Alexei Navalny’s speech at a rally in Yekaterinburg

Thank you. So, um, the police officers

asked me to remind you once again

about the safety

instructions for holding a public

event.

Ah,

so, in case something happens,

the oxygen masks will drop automatically.

Oh, sorry, that’s the wrong one. Now then,

in short, no pyrotechnics are allowed,

don’t pick fights with police officers,

they’re doing their job and they’re good people. Uh,

there was a big request, and I’m glad that it has,

so to speak, been followed: we don’t need

any, so to speak, placards or

slogans. We are not disturbing public

order, and when the event is over

we quietly and calmly disperse.

And chants of an extremist

nature are unacceptable. Though I don’t really know

what exactly that means, but I think you and I

will figure it out, and there won’t be any.

Well then, let’s get started,

dear friends.

As usual, I didn’t prepare for

the speech. Everything has somehow been about

organizational concerns. Above all,

thank you so much for coming and for

there being so many of you here today, even though

there isn’t really any clear or specific purpose

to this gathering. In the notice that

I submitted

on November 15, it says: "Purpose of the public

event: support for candidate Leonid Mikhailovich

Volkov in the Oktyabrsky

single-member electoral district

No. 10 in the early election of deputies to the

Legislative Assembly of Sverdlovsk

Region. Unfortunately, I am no longer

a candidate

for deputy to the Legislative Assembly in

the Oktyabrsky single-member

district No. 10. And all of you surely

know perfectly well how that happened and

why I am no longer one. I

won’t repeat myself. I believe—and standing here,

it’s especially easy to believe it from this spot,

of course, when I see how many

people are here and look at your faces, and

once again at a rally like this I see that

this is not a crowd at all, but many, many different

people. Everyone came here for their own

reasons.

And surely there are also people here who had no

intention of voting for me, but who, just like

me, can clearly see how cynically and crudely

the right

to take part in the election was stolen.

So, seeing this many people and

seeing your faces, I understand perfectly well that

more was stolen from us than just the right

to participate in the election. What was stolen was not only

the right to participate, but the right to win.

I’m not going to cite specific polling

numbers. Polling is

an imprecise science. But all those volunteers

who went around courtyards campaigning,

handing out leaflets, said that 50,

60, even 70% of people said they would definitely

come and vote. And I held more than 40

meetings in courtyards. And people told me

the same thing. And people called the campaign headquarters. And

complete strangers, when they received

our newspapers, said: "It’s great

that there’s finally someone worth voting for, and to vote—

that’s great! We’ll support you, and give

us more newspapers, we’ll hand them out in our

building entrance, and so on and so on. There was

real momentum; it was genuinely great.

These two months of the campaign

were practically the best thing

that has happened in my life. One of the—well, the

very best is over there walking around, of course, but I mean

this is somewhere in the top three. And,

uh, thanks to you, of course, thanks to

your help and support, I calculated that

on the plane, returning from the Supreme Court,

tired and drained, but unable

to overcome my mathematical

training, I worked out that roughly

20,000 person-hours of volunteer

work went down the drain

in the few minutes that the panel of

the Supreme Court spent in the

deliberation room.

Those hours, those efforts

were stolen from us.

More than a million rubles were stolen from us,

sent by more than 400 people. Mostly,

of course, from Yekaterinburg, but also

from all across the country.

Just acquaintances and strangers alike, all to

show support. We were robbed too. What

do you call people who steal things by dishonest

means? We all know perfectly well.

These people are called crooks and

thieves.

And all that remains for us now

to do constructively—and I don’t want

to spend a long time now exposing them somehow,

you understand? There’s no point in that.

They expose themselves.

There have already been many telling stories over

these two months in which they exposed

themselves. Everyone, from

the election commission all the way to

the official portal of the Yekaterinburg

city administration

with the story about the attack on the office of the council

of veterans, or, of course, the story about

the regional TV channel, when

a video 1 minute 20

seconds long got more views than all

the TV broadcasts, all the programs

on that channel over a month combined.

And they punish themselves, they themselves

expose themselves, they themselves show

what they are worth, who they are, and what they are. We

To make that happen, we don’t need to do anything. They

are afraid, and that’s why they make mistakes. It’s all

very simple. What remains for us

to do today is to carefully

document it. That may not

be useful to us

tomorrow, but it will be useful the day after tomorrow.

Maybe not the day after tomorrow, but in a couple of

months. Fairly soon — that is already

completely clear. Therefore,

without getting into denunciations

or exposés, I want to say that we

have a perfectly clear and constructive

agenda. The December 4 elections will still

take place. That is a fact of our lives.

It is clear that our attitude toward these

elections has changed dramatically, but there is

something we can do. We can

come to them as election observers.

Over there, to my left — which means to the right

for most of you — my

assistant Vladisa Buzunova and I are handing out

contact information and signing up observers. We have

600 polling stations in the city.

