one is coordinating volunteers. There are a lot of them: 110,000 across the country now. That’s a huge machine, but no one has yet known how to manage it, because no one has ever had that many volunteers, and no one has run a campaign relying on volunteers. So the task of the headquarters is to talk to everyone, get to know everyone, understand who is better or worse at doing what, who can put a sticker on a car, who wants to campaign, who wants to set up campaign cubes (street information stands). It’s all about coordination. This is an absolutely new thing. There really isn’t a single book that tells you how to do all this. We read all sorts of wonderful books about how people ran Obama’s campaign or Trump’s, or now there’s a documentary about Macron’s campaign, right? All of that is interesting, but, excuse me, Macron has never spoken in a warehouse hangar at a wholesale base the way I did in Tambov, and he’s never spoken on the edge of a forest the way I did in Mordovia. Unfortunately, most of what comes from there isn’t applicable here. We’re running a campaign that in many regions faces active resistance. So learning how to manage ourselves—this huge number of people who can and want to work, but who are all different and don’t know each other—that is the main task of the headquarters right now. – This brings me back again to the latest rally—the one against renovation in Moscow. – Renovation and all that? The anti-renovation rally is already the one before the one before last, because there was one today, one yesterday, and one before that. People in Moscow love to rally. – It all looked like a parody again, especially the whole story with the organizers, who showed up, who scared whom. Does the opposition that exists in Moscow amuse you a lot? It seems to me they don’t understand anything at all—they’re detached from ordinary people. For one thing, they, Open Russia included, never travel to the regions. – Any generalization is wrong. There is no such thing as “the opposition in Moscow.” There are different people in Moscow, but we have the Progress Party, and a significant part of the Moscow opposition consists of absolutely decent, normal people. It’s just that any rally naturally gets hijacked, and the authorities can quite easily direct their own—in this terminology—agents of influence there, or simply fools who will wreck everything. That process is always there; you have to treat it calmly, though it’s often irritating. What irritated me quite a lot personally was when my family and I were being led away from that rally. But yes, you’re right, many people don’t travel to the regions. First, there’s no money. And second—and this is one of the most important things we have to break during this campaign—it’s considered pointless to travel to the regions. Why go? Nobody there organizes anything. There has always been this model of working with the regions according to which in Pskov there are some vague people sitting around who don’t understand anything, so if we even want to organize a picket, we have to send a Muscovite here to organize it, because they obviously can’t do it themselves. That attitude has lasted for years... or rather, it was always there. But we’re doing the opposite: we believe that, first, everyone can do everything and will do it much better than any outsider; and second, we believe there are no “dead” political cities. People tell us that in Kazan or Ufa nothing is possible because everything is locked down, Volga cities, national republics. So what? Not even close! Huge numbers of volunteers sign up and come. And here too: it’s assumed that nothing can break through, nothing can be done—that the only opposition figure, Shlosberg, stands alone in a huge empty field. But that’s just not true! – That’s the second stereotype. – Yes, exactly—it’s just not true. I was surprised and delighted to learn that Pskovskaya Guberniya exists on its own. There are volunteers—many wonderful people. Pskov has a population of 208,000; of those, 150,000 are against corruption, and several thousand know about what we’re doing. What matters is that those several thousand persuade those 150,000 to come to the polling stations. So it’s very important for us to prove—to ourselves and to everyone else—that things in the regions can happen no worse than in Moscow. “Who works at the ACF? Hell if I know” – There’s this strange thing called a crisis of trust: a person is against corruption, against theft, against all of that. He works in the public sector, votes for United Russia out of habit, for Putin, yes? He’s against it all, he’s for the same things you are. But he doesn’t trust you. – It’s a crisis of trust in politics in general. People have never seen independent politics or honest politics. Just imagine any person, say, a grandmother: she’s 60 years old, she’s been following politics for the last 30 years—whom has she seen? She’s seen people constantly switching from one party to another, cheating, rigging things, doing nothing, so naturally all her life experience screams at her that they’re all crooks, and this one is probably a crook too, and tomorrow it’ll turn out he’s a Kremlin agent. You have to fight that, but there’s no need to agonize over it too much. It’s simply part of our country’s history. You have to prove through your work