About Crooks and Thieves, Saffron Milk Caps and Shawarma, Black Grouse and Nationalism

For more than two years, I had not written anything personal in my blog. Children of military officers never have childhood friends, because military families are constantly moving. I loved woodburning. But to do woodburning well, you first had to draw well — and I drew badly. So I would ask my mother to draw something for me, then burn over it, and of course give it to my father on February 23rd. The war in Afghanistan passed almost unnoticed for me. For those of us who lived in military towns, the people returning from Afghanistan did not seem like men returning from war so much as people returning from abroad. We did not see those who died there. We saw those who brought back Sharp double-cassette players or — if they were senior officers — VCRs and flat-screen televisions. There was a boy in my class whose father had served in Afghanistan as an adviser — people visited their apartment almost like tourists. My main hero was and remains Arnold Schwarzenegger. As children, everyone fought until blood was drawn. To make someone bleed in a fight meant you had won. I remember very clearly how, after an Alisa concert, I got into a fight with some gopniks who had come to harass the nonconformists. What struck me most was that thirty thousand people had just come out of the concert shouting “we are together,” and then, right in front of those same thirty thousand people, someone started beating people up — and everyone simply walked past and looked away.

My nunchucks were not like everyone else’s. Not chair legs connected by a chain from the bathroom, but more advanced. After all, my mother worked at a woodworking factory. At school, only older students could beat me up. The first checkpoints I ever saw in my life were in the USSR. In 1986 we lived near Obninsk, a nuclear town. When the Chernobyl disaster happened, people with dosimeters stood at the entrance to Obninsk measuring radiation levels on car wheels. They were catching those fleeing from Chernobyl. If you joined United Russia, then you are a thief. And even if you are not a thief, you are certainly a crook, because you are covering for the other crooks and thieves with your name. Don’t compare United Russia to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Today nobody will hold a gun to your temple if you refuse to work as Ekaterina Andreyeva. My father is from near Chernobyl, and every summer I spent with my grandmother in the village of Zalesye, a couple of kilometers from the city. If the accident had happened in June, I would have been there. To avoid panic, all the collective farmers — including our relatives — were sent out to dig potatoes in radioactive dust. Only later were they evacuated. It was a real universal catastrophe in which my relatives and I were victims. I was there last year. I entered my grandmother’s house. On the floor lay the coat all my brothers had worn, and photographs of me running around in that coat during summer. Almost everything had been looted, but nobody needed those things. Back home, there is a monument to fallen soldiers — like in any Soviet village. On it are written the names: “Navalny, Navalny, Navalny...” But that does not necessarily mean they were all relatives. In Ukraine there are countless Navalnys.

There were no Banderites in my family. Of course, I tried to find out the meaning of my surname, but I found nothing. Well, Navalny. Maybe someone in the family made felt boots. My clearest childhood memory is the Uzh River flowing into the Pripyat River, a high riverbank, and swallow nests. I kept trying to reach the swallow inside the nest, sticking my hand in there, but I could never catch it. I love hunting, though I’m more of a theoretical hunter. In my entire life I have killed only a black grouse and a woodcock. My wife still hasn’t forgiven me for that woodcock. When I brought it home, she said: “Pluck it yourself.” But we were already about to leave for vacation, so we simply threw the woodcock into the freezer. While we were away, the electricity in the apartment was cut off. To make a long story short, we had to throw away the refrigerator. What I liked most was hunting from a blind. You blend into a haystack, sit there, and wait for the black grouse. You sit for one hour, two hours, and it still does not fly past. You cannot move, breathe loudly, and your legs go numb. But you sit there in absolute silence, thinking about something pleasant.

Real hunters — the ones I’ve met — would give any Greenpeace employee a hundred points head start. I’ve never met people greener or more obsessed with ecology. They are fixated on the idea of “population growth,” because hunting depends on it. But I’m talking only about real hunters. The people who shoot argali sheep from helicopters are degenerates. People playing at being something halfway between a maharaja and Lieutenant Rzhevsky. Hunting has become an essential attribute of power. The perfect way to settle matters and make deals while nobody can see you. Bureaucratic escapism. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized with surprise that I’ve actually started to like our awful weather — the weather of central Russia. Emigration is a question of responsibility. Some people think responsibility toward their children means leaving so their children can live better lives elsewhere. But to me, responsibility means making sure my children want to stay here.