Here, in this square right now, I

can’t really estimate numbers very well, of course, but

there are obviously more people than that. And

we can come as observers, we can

campaign. That is not prohibited. There is

a Constitutional Court ruling. We

can campaign among all our acquaintances,

relatives, and friends. If each person persuades 10 or

20 people, that will already be very

good. Encourage them to come to

these elections, no matter how we

feel about them, no matter what kind of farce they have

been turned into, and not only observe but also

vote. Vote against the party

of crooks and thieves. That is the minimum we

can do right now. But it is something that will

be immensely useful to all of us. In this lies

our future.

Friends, I want to say thank you once again

for coming here and for

helping me throughout this campaign.

If there was anything we failed to do properly,

please forgive us. From us, from you,

from me, from all of us, this

opportunity to fight honestly in the December 4 elections

was stolen. And, I am sure, to win. It is

deeply upsetting. We probably should not

let our emotions, nevertheless,

overflow right now, because

there is still a lot we can do.

And what we can do still has

meaning. And of course, we still will not

forget, and we will not forgive. Thank you.

Look, we don’t really have any format for

long speeches, and there are no great masters of

speechmaking here either. I wrote that

we gathered simply to look at one another.

If, from the stage, I can see

I don’t know, about a thousand

mostly young people with

open faces, then I’m lucky. But

each of you sees 999

people like that around you.

It is really great to see that there are

so many of us. They are constantly lying to us, saying that

they are many and we are few. That they are

normal and we are strange. Well, that is simply not

true. Why did we come here today?

We came here to make sure that they

are stubborn fools and they are few, while normal people

are here. That’s all.

Greetings to the glorious city of Yekaterinburg.

I know that Muscovites are not especially

loved here, but I will still dare to say

a few words, and

it seems to me, on behalf of both Muscovites and

simply normal people across the country.

And in a way it is even somewhat strange

to be speaking here in Yekaterinburg at a

rally in defense of political rights,

because you have always had more of them

than we did, for example, in Moscow. You

had local regional parties, you

had a bicameral parliament. Rallies were rarely

banned here, and candidates were fairly

rarely removed from the ballot — practically never

removed. In other words, you had a certain kind of

political freedom,

but now we stand

on the threshold of a transition to a new reality,

where a handful of crooks and bandits

is taking away

our — your and our — basic political rights.

These people have united in a special party.

We all know what that party is called.

It is the party of crooks and thieves.

Crooks and thieves.

Here, the respected police officers

are filming me so that later

they can review it and determine whether my

words contained extremism or incitement of hatred

toward some particular social group

of persons.

They’ll edit it too. I came here to

incite hatred toward the social group

of crooks and thieves.

We hate these people.

They are stealing our money and our future —

the future of our children.

Do we not have the right to vote for whoever

we want?

Where is he?

Why is it that your Mostovshchikov, Misharin,

and various other pieces of trash get to decide who

we are allowed to vote for and who

we are not allowed to vote for?

Why is it that these thieves, whose

one child is in London and whose other child

at age 25 was apparently so talented that he

managed to invest half a billion rubles somewhere,

get to tell us what to do and what not

to do? Simply on the basis that he

has stolen a great deal.

He thinks that now he will, on our behalf, and

to elect deputies.

We must say: "No."

And perhaps, unfortunately, right now

Volkov will not become a deputy, but we

still have the opportunity to hammer

the party of crooks and thieves. Each of us

knows what to do.

We must sign up to be election observers.

We must devote the last week

of campaigning

to ourselves, our relatives, our

friends, everyone in the contact list

on your phone, tell your

grandmother, your mother, your parents and

relatives

to come and observe at the polling station,

to distribute these newspapers and remember,

to vote for any party against United

Russia, the party of crooks and thieves.

Here they have a really low result.

People genuinely hate them.

And at every meeting that took place here,

I said several times yesterday, and today

I am repeating these wonderful words, which

are simply balm for every person's soul.

In Uralmash, United Russia members get beaten.

They should be beaten all across the city

of Yekaterinburg,

beat this thieving

For our rights, for our freedoms. We

will definitely win; victory is inevitable,

because strength is in the truth. You have this

popular slogan: strength is in the truth, strength

is on our side. We will win.

Ah, and we also have cookies, uh,

magnets, rather. So,

well, uh, there is hardly anything in

this whole story that upsets me as much as the million rubles,

that we collected from all over the country and

that were simply stolen from us, and we

spent it on 180,000 copies

of a campaign newspaper, a great one,

a wonderful one, which told

the whole truth about me, about my

program, about the crooks and thieves, and about

Misharin, and everyone else. That too

was something they were very afraid of. Now this newspaper

is fit only as a souvenir, but if

someone wants to take such a souvenir, we have

a lot of them over there. We also printed

cool magnets. We wanted

to hand them out to everyone who supported me,

who signed up.

But now let them be a souvenir from

this rally. They should be taken somehow

carefully over there, without creating

a crowd. And we printed 2,000 magnets

according to the payment records. That is,

exactly 2,000. So

carefully, please, take one

magnet per person. I will be very

interested to count how many of them

are left there, and whether any are left at all.

Because it seems to me,