Alexei Navalny’s meeting with voters in Moscow’s Profsoyuznaya district

A question, a question.

How are you going to solve this problem, I mean—

our district, generally speaking, is located in

the most elite part of the city, but it’s neglected, and

my second question: are you following the Bolotnaya case

involving the 12 defendants, and what

is your view overall? So, two questions.

First: how can we make sure the district is

not as neglected as it is now? And the second

question is only about the Bolotnaya case.

The answer to the first question is very simple.

Let’s come back to this again: 1.6 trillion

rubles in Moscow’s budget—there is enough money

to create much better public amenities overall, and

there is already enough money

to make sure that this horror and nightmare

really would not exist in an elite district of Moscow.

There is a sea of money in Moscow. What matters is that this

money should not simply go to some

contractors. Just look at the budget and

you will clearly see where all the

money goes: giant construction projects, giant

projects accountable to no one, costing four times

more. Look—there are 400 billion

rubles allocated for road construction. That’s about 15

kilometers of roads over the past year. The average

cost per kilometer of road in Moscow’s budget

is $38 million.

An excellent German Autobahn

with four lanes costs three times less.

Here, everything is built at several times

the cost, and the result of this

economic activity, unfortunately,

is what we discover here for ourselves, while they discover it

for themselves in the form of

new palaces on the southern coast of France,

apartments in Miami, and so on. It

is all very simple. It’s all simply about

money that we should be spending on

ourselves, yes.

Probably the Academy of Sciences, city—

federal land.

Because people go to the courts over

all sorts of issues; the courts are really a matter for lawyers.

That brings us precisely to the second question, about

the Bolotnaya case.

Of course I’m following it. I do not have the right

to attend the trial itself. Many people

ask me why I’m not sitting in the courtroom at

the Bolotnaya case—but I’ve been listed as a witness.

If I go into the courtroom, then as a

witness I can no longer be questioned. But

of course I am following the Bolotnaya case.

Random people are sitting in jail over it, and it is our shared

responsibility to make sure that these

people, who are clearly being used for intimidation,

that these innocent people are released.

As for the Ministry of Justice—continuing the theme

of local improvements—this is why I say that

local deputies—for example, the local deputies

who are here—should, and you together with

the local deputies, should resolve such

issues. And that is why local residents should have

these powers, because honestly speaking,

no one at 13 Tverskaya (Moscow City Hall’s address) cares

about what is happening here. It’s simply

not interesting to them. Just to be safe, they

don’t permit you anything. In general, they are not

interested until someone suddenly

gets the idea of building a shopping

center here.

That’s when it becomes interesting to them. All these

issues should be handed over to residents, and

the money exists for residents to solve

these issues. And we have enough trust in ourselves

for all this—we are fully capable of

solving these problems.

United Russia has an enormous budget

as a party, probably billions. And you

probably do not even have one percent

Nemtsov doesn’t have one percent either, and

Yabloko doesn’t have one percent either.

Some have even less. Why don’t you unite?

Do you really not understand

that even with all our enormous sympathy for Nemtsov

and Yavlinsky, why—after all, you all want

the same thing. Do you really not

understand that if you do not unite, you will achieve

nothing, and in 10 years people here will still

be saying:

‘So how is life in Moscow? Not good.’

That last remark was not very

politically correct. So,

first: yes, United Russia really does have

huge amounts of money. As for me, I don’t have even

one percent—not even one hundredth of a percent.

Despite the fact that these 10,000 people,

as I said, have transferred 20 million

rubles—we have raised 20 million rubles so far for the campaign,

and that is still not one percent of what the other

parties have. But I have something far

greater,

a hundred times more powerful: you.

You, the people who want this. Maybe not all of you

support me, but at least you came to

listen to me. I am sure that if this

were a United Russia meeting here, then

people would be coming not in flip-flops but with tomatoes,

whereas everyone who came here came without tomatoes,

without rotten eggs. And that matters. Money does not

decide everything. It matters, but it does not decide everything.

