Meeting with Alexei Navalny in Yekaterinburg. 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 gives a detailed account of the work of his main project at the time, RosPil, and explains how any citizen can 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.