Alexei Navalny’s Street Movement

The informal leader of the opposition’s Coordination Council tells MK: “The regime will fall if everyone who sat at home outraged by torture and corruption takes to the streets”

The election to the opposition’s Coordination Council has taken place, and the 45 elected members have already held their first meeting and issued their first statement. But whether the new body will actually function remains unclear. Critics mock the modest figure of 86,000 voters and suggest that 45 people with different views will never be able to reach agreement. Some also claim the election was needed only to legitimize Alexei Navalny as the opposition’s leader. Navalny did indeed win the race and, as expected, received the most votes. What does Navalny himself think about this? What hopes does he place in the Coordination Council, and what achievements and failures does he see in the protest movement’s less than a year of existence? He spoke about all this with an MK correspondent.

— It brings back memories of events almost a year ago: the spontaneous first rally, the mass protests over the election results. Back then, no one expected anything like this to begin in our country, but even more unexpected is where we’ve ended up a year later—opposition elections, arrests... Did you imagine then that this could happen?

— Hardly anyone, myself included, heading to the December 5 rally, could have imagined that the country would undergo changes as dramatic as the ones we see now. But whereas in late December and in March it seemed these were positive changes—that Russia might move toward building a European-style state—now it feels different.

— That we’ve turned toward Belarus or Kazakhstan?

— That the people who were frightened by the road to Europe and prefer the road to Belarus or Kazakhstan have become highly mobilized. Once they realized that losing the levers of control meant losing enormous sums of money, they took steps they had previously not dared to take.

— Such as?

— For example, they abducted a man on the territory of another country, kept him in a basement without food or water, chained in handcuffs, and beat a confession out of him—that’s more of a Latin American сценарий (this refers to Leonid Razvozzhayev, charged in the “Anatomy of Protest-2” case, who said he had been abducted in Ukraine. — Ed.). It would be an exaggeration to say that over this protest year the authorities saw the ground slipping from under their feet, but they definitely saw unrest and a loss of control. And they took the only action available to them: they compensated for that loss of control with repression.

The authorities have three ways of solving every problem. First, television, which tells people how wonderful everything is in the country and that no change is needed. Second, the police, who arrest people, intimidate them, and carry out searches. Third, bribery: handing out jobs and money to the discontented. Lately, the first and third methods have stopped working. Huge amounts of money are sent to the Caucasus, and there is still a civil war there. They poured 660 billion rubles into Vladivostok—about $21 billion at the time—and people are still unhappy. You can’t buy everyone off: you can’t arrange corporate gigs for every performer, publish books for every writer, and set up foundations for every political analyst. And the attempt to crush everyone with crude TV propaganda has also failed. That’s why they turned to repression.

— You speak of repression, but all the opposition leaders are still free, even Udaltsov (though he could be jailed at any moment). Do you think it hasn’t really begun yet?

— The authorities are acting gradually, trying to cultivate a kind of tolerance for repression in society: first searches, then one arrest, then three, then eleven, then absurd criminal cases are opened. Now it has emerged that someone was tortured. It’s as if they’re trying to feel out the threshold beyond which people will definitely pour into the streets in outrage.

— Then why have the rallies started drawing fewer people?

— Protest is not a linear process. The May 6 rally was barely prepared for, there wasn’t much campaigning, and everyone thought it would flop—but more people came out than ever before. The September 15 rally, by contrast, was carefully prepared, and fewer people showed up. When I arrived at the December 5, 2011 rally and saw 10,000 people there, I thought it was the biggest rally I had ever spoken at. Now 40,000 turn up and we think, “Not enough”...

— Can you forecast how this situation will develop—what comes next?

— A harsh confrontation between those who want to live normally in their own country, with Russia’s trillions of dollars in oil and gas rents distributed fairly, and those who want that money to keep going to a hundred thousand people—the authorities and those who serve them. And this confrontation will intensify: these people will not voluntarily give up the power they have appropriated—we will have to take it away from them.

— Fine, but these same ideas were voiced at the first rallies. We began by talking about the emergence of the Coordination Council. Why was it needed? And how will it help achieve these goals?

— The creation of the Coordination Council was not our whim—it was a response to people’s demands. Remember, before rallies the most popular pastime was voting on Facebook over who should speak and who should be on the organizing committee. We simply turned that into a legitimate procedure, responding to people’s natural desire to have a choice. Participants in the protest movement are different: they have different views on whether a rally should be officially authorized, and different preferences when it comes to speakers. So they elected a 45-member body in which each person represents a particular position close to their voters.

