Navalny: “All that’s left is to pat each other on the shoulder and remember that we have no other country”

Ilya Shepelin: To start with, explain what you’re allowed to discuss with the press and what’s off-limits. Alexei Navalny: I’m allowed to talk about anything. Initially, the terms of my detention said I was forbidden from communicating with anyone except my close relatives, so that I supposedly couldn’t influence witnesses in the Yves Rocher case. That was absurd in itself, because all the witnesses in the case are in fact my close relatives. But I think the change in the terms of my house arrest happened because the European Court very quickly agreed to hear my case. Now I’m not forbidden from communicating with anyone who is not a witness in the case. There is, however, still a clause forbidding me from commenting on the Yves Rocher case. But from the very beginning I said I would not comply with that clause. It is completely unconstitutional and absurd. I am not going to stay silent about how a case is being fabricated against me. Shepelin: Do you really think the European Court of Human Rights still matters to Russia now? No international law stopped us from taking Crimea. Against that backdrop, individual cases in Strasbourg seem like trifles. – That’s certainly true. Apparently, the decision to place me under house arrest was made when the Kremlin understood that it could now do whatever it wanted. It’s a good thing it was house arrest and not pretrial detention. But the system is complicated. Prosecutors, judges, investigators—all of them are involved in the process. Each of them wants to cover himself. Why did they ease the conditions of my house arrest? Because they have internal judicial procedures: the European Court may overturn something, someone may get disciplined, something will have to be done. So sometimes people are forced to do their part of the job in keeping with these internal rituals. Shepelin: So you’re now so unimportant to the authorities that your fate is being handled by minor officials? – The key decisions are, of course, made by Putin. I’m probably part of what is usually called Putin’s nomenklatura file—the set of issues that require someone to come to him with a red folder so he can write his resolution on it. What is happening with my case right now is unclear. Because of Crimea, Novorossiya, sanctions, the line of people with red folders waiting to see Putin is enormous. If in 2011 or 2012 my case was a priority and someone could get to Putin with my folder in two or three days, now they can’t get to him in 33 days. But they still have to. So right now no one understands what to do with me, and you can see that in the way the trial is proceeding. All the victims and witnesses in court are testifying in my favor, the judge is blinking in confusion, the prosecution also doesn’t quite understand what to do and doesn’t prepare for hearings at all, barely reads the case materials. Everyone understands that there will be an X day when my red folder finally reaches Putin and he decides something. But until that moment, the lower layers of the anthill are simply trying to make sure nothing happens before the boss approves it. Shepelin: As I understand it, you have plenty of free time now. Do you spend a lot of it thinking about who is going to decide your life and how? – I stopped thinking about that a long time ago. Otherwise you’d go insane. There’s no way to predict or analyze anything here. There is Putin, who, judging by his recent actions, makes a great many irrational decisions. What influences him—whether he’s in a bad mood, had a fight with relatives, likes Rotenberg more than Timchenko on a given day—we don’t know. The decision-making process is completely closed off, even to people in the government who themselves sit for hours in his reception room. So it makes even less sense for me to rack my brains over it. Even three years ago, when criminal cases were being opened against me, there was no point in guessing. When the first criminal cases were brought against me, it was obvious: they were doing it to make me leave. The first time they prosecuted me was when I was supposed to return from Yale. The second time they did it when I had vacation tickets booked—and they promised to charge me a week later, simply expecting that I would leave and not come back. They want me to stop what I’m doing. And I do not want to stop. So that is the framework within which I act. Whatever else they may come up with is not my concern. Since they have seized all power in the country, the day after tomorrow they could go down a list of opposition figures and smash each of us over the head with a brick outside our apartment building. So what then? Should everyone be afraid and never leave home? Ivan Davydov: Well, as for whether to leave your building or not, it’s easier for you to make that decision now than for others. – Well, yes. Shepelin: What is left to do? I won’t even mention the information war now being waged against “national traitors,” or the fact that almost nothing remains of the opposition’s agenda from three years ago. – I can honestly say that I do not share the general gloom