Presentation of the platform for the Moscow mayoral election

Yesterday we rehearsed our

program—not here, but at our campaign headquarters—and we

had these really cool slides. On

those slides there was infographics; we ran through all of it

and then decided to completely

change and scrap it all, because all those

slides, all that infographics—it was all

very cool, very serious-looking. But

it looked a lot like, well, a corporate

presentation for people who sell

soap, and are very successful at it—like,

soap sales will grow from 5 to 17 percent over the next

quarters, and so on and so forth. But we

didn’t write this platform as soap

salespeople—though there’s nothing wrong with

selling soap. We wrote this platform for

ourselves. So our platform, and what I’m

about to say about it, is

simply a set of stories about us, and I

think each of us will be able to

recognize ourselves in one of them. And the booklet

you have in your hands—you can simply

follow along. Everyone has a copy of the platform, as I

understand it, in this hall.

No one? Ah, everyone does—excellent. You

can follow the text and at least

see some more specific

proposals on the issues I’m

talking about.

And let’s try to make this

event as informal as possible,

so shouts of approval—or

disapproval—and so on are all perfectly

welcome. And we’d be betraying our own principles

if we didn’t begin our platform with the

section on fighting corruption. And here we have

a story about Lyuba. Hi,

Lyuba. One day Lyuba simply decided that

it would be nice if flowers were planted outside her building—she lives

in Nagatinskaya. Since

Lyuba works at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF),

she knows for a fact that Moscow allocates

huge sums for beautification and public works. She went

onto the public procurement website and

found that, in fact, huge amounts of money had been

allocated to plant

flowers by her beloved building entrance—but the flowers

aren’t there.

That’s why Lyuba is here with us today.

Because our platform

provides for oversight of all spending

by the city of Moscow. Our platform

calls for the introduction of contract

monitors, and it is absolutely

essential to secure the right to monitor what is actually

being purchased and what is not,

what is being built and what is not. And Lyuba,

not only was left without her flowers,

yesterday, when she was going in and out

of the Yasenevo metro station, she was wading through water, just like

some of you who have been near

the Yasenevo metro station. And when this morning she

looked sadly at her

ruined shoes, she heard on the radio

an announcement that the Moscow city government

was buying the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty

for $100 million, and she knew

that Moscow spends half a billion

dollars every year on various

media outlets. And no one asked Lyuba, no one asked

you, they didn’t even ask the deputies,

whether the city of Moscow actually needs the newspaper *Argumenty

i Fakty*. That’s why Lyuba is here with us. Because

our platform provides that

all such purchases must be

justified, and all that justification must be

completely transparent. And every

person who simply looks out

the window and sees that someone, somewhere,

is building something in their building, near their

entrance, in their courtyard—by going

online, with one click, can find out who

is building it, what exactly is being built, which workers

are working there, and how much it costs. That

level of transparency is something we can

have right now, and we will absolutely make it happen when

we come to power in the city of Moscow.

Thank you, Lyuba, for being with us. Now

let’s talk about Alexei. Alexei is our

municipal deputy in the Kurkino district.

Alexei has a major problem:

residents are constantly calling him. Residents

keep calling him because he’s their deputy, and

there’s construction going on in Kurkino—they want

to take over a vacant lot or a small park where

people live nearby, and he can’t do anything. He’s

a deputy elected by those people, but the system

of power in Moscow is structured so

archaically that all decisions are made

exclusively at 13 Tverskaya Street (Moscow City Hall), and at

13 Tverskaya, in fact, no one will even

see any of what is going to be built

somewhere out in Alexei’s Kurkino. But it will be

built, the residents will be unhappy,

and Alexei will go on receiving their

angry calls. Moscow’s budget—we all

know how much it is: 1.6 trillion rubles. Do you know how much money

is controlled by

all municipal deputies

like Alexei combined? It’s 16 billion rubles—1%

of all the money in Moscow is allocated where

people actually live, where they

face their everyday problems.

That’s why Alexei is here with us today.

Because he supports the point in our

election platform that says we will

redistribute both power and

money to the level where people actually live, and

where there are deputies who are already now

ready to manage that money.

And then there’s Zhora, whom I very rarely see in a

jacket. Everyone knows and loves Zhora, but

recently he committed a minor

offense and was brought to

administrative

liability. He was tried by a magistrate judge,

who threw the book at him,

holding him fully liable without even

While the case was being considered, they brought it to the police and handed it over.

The judge sided with the police, and Zhora...

is with us today because our platform includes...

a provision in the program that says that

in Moscow, justices of the peace can be elected

either by the Moscow City Duma, as is effectively the case now,

in practice appointed by the Kremlin, or elected

by the public, and we demand that they

be elected by the people, because 70%

of ordinary citizens who deal with

the courts are not involved in any criminal cases;

people deal with divorce cases,

property division, and administrative offenses.

These all fall under the jurisdiction of justices of the peace, and Moscow residents

can, and are absolutely ready to,

choose them.