— And how are these 45 people supposed to reach agreement among themselves now?

— It will undoubtedly be a difficult political process—we’ll vote and make decisions. Some fundamental issues will be put to a general vote; that is the advantage of direct democracy: people need intermediaries far less when they can vote directly. For those who have already registered and gone through the whole ordeal of verification, voting will take one minute, and we will definitely continue registration. We have a lot of work ahead to prevent individual people from trying to pull the blanket over themselves. The dominance of personal ambition is something we will have to overcome.

— And then there’s nepotism: Ksenia Sobchak might start influencing Ilya Yashin’s decisions...

— Or Gudkov Jr. influencing Gudkov Sr., or vice versa. (Laughs.) We put all these people through an election—and now they don’t do what they personally feel like doing, they answer to the demands of those who elected them.

— So much effort went into creating the voting system and fending off all those hacker attacks during the election... Wouldn’t it have been easier to create, say, a party and let that do the work later? Why did you decide to build a fundamentally new model?

— For us, this is a way to outsmart the system. It is designed so that any formal structure is under the authorities’ control. Imagine a little pen (Alexei draws a “pen.” — Ed.). Here is the place for parties, here for civic organizations, here for some kind of public council attached to the Interior Ministry’s local department. But we stepped out and said we would not sit in that pen with everyone else—we would create our own body, one that would truly be representative. You set up a party, and the Justice Ministry can obstruct you at any moment, even under the new simplified rules. You have to open regional branches, collect piles of paperwork—and all so that two crooks at the Justice Ministry can nitpick some formality, and if they’ve been told to find fault, they will do it anyway. If you open an NGO and that too is inconvenient for the authorities, they will shut you down as a “foreign agent” because some citizen of Belarus transferred 100 rubles to your account and you failed to notice. Our answer was to create our own formal system, but we are not an organization, and the authorities cannot ban us. They shout that our election was pathetic, insignificant, and miserable, yet every column on United Russia’s website is devoted to these “pointless” elections, and the national TV channels are broadcasting about them...

— Isn’t 86,000 voters too few for a country like Russia?

— Anyone who has worked on party-building knows that the real number of active party members is tiny. Even the biggest party has only a few thousand truly active people. We had 86,000, and that is a lot.

— Was anything done wrong in this election? Now that it’s over, can you name the main mistakes?

— There are still doubts about whether the ideological quotas were necessary. In the end, many people simply refused to vote for the quotas. Even so, I wouldn’t say it was a mistake—it was a compromise between electing people already well known in the protest movement and representatives of non-systemic political forces. The left loves to shout that social demands are now coming to the forefront of the protest movement and that their ideology is therefore the most popular; the right says nationalists are the driving force of the protest; liberals say the truth is on their side... But it turned out that the more loudly people proclaim their political orientation, the less support they get.

— Is that why some of the best-known nationalists, such as Alexander Belov and Dmitry Demushkin, failed to make it into the Coordination Council?

— I think a major loss for the Coordination Council is that Belov did not get in. He worked very hard for this idea and did a great deal to make the election happen. Perhaps he did not mobilize his voters very effectively; perhaps voters were put off by the word “DPNI” in his biography. But in any case, a vote is a vote. It is a reason for everyone to mobilize their resources more effectively.

— What do you make of the view that this entire election was invented solely to make Alexei Navalny the legitimate president of the opposition?

— I take that calmly, because I know it isn’t true. Three hundred candidates, a significant number of them independent and quite well-known figures, certainly would not have agreed to serve as my “backdrop.” Let me be completely frank with you: it used to be easier for me. If someone asked, “Who is the leader of the opposition?” what would you have answered?

— I understand: let’s say most people really would have answered, “Navalny.”

— And the role of that kind of informal opposition leader is much more attractive. You are responsible for nothing, you have no formal powers, and there are no 44 other people with whom you have to coordinate joint actions. It was very interesting to watch the Coordination Council, just a week after being elected, put out a program of action on repression and torture. At midnight, Vinokurov (a Council member and owner of the TV channel Dozhd) created a Facebook group on the subject, and I was writing the program until three in the morning. No organizing committee would have done that. Why did we? Because the voters were pressuring us. Every Council member was getting messages on Twitter along the lines of: “O-kay... Razvozzhayev was tortured, and you’re just sitting there in silence? What did we elect you for?..” There I am, the “leader of the opposition,” sitting at home drinking tea. I don’t owe anyone anything; I have my own understanding of what I should be doing. Now the situation is completely different. Before, people would write to me asking, “Lyosha, please...” Now they write: “We voted for you, now get up and do it.” So personally I don’t need any legitimacy; I have something to show for myself: RosPil, RosYama, our investigations. I don’t need to prove to anyone...