and anxiety over the “84 percent” for one simple reason. You were born in 1988, and I was born in 1976. So I remember how the Soviet TV program Vremya showed segments about Dr. Haider in America, supposedly on a “fatal hunger strike” for nine months. And in 1986, what now seems like a joke had the support not of 84 percent, but 99 percent. There is nothing new in manipulating public opinion, and there’s no reason to worry too much about it. If I saw with my own eyes a news anchor take out a little box, open it, and inside was a shiny, glittering Dr. Haider medal, then Dmitry Kiselyov won’t impress me now. Everything changes quickly enough. Poll ratings swing back and forth. Yeltsin once won in Moscow with 96 percent support, and a short time later his rating was 4 percent. Then he won elections again (though we know how). None of this demotivates me. Besides, once you make your basic life choice, things become much easier. If I lived every day choosing between my work and leaving the country, maybe I’d still agonize over it. But I rejected the second option from the outset. Sorry, these are grand words, but I have no other Russia. I’m 38 now, and apparently I’ll live out my life here. My children live here, my wife lives here. And another 140 million people live here with us. Yes, if the situation gets worse, many educated and wonderful people will leave, and we will miss them badly. But 139.5 million will remain. And we will be among them. And we will live in Russia—with this government or another one. So all that remains is to live here and do everything possible to change this government. Shepelin: People make different choices about emigration. For example, your close associate Vladimir Ashurkov left the country when a criminal case was opened against him here. – He left partly on my advice. It was a rational choice. When I do something, I do it together with other people, with my associates. If everyone ends up under house arrest, we can of course continue our work, but it becomes very difficult. At that moment it was important for Ashurkov to remain free. So I strongly advised him to leave. I didn’t want them to grab him. Our fundraising system has one big advantage and safeguard—it is transparent, and we raise money in small donations from ordinary people. But Ashurkov administers that process. If he were under house arrest, I would have to deal with finances and letters to sponsors; instead, Ashurkov continues to handle it, and I’m very happy about that. In our Progress Party, there are seven people on the political council, and four of them are under criminal investigation. Ashurkov left so he could keep working. The others stayed here. Shepelin: And what does your work consist of now, under house arrest? – Despite house arrest, there is still a lot one can do. I still stick to the strategy I’ve explained many times. We need to do the right and useful things that create problems and pressure points for this government. Since everything in our country is decided manually, the line of red folders waiting to reach Putin keeps getting longer and longer and longer. The priority of these problems changes: at one time the Caucasus was a problem, then it became less acute, though it will return. Then they had the white-ribbon protest movement; it subsided, but the potential is still there. Everything I do comes down to weakening and forcing this government to change by creating problems for it—a government I hate and that harms the development of the country and my people. We continue our anti-corruption investigations. We are building a party, although just a few years ago I truly thought the idea of parties had outlived itself. But life changed: party administration became easier, and we changed with the world and started building a party. Right now we have launched our campaign against illicit enrichment. Speaking of short-term tactics, we need to do and support the things that 87 percent of the population will support together with us. We need to beat them in percentage terms. Yes, they talk about Crimea and all sorts of pseudo-Soviet nonsense and report 84 percent support. But we launched our own polling service and now have a very good sense of how people feel about our core demands. Criminal liability for illicit enrichment is supported by 87 percent of Russians; all anti-corruption initiatives are supported by close to 90 percent. Federalization and decentralization of Russia are supported by more than 60 percent. More than 70 percent think judicial reform is necessary, and among those who have dealt with the courts, even more do. There is no need to keep whining and feeling sorry for ourselves. We have a huge number of initiatives, programs, and slogans whose support exceeds any level of support Putin has. Those are the slogans we should be working with if we want to change life in Russia. Davydov: I’m curious how house arrest affects you personally. Forgive the word, but it’s a serious blow to a politician’s career. In circles close to the authorities there’s a fashionable meme: after mentioning the name Navalny, they write in parentheses, “remember who that is?” How much of a problem is it to be torn out of