Lena is young and beautiful, as you can see,

and, incidentally, very law-abiding,

and she would never imagine, even in her worst nightmare,

that she could suddenly be locked up for

about a year and a half in prison. That would be

terrible. But unfortunately, if the authorities in

Moscow do not change, that is exactly what will happen,

because every Muscovite who has lived

in Moscow for 30 years or more

will lose a year and a half of their life

sitting in traffic. A year and a half of life. Every

one of us—every one of us who lives

30 years in Moscow will spend a year and a half

in traffic. That time will be taken from each of us;

each of us will sit in this

little prison. That is why Lena is with us today

because in our

program there are provisions stating that all

transport-related decisions must undergo

projects costing more than 3 billion rubles must undergo

international expert review so that

we do not end up in a situation like the one with

the Fourth Ring Road,

which was first built—you know,

the most expensive road in the world—and then

declared an urban-planning mistake. All

the people who made that

urban-planning mistake are still sitting

in City Hall, in the General Plan Institute, in Moskom

Architecture. Lena is with us today because

our program provides for

a strategy for Moscow's development. We must

finally decide whether we are moving

the federal authorities out of the city or not,

where we are building a parliamentary center, where our

major highways will go, and so on. Lena is with us

because she likes our approach,

based on the understanding that there is no need

to pour money into giant interchanges; instead, we need

to build a capillary transport network in Moscow.

Thank you very much, Lena, for being

with us today.

Our neighbor Roman, who is now

doing tremendous

work helping with municipal issues,

read in the newspapers that the average

salary of a migrant street cleaner in Moscow is

42,000 rubles. That street cleaner told him

that he works on the condition that

he hands over part of the money, pays

part of it in bribes to the district administration, which passes it

all on to the prefecture, and this system also

shares with the police. That is why migrants have been

coming and will keep coming in

any case,

because they are simply needed so that

this entire structure can keep sucking

money endlessly out of these migrants. And

Roman is here with us today because

he supports the part of our program stating

that all migrants must be

registered, and all information

about the presence or absence of migrants

must simply be published. You

go online and you can see your

street cleaner, you can see his salary; the

street cleaner himself and the street cleaners' union

cannot be deceived.

In addition, Roman supports the part

of our

program dealing with migration, because

he knows very well that this street cleaner's children, unfortunately,

have lived here, but they did not

go to school, and they speak Russian poorly.

Therefore, they have no real

future here, yet they are already Moscow

teenagers. In order to

earn money, they resort to the simplest

method: their cousin

from Tajikistan comes and brings them, once

every quarter, 200 grams of heroin, which they sell in

Roman's courtyard, and

simply to survive. And he

supports the point in our program that

the Moscow mayor's office must use every

measure—we have spelled out which measures—to

prevent the creation of these

criminal ghettos, where people live in basements

30 to a room and are

forced, and in any case will end up selling

drugs simply in order to survive.

Konstantin Yanka, a deputy of the municipal

district of Zyuzino, recently attended

a housing and utilities meeting, and he himself is unhappy with how much

he pays for his apartment.

Konstantin was outraged because in the newspapers

he read that a subsidiary of Mosenergo,

the utility company that supplies

heat and electricity to our apartments,

transferred 200 million rubles to United Russia.

That 200 million rubles in sponsorship

was simply

stolen from us. That is why our program says

that all spending by utility suppliers

and housing management bodies must undergo

basic and public auditing, and that all

these so-called investment programs,

these giant and mythical schemes that monopolists once again

present to us in the form of enormous tomes

of paperwork about how they are supposedly going to invest

a billion dollars in their own development, and why

tariffs therefore need to be raised by that amount...

In the end, there is no real development at all. There is only

just new houses somewhere on the French Riviera

of France, which can be verified by a simple audit.

Konstantin cannot achieve it on his own, but together

with us he will. Thank you very much for

Konstantin joining

us. Now let’s talk about

a citizen named Yulia.

Yulia has a family. Yulia has two

children, and because of this Yulia is concerned about

the situation at Yulia’s local outpatient clinic in

the Maryino district, because every time

you need to go to the clinic even just to get

some certificate, you spend three hours there. At the same time,

Yulia knows perfectly well that for every

Muscovite—I told her this—

24,000 rubles are allocated just for

outpatient clinic services. Thus,

Yulia’s family has 100,000 rubles

per year allocated to

outpatient care—not

for each person. I’m simply

curious: please raise your hand if you

have been to your local clinic in the last year.

And now raise your hand

if you have never in your life been to your

local clinic.

And yet 24,000 rubles go toward

each person. Yulia is with us today. She

of course has another reason as well, but among them is the fact that

she supports

the points of our

program stating that the enormous sums of money available

in Moscow should be spent first and foremost

on increasing

the number of general practitioners,

primary care doctors. We have enough money,

space, and infrastructure to have

enough primary care doctors so that every family

has its own general practitioner and can, without difficulty,

turn to them and receive

a consultation on the same day. We have

the money for this—more than enough money. So if

we introduce the provision contained in our

program that money follows the

patient, clinic doctors will be running

after our family because we have

100,000 rubles that can be received. And Yulia

is with us today because she

supports the idea that we should not

keep pouring money endlessly into

healthcare like this—into all this equipment

and the purchase of scanners. In Moscow we have more scanners

than London does per capita

and more than Berlin.

