Meeting with Alexei Navalny in Yekaterinburg. Part 2

So there’s no need to go into

all sorts of weeds, background, and so

on. So I’d just say

a few words about kickbacks, and then

we’d move on to questions, because

practice shows that this is the most

interesting part of the program.

Now, kickbacks—

how much is stolen through public procurement in our country? We all

remember President Medvedev saying,

how much?

A trillion.

A trillion. Exactly right. What is being done

to preserve that trillion in some

form? Nothing. In other words, here

at the level of rhetoric, they say: "Oh,

a trillion, a trillion, our trillion is gone,

how are we going to save the trillion?" But

absolutely nothing happens. Take

Luzhkov, for example, right? At every level

it was said that he was a terrible scoundrel,

that he stole everything, that his wife is a billionaire—this

was said on television. Horrific,

exposé reports. Medvedev

said it, Putin said it too. And

what came of it? Not a single criminal case was

opened, and, uh, there isn’t even

any serious investigation under way.

Resin, yes, the Moscow construction complex,

so much was said about it—watches worth

a million dollars, and so on.

Nothing—he is still

the first deputy mayor of Moscow, and absolutely

nothing is happening. Your favorite

governor, Misharin, excuse me, is another

fine character. And the things he does,

he does completely openly. And

absolutely everyone sitting in this

hall knows, including about

Volkov’s latest investigation

into that wonderful case involving

a candle factory, a plywood plant,

which exists only on paper, but

nevertheless somehow miraculously

receives budget subsidies. So, uh,

we see no real action from the authorities in this

regard at all—absolutely

none.

Just rhetoric. And

not very convincing rhetoric at that. At the same

time, there is this rather

remarkable thing called Federal Law No. 94,

which, broadly speaking,

gives citizens

the anti-monopoly service, really anyone

the ability to monitor the public procurement

process, find these

corrupt tenders, and fairly

successfully challenge them. Even under the conditions of

our completely trashy

system, where everyone controls everything,

all the crooks control

other crooks, and so on. Even in

this system, these tenders can be successfully

canceled. So the idea arose, rather

spontaneously: why don’t we just

organize a group, monitor all this,

and get these tenders canceled? But as usual,

the idea was born, and then for a long time all of this

was chewed over somewhere in the comments,

and nothing happened, because there are

lots of ideas: let’s do it this way,

or that way, or let’s also

build a beautiful crystal palace.

Well, nothing happens. Until

a wonderful fellow named

Pavel Sinko, who lives in

California,

works in Silicon Valley, simply

wrote us a letter: "I’ve already done everything,

I built the website, I made the

framework, so here you go." And after that

we had no choice but

to announce it. And after that, things really started

to snowball, because I wrote on

Twitter that we were testing the site, and

within four days, 1,000

people had registered there. That is, 1,000 people

registered for the monitoring group—

people who were ready to look for these

public procurement cases. And as experts, several hundred

people registered there

as well. So in a sense,

the birth of the project was also a kind of

pressure from the public on us. Like,

you said you were going to fight

corruption in this area, so

go ahead and fight it, because we’re already completely

ready. As of today,

2,000 people are registered in the

monitoring group, and about 300 people in the

expert group. And the question arose that

we needed to recruit lawyers. And lawyers need

to be hired on a professional basis.

Because what is a lawyer’s job? Speaking as someone

who does this

all the time: a lot of people think

that fighting corruption is something very

romantic. That I’m out there walking around in some kind of

dramatically billowing coat. And that

it’s all very cool. In reality,

it’s very boring work. Basically, all

the time you sit there writing things, paperwork,

filing complaints against someone, and no one

pays attention to you, so you complain again.

It’s endless paperwork. An office

buried in papers, outgoing mail,

incoming mail, outgoing, incoming. It’s very

tedious and very unpleasant. So, uh,

volunteers can’t handle all of it. And

when I get yet another

hundred-thousandth-millionth letter saying, okay,

like, I’ll help you fight

corruption—well, everyone seems to think that I’m

going to hand out Parabellums (pistols), right, and we’ll

go out somewhere and lie in wait for

corrupt officials. In practice, it

means: sit down and write. Sit and write,

Of course, everyone is basically too lazy. So we

immediately decided that these lawyers had to be

hired for pay. And then this, uh,

moderately crazy idea came up: why not

try raising money from everyone?

As you know, I wrote about it. And

as you know, in 6 days we raised more

than $100,000, yes, more than 3 million

rubles. And right now, uh, the most astonishing thing

is not even the amount, although that was the goal

we had set for the whole year. What’s astonishing

is the number of transactions — there were

more than 7,000 transactions, which means

at least 6,000 people, as of today,

have sent in their money. And in that

sense, it’s not even just that people

helped the RosPil project — they

helped the RosPil project, and so on.

The most important thing that happened for me

was that the myth of some kind of

social passivity among the population,

the atomization of society, and so on, was completely destroyed. In other words,

this whole line you hear from all our

opposition figures and just public

activists, who are always whining that society

is so passive, that nobody follows us,

nobody comes out anywhere, and in

the comments everyone is eager to argue, but

actually doing anything is impossible — well,

when a person takes their own money,

and on top of that deals with this fairly idiotic

payment system, spending a huge amount

of time just to give away their money,

basically to someone unknown and for

some unclear purpose, with no guarantees — that is a far

more real act

of civic responsibility,

civic courage, civic

action, and so on. So now we

have raised money so that

the project can exist for at least

a year. We

are now going to start systematically tracking down

a huge number of these tenders.

We’re going to start challenging them methodically. And

today, in that sense, we need

help — significant help from the regions.

And what happened this morning, this

meeting with lawyers, made me very, very

happy, because not only are

these people absolutely professional, but

they immediately said: "Here we have

a tender underway for, uh, the renovation of a school,

the governor’s old school, for which

550 million rubles are being spent. It is completely

obvious that this is the cost of two schools in

a city with a population of 30,000. Yes,

30,000 people. And right now you have a tender

posted for 6 billion rubles for the construction

of an interchange.

An interchange where we’re not saying that

we can state right now that

a lot will be stolen there, but judging by the fact

that the tender documentation doesn’t even include

the design and cost estimate documents, and

so the proposal is basically: well, you come in,

build who-knows-what, and put down hundreds

of millions of rubles as bid security.

So it’s obvious that it has already been decided who

will build it. And if it’s already decided who will

build it, then we have every reason

to believe that it has also already been decided who

will get how much in kickbacks for it. I can see

that this group is absolutely ready, right

now, to work on these tenders and is

completely ready to, I don’t know,

get them canceled even without any help from us.

And in that sense, I would be very glad

if you, among other things, would somehow

join in this work and

get involved in the RosPil project in all sorts

of ways, because, uh, we need

experts, we very much need

expert analysis. For example, this is how it all

works. Recently, you sent us

a tender, and I’m going to write about it on

my blog — it concerns the purchase of, uh, rifle scopes

for the needs of the Ministry of Defense. How do you

make sense of these? I mean, it very much

looks like these scopes, which at a price of

80,000 rubles apiece, are being bought for 180,000.

At the very least, in a store the exact same

scope is sold for 80,000. The state contract

proposes buying it for 180,000. So I

accordingly write on Twitter: is there, well,

maybe some of you saw it, is there

a specialist in scopes? And I get a lot of

jokes in response — ha-ha, yes, about scopes.

At last you’ve moved on to real forms

of struggle. You need scopes. Uh, well,

the jokes were fine, but what I really need

is an optics specialist who

will take this tender, break it all

down piece by piece, and prove that it is the same

scope with the same technical

specifications. If it costs

80,000 rubles retail in a store, then

it is perfectly obvious that wholesale from the factory

it should cost 60,000 rubles. So

buying it for 180,000

looks, to say the least, very

suspicious. And so on. In other words,

what’s needed here is very professional

help.