And until we understand that ourselves, we

will achieve nothing. Everything is decided by whether

100 people who came to a meeting

tell 10,000 other people about this

meeting—and no television channel will wash

people’s brains that effectively. So money

is less important as long as there is popular support.

As for everyone uniting,

well, unfortunately we must remember that

there has never been a time when everyone

united. This is politics; there are personal

ambitions, and so on. You can look

at the opinion polls and see that

yes, Sobyanin is in first place, then perhaps

with a gap, but I am in second place, and

then, far behind, come all the

others. But even despite that, it would have been

Logically, they should support me, but they won’t.

They won’t do it. I’m not going to

criticize them here.

People are people. It will never work out so that

we can unite in a way that, first and foremost, the authorities won’t allow.

That means they will

push their own controlled, handpicked

pocket candidates. From the very beginning, the whole thing

Sobyanin’s campaign was

pre-programmed: there’s handsome me, Sobyanin,

and then there are some absolutely

worthless couple of candidates who aren’t

running any real campaign, and I get

75%. We managed to break that script. We forced them

to register us because

we started campaigning, and we

proved to them that no one would believe in these

elections. Maybe Sobyanin would have won with

a marketed 70 percent, but at the same time

turnout would have been 10 percent, and those elections

would have meant nothing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

It would be good — I completely

agree with you. It would be good if

tomorrow I were the one single united

candidate and the election were Navalny

versus Sobyanin. Everything would be much

more useful, but that’s an unattainable dream.

People are people, they have ambitions, and that

has to be accepted. But then our task, as

voters, becomes more

responsible. That means we must

vote more carefully. Is that right?

Yes. Please, go ahead.

Is this Mikhail Prokhorov’s electorate?

Listen, look at me and at Mikhail

Prokhorov. Again, I’m certainly not going to

criticize Mikhail Prokhorov,

and I’m not going to put on some kind of

grand performance for you here. I’m simply

who I am. I’ve lived in the same place for 15 years,

in the same apartment. I’m absolutely a person

who lives the life of an ordinary Muscovite (Moscow resident)

every day, and my electorate is ordinary

people. It doesn’t matter whether they were for Prokhorov or not.

When I talk about how

money is stolen from the budget, that concerns everyone.

When I say that through procurement alone

30,000 rubles a year are stolen from each of us

(about $900 at the time), well, that concerns everyone. When I

talk about migration, that concerns everyone. It’s not

about Prokhorov. I just know that

in my building entrance — and I assure you that in

the southeast, migration-related problems are even

worse — women are simply afraid

to leave the building in the evening. I just know

this. What difference does it make whether those women

voted for Prokhorov, for someone else, or

even for Putin? Maybe they voted for him.

I just want them to believe

in my program, because I’m saying that I

will solve this problem. What difference does it make

who they supported before? I think Prokhorov

has probably never once in his life tried to book an appointment through

this electronic queue at a state clinic, whereas I

have — or rather, I tried to

several times. I know that

we supposedly have an electronic registration system, but

there’s a notice posted saying that appointments through

the internet and the electronic registration desk

are available every Tuesday and Wednesday from such-and-such

time at such-and-such window. It’s absurd.

That’s why I’m running in this election: to

solve the problems that I

face, that my family faces. My

electorate is simply ordinary

normal people. There’s only one question:

how many people will be able to learn anything at all about

me and my program in a situation where I

have no access to television. That’s why I came

here — to persuade you, and tomorrow

maybe you’ll persuade someone else. Your question?

Please tell me, why are these

meetings — their time and place — kept so secret?

How can people find out where they’ll

be held? As for the secrecy, I

can say this: first, this is a trial

meeting. We’re all very

anxious about whether it will work. No one

has ever done anything like this before. It’s an absolute

something new in the history of

political work in general, when people

simply organize meetings like this themselves.

Because the usual kind of politics is simple:

we take money from someone — either

oligarchs or the Presidential Administration —

and with that money we run ads on Channel One,

and that’s the whole of our politics. So

we’re very worried about how

this will all go, and whether people will come.

Will people come? As I already said, at

the first meeting with me there came

three people. And I spent an hour

talking with them, and then another

30 people came. Well, that’s my duty.

