They will arrest everyone first, and then we will wipe them out

On the eve of the start of the Kirovles trial, Alexei Navalny told Gazeta.Ru about his expectations for the upcoming court proceedings, as well as what fate awaits the Anti-Corruption Foundation and the Opposition Coordination Council if one of the protest movement’s leaders is imprisoned.

— Has the decision already been made or not?

— Of course.

— What is it?

— I don’t know. What I do know is that it will definitely be a guilty verdict. It can’t be anything else. They already fabricated this case and already took a beating for it — everyone accused them of obvious distortions. They’ve already gotten all their negative PR, all the talk along the lines of, “Are you out of your minds? How can someone steal 16 million rubles if they paid 15 million?” Now they’re waiting for the payoff. I don’t have the slightest doubt that the decision has been made. A guilty verdict. The only question is whether it will be a real prison term or a suspended sentence.

— What do you think?

— I don’t know. It irritates me terribly to read all this crap: “Navalny wants to become a hero and go to prison; he’s worried they’ll give him a suspended sentence.” What already annoys me in advance is knowing I’ll have to read a pile of trashy articles saying, “If he got a suspended sentence, that means he’s a Kremlin agent,” “He got a suspended sentence, so he’s not a real opposition figure,” “Look, Navalny got a suspended sentence, while the guys in the Bolotnaya case are actually in jail!” That annoys me, but at the same time I don’t have the slightest thought like, “Oh, how wonderful it would be if they gave me real time.” Someone gave me Perverzin’s book to read — he’s a former Yukos employee who was released quite recently, and the book is supposed to be published soon. It’s certainly powerful reading. He describes day by day how he was imprisoned, the pretrial detention center...

> I have absolutely no desire to be sitting in Mordovia (a region known for prison camps) arguing with a prison unit chief about whether I’m going to work or not, instead of dealing with Shuvalov (First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov — Gazeta.Ru), for example.

I understand what that means. Besides, it would be especially annoying if they jailed me before Lent is over — I won’t even get to have some shashlik (barbecue).

— Have you tried to guess what kind of penal colony you might theoretically end up in? Have you thought about that?

— It’s impossible to guess anything here. I don’t understand that world, and I’m not even trying to pretend I can figure out what role I’d end up playing somewhere. I’m relying on existing experience: political prisoners end up in “red zones” — colonies under strict administrative control.

Everyone loves quoting my line about sneakers without arch support. I know you’re supposed to take sneakers without arch support. Actually, all of that comes from stories told by Olga Romanova (journalist, member of the Opposition Coordination Council — Gazeta.Ru). She really got to me with all her advice about what I’d need to take to prison. She jinxed it. The first time was a couple of years ago. We were going to some TV appearance, and she drove me up the wall there. She was saying: “They’ll jail you, 100 percent. Take this kind of sneakers and this kind of underwear. The first care package should come at this point, the second at that point.” The point is, I’ve been living with conversations like this for years now. I’m very tired of them, but I try not to think about it too much, because if you think about it all the time, you’ll definitely go crazy and definitely won’t be able to do anything else.

— What do you expect from the first day of the hearing? What should anyone expect from it? Will the first day bring any clarity about how the trial will unfold?

— We’ll find out whether this is going to be a rushed farce or whether at least some ritual elements of justice will be observed. The shortest possible scenario is probably a week and a half to two weeks. But that seems unlikely to me — that would be total madness. They’ve listed 40 witnesses. How long does it take to hear them all? This is still a lengthy trial. So it should last several months. — How are you going to build your defense? You’ve said many times that your arguments are almost the same as the prosecution’s, in a way. You’ll obviously ask for a financial and accounting expert review. What else?

— The expert review is the key point. How can an investigator claim that 16 million was stolen when there are payment orders showing that everything was paid for? An investigator has no right to make his own judgments that something was stolen somewhere. There isn’t really even a proper victim in the case — one was designated by force. There is not a single calculation showing that 16 million was stolen.

> The key issue is whether they grant our motion for an expert review. Another issue is whether they grant our motion to request additional financial documents.

They keep using terms like an unfavorable contract, a knowingly loss-making contract. We’ll request other contracts, and everyone will see that the prices there are even lower. I’ve looked through all these documents and worked through them. I know for a fact that the prices are market prices. If the judge grants that, that’s one thing — it will mean they’ve chosen some more presentable path. If they deny us, then the whole trial will just be a reading of the indictment.