active politics? Do you feel you’re losing influence? – I won’t lie: it has become harder to work. Not critically harder, but harder. It would be much harder in pretrial detention, but even that, I assure you, would not stop me. Yes, I have no communications, no ability to appear at the office. Many things can only be done when you talk to people in person. Besides, this house-arrest situation is a bit demoralizing for those around me. Many people think: well, if they jailed even Navalny, then they’ll definitely jail me too. After all, these unprecedented cases—like the one over Alburov’s painting—are being handled by FSB generals. But in general I take the decline in popularity philosophically. I know very well how the internet works. I know perfectly well that it is impossible to stay popular for a long time. And I was popular for too long—abnormally long. If you’ve been the trendy, popular guy on the internet since 2006, then by 2014 it’s long past time to stop being that. Davydov: Tell that to Vladimir Putin. – Ha, that’s a slightly different example. But actually it applies to Putin too. It affects me more strongly, because all Russian television is not going to work on my popularity—I have to manage somehow on my own. I’m completely fine with people writing, “Navalny is boring now, give us someone new already.” I’m not going to change, and I can’t rewind anything back to the old days. There are axioms of love and dislike on the internet, there are familiar mass expectations all over the world: “Here is our politician, we loved him, we supported him, he should become president or something,” “we loved Navalny during the mayoral election, he should have become mayor, and if he didn’t, then we’ll stop loving him.” What is there to worry about? Yes, I would prefer that no one ever get tired of me and that my ideas always seem new and fresh. But my ideas about fighting corruption are as old as the world, and my platform has not changed. I understand all this and try to adapt in terms of methods, though not in terms of ideas. Shepelin: So what exactly should be done? What are your immediate goals? And why bother collecting signatures on ROI, which, as life shows, is useless and whose petitions deputies toss in the trash without even looking? – Usefulness and uselessness are relative. Some people think rallies are useless, others think elections are. The world is beautiful in its diversity, and we must use every available tool. Collecting signatures on ROI is the first step in staking out a position and showing that this bill exists in our program—the one tied to Article 20 of the UN Convention on illicit enrichment. We mobilize our core supporters; if we get 100,000 votes, then we know at least a million people definitely know about the initiative. What matters is that after that we will force the government to engage with us on this issue, because right now they pretend not to notice anything. Then we want to call and send letters to every deputy in the country—and there are tens of thousands of them—and distribute millions of newspapers. We have set ourselves the goal of achieving this sooner or later. Because we have no other country, and here illicit enrichment is not a crime. We disagree with that, and we are ready to work on it indefinitely. Lately no one has been doing anything serious. Can you name even one major socially significant campaign for or against something? There was the “law of scoundrels” (the law banning U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans), and there was a rally about it. The law was not repealed, but can everything that was done therefore be called useless? We want to build a genuinely large campaign and involve several million people. And here too I understand perfectly well how the public works: “We already voted for your cars law, we voted against internet blocking, we collected 100,000 signatures, but the switch didn’t flip.” So we need to explain to people again and again: Putin is sitting there with his thug gang and does not want to give up power. Right now they have no serious reason even to think that something in the system they created should be changed, corrected, or weakened. Our activity must create those reasons. When there were rallies, they got scared and announced political reform. Yes, six months later they rolled it all back, but at that moment we forced them! And we need to create pressure points again. It may seem that votes on ROI are nonsense too—they’ll brush them off and that will be that—but let’s at least do even this. Especially since voting on ROI is even easier than going to a rally. Spend five minutes of your time. The pressure on the authorities will be equivalent to those five minutes spent. When we come up with forms of activity that take our supporters an hour, the authorities will have to spend an hour dealing with them. Their reaction will be equal to the force of our action. They will change only because of our pressure, and the price of oil will save no one if we do not press them. If no one forces you, there is no reason to change. Shepelin: Yes, perhaps. People are inspired by success. A long absence of success makes them give up. When should we expect your next successes? – Unfortunately, we are not in a situation now where people can be inspired the way they are in democratic countries—by winning elections, by consolidating around coalitions. Nothing like that is going to happen in Russia anytime soon. So all that remains is to draw inspiration from our own persistence. We cannot count on one of us simply going out and winning an election. As the Moscow City Duma experience showed, they will disqualify everyone anyway. Despite all the shouting about 84 percent support, anyone who wants to take part in elections gets removed from the race—or simply jailed. All that remains is to pat each other on the shoulder and remember that we have no other country. That is the only way to stay encouraged. Shepelin: Explain how you see it: why does the Kremlin need Novorossiya? – It’s actually very logical. The whole history of rulers is the history of how they start wars to boost their popularity. This applies not only to terrible tyrants; the same pattern exists in democratic countries. For example, the United States, which, if necessary, can bomb some Albania to prop up Clinton’s ratings and distract attention from scandals. That is simply a fact of world history. And now Putin has used a technology in which there is nothing new. He is distracting all of us from Russia’s internal problems. I’m not inclined to look for anything complicated here, like the idea that Putin has turned into a nationalist, wants to build an empire, or plans to restore the Soviet Union. I see no grand idea behind Putin’s actions. It was obvious that many people here feel nostalgia for the Soviet Union, that many would be happy to see the country’s territory expand. Just as in Britain people were wildly delighted by the return of the Falkland Islands. Putin runs into problems, he needs to raise his popularity, distract people from criticism and corruption. So he went for Crimea and Novorossiya. Besides, it was extremely important for him not to lose in Ukraine, because the success of an anti-corruption revolution there would have been a monstrous blow to him. Remember the mood before Crimea! When Maidan had won, but Crimea had not yet happened. That was simply a victory over Putin. Shepelin: But then Putin outplayed everyone! – Then he outplayed everyone in terms of seizing the agenda. Let’s put it this way: we underestimated Putin’s determination to stay in power. It seemed impossible to imagine that he would inflict such damage on the country’s development for the sake of a few tactical percentage points in support, that he would strike such a blow against the very idea of the “Russian world.” We really have now lost 40 million Ukrainians. From a friendly neighboring country we created, in half a year, a large hostile one. From the standpoint of strategic interests, Putin dealt a gigantic blow to all Russian civilization. We already have a Slavic Poland that hates us and will hate us for a long time; now there will be a similar Ukraine. We pushed the Baltic states even farther away and brought NATO closer to our borders, and now our frightened neighbors will gladly invite it in. No one thought Putin was capable of doing this for the sake of his miserable approval ratings and his rotten Rotenbergs. But Putin went full hardline. No one expected him to be this malicious. Still, there is nothing new here either. Putin is not the first person to rule by the principle “after us, the flood.” Davydov: You said your goal is to create problems for the authorities and force them to change. But they really are changing, even if they won’t let new people into elections. Remember when we were sitting together in the police station in Western Degunino? Even then it already felt like we were inside some awful dictatorship. But I’m sure neither you nor I imagined then where all this would lead and where the country would end up. There’s a common view that the middle class, with its protests three years ago, offended Putin, and he had no choice but to push the country toward hard authoritarianism. Do you agree with that assessment? – Most likely, yes. Putin understood the scale of the threat. Remember December 5, after the 2011 State Duma elections. Everyone laughed at the campaign “vote against the party of crooks and thieves,” everyone said the internet had no influence. Then—bang!—and Russia saw rallies on a scale not seen since the early 1990s. They realized there was a real threat. And if they did not resist it, their power would have to change substantially—they could lose elections, lose control of the State Duma. Seeing these astonishing things, they perceived them as a serious threat and went with the Belarusian scenario. They began building a counter-system of repression. The only question was where they would stop. Now, when we see that Putin has started a real war with our paratroopers dying in it just to maintain his approval ratings, we understand that apparently there is no point at which he can stop. He will respond to threats in what he sees as an adequate way. Adequate in his understanding, of course. They can go as far as they like, feeling our resistance and reacting to it. But our goal is to intensify that resistance. It is entirely possible that in the course of this struggle things will get even worse for us than they are now. But we need to take that normally. In the end we will still win. Afterward things will get better. Davydov: Do you have any sense of what could break this 84 percent support? The collapse of social programs? Price rises because of sanctions, or what? For now, judging by polling, those things only seem to excite people: “Hooray, we’ll tighten our belts, but at least everyone is afraid of us again.” – 84 percent is foam. When you turn up the heat, everything in the pot boils and the foam rises. Turn the heat off, and the foam subsides. What matters is that we’re not fighting just because we dislike Kabaeva or Putin. The country is moving in the wrong direction. We are squandering Russia’s colossal development opportunities—including those created by high oil prices—on nonsense like expensive sports spectacles and feeding the oligarchy. In 20 years, nothing has been built, nothing is developing, and yet in the number of billionaires we rank second only to the United States. I am convinced that the direction Putin is taking the country will, one way or another, bring an end to his regime. The only question is when. It could happen quickly if a piano falls on Putin, or more slowly because of old age or because of a revolution. Economic, political, and organizational problems are piling up. No one wants to solve them, because Putin is more interested in playing war. If we take a sober look at the pension system, we’ll see that nothing but collapse awaits it. Putin’s famous May decrees are getting harder and harder to fulfill; the regions have no money. All this talk that our economy will merge with China’s is nonsense that the Chinese themselves laugh at. Three problems can easily be handled manually. Thirty-three problems are difficult, but still manageable. When there are 333 problems and the price of oil falls to $80 a barrel, solving them becomes almost impossible. In essence, Putin is building a corporate corrupt state: thieves and gangsters are in power. These are harmful, hypocritical people doing the wrong things. That’s why we will win anyway, because history is on our side and no one agrees that our country’s budget should serve as a feeding trough for fucking Rotenberg. Shepelin: In effect, a war is already underway. And in our history there are examples of how the Russian opposition behaved during wars. A hundred years ago the Bolsheviks were defeatists and wanted the country to lose World War I in order to change the government. There is also something in your struggle against oligarchs that resembles Bolshevik class theory. Don’t you feel the parallel? – I am certainly no defeatist. And my hatred of the oligarchs is not class-based. In my experience, from what I’ve taken away from meeting voters, the more a person has achieved in business, the more he hates the Rotenbergs. A guy working at Gazprom and earning $20,000 a month hates Putin’s oligarchs 146 times more than a person working in a factory, because he understands the value of money better and how everything is arranged. As for parallels with World War I, it’s rather amusing, because under house arrest you read a lot whether you want to or not. Recently I reread School by Arkady Gaidar. It’s very interesting how he describes the enthusiasm for World War I. All the schoolboys dream of running off to the front. Everyone hates and boycotts the deserter’s son. Ladies send chocolate to the front. And then it all fell apart. What did that war bring the country? Nothing good. Just like the Afghan war, which was also greeted with great enthusiasm. I think truth is the best policy. So we need to tell the truth about this war. There are different views on Crimea, different views on Novorossiya. But there cannot be different views on the fact that our paratroopers are being sent to Ukraine to die, and then buried here in secret, with relatives not even allowed to put their names on the graves. If you want war, then wage war. Declare war, seize Donetsk, hand out medals to soldiers who had their legs blown off. If you are such great imperialists, then let’s thank the soldiers fighting for the empire. But this is some kind of crooked imperialism, where those killed in battle for new lands are officially recorded as victims of traffic accidents in the Rostov region. Shepelin: So you’re in favor of honest imperialism and declaring war on Ukraine? – I am against imperialism in principle. I would under no circumstances support a war with Ukraine. Because it is the largest country in Europe, and the majority of its population has always treated us wonderfully. A friendly nation of 40 million is a strategic advantage. Who are we supposed to be friends with, if not Ukraine? Zimbabwe? Or China, where on maps popular with internet users half of Siberia already no longer belongs to us? By the way, you’re asking this question to someone whom all these current great defenders of Russians—Vladimir Solovyov and United Russia members—used to call nothing but a Nazi. “Nazi Navalny went to the Russian March!” Vladimir Solovyov always had one answer to the question of why I never appeared on his programs: “I don’t invite Nazis on air!” To them I was a Nazi when I spoke about the rights of Russians in Kazakhstan, when I said Russians had been sold out for gas in Turkmenistan, where they had simply been turned into voiceless cattle. When I said that 400,000 Russians used to live in Chechnya and now there are none, that made me a fascist and a Nazi. And now all these crooks who branded me for using the word “Russian” have become great defenders of national interests. And interestingly, they continue to ignore Russians in Turkmenistan, Russians in Kazakhstan, and so on. All the state rhetoric about protecting our compatriots is a lie. The rights of Russians do need protection; they suffer and struggle in many places. Russians in the Pskov region suffer and die from alcoholism far more than Russians in the Donetsk region suffered and died before the war. This is a completely stupid imperialist war. It harms the Russian world and the interests of the Russian people. A war declared to defend Russian interests does the greatest damage to the Russian people. If only because Russians now buy pork at prices 20 percent higher. Russians are paying for all this to benefit the Rotenbergs and the Kovalchuks. We had far more opportunities to influence Ukraine through Russians in Donetsk and Luhansk than we do now. But now we have lost all of that. Shepelin: But again, forgive me, you’re using the word “imperialism” from the Bolshevik lexicon. So let me ask directly: are you in favor of this war turning into a collapse for Russia that would bring about a change of power here? – Do I follow the tactic of “the worse, the better”? No, absolutely not. I try to think about what may happen tomorrow or the day after. If this turns into some kind of nightmare or civil war, then the probability of my being hit with a crowbar when I walk out of my building is much higher than the probability of my taking part in a presidential election in such a situation. We need to understand that, with a high degree of probability, the next major post-Putin crisis in Russia could lead to Russia simply falling apart to hell. Putin has created a country that is held together only by him. Present-day Chechnya, which we armed and allowed to build a sharia army, will break away in an instant once Putin is gone, and we will have a bandit state next door like ISIS. Yes, I know there are people who secretly long for war. They think that if Putin digs even deeper into Ukraine and sanctions against us become ten times harsher, that will help bring down the regime. It certainly will help bring down Putin’s regime. Putin will disappear. But what will the next government do with a country at war, under sanctions, and with oil at $40 a barrel? We may repeat what happened in the 1980s and 1990s. Those donkeys sat in the Politburo, spent money on some phenomenal unfinished construction projects, fought in Afghanistan, and then everything collapsed. It wasn’t Gorbachev who destroyed the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was destroyed by the idiots from the Communist Party, the same people they now put memorial plaques up for. After that, in the 1990s, a new government came in that had no money, and was itself made up of shady Komsomol types, corrupt and hypocritical through and through. For a while this was called democracy. That whole wonderful construction was of course bound to fail, after which the words “democracy” and “liberal” became insults, the market economy never really took hold, and reactionaries returned to power. Post-Putin Russia will quite likely repeat that cycle. Oil prices will fall—and where will the money come from to pay teachers and doctors? Any government will meet the fate of Yeltsin’s. So the collapse of Putin as a result of his military adventures promises us nothing good. Ultimately, we all want Russia to become a normal European state. As a result of war, maybe we would get that. But with a country much smaller in size. Imperial-style nationalism is the worst thing the country could choose right now. We have a gigantic country with empty spaces, people drinking themselves to death. The population is shrinking. The task of a Russian nationalist is to care for those people. To hell with Ukraine—go look at the Smolensk region. That’s where people need saving. Shepelin: Then how should you behave in order to press on the authorities’ pain points without following the logic of “the worse, the better”? – The only thing left is to act honestly. You have to say what you think. Yes, Russia has interests in Ukraine, but any confrontation with Ukraine harms Russia. We are on planet Earth—let’s look at the globe and understand whom we should be friends with. Nauru, with which we introduced a visa-free regime? Or 40-million-strong Ukraine? There is nothing new to invent; all the methods of confrontation between power and society have long been known. Russia even has canonical texts on this subject. Solzhenitsyn’s Live Not by Lies, for example. For all the irony with which people now treat those words, nothing better has been invented. What matters is non-participation; what matters is condemning the people who become incorporated into that system. Davydov: Among Russian nationalists, including those who went to Bolotnaya, there is disappointment in you: why is it that you do not support the “Novorossiya” project? – Yes, some nationalists turned out to hold precisely imperialist positions. For me too, that is a disappointment—that many of them rushed into this kind of Soviet nationalism. They turned out not to be Russian nationalists, but Soviet patriots. Which is strange: in 2011 they said they were going to work on the rights of Russians in Chechnya. Now they say: let’s restore the Soviet Union together with Kadyrov’s thugs. Shepelin: Every year I ask you about the Russian March. It’s a little pointless now to ask whether you’ll go or not. But will you at least wave from the balcony? It passes somewhere near your home, doesn’t it? – It usually takes place in Lyublino; I can’t see it from my window, though it’s within walking distance from here. I’m watching very closely what will happen around the Russian March. I’m interested in the political evolution of the people who took part in it. Maybe you remember the movement Narod (“The People”), which we created together with [writer] Zakhar Prilepin, now an apologist for Novorossiya. In any case, I have many topics to discuss with these people. If this year the Russian March takes place as a rally for war with Ukraine, then in my view that will be a major regression for the whole movement. For me, of course, this is unpleasant. The Russian March is an event about which people asked me every year whether I would go or not, and then criticized me mercilessly. Boris Akunin, whom I love and respect very much, wrote a huge letter every time saying that support for me should be withdrawn because of it. I spent a great deal of effort trying to bring liberals and nationalists closer together. I always considered that one of my political missions, even though it meant sacrificing some supporters on both sides. But sooner or later the Ukrainian question will recede into the background, and the traditional nationalist agenda will return; my work will not have been in vain. Shepelin: But it’s obvious that this 84 percent support for events in Ukraine doesn’t come from nowhere either. You yourself already said that rulers throughout history have started wars to raise their support. As a convinced democrat, doesn’t that trait of all peoples—including Russians—trouble you? – I believe the Russian people are absolutely no worse than any other people and are fully mature enough for democracy and fully capable of resolving even questions of war and peace through democratic means. What bothers me more are statements by advocates of the opposite theory, like Anatoly Chubais, who gave an interview to The New Times in 2007 saying that Putin had to be supported because under democracy some terrible Rogozin-type figures would come to power in Russia. And in 2014 we see those same half-finished Komsomol apparatchiks sitting in neighboring offices with Rogozin in the government, begging for money for nanotechnology. Yet another proof of the hypocrisy of such theories. Russian society is paternalistic, complicated, and conservative. But it is no less ready for democratic institutions than any European society. That is the only way we will be able to develop. Shepelin: But right now the main advocate of the idea that Russia is not ready for democracy is your fellow Bolotnaya supporter Ksenia Sobchak. She is the one now saying more than anyone that Putin is Russia’s main European, while the people are backward. – That’s all nonsense. Look at Sarah Palin’s rallies when she was running for U.S. vice president on McCain’s ticket. If you want to see real vatniks (jingoistic patriots), you shouldn’t go to Novorossiya—you should go to the United States and look at the rednecks and hillbillies. Every country has people like that. In the States, those people are a hundred times more wooden-headed and impossible to get through to. There are literally millions of armed, mustached men in plaid shirts dreaming of bombing and conquering somebody. So don’t tell fairy tales about our uniquely backward conservative population in Russia. Look at the Republican primaries in the United States. You find conservatives there compared with whom one of our deputies like Milonov looks like a liberal gay man from Holland. According to polls in the U.S., 11 percent of the population are ready to start a war with Russia. I’m not sure that even after all the hysteria over Novorossiya we would have that high a percentage here in favor of a possible nuclear war with the United States. Democracy regulates all this by filtering out the radicals, though it is not an easy process. Of course, a significant part of the people in Russia hold imperialist views, want to conquer everything, want to restore the Soviet Union. But that’s all right—we still have to find common ground with these people. I know that on many issues they will be with me. Let’s channel their expansionist energy in the right direction—for example, by seizing and bringing back to Russia the corrupt capital of Putin’s friends.