There’s no other way. If we publicize them widely,

there’s also this particular issue:

we’re the only ones who are actually running an

election campaign. The others, unfortunately,

really aren’t campaigning at all. If I were

to announce it loudly, there’d be 45

photographers running around here, and they’d prevent me from

talking with you. That’s why — everyone kept telling me,

“He’s not meeting voters, he’s just doing PR.”

So for now I’m notifying only residents

of the neighboring district, so that I can genuinely

meet with voters. Your

question now.

Let’s return to New Moscow (the 2012 expansion of Moscow’s territory), my view

and to Law 43 on expropriation. This is an excellent —

actually a brilliant example of the nonsense, chaos, and

corruption connected with it, which

are happening because they passed this

law on simplified land seizure, and now it’s

very easy to take land away from anyone

in order to move

federal government bodies there. But at the same time

they have already said that federal government bodies

will not, in fact, be moved there.

Then why the hell, why the hell did you pass

this law again? I believe that the issue we

have is that the concentration of offices and everything else in the center

is far too high. That is, we live in

our enormous country where, if nothing else,

there is plenty of land, yet we live packed together like sardines in a

barrel. But the issue of expanding Moscow is

really a matter

of architectural planning, at the very least

for a year. We need to calculate how much

the relocation will cost, how much

new public transport will cost, how much

people who will be commuting will have to pay.

This cannot be decided just like that, with us

simply deciding by popular impulse whether to move it or not.

All of this will cost us

trillions, and until the Moscow mayor's office

does what it is supposed to do and does not

invite the best experts here,

the best urban planners, does not calculate all of this

and does not show us these calculations so that we

can verify them, until then answering

this question is impossible. Let's simply

in two weeks.

There are a lot of you, a lot. Let's try

there, for those who haven't spoken yet, yes.

And now this store, it is now 20

meters

which are

at the moment the owner of the store, the owner

of the central store, is a company

registered in Ukraine, uh, LLC Max.

So now they have received permission from

and the store

with an area of 2,050

sq. m.,

with an underground area for 20 minutes

A person lives opposite it.

Where should they turn?

A basic case like this. Go ahead, go ahead.

I'll start answering. This is an absolutely typical

situation. This situation also perfectly

reflects how power is structured in

Moscow. A person lives across the

road, and downstairs there is a small store

which used to function as a small

store, but now they have received permission

to build a 2,500-square-meter

two-story building, 2,050 square meters,

and it will completely

poison life in that building again.

Why does this happen? Because all

decisions are made there, not here at the

local level, but somewhere out there.

Some obscure official

who does not even know what is happening here

simply received a small

bag of money and therefore signed

the permit to build the store. That's

all. And all of this can be resolved only

in one way: all authority over

approving or rejecting such facilities

that are located directly

next to residential buildings must belong to the residents,

including local deputies, so that

at least for small

projects there is none of this

interference from Moscow City Hall. We will help

you, of course, to appeal this once again,

to file complaints, and so on. But I want

to tell you that we will never solve piecemeal

issues, spot development, an individual

store, as long as power is structured in such a

ugly way, you know.

Naturally, here everyone, you know, about

the reconstruction of Leninsky Prospekt

nearby, they announced that they would

reconstruct Leninsky Prospekt.

When the residents raised hell, they announced

that they would not rebuild Leninsky

Prospekt. It is obvious that on September 9, after

the elections, they expect to win and

then start reconstructing it again.

Leninsky Prospekt. So we can

express our outrage and for a while

stop all this, but overall this

this

idiotic system, where some people

whom we did not even elect make

decisions we do not want, will

remain in place as long as there remains

this kind of power, this power of United

Russia, Sobyanin, and so on. Just a question

for the local deputy. I want to hear

from the person who is supposed to deal

with exactly these kinds of things.

Alexei Gusev, district deputy. Well, actually

my question was a little

different; it concerned the elections, uh, basically.

Can these elections be considered the beginning

of the campaign, including for the

2014 elections to the Moscow City

Duma, and will you

personally take part in them, and in what

capacity?