that things can be different. – Your investigations department: how professional are they as journalists? Or what are they professionals in? – Good question. Hell if I know. People often tell me that I do journalistic work. I don’t want to do it; I have absolutely no desire to be a journalist, even though in practice I publish materials, often effectively work as an editor-in-chief, and now I’ve somehow turned into a TV host from hell and a TV producer too, because I do other things as well, discovering new stars. Just now, riding on the bus, I thought our Ruslan Shaveddinov could be an excellent video blogger, and now I’m going to make him record some new videos. I do it because I’m forced to, but I have no desire to. And in a normal situation, in a democratic country, there would be no place for people like me. There would be no need for investigators of this kind, because newspapers would do everything, expose everyone, and drive those politicians out. Video bloggers aren’t nearly as popular abroad. Why? Because on television you can say whatever you want. Why do you need the revelations of the wonderful Sokolovsky if you can just turn on the TV—whether you want liberal CNN or conservative Fox News, whatever you like. You read that, and people like us shouldn’t even have to survive in a normal country. The goal, essentially, is to win the election and make it so that there is no need for any Anti-Corruption Foundation or any bloggers or video bloggers. – If you win, what will happen to the foundation? – The foundation is still a civic organization; it fights corruption and exposes officials, and organizations like that are always needed. It’s just that in a normal society [such organizations] aren’t as much in demand as they are in Russia, where corruption is everywhere. It will probably continue to exist. If I become president, the Anti-Corruption Foundation will be autonomous and independent, and it will monitor my government and, say, your properly elected governor rather than an appointed one. Even in Norway and New Zealand, where there is practically no corruption, such organizations exist and are needed, because if they don’t, the level of corruption will rise. – Thank you for the interview. I suppose you still need to prepare for the headquarters opening. – Thank you very much. I’m very pleased that the legendary Pskovskaya Guberniya dropped by. I mean that without any irony. It’s rare now to see so many references to a regional media outlet. In Saransk, one single guy came—from the newspaper Stolitsa S. He seemed normal, asked some questions, looked like a hipster. And at one point he asks me: “What is your attitude toward homosexuality?” I thought: “Right, I get it.” I leave—and the next day they publish an article with the subheading “Mordovia’s homosexuals supported Navalny,” and it began like this: “A native of a small village near Moscow entered the majestic capital of Mordovia...” Seriously, I’ll post it on my blog somewhere. Unfortunately, that’s what regional press is mostly associated with, and it’s monstrous. Why did I say it’s such basic social infrastructure? Take any tiny little American town—there are three newspapers there, with circulations comparable to the town’s entire population, there are five radio stations, and all of it pays for itself, makes money, and exists. That’s how it should be here too. Without that, no politics will work: there will be no political competition, nothing will ever happen if that doesn’t exist. And what is it I really like about your model? A lot of people criticize me for the program point that oligarchs should not own media outlets. But I really do think they shouldn’t. Right now in Russia, big oligarchs—and your local ones too: say you have some kind of pork-farming king here, right? Okay, let him do it—he’ll just buy up all the newspapers, that’s all. Even in a beautiful democratic Russia of the future. He’ll simply buy the newspapers, and that’s it—goodbye democracy, goodbye freedom of speech. So I believe non-core businesses should not own media, because media are too vulnerable right now, they have too little money, and it’s extremely hard for them to survive. Any guy who owns any enterprise at all can just buy up those newspapers in six seconds. – Which is basically what he does from time to time. – Which is exactly what he does. And many people criticize me for this—various Demyan Kudryavtsevs, for whom it is of course profitable to be proxy oligarchs. But I believe Gazprom should not own newspapers and television at all. That’s not your business—deal with gas. Same with Usmanov: why do you need it? You have Metalloinvest—go deal with your Metalloinvest, and you don’t need Kommersant or anything else. – In part, though, he serves as a kind of intermediary between the government and the media... – Naturally, we understand why they do all this. But even if we imagine that tomorrow a beautiful democratic Russia begins, we must not repeat the story of the 1990s, when oligarchs bought up all the media and turned them into mere puppets in their own struggle, as was very well shown in the film about Nemtsov that Krichevskaya made. That’s an important point. Not everyone agrees with it—many people don’t—but I keep carrying this idea forward, and Pskovskaya Guberniya is a good example to cite here.