They

do not cure anyone. From this we get only

a $1 million bribe

that is taken with every procurement of a

scanner, and that’s all. Thank you, Yulia, for

being with us and supporting our

program. Since we’ve already talked about Yulia,

let’s talk about Alexei, who

is very concerned

that the standard of secondary education in Moscow is falling

catastrophically. Alexei has

a daughter. She is 11 years old, and now her school

is being merged with some other school, and

his wife, who is on the parent committee,

constantly complains that the other school is worse. And

no one understands the reasons for the merger. I

think most of you with

school-age children have encountered this.

What’s more, to

this school they are attaching a kindergarten, and

it is completely unclear what this even is. No one

even explains why all this is happening, even though we

have enough money for secondary

education. That is why we, among other things,

are simply saying that, first,

there must be full transparency in decision-making on

school mergers; second, full transparency

in

publishing reports on how

well children are studying, and funding should, among other things,

be tied to that. And in our

schools it is entirely possible

to introduce those

child assessment and evaluation programs

for children

that exist in European countries and are fully

transparent and can be used by parents

right

now. Vladimir—you all know Vladimir.

Well, some of you know him. Vladimir worked at

a huge corporation and held a very

high position. Then, for reasons beyond

his control, he was forced to leave

that corporation. As you know, he worked with

the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), and that became

an insurmountable obstacle to his

bright and promising corporate career.

Nevertheless, he is a wonderful person.

Everyone knows him, and he could very

easily go into business. But

when Vladimir decides in which city

in Russia he could open his own business

and do business, he would never

choose Moscow, because he looks at

the ease-of-doing-business ranking, in which

Moscow occupies a shameful

30th place among Russian cities. And

Vladimir is with us today because in

our—our program there are provisions about

how to move Moscow from that shameful 30th place

to a leading position;

how to make sure that all leases for

all premises belonging to the city

are visible and transparent. You go online

and you see at what price

city-owned premises are rented out, to whom

they are rented, and you can check whether

they are being subleased—whether someone

takes them from the city for 1,000 rubles and then simply

rents them out for three times as much, as

happens with

95% of all municipal premises.

Our program includes provisions on how

make it easier

to connect to the power grid. How

to make it easier to obtain

construction permits for

so that businesses could develop in Moscow

business. Thank you, Vladimir, for

joining us. Oksana is a wonderful

member of our team, who is currently running

our presentation right now

she's hiding under the table, talking

on the phone. She's a wonderful young woman

but she has a problem. The thing is, in

Oksana's courtyard, there's a dark

passageway, and through this dark

passageway she has to walk, and in this dark

passageway, someone regularly gets their

bag snatched. Oksana is a wonderful young woman, but

she has the kind of build that all sorts of thugs

apparently find it fairly easy to

take

her bag. In this passageway there is

a camera, but Oksana knows perfectly well that this

camera—we found this out at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF)

—was installed after a secret

tender for installing cameras, in which

one single company won, and all

the cameras that were installed are either

fake—just dummies—or they simply

produce no footage at all. We will replace

them everywhere we can, and the experience

of Singapore, Hong Kong, and London can in Moscow

absolutely

be applied. Thank you very much that Oksana is with

us, and to conclude this part, I would like

to say that for everyone who is on

this stage, and probably everyone who

is in this hall,

we all understand that it would be completely

hypocritical to say: let's just

tweak things here, patch things there, put

up a video camera here, and that something will change without

some kind of political change. That is

absolutely not the case. We understand that not

a single reform will work without basic

political conditions. In Moscow, deputies

must be those whom people elected. We

need honest elections. All residents must

have the right to a notification-based procedure

for holding any public events or demonstrations.

We must not have censorship in Moscow's

media. And everyone standing on this stage, everyone who

is in this hall—I think we all

believe and understand that when we begin

to implement this in Moscow, by implementing it

we will change Russia. Change Russia—start with Moscow. This is

our practical

slogan.

We know exactly what to do. We have a program

that, together with these right words, we

will get what we want from Muscovites:

support and victory. That means for us there are no

toy elections—we are going into these elections

with complete seriousness. The question of power in

Russia, in Moscow, is absolutely serious. We

understand perfectly well that Putin, Sobyanin, and the whole

rest of the Kremlin

will not stop this election campaign on September 8, and

beyond, until we bring these ideas to everyone

we want to reach. For us, an election

campaign is not interaction with

the election commission, but interaction

with voters. That is what we will

be doing. Once again, I thank everyone who

has joined our volunteer groups already

now. The people here, those of us sitting here, we

have learned how to work properly with

these 5,000—and there will be many more of them—

how to organize them properly, and then we will have

such a force that nothing will

matter against it: neither censorship, nor administrative

resources, nor fraud. Friends, thank you

so much. We will definitely

win. Thank you.

And so we have come to assert our rights.