My friends, unfortunately, like any

independent politician, I perhaps more than

anything work in such a way as to try

to be useful to you and improve life

around us every day. But to make predictions

about 2014 is difficult for me. You

know, quite recently, basically,

I had such... I mean, there was that whole

they jailed him, then released him, and so on.

So as for 2014, I do not have

any plans. My task right now

is to bring politics back altogether,

to treat elections as an actual choice, so that

candidates finally emerge who

meet with voters,

who come and listen to pleasant

and unpleasant questions. When we achieve this

situation, when we make it so that

there are candidates like us, like

me, who will meet people in courtyards,

who will raise money from ordinary people rather than

rely on some oligarchs,

and so on, then we will win in

in 2014 or in any other year

right now our task is to make sure

that Moscow pushes back against United Russia

that Moscow pushes back against the Kremlin, and that Moscow

pushes back against this system in which 10

or 20 or 100 families have grabbed everything for themselves

the national wealth that belongs

to the country, and are giving no one any chance to live or

to resist

How do you feel

about fighting gay pride parades? What

kind of idea do you have of my fighting gay pride parades?

They walk, and I run against them? I’m answering

your question.

So, our task is to make sure that

no one is fighting anyone where

there is no need to fight. We all have the

constitutionally guaranteed right

to assemble peacefully and without weapons.

Left-wingers, right-wingers, gays, heterosexuals—

it doesn’t matter who they are. The authorities’ job

the job of Moscow City Hall

is to ensure everyone’s safety. Let them go quietly,

calmly—let them go. The main thing

is that no one beats them and they beat no one. If

someone there is running around naked or something else,

that is simply an offense

covered by the administrative code.

Detain them, fine them, and move on. Let’s not

try to control

every second of people’s lives everywhere. Residents are residents; they have

the right to gather, both those who want to and those

who don’t like them. The authorities’ job

is to make sure they do not

kill each other. Your question?

You mean the restructuring

of the Academy of Sciences. This is actually very important,

especially in your district, where

a large number of members of the scientific

intelligentsia and the institutions themselves are concentrated.

The thing is, as you know, the Academy

of Sciences has an enormous amount of

land and property; it is simply a very wealthy

organization.

And the authorities said: well, what is this—some

elderly professors, old men who

don’t understand anything, and they are managing

all this land and wealth worth

billions—why don’t we manage it

all ourselves instead? Well,

excuse me, maybe those old men are

very old and do not always keep up,

but at the very least those old men have received

Nobel Prizes—they are outstanding scientists. And

when I’m told: let’s have it managed not by the old men

anymore, but by some kind of

clever young men, these crafty fellows who

appeared from who knows where, these

phony managers—I say no. And if

they want to change the system for managing

the Academy of Sciences’ property, then let it be

transparent. Then let them create a system under which

we can know for certain, for example, in

this building—an office building, one of the largest—

what is being rented out and at what price,

and at what price it is then being subleased.

Let them do it that way. But they

simply want to take this property away from

the old men and manage it themselves. But

the old men have at least earned their place; we at least

understand where they came from. But we

absolutely do not understand where

this gang of swindlers came from, the ones who

say they are better. So I view this negatively.

There are things there that need to be changed, but

not in this way at all. Yes, your

question.

And as for the series of five-story buildings not slated for demolition,

as I already said, in your

district this is a less pressing issue.

But there are districts like Zyuzino where this is absolutely

a pressing matter. Simply put, these five-story buildings

were built in

the 1960s, and each of them had an

originally planned service life of 25

years. That service life has expired; repairing

them further is pointless—it will all be

more expensive. Yet they are being repaired now, and as I

already said, even the demolishable five-story buildings were illegally

removed from the program because

there is no more money to be made from them. There

used to be a scheme under Luzhkov (former Moscow mayor) through which they

simply made a lot of money

off these five-story buildings. But now there is no profit

in it, so they say: well, we won’t

demolish the five-story blocks because

we personally won’t earn anything from it. The city

most definitely has the money for

rehousing people from the five-story housing stock; it needs

to be resettled. That is my direct answer: they need

to be demolished and residents rehoused.

Alexei, well, I’ll say it directly too: I

fully support you. Just a big

human thank-you to you for what you are doing. I

wanted to ask about election observers, but of course we have

a certain magician, as we all know, and

the elections accordingly may come with a well-known

outcome.

So, regarding observers: when are you

going to

announce who will be able to become an observer?

By what criteria will you select

people, and will you be doing that—that is,

will observers go to the elections

through your campaign, from your side as observers? Because

we really can achieve a great deal,

and then the magical Churov (former head of Russia’s Central Election Commission) will come along

and twist his magic

switches, and all the votes will somehow

evaporate.

We took this very seriously

a year ago, when the presidential

elections were held, and thanks to that we now have

around 2,500 commission members in Moscow

with voting rights. Of course, we

remember the experience of the last State Duma elections,

when observers were literally grabbed by the arms and

legs, carried out of polling stations, and thrown out, and

And then, when it comes to these elections, I...

I won't get anything done here without you. We...

will announce a truly large-scale

recruitment drive for election observers. I'm sure we can

mobilize at least five to six thousand people

to cover all the polling stations

of which there are 3,200 in Moscow, and

here I will be relying entirely on your help

in this operation, because my

campaign headquarters cannot monitor every single station. This will be

the most important task, and of course we will fight

for every vote—we earn them

with such effort.

We go out, I go out, persuading people,

convincing them. Of course, we will not let these

people simply steal our votes from us, as

happens in every election in

Moscow.

Sorry for asking a second time, but the thing is

that a serious campaign has already begun against you—

or rather, propaganda and counter-

propaganda. Please tell us:

your internship at Yale University, and

it is said that this internship was arranged for you

by obvious enemies of Russia,

people like Genrikh and so on. Could you

explain that a little, please?

Please explain it firsthand, especially since

the media may amplify it somehow. This is

a very serious image issue, and

it affects trust in you.

He would be surprised if he even knew

that I existed at all. Indeed, this

negative brainwashing campaign has been going on

constantly, on television. I think that

in the last two or three weeks before the election

it will intensify dramatically, because they

can see, just as we can, that our ratings

are rising, that our election campaign

really is reaching voters, and they

will say even worse things on television.

As for my studies at Yale, this is really

just a question of whether

people should study at good educational institutions or

not, whether we value education at all or

not. I can tell you that at

Yale University,

60% of the students are Chinese, because China

realized that education is something

worth investing in, and China,

for example,

sends hundreds of thousands of students to

the best universities and pays for them

itself, so that they return and work, and

they have been doing this for many, many years.

And now even Chinese universities

unfortunately are far ahead of

our Moscow State University in the rankings.

In effect, they are trying to tell us on television

that apparently we should be

as backward as possible, never study

at the best universities, and anyone who

studied or went abroad to do something

is a spy.

It's especially funny to hear this

from people whose own children

study abroad. You may have read

my investigation into Zheleznyak

and those deputies, those loudmouths who are always

fighting 'foreign agents': one of them has

a daughter studying in England, another in

Switzerland. He pays for their education

more than he earns. They all themselves

live there, they educate their children

there, and yet they reproach me for the fact that I

spent half a year at Yale University. We

should be sending students abroad to study;

this has practical value.

For example, for Moscow: Moscow does not have enough

general practitioners. We can train them, but

medical education in Moscow is very poor—

indeed, in Russia as a whole.

Russian medicine has fallen 20 years behind

the rest of the world. We simply need to send thousands of

students abroad to study

so that they come back here and treat us

better. You see, we have

a paradoxical situation. For example, in terms of

the number of scanners—serious

medical equipment that

diagnoses cancer and other complex

diseases—we surpass others in the number of

scanners per capita; we are ahead of

London and ahead of European countries.

But if you try to go to a

clinic and sign up for an MRI,

you will wait two months. And if you pay for

an MRI, it will cost 60,000 rubles. No one knows how

to operate these scanners. We have

a lot of them, but our cancer diagnostics

are still just as limited, our

prevention is still poor, and our

recovery rates are appalling, like in Africa,

because no one knows how to work with the equipment. So, for example,

with doctors, we should simply identify

the best students and send them abroad,

pay for them, so that they come back

and help us. Why not simply improve

our education here? Why do we need

to send anyone anywhere? Is that easier?