We have absolutely unanswerable legal arguments. The investigators do not have the slightest evidence that I exerted any pressure. They do not have the slightest evidence that I received or wanted to receive any money. Obviously, I have some connection to Ofitserov (Pyotr Ofitserov, director of Vyatka Timber Company LLC — Gazeta.Ru), but I’m not denying that; I’ve known him for many years. But there were no talks about money, no criminal intent, no facts showing I received money. None of this can be proven.

— Do you think the essence of the Kirovles case can be explained to an ordinary person with no background in business? In a way that makes everything crystal clear?

— Who the hell knows. I’m so deep into the case that it already seems completely clear to me. But I think the basic idea should be understandable even to people far removed from economics. A man’s company bought timber for 16 million rubles. It sold it for 17. They had 1 million left over. They paid that out as salaries. How can they be accused of stealing 16 million rubles?! And what exactly do I have to do with any of this? If someone stole 16 million rubles, then where did it go? Let the investigators answer this question for us: where are those 16 million rubles or 40,000 cubic meters of timber? It was sold? Then where’s the money? Or was it returned to Kirovles? Brilliant.

— Has the Anti-Corruption Foundation been preparing for the trial in any way? You seem to be planning some kind of headquarters in Kirov. Has anyone from the foundation already gone there?

— Foundation staffer Georgy Alburov has already gone there, but solely to rent an apartment. Staying in a hotel is expensive, so we’ll rent an apartment where I’ll stay with the lawyers. At a minimum, we need to set up a headquarters. If the trial drags on for a month, we need a place for people to live, and a place for computers and printers so we can print motions. > A lot of people want to come there, the way we once went to Astrakhan (for a protest rally against the falsification of the mayoral election results in April 2012 — Gazeta.Ru). Those people also need some kind of base to anchor themselves. In a sense, the Astrakhan situation is repeating itself. When I arrived there, there was nothing except Shein’s small headquarters (Oleg Shein — the candidate who went on a hunger strike in protest — Gazeta.Ru) and three Muscovites who were for some reason sitting in the local square. A week later, five thousand people marched through the city in an unauthorized demonstration.

For obvious reasons, I can’t personally handle the PR preparation for my own trial. And I don’t have the time anyway. Volunteers will do that. For now, though, it’s unclear how many people will come. It’s also unclear how much resistance there will be from the local authorities: whether they’ll harass activists or not...

— As I understand it, that depends on the local authorities, on Governor Nikita Belykh?

> — Whether they harass people or not depends on Belykh.

— So will they harass them?

— I don’t know. It’s unlikely Belykh will go for that... Practice shows that wherever they crack down, problems arise. Where they don’t, people walk around for a while and that’s it. He’s not a complete fool; he understands how this works.

— Will your family go to Kirov? How have you decided that?

— My wife will go with me on the 17th. And everyone will go on the 17th (of April). But people imagine the court in Kirov as if on the 17th there’ll already be that agonizing pause, we’re all standing there, and the judge reads something out and says, “Sentenced!” But none of that is going to happen on the 17th.

> It’s entirely possible there’ll be a two-hour hearing and then we’ll all go home. We’ll file a motion to review the materials, and the next hearing will be three days later. And no one will see the heart-rending “the court has sentenced” and “the punishment is hereby imposed.”

So I tell all my relatives: “Why go there now?! You should go for the verdict.” If someone wants to offer moral support, they should just come on one of the hearing days. See the court, see how it all works, see the sights of Kirov...

— In one interview you said that you and your wife discussed the possibility of you being imprisoned...

— Ages ago.

— Can you remember when you first had that conversation?

— Go to my LiveJournal from 2008, to the post “How They Steal at Gazprom,” and look at the comments. There are loads of identical comments there: “They’ll jail you.”

— But those are comments, not your wife. > — My wife reads the comments! We never had any illusions about this.

But we started discussing it seriously — seriously enough for me to write down phone numbers she should call and to arrange powers of attorney — when we were returning from the States, from Yale. That was when they started putting out their first official statements. There was a special campaign meant to scare me into simply staying at Yale for another year. That’s when we first discussed it.