— That you are the leader of the opposition?

— To prove that I amount to something. My team and I run investigations and projects for which many people support us. With the Coordination Council, it’s a different story. Yes, I came in first, and I’m very grateful to those who voted for me, but I am one of 45 and I have the same voting rights as everyone else.

— “First among equals,” like the Patriarch.

— I’d rather not make that analogy. (Laughs.) By the way, I’m against electing a chair of the Coordination Council, although such proposals were made.

— Setting aside the Coordination Council’s mistakes for the moment, what do you think the opposition’s mistakes have been from December 2011, when all this began, up to now?

— We have nothing to compare this to. All these phenomena were new; they came unexpectedly for everyone. Given that we are now in a situation where, among the Coordination Council members alone, seven are facing criminal prosecution, two are in prison, several are in hiding, and I myself am under investigation and barred from leaving the country, it is obvious that we did not do everything well enough. Otherwise Putin would not still be in power, or at the very least we would have succeeded in overturning the falsified State Duma election. We worked ineffectively when it came to securing our lawful rights. Far too much rhetorical hot air was spent discussing whether we should take part in local elections and whether we should keep holding rallies—after all, we’ve already rallied twice and Putin is still in the Kremlin!..

We need to press forward, not torment ourselves with endless doubts. The authorities have no such doubts—they defend their right to steal without much hesitation. But personally, I look at the situation with optimism. I have been involved in politics since 2000, and there have been much bleaker times. Now we have every means of getting our message to people, it has become easy to raise money, people finance us themselves, and there is no need to seek help from oligarchs and businessmen. And the fact that not everything has worked out for us so far is only one stage of the struggle. It is foolish to expect that people who have at their disposal 2 million police officers, half a million FSB officers, the administrative machinery of executive power across the country, television, and billions of dollars will simply surrender. The authorities are doomed; they are burning down both themselves and the country, but these people will resist for a long time yet. If someone with views like mine comes to power, it means they will lose their billions and their freedom. The country is still receiving colossal revenues from raw-material exports—and they do not want to give that money up to anyone. These are concrete figures with lots of zeros in Swiss bank accounts, protected by the police, the press, Channel One...

— And what do you think needs to be done to change the situation?

— We must persuade people to come out more often, stay longer, and show solidarity with political prisoners. For example, after what happened to Leonid Razvozzhayev, hundreds of thousands of people did not take to the streets, even though it is obvious they were outraged.

— Then why didn’t they come out?

— Because they still do not believe in their own strength. There is a well-known cartoon in which one policeman with a baton commands a thousand people, each of whom thinks: “Nothing depends on me.” The regime will fall within a day if everyone who sat at home outraged by torture and corruption takes to the streets. I truly believe that a peaceful, anti-criminal revolution in Russia is possible, and it will happen. Right now, the authorities are sustained solely by this idea in our heads that “nothing depends on me.”

— But if these people, as you say, will not leave on their own, how can the revolution be peaceful? They would have to be forced out.

— There is hope that some remnants of reason still remain there, and that if people take to the streets, they will not crush us with tanks and will still allow fair elections. In that case, they would lose 90% of their power, which would pass to genuinely elected bodies, but they would keep their freedom.

— Eduard Limonov has lately been amusing himself by writing verbal portraits of opposition leaders. About you he said: “Navalny does not consider himself a politician.” Is that true?

— In our country, politicians are viewed badly, and many people, knowing this, camouflage themselves by calling themselves “civic activists.” But I do not want to deceive anyone. My main activity is fighting corruption. Corruption is the main political problem in our country; the corrupt vertical has become a system of governance, so what I do is absolutely political. I do not write manifestos, but every line of my legal requests as a lawyer is full of politics.

— How is the Kirovles case progressing now?

— It has turned into a case about the life and work of Alexei Navalny. They are not even conducting a financial audit to explain where the 16 million rubles—about $500,000 at the time—that I am accused of embezzling supposedly came from. But at the beginning of the week they questioned a man I used to go to the gym with in college—I hadn’t seen him in six years, and he called me in total shock. They questioned a girl I worked with in Yabloko a year before I left for Kirov. They questioned her boss, whom I have never seen in my life. They searched my parents’ home. They seized my legal documents. What does any of that have to do with Kirovles?..

— Do you think that is because they lack enough material to convict you?

— And with an attempt to find at least some compromising material on me. They are once again checking my lawyer’s status, claiming it was obtained illegally, although that is untrue and has already been checked a hundred times. They are questioning people who were connected to me many years ago. On the one hand, it is ridiculous; on the other, it is unpleasant for the people involved. My unfortunate alleged accomplice, Pyotr Ofitserov, has five children. He made a living by traveling around the country and giving business seminars. For two months now he has not been allowed to travel, so he is sitting there with no income. That is how they blackmail him: testify against Navalny, or you’ll go broke. The case is fabricated. But when they show me on television, they add that this is the very same Navalny against whom a case has been opened over the theft of 16 million rubles, with four senior investigators assigned to it, FSB support, and me under travel restrictions.

— When Bastrykin ordered his subordinates to reopen the case, you said you were not afraid; when you were taken in for questioning, you said the same thing. But now, after charges were brought against Udaltsov and Razvozzhayev and Lebedev were arrested, haven’t you become afraid?

— I am still not afraid; otherwise I would not be doing what I do. I was conducting my investigations when I was a much less well-known person, and even then I understood that drugs or weapons could be planted on anyone and they could be jailed. But I was not afraid then, and even less so now.

— What do you think of the “Anatomy of Protest-2” case?

— It is all complete absurdity. You yourself were on Bolotnaya Square on May 6 when all this happened. What Georgian funding? What planned riots? Everything that happened was a spontaneous reaction by people to the fact that the police violated the approved layout for the rally and forced people to crowd onto a tiny patch of space instead of letting them proceed to the demonstration.

— You believe the story about Georgian funding is a lie. But speaking theoretically, do you think it is immoral to take money from representatives of foreign states to develop the protest movement?

— To develop the protest movement, first, there is no need to take money from foreigners, and second, there is no necessity for it. What would the money even be spent on? People do not go to rallies for money. Of course, you need a stage, and city hall will require us to install portable toilets, but these are not enormous sums. If you need money now, you can write about it, open an online wallet, and raise it. It is not easy—you have to account for every ruble spent—but it can be done. We raised 3 million rubles for rallies at a time. It is for creating a party and taking part in local elections that you need serious money.

— So do you support participation in local elections or not? On the one hand, you have spoken critically about it, but on the other, you campaigned for Yevgenia Chirikova in Khimki.

— In Khimki there was an obvious candidate, and it was clear that the authorities would throw all their resources into preventing Chirikova from winning, but it still had to be done. I support participation in campaigns where there is a real candidate. But the idea that participation in local elections is mandatory, that we must build from the bottom up, is complete nonsense. We saw how the systemic opposition—Yabloko, RPR-PARNAS, Democratic Choice—rushed into regional elections. For example, all of them, together with Prokhorov, united and declared that they would give the system a decisive battle in Saratov, Volodin’s home turf. They invested huge sums and resources—and what was the result? 1.5 percent. Of course, many of their votes were stolen, but you cannot defeat the system in local elections. It is built exactly like the little pen I drew for you. If there is a candidate and he wants to run, then let him run, but it is fundamentally wrong to see that as the main method of struggle. It is a deceptive and false system: without political reform, participation in elections is impossible. I do not claim to possess the one true opinion. Let a hundred flowers bloom. But to say that we do not need rallies, that instead we should go and try to win a seat in the town council of Vsevolozhsk, is to work for Putin.

— And are negotiations with the authorities acceptable?

— They are already happening, these negotiations. We brought crowds of people into the streets and voiced our demands. The authorities brought out crowds of migrant workers and municipal utility employees and said “no.” We brought out even more people—and the authorities began repression. So now we need to make sure that millions take to the streets.

— But the systemic opposition is convinced that it is worth negotiating with the Kremlin.

— Negotiations involving all these representatives of the systemic parties are daily capitulation. They say: “Give us money to take part in elections to some municipal assembly. We’ll steal half of it and get our 1 percent.” I am not interested in that money, and I am not interested in a simulated political system. I am fighting for something else: I want my children to receive the kind of education a country with a budget like this can afford. I want not to spend two hours driving in traffic from Maryino, even though we have enough money to rebuild the entire road system and create proper interchanges. I am fighting for quality healthcare. We have more police officers than most countries in the world, yet our murder rate is on a par with Zimbabwe. I do not need their stolen billions—I need a normal quality of life for people. That is my sincere motivation. And if all that worked, I would be perfectly happy to be an ordinary lawyer earning a good living and not going to any rallies.