For some reason, I like the idea that one of my children might become an architect. My daughter tells everyone that her father fights crooks. She even shouts at school that Putin is a crook. My wife scolds her. She thinks it creates problems for us. But my daughter still likes the idea that her father is fighting something. I don’t think she can yet understand whether her father is Robin Hood or not. But for a nine-year-old child, a father by definition cannot be fighting for something bad. I don’t think toy weapons make children cruel. Children love playing war. If a child has a toy nuclear bomb, he’s unlikely to want to use a real one when he grows up. I make my children stand in the corner as punishment. But the most effective punishment is banning them from watching television. My best friend is my wife. I often tell her: “I can’t lie on the couch and eat if you’re not watching me.” It’s probably the most quoted line from The Simpsons in our family.

My children love The Simpsons and Futurama most of all. Cartoons and television, I think, help develop vocabulary. And to understand American politics, it’s much more useful to watch South Park than an American news channel. I try to watch the news on Channel One Russia. All television channels lie more or less equally. But what bothers me much more is the way NTV lies, because it lies more cleverly. I don’t care how Ekaterina Andreyeva lies. She’s not really a person. She’s simply a face on a screen, no different from the Delphic oracle. But when the lies come from people who seem alive and human, it’s much more irritating. My blog exists only because censorship exists in the media.

I regularly receive comments saying: “Navalny didn’t write about this because he’s afraid.” But I cannot write about every corruption scandal. I cannot write about every stolen billion. Otherwise I’d have to post ten times a day. My sources are not exactly high-level insiders. Imagine someone sitting at VTB Bank earning a decent salary, most of which goes toward paying off a mortgage. Then suddenly he sees some scumbags making hundreds of millions while doing absolutely nothing and dumping all the work of administering corruption onto him. It infuriates him, and he desperately wants to tell someone about it. People say I work for Igor Sechin and attack Gazprom on his orders. Others say I work for Stanislav Belkovsky, though that’s more connected to the nationalism issue. Radical nationalists say I work for Jews — that “the kikes found a blue-eyed guy and made him their frontman.” When I went to study at Yale University, a very popular theory emerged that I worked for the Americans. And the head of Transneft, Nikolai Tokarev, even claimed I was carrying out orders from John McCain. Though that one I truly cannot understand: why McCain specifically, and not, say, Sarah Palin? We have windmills set up everywhere. Whatever you do, you’ll always be accused of pouring water onto someone else’s mill. Two things are essential for fighting corruption: political competition and free media. There is practically no free media left in the country. Which means we have to try to create political competition. The idea of inserting good people into a bad system of power does not work. I understood this from the example of Nikita Belykh, whose adviser I was in the Kirov region. Of course, a decent person will not seek personal gain, but he still cannot be an effective mayor or governor unless he cheats every single day. A minister calls you and says: “I heard you need money for the bypass canal, so please solve a problem for my businessman.” And so you end up corrupting everyone daily — providing what is required “in full.”

In Russia, not that much money is actually stolen. For every ruble stolen, five are simply wasted through incompetence. There are people in United Russia whom I personally find fairly likable. But if you joined United Russia, then you are still a thief. And if not a thief, then certainly a crook, because you use your name to cover for the other thieves and crooks. And don’t compare United Russia with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Today nobody is going to hold a gun to your head if you refuse to work as Ekaterina Andreyeva. At the very least — if you have already joined United Russia — then at least sit quietly. “Can you swear in this magazine? Then tell me: who forced that asshole Mashkov to speak out? Why did he miss such a perfect opportunity to stay silent and remain for everyone simply a good actor?” “The phrase ‘United Russia is the party of crooks and thieves’ was a complete accident. There was a broadcast on Finam FM where the host asked me how I felt about United Russia. And I replied: ‘I view United Russia negatively. United Russia is a party of crooks and thieves.’ No creativity whatsoever. Ask me to invent a slogan and I would never come up with one in my life.” Right now Russia is the richest and the freest it has ever been in its history. The enormous amount of money pouring into the country gives us a chance for grand transformations, but apparently that chance will not be used.

Russia’s main problem is that the state has turned into a mafia — in the true Italian sense of the word, where everyone is tied to everyone else. The only difference is that in Moscow there is no single place where they all gather together. Revolution is inevitable. Simply because most people understand that this system is wrong. When you sit among groups of officials, the main topic of conversation is always who stole what, why nothing works, and how terrible everything is. Everyone is ready to live honestly. Look at Georgia. If twenty people at the very top begin following rules and laws, they will force everyone else to follow them too. Change begins with events that cannot be artificially organized. In Tunisia everything started after a man set himself on fire in a public square. Before all those events, a well-known Tunisian opposition figure came to Yale University. He told me: “You Russians are so lucky — you have a free internet, Twitter, while in our country all of that has been crushed together with the opposition.” He showed me videos of protests by Tunisian opposition activists. Compared to them, our Strategy-31 looked like the breakthrough of the millennium. It looked like this: ten people in white T-shirts would go sit in a café as a form of protest. Thirty foreign journalists would arrive at the same café, and then the police would arrest everyone. That was it. By last December, they were already planning to move to Paris and continue the struggle from there. Then suddenly, a month later, he becomes a minister. And this happened in a Tunisia where the elite was completely consolidated, where people lived better than in neighboring countries, where all the crooks supported Zine El Abidine Ben Ali because they had the opportunity to live luxuriously on the French Riviera. And all of it collapsed within a month. Simply because some street vendor burned himself alive in a small town. Only dissatisfied people are capable of bringing about change. And right now there are too many dissatisfied people. The main thing is for Rusnano not to invent immortality pills for crooks and thieves.

I would forgive Putin many things if he were a Russian Lee Kuan Yew. Yes, he would establish a totalitarian political system, but he would also hunt down crooks. But Putin cannot become a Russian Lee Kuan Yew. He cannot even become a Russian Alexander Lukashenko. I would very much like to know how sincerely Putin believes in all of this. How sincerely he believes that the system he created will endure — especially after seeing footage of Muammar Gaddafi being killed. He too had once seemed like a tough guy. Putin does have certain achievements. I remember that in the military town where I lived with my parents, there was a very specific gangster whom even the police obeyed. He was a Georgian man who wore white socks, and all the armed officers could do nothing to him because he was the boss. That Georgian is gone now, and in some sense that truly is Putin’s achievement.

I think Putin has an ideological justification for what they do. Everyone is corrupt, but “we are patriots.” We won the Olympics, we sing “Where the Motherland Begins,” and we always stand up when the song “Gentlemen Officers” is played. If I were suddenly given one minute on Channel One Russia, I probably would not be able to convey the truth to people. I simply do not possess some mystical set of words. But I would try to explain the biggest lie. The biggest lie is this: despite the fact that our country is the world’s leading oil exporter and despite the fact that we have received two trillion dollars in recent years, all that oil wealth is being stolen by specific people brought in by Putin. Here are their names. They betrayed the country, renounced Russian citizenship, and fled to Switzerland so they would not have to pay taxes on that oil. They are robbing us. So let’s work to make sure those people end up in prison. At elections, people should vote for any party except United Russia. Boycotting elections may be morally correct, but from the standpoint of political struggle it is pointless. It demotivates and divides people. When I vote for any competitor of United Russia, Yabloko, the communists, A Just Russia, and everyone else applaud me. But when we propose spoiling all the ballots, our main critics are not United Russia but the smaller parties, because above all we are taking votes away from them.