You know, nothing can be done the easy way.

It has to be done properly.

If countries that grow by 10% a year,

for example China, have been doing this for many

years and have achieved success, then we should

do it too. Of course, we must invest

in our universities, we must invest in our

science, but unfortunately we see that

the only question that was asked about

science concerns how they want to take

property away from scientists and carve it up.

So we must not simply allow ourselves

to be fooled. This entire elite

is itself oriented exclusively toward the West.

If you look at what we can

be proud of, for example, among our

officials, there is this remarkable fact:

all the houses in London are more expensive than...

Russian officials are buying million-pound properties.

Officials. Right, right, right, right — here is the answer to your

question. Yes, please.

60,000 rubles

The question is that it is impossible to get a child

into a school. You either have to register them at an address here

or, yes, it can be done without registration, but for that

they ask a standard rate of 60,000 rubles — an absolutely

standard situation. More than that,

speaking again about problems — why do they concern me?

Those same schools. Do you know that

there is currently a process of merging schools?

Here, as far as I know, School No. 525 — I needed to check —

School No. 523 was merged with a kindergarten,

and the head of the kindergarten became the director.

I know these

problems because my wife is

a member of a school parents' committee

that is also dealing with the merger of neighboring schools with

a kindergarten. All the mothers are up in arms, and

no one is even explaining anything to them.

In fact, what is happening is illegal.

After all, in theory we now have open

electronic enrollment. And when someone

asks for 60,000 rubles to secure a place, well,

that is simply, you understand, this familiar

corruption. Everyone knows that a child can be placed

in any school for a bribe. Nevertheless,

this keeps happening all the time. And at the same time,

here in Moscow, we allocate so much money

to education, so very much

is available, that we could, without any

problem at all, fully staff schools. And teachers,

by the way, now earn quite

a lot. School principals, principals of schools,

receive enormous sums, really

200,000 to 300,000 rubles. So there is certainly no shortage of money for

providing for children in Moscow — there is plenty of it.

Now, if I were running here for

mayor of, say, the city of Kostroma,

and you told me, “We want schools or a clinic in our district,”

I would tell you:

“Guys, I understand what you want, but we just don’t have the money.”

But here we have the opposite, paradoxical

situation. I’m telling you, we have money —

simply a sea of it — and yet we still do not get

the schools children need, nor

the clinics, because instead they build some kind of

incomprehensible interchanges at three times

the proper cost. You could build the interchanges and

still have a huge amount of money left. Yes, go ahead, a question.

Please comment on your statement that

the price of goods does not depend at all on

corruption. You probably did not quite

understand me, because I did not say

that.

What I said was: this is how it will be in the city,

this is the kind of Moscow we will create. And when

we truly manage to change

this government, we really will make it so

that the price of products will not depend on

corruption, and there will be no corrupt

component. Living in Moscow is very expensive.

It is hard even for a working Muscovite to live here,

so what can we say about

pensioners? Everything in Moscow is more expensive, everything.

And these are not my calculations, but

the calculations of international companies and

various analysts, who say that

in the price of practically any product in

Moscow — a carton of milk, a kilogram of meat,

and so on — 30 percent

is a corruption-related markup. That is why, before

you, my friends, here I say: I do not want to

pay 30% more myself, and I do not believe that we

should have to pay 30% more. That is why I am

here. Because all of us can change

this. Because all of us must

come and say: “Stop robbing us. We

know how to do things differently, and we

will definitely achieve this, my friends.” I

want to thank you all. I have to

go to the next meeting.

I have three of them a day, three meetings a day. I

thank you for coming. For

me, it is very important that you listened

to me. I ask you to support me and

reach out to your neighbors however you can,

tell them about this speech, and help

me break this system of propaganda

that intoxicates everyone, that makes everyone

lose their minds. Thank you very much, thank you.