This is how it works... You say, “If anything happens, call these people.” You need powers of attorney, for example. There’s money sitting in a bank account — how is my wife supposed to access it? She’ll go to the bank and they’ll say, “Where’s Navalny?” Navalny isn’t there. And from a pretrial detention center you’ll be trying to get a power of attorney for six months. Bank powers of attorney, powers relating to the children, all sorts of them... You have to understand where everything is kept. Passwords for email accounts, for computers. Where to get money, what to do.

— And have you personally discussed any of this with your children?

— Zakhar is still little. But just last week Dasha said to me: “Why do I always find out everything last? The girls in my class say you’re going to be put on trial.” I had planned to talk to her, but unfortunately those

> girls in her class ruined it for me and discussed everything with her before I could. Back when I was jailed for 15 days, Dasha already knew everything — it was on television, teachers came up to her at school and said encouraging things. She knows that I’m fighting crooks, and that the crooks are trying to put me in jail. For Dasha, it won’t be any news that people are going after me.

My whole building was covered with pictures of me behind bars. Naturally, everyone saw them, including the children. There was a funny situation: I come home, and Zakhar’s whole wardrobe is covered with stickers showing me behind bars. He had gone out into the courtyard, and the whole courtyard was plastered with those stickers. And he thought, “Oh, my dad is so popular, his pictures are everywhere.” So he peeled them off and put them up on his wardrobe at home.

— Was there ever any discussion of your wife leaving with the children?

— Of course it was discussed. But first, there’s a banal but important obstacle: it takes money to live abroad. You can’t just send someone off to London and say, “Please go, wife with two children, to London! And live there!” Life there is even more expensive than in Moscow. Second, they themselves don’t want to leave. And I don’t want them to leave either. If it comes to threats or a danger of violence, then we can think about it. But otherwise, I don’t see the point.

— Political analyst Alexander Morozov wrote last week that, in his view, it would be better for you to leave and create a kind of government in exile. He cited Khodorkovsky as an example: he had political influence, and he chose to go to prison, presumably hoping to preserve that influence. Then he comes out ten years later, and obviously he no longer has any influence. Did you ever consider emigration at all?

— First, I don’t think Khodorkovsky went to prison with the idea of preserving political influence. I think there were no other options. That’s just how events unfolded. Second, I have truly never discussed it (the possibility of emigration), and that is a matter of principle for me. The key issue for me is trust. Everything I have is built on trust. You can see how we live. We’ve never had resources, but people have always helped us with everything. People send money. Why? Because the main resource is trust. I share all the dangers with them.

> When I go to hearings on extending detention in the Bolotnaya case, I see the way some relatives look at me. I can read it in their eyes: “You’re not the one in jail, are you? You stirred it all up... and they’re the ones sitting there.” You can understand the relatives, but most people realize that I can’t control who gets jailed and who doesn’t. I share the dangers and risks of staying here. If I stop sharing them, I’ll lose that trust, and everything I have will collapse.

— Then here’s a question: what happened with Opposition Coordination Council members Rustem Adagamov and Garry Kasparov? During the council elections, people entrusted them with the right to speak on behalf of Bolotnaya Square (the center of the 2011–2012 protest movement). In the end, Adagamov left for the Czech Republic, effectively abandoning those who voted for him. And with Kasparov, the situation is unclear: maybe he left, maybe he didn’t.

— Adagamov didn’t abandon anything. When that situation began, I told him: “Leave.” A completely deceitful campaign was launched against him. Even then it was clear that it had no basis whatsoever — total lies and fabrication. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just a propaganda campaign run by the idiots at Life News; the Investigative Committee was also actively involved. They would have arrested him on that lying garbage about pedophilia charges and then killed him somewhere in a cell. So he did absolutely the right thing by leaving. Why sit around waiting until they actually kill you?

As for Kasparov, Yashin (Ilya Yashin, a member of the Solidarnost political council — Gazeta.Ru) just said something stupid (about Kasparov supposedly planning to emigrate — Gazeta.Ru). Everyone knows Kasparov has an apartment there (in the United States). There’s no doubt about how he bought it. He lives partly here and partly there; I’m in regular contact with him. He’s active, constantly traveling, giving lectures. I don’t understand where the talk came from that he had emigrated. Of course he’ll come back.

