I think power in Russia will not change hands as a result of elections.

“I believe in the victory of good over evil.” Alexei Navalny is an outsider to the system. He does not belong to any political party, and he is feared equally by the right, the left, and those in between. Some brand him a nationalist, others suspect him of playing games with the Kremlin, and still others call him “the people’s president.” His blog has 46,000 subscribers on LiveJournal, and many times more read it. In just a few weeks, his website RosPil.info raised more than 6 million rubles; his team says it uncovered fraud in government procurement worth more than 1.6 billion rubles and prevented spending totaling 337.5 million rubles. Is Navalny ready to fight for the country’s top office, whom will he rely on, and what would he do first if he won? The New Times asked him.

NT: Greetings to the future president...

I’ve heard that joke so many times lately...

NT: Why call it a “joke”? In an interview with The New Yorker, you said you would like access to the levers of power.

It would be stupid to say that I just want to do a bit of investigating here, catch a few corrupt officials red-handed, but that politics doesn’t interest me. It would be obvious to everyone that I was either a) being coy, b) lying, or simply an idiot. Because if you are seriously fighting corruption in Russia, you cannot fail to understand that it is impossible to defeat it without major political change. It is impossible to defeat it without control over the levers of power. That is obvious to any reasonable person, and I’m not going to mislead anyone. But today, any statements—including that I’m running for president or will take part in a presidential election—have, in my view, nothing to do with real political struggle.

Waiting for the moment

NT: So you’re sitting out the 2012 cycle?

I don’t think there are any cycles. There are no timelines, no deadlines; they can elect whoever they want in March 2012, and by April it could all be over. I think power in Russia will change hands not as a result of elections.

NT: A Tunisian or Libyan scenario?

We call it the Tunisian scenario because there isn’t another name for it. Obviously, in Russia the scenario will be different, and no one understands exactly what it will look like. There will be some kind of confrontation between a corrupt elite at the top and broad popular masses.

NT: In other words, you’re waiting for a wave to rise from below?

I’m not waiting for it—I’m organizing it. My idea is that we don’t know when that moment will come, but we can do everything in our power to bring it closer. And there is no need, out of political correctness, to play any games with the authorities. They are crooks and thieves. They must be fought, they must be given problems and stress, and more and more people must be drawn into creating those problems for them. The more actively we work in this direction, the closer the moment when everything changes.

At the same time, I’m not claiming that my concept is the only correct one. Everyone is creating problems for them—PARNAS (the People’s Freedom Party), Strategy 31, your magazine, and the whole LiveJournal scene is creating a host of problems the authorities cannot solve. Under their manual-control style of rule, they can do nothing about it.

NT: The history of our part of the world also knows milder versions—for example, the “velvet revolutions” in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Those were above all negotiated processes, in which the ruling parties stepped aside and handed power to the opposition.

It’s roughly the same thing. One way or another, the regime changed as a result of pressure from broad sections of society on the authorities. That pressure can vary in intensity: from negotiations to people standing in the streets, to crowds dragging officials out of their offices and hanging them. And the sooner the authorities themselves—their more farsighted representatives—agree to negotiations, the less likely a scenario becomes in which they are simply hauled out by the scruff of the neck. I don’t think some clever political technology or Twitter can make people take to the streets, drive out the crooks and thieves, and replace them with decent people. The moment will come, the time will come, and another person will emerge.

It could happen in two months, or in three years, or in seven. The main thing is to be convinced that such a moment will come.

NT: Oil prices have shot back up to $120 a barrel.

I think high oil prices are good news for Russia. But whether oil prices are high or low no longer has much political significance. This constant flow of money no longer strengthens Putin’s regime; its support lies in Putin’s real personal popularity. That is exactly what gave him legitimacy from 1999 to 2003. But from 2003 to 2007, the authorities stopped doing anything useful, and from 2007 to 2011 they became completely meaningless, useless, of no benefit to anyone. I can even allow that Medvedev, even Putin, sincerely want to achieve some positive changes in various sectors. They may even want to fight corruption somewhere—among police officers, teachers, doctors. They do not consider the stealing going on around them to be corruption. But it has become clear that they are no longer capable of anything. A signal from the top no longer travels beyond the conference room. And the same high-profile corruption cases—at Transneft, for example—in whose investigation I am involved, are the best proof of that. Take the Magnitsky case. Obviously, neither Putin nor Medvedev stole those 5 billion rubles, and neither did their closest associates. And everyone more or less understands that there is a gang there of about 30 people, including judges, tax officials, cops, prosecutors, and so on. And Medvedev himself, who is constantly being reminded about the Magnitsky case, would probably like this issue to go away. But he cannot make it go away, because to pull out those 30 people—just 30, it would seem—you would have to pull up the entire Interior Ministry, half of the FSB (Federal Security Service), and the whole tax service. In other words, this is not a rotten tooth, it’s the whole jaw. And if you tear out the jaw, there will be nothing left to chew with.

There are no electoral cycles, no timelines, no deadlines. They can elect whoever they want in March 2012, and by April it could all be over.

NT: You’re a loner, and loners rarely win in politics.

First of all, I definitely do not consider myself a loner, and it would be a complete failure on my part if I were alone. It’s just that here people are used to thinking a politician must sit on a presidium, with two people on the right and two on the left, holