Meeting in Yekaterinburg with Alexei Navalny. Part 4
A recording of Alexei’s meeting with residents of Yekaterinburg in December 2011—a historic moment on the eve of the first mass protests at Bolotnaya Square (in Moscow). Alexei explains in detail how his main project at the time, RosPil, worked and shows how any citizen could effectively put pressure on bloated, self-satisfied officials like Sverdlovsk Governor Misharin. The meeting’s main message still resonates today: enough of passively grumbling in our kitchens—it’s time to act, support independent projects, and fight the ruling tandem.
Text version
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We were preparing.
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And the second question: will there be
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local RosPil branches in cities? Will there be
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a
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RosPil operations already exist in every city.
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They have already been set up.
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Will this be some kind of unified system?
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Thank you.
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And if you want to fight corruption,
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absolutely no one is stopping you. I
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hope you’ll join in, and there are
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many people around you who are fighting it. And, uh,
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everything I do can absolutely
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be done by anyone. Literally
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anyone. I don’t have any kind of super
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or mega-knowledge, organizational
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abilities
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or anything else like that. This can be done
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by absolutely anyone. Take your governor,
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Misharin, with that plywood
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plant of his, got it connected,
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wanted to build it, spent budget
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money on hooking it up,
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blah blah blah blah blah. No one is stopping you
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from teaming up with these lawyers and simply
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hounding Governor Misharin over it,
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filing complaints and statements. We understand perfectly well
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that it’s not like he’ll
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be jailed tomorrow. But if not tomorrow,
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then the day after. If not the day after,
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then in five years. The main thing is to believe that sooner
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or later it will happen. But in any
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case, starting tomorrow, if you
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start writing, Misharin will know
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that there’s a student named Alyona, a real little crusader,
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who’s fighting him alongside me, and he’ll
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have to devote a huge amount of time
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to fending you off, I assure
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you. So you can do this.
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Go ahead. Right. Striped...
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Good evening. I wanted to ask what you will consider
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a success for the RosPil project, well,
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even in numerical terms. What
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are the prospects in Belotransmert?
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And the third question, uh, who are your
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allies, perhaps even within the system and
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among public organizations?
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As for the first question, what I consider
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success for the RosPil project is a very
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difficult question for us, because we
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raised a lot of money, and that means
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a fundamentally different kind of
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responsibility. It’s one thing when I
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just come speak in front of you, and you
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write: "What a great guy
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Navalny is." And then later, disappointedly,
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you say: "I believed in you so much,
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and you turned out to be an idiot." It’s another
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matter when you’ve already paid
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some money,
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because then the issues are completely different, yes, and
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the negative reaction would be completely
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different. So for us this is a very
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big responsibility, and, uh, success
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for RosPil will be measured. We promised
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people concrete results, and we’ll try to deliver
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those concrete results. That means we’ll go out
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and get things canceled. That is, canceled, uh,
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tenders, challenged tenders,
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people held accountable, or
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real attempts to hold them accountable.
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Yes. But it won’t just be
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like this: we say, "There’s that crook over there,
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here’s his photo." We’ll say:
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"Crook, photo, letter, attempt
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to open a case, and so on." In other words,
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that crook will always know that there is
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a file on him, right? And that
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file may be put to use
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tomorrow, in a year, and so on. So
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it will be measured in a completely
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concrete way, where anyone will be able to
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go in, click, and look at this
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file, letter, response, and so on, and so
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forth. And we hope that we’ll be able to—
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I understand perfectly well that we won’t replace
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the antimonopoly service and
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the prosecutor’s office, and at best we’ll be able
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to cover maybe 0.001%
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of everything that is purchased and
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stolen. But even if we can at least
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cover that much, I hope we’ll
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still be canceling things and
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taking money away from specific people,
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from crooks who are planning to do this,
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whether they are bidders or
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not bidders—things are getting canceled
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and right now the practice is that they’re more often canceled,
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that is, because of what we do, and not
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even as a result of a hearing, but before
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the hearing, as a result of the scandal. In other words,
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you write about it, uh, publish it, newspapers write about it,
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and they all understand that at the FAS (Federal Antimonopoly Service)
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they have no chance at all, so they
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prefer to pull back in advance. This is, this is
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a fairly standard practice. Well, some people are
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more stubborn, like Onishchenko, so with
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him we’ll be stuck there for a long time in the same
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FAS proceedings. Others are less stubborn
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and prefer to back off and cancel
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things more quickly.
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Well, that person is you, yes.
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And I’m probably representative of a fairly
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large community of people who passively
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grumble and complain. I mean, I follow
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your work, your
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work, Leonid, but, uh, I grumble, I don’t
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like it, and yet I don’t actively
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do anything. So what advice would you give me and, perhaps,
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people like me—what should we do
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so that in 2012 someone wins
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who isn’t from the tandem?
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Don’t just grumble—do something. But here
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the thing is, your question already contains
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the answer. You already have everything you need. And,
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to be honest, I assume that since you
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came here, you are in fact doing something
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more than nothing—you at least came here.
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spent a few hours of your time there. You
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have every opportunity to
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vote and campaign against United Russia,
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join those lawyers there, help
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them in any way you can, donate 50 rubles to
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the cause. You have a huge number of options,
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so there’s no need to just say: "Well,
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Navalny did something wrong there."
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Volkov also did something wrong. He—I have done
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the wrong thing a million times. That is, all
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everything I do is a huge
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number, a whole chain of mistakes. And somewhere
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after a long time, I find
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some kind of optimal solution.
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So, well, it’s pointless to
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criticize me. Yes, I know that I have done
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the wrong thing a million times. Do something
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together with us, whether right or wrong, do it
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yourselves, or help. Stop.