— Do you think it’s already possible to speak of a new wave of political émigrés? Has this become a real phenomenon?

— Then who is Rybachenko (a Solidarnost activist Anastasia Rybachenko — Gazeta.Ru)? Or Gazaryan (environmentalist, Opposition Coordination Council member Suren Gazaryan — Gazeta.Ru)? Or the people from the Bolotnaya case? Of course they are political émigrés. These are people behaving absolutely correctly. They’ll fuss over me, and 60 journalists will come to my trial. But an ordinary person, especially somewhere in the regions, can simply be grabbed and killed, like Chervochkin (Yury Chervochkin, a National Bolshevik activist, killed in 2007 in the Moscow region under unclear circumstances — Gazeta.Ru). Better that they leave. I would advise people who truly feel they are in danger to leave. It’s the right decision, and for people who have greater responsibilities resting on them, I would advise them not just to keep doing this there. — And how do you continue the struggle from there? — We live on the internet. You’ll write in your little blog there just as you would here. As for practical activity, we’ve

> basically gone back to 1905: leaflets, pickets, rallies. Organize your rallies there, abroad. Demand that the crooks be added to the Magnitsky list. Help raise money. Help other political prisoners. What difference does it make whether you live in Yaroslavl or Tallinn?

— So are they actually engaged in political struggle there? Take Rybachenko in Tallinn, for example...

— That’s a second question, whether they’re doing it or not. It would be good if they were. But you have to understand: a person is fleeing. They have no job there, no relatives, no friends, and there are all sorts of Dolmatov-type scenarios — ending up in a refugee camp. First you have to get your basic life in order. It’s strange to reproach someone who understands that tomorrow they may not be able to pay their rent for failing to organize pickets. First a person needs to get political asylum, find a job, and somehow deal with their sobbing relatives as well.

— Why did things turn out this way with the Opposition Coordination Council in the first place? Some people think the elections to the council were far more successful than the council itself.

— That’s true. The elections to the Opposition Coordination Council are still the best thing that has happened to the council. We introduced honest, free elections as a principle for making decisions. That’s an important thing we need to preserve.

> But we shouldn’t think that just any body, even an elected one, can simply come along and build a bright future for everyone.

The Coordination Council is the top layer of the movement. It would be good to elect the best people from that movement, but we shouldn’t think they’ll suddenly solve every problem and increase rally attendance twentyfold. The task of the Coordination Council is to make the protest movement more effective. Did it make it more effective?

— No.

— ...No, it didn’t. We failed to organize the work. In my ideal Coordination Council, all these ideal people were supposed to fit their resources together like a puzzle so that overall effectiveness would increase. That didn’t happen. We were consumed by immediate problems and endless discussions about procedure. But a collective body has to work according to some rules. It takes time for it to take shape.

— Why was the Coordination Council never able to become an effective body?

— Unfortunately, there’s a tradition of activists focusing on adopting statements of one kind or another. A new generation of activists — including, for example, all the members of Civic Platform (a faction within the Opposition Coordination Council that includes, among others, Ksenia Sobchak, Mikhail Shats, Tatyana Lazareva, and Filipp Dzyadko — Gazeta.Ru) — simply don’t understand why they should be doing that instead of training election observers. And that’s where the split began. The non-political people aren’t interested in sitting around listening to yet another statement; they’re interested in project-based work. The political wing isn’t interested in project-based work. At the foundation, we work with both groups. Apparently, voters will have to take that into account when forming the second Coordination Council...

— Do you think there will even be a second Opposition Coordination Council?

> — Something will exist one way or another. If there’s no Coordination Council, then what will there be? Will we go back to “round tables”? Or to an organizing committee? Then the same question will arise again: “Who are these people sitting there?”

— Do you realize that you are the main driving force in the council? I’m asking because if they “lock you up” now, the future of this body will become even more uncertain. Don’t you think everything will fall apart?

— Nothing terrible will happen if it falls apart.

— So it will fall apart?

— You voted for the council, didn’t you? Are you going to disappear somewhere? You’ll still be interested in either the Coordination Council or an organizing committee, won’t you? There are all these 80,000 people who go to rallies, there are people who disagree with the current situation. They’re not going anywhere. The decision-making process will probably slow down. There will be some disorientation for a while. But a center of decision-making will emerge anyway. That’s an objective reality — a vacuum never lasts.

— Will People’s Alliance, which presents itself as a party of Navalny supporters, be able to become Navalny’s mouthpiece if you are imprisoned? Will it speak on your behalf?

— Navalny’s real mouthpiece is our foundation, more than anything else. The people in People’s Alliance are also my mouthpiece; they work with me. Anyone who thinks the way I do is Navalny’s mouthpiece. The December 5 Party is absolutely Navalny’s mouthpiece, just as I am the mouthpiece of the December 5 Party. The National Democratic Party is Navalny’s mouthpiece, and vice versa. From Akunin and Parkhomenko to Tor, Krylov, and Kashin — all of them are Navalny’s mouthpiece, and vice versa. We’re all talking about the same thing.

— How will the foundation function without you? Have you discussed with your staff the possibility that you may not be there?

— At the foundation, we’ve discussed the scenario in which I’m not there. Everyone here has powers of attorney. The foundation understands what to do; it has clear projects.

We’ve discussed the possibility of my being isolated a million times. We had one such meeting before New Year’s, and another one quite recently. I wouldn’t say it’s any kind of surprise or problem for the foundation’s staff that I might not be there.

> I told every person I hired: “Do you understand that they may imprison me, and they may imprison you too?” Everyone said: “Yes, and I’m coming in with that understanding.”

The issue is finding funding for the foundation. If I’m removed from that chain, I hope all of you will chip in with money. My feeling is that ordinary people, private individuals, will send even more money. Major backers may get scared, although the ones who are still with us now are probably unlikely to be frightened. I understand that preserving the foundation and preserving its work will be a hundred times harder. The effectiveness of my own work will drop by 99 percent. The investigations will also take a serious hit. Unfortunately, a lot still depends on me, even though I tried to change that. Everyone will be shaking their heads and saying: “So what do we do now? Let Navalny tell us, let him write us a letter from prison explaining how to fight United Russia.”

— And how will the information work be handled? What will happen to the blog?

— Maintaining an information connection is harder. But if my LiveJournal is gone, the role of other platforms will grow.

> The blog will still exist, but I obviously won’t be able to write in it from prison. I’ll send out little notes from there, and they’ll be published,

and everyone here has access to all my Twitter, Facebook, and VK accounts. Right now I write everything myself, but then the foundation staff will write. What difference does it make — my entire Twitter feed consists of useful links and stupid jokes. So there’ll be fewer stupid jokes and more useful links.

— You talk about this so calmly. Do you just not care?

— There’s no drama here. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be imprisoned. There’s no need to make it more dramatic than it is. It’s an extremely unpleasant fact, but if I start clutching my head and tearing my hair out — “My God, my God, they’re going to jail me!” — what exactly would that change?

> Sooner or later, they’ll jail everyone. That has to be understood very clearly. The alternative is very simple, judging by the way things are developing along a Belarusian-Uzbek-Kazakh scenario. Either we sweep them away, or they jail everyone. Most likely, it’ll be the version where they jail everyone first, and then we sweep them away. There’s no need to worry too much. So they jail us — we’ll get out.

The system will collapse, but it may take several years. Our task is to bring that closer.

— And when, in your opinion, will that happen?

— If everyone stopped whining endlessly and did a little work instead, did what I say, and spent 15 minutes a day on it, the system wouldn’t last even a month. When people asked me a year ago, I said the system wouldn’t survive another year and a half to two years. Now my forecasts are more pessimistic, but I still don’t give it more than two years.

— I have just one question: why didn’t all this begin back then, in December 2011?

— We didn’t start anything in December. If we started anything at all, we started it much earlier. In December, it all happened by itself. They were the ones who started all this in December. With yet another round of election fraud, they drove people into the streets. We didn’t start anything. That’s actually the problem, because by now it really is time to start. We haven’t done a damn thing.

So if anything, it’s a shame we didn’t start all this back then, in December. It’s time to begin already, time to overcome our laziness and understand that no one but us is going to do this. There is no Navalny, no Coordination Council, no Khodorkovsky who will come and silently fix everything. That only exists in a song by Aquarium (a famous Russian rock band).