For some reason everyone expects me to say: “Let’s unite and improve our courtyards ourselves if the state cannot do it.” But I think that right now we should not be improving courtyards — we should be finding out who stole the money that had already been allocated for those courtyards three times over. First we need to restore order not in the courtyard, but in the Kremlin. Charity today has become something like an indulgence. You ask someone: “Why are you sitting around doing nothing?” And they answer: “I am doing something — I help children. You politicians just talk, while I do concrete things.” But it’s deceptive to set these things against each other: “I won’t take an active political position because I help children.” It’s wrong to try to help one particular little girl named Anya instead of trying to help everyone. I think life will start changing when the much-discussed generation born between 1976 and 1982 becomes more involved in politics. Am I the leader of the hipsters? I’m not sure. I’m more of a guy from Maryino who happens to like wearing a coat with sneakers. But I won’t wear glasses with hipster frames, and I’ll happily drink beer in places where hipsters wrinkle their noses and say “ugh.”

I have very long arms. Buying a suit jacket is real torture. The best holiday is to leave, hide from everyone, and not talk to anybody. But after a day or two, I start missing people. I don’t like museums. I just like walking around on foot. I’m baptized, and I consider myself Orthodox. But I’m Soviet Orthodox: I cross myself when passing a church, but I don’t go inside. I realized that religious studies should be taught in schools after reading Moscow to the End of the Line and discovering from the commentary that every second phrase in the book is a biblical reference. It’s not even specifically about Orthodoxy. If you know nothing about the Christian tradition, you simply become incapable of understanding a huge layer of culture. When the area around the central mosque is covered with prayer rugs all the way to the horizon, it’s not because those people are extraordinarily religious. It’s simply a way to gather together and feel part of a shared “we.”

I’m in favor of assimilation, not deportation. If you want to live here — become Russian. If a child grows up in Russia, why should he remain Tajik? Let them literally become Russian. After all, when people move to America, for the most part they become American. There is no genocide of Russians comparable to what happened in Rwanda. But the problems of Russians being pushed out of Turkmenistan feel a million times closer to me than the terrible suffering in Rwanda, where there truly was genocide. Simply because Russians in Turkmenistan are much more closely connected to me. I’ve been attending the Russian March for four years, and my attitude toward it is this: if you don’t like the Russian March, the only way to make it better is to attend it yourself. If normal people don’t show up, then the only people visible there will be marginals — people obsessed with fighting Zionist conspiracies. And I’ll keep going there, because right now I’m almost the only person accepted both there and here — although over there some consider me a sellout liberal bastard, while over here some consider me a sellout fascist. It’s like “one’s own among strangers, a stranger among one’s own.” Did you see the latest “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” rally? There was a sign saying: “United Russia flags and Sieg Heil salutes prohibited.” It’s an evolutionary process.

The slogan “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” sounds provocative overall. But if you look at what’s actually behind it, you’ll understand that we are talking only about the corrupt elite of the North Caucasus. But you can’t fit every definition into a slogan. “Land to the peasants” is a good slogan, but not every landowner was bad — writer-landowners were good — so perhaps we should say: “Land to the peasants, but please don’t burn down Alexander Blok’s estate!” I remember my first shawarma very well: it was a mega-shawarma. I studied at Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, and there, in dormitory Block 7, with some Lebanese students, I tried shawarma for the first time. In general, I’ve eaten more shawarma than all of you combined, I think. If Dmitry Medvedev suddenly admitted that he had loved Grazhdanskaya Oborona all his life, I’d forgive him even for badminton. Though in reality, that badminton video damaged Medvedev’s reputation more than his failed Interior Ministry reform. Family legend says that I know how to bake apple pie. In reality, I’ve made one only once. Many people seem fascinated by the process — cooking something and then eating it. I never understood what was interesting about that. The things I cannot control, I prefer to ignore. For a long time, I didn’t dream at all. I’ve been unlucky — I’ve never seen a UFO. But I would find it deeply disappointing if there turned out to be no other form of life in the universe besides us.

There are listening devices in our office, and I’m one hundred percent certain of it. All the companies I’ve sued have security departments — huge groups of idle former Federal Security Service colonels who simply have nothing better to do and are always happy to find themselves a task. Nobody has ever threatened me. They haven’t even slashed my tires. Honestly, I’ve never really thought about where to buy gasoline. The struggle hasn’t escalated to that level yet. I fill up at BP because there’s a station near my house. Though they also trade through Gunvor. The campaign against Lukoil after the Leninsky Prospekt crash was good, but it was also a kind of lazy activism: clicking “likes” on Facebook. Though even that still counts as a form of struggle. No matter how often I call people thieves and crooks, nobody seems especially eager to sue me for it. For the simple reason that they really are crooks, and they understand that themselves. There was a period when I worked with the Moscow Residents’ Protection Committee within Yabloko. We fought against illegal construction projects, and in my opinion that was far more dangerous. Because developers whom we obstructed tend to prefer much simpler methods of solving problems than oil companies or the state do. The distance between the director and the person who can be told “deal with them” is much shorter there. Believe me: fighting the head of municipal utilities in a small town is far more dangerous than fighting Rosneft or Putin.

When I sued Gunvor, everyone told me it would end in prison. My wife even carried a piece of paper with phone numbers to call “just in case.” But I don’t think anyone can ever be one hundred percent prepared for prison. I never really thought about what would happen if I shared the fate of Mikhail Beketov or Oleg Kashin. Maybe people would come out into the streets, maybe they wouldn’t. Mostly I think about something else: it’s better to end up in Kashin’s situation than Beketov’s. Sergei Magnitsky feels much closer to me than Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Because Magnitsky was not an oligarch and not a politician. He was a lawyer, accountant, and auditor who did not aspire to power — he simply did what he believed was right. I sit around with documents, and he sat around with documents too. But then he was tortured to death in prison because of those documents, and in some way I felt partially guilty about it. At the time we all nodded and said: “Well, everyone goes to prison. He’ll sit for a while and then get out.” But he never got out. Even if Khodorkovsky were released tomorrow, nothing would fundamentally change. But this regime hates new uncontrolled variables and is terrified of appearing weak. That’s why Khodorkovsky will remain imprisoned for life. “Life” means either until Khodorkovsky’s life ends, or until the life of this regime ends.

I’ve heard interviewers ask people a million times: “What will you do first when you come to power?” But I don’t have an answer. I haven’t come up with one yet. I don’t care that they don’t show me on television. They ignore me, and I ignore them. There’s a sticker on the rear window of my car that says: “United Russia — the party of crooks and thieves.” It’s excellent self-restraint. Once you have that sticker, you can’t really behave like an asshole on the road anymore. Because afterward everyone will say: “Aha, that was Navalny.” People rarely recognize me in the metro. I hate audiobooks because they’re too slow. I read quickly — in the time it takes them to read one page aloud, I could have read three. Nowadays nobody cares what kind of music you listen to. I think the truest music is Grazhdanskaya Oborona. If Dmitry Medvedev suddenly admitted he had loved Grazhdanskaya Oborona all his life, I would forgive him even for badminton. Though in reality that badminton video damaged his reputation more than his failed Interior Ministry reform.

Putin definitely has a sense of humor. A person capable of usurping power in a country of 140 million people must possess highly developed intellectual abilities — and a sense of humor inevitably comes as part of that package. Russia has a problem with the distribution of authority. Every little action local officials take must be coordinated with Moscow. I saw Kirov officials flying to Moscow like migratory birds, sitting through meaningless conference calls, and endlessly carrying bags of Vyatka saffron milk cap mushrooms to Moscow officials “for approval.” The problem with wicker weaving, like all traditional crafts, is that the people who know how to do it are dying out, while younger people do not want to learn. When my mother opened her wicker-weaving workshop, everything was built purely on enthusiasm and belief in the idea. But if today you go to a theater and see wicker furniture on stage, then in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it will be furniture produced by my mother’s factory. I don’t understand much about wicker weaving itself, but I was good at stripping bark from the rods.

I have always looked suspicious — ever since the days when I worked for Yabloko — and there was nothing I could do about it. The question “Why are you even doing all this?” has followed me for about ten years now. When you already have everything, but still continue doing something, people find that very strange. I don’t have a clear answer to the question of why I am still alive. A country’s life can be completely transformed in five years. I hope that future Russia will resemble a large, irrational, metaphysical Canada. I don’t know who Guy Fawkes is. Black grouse tastes just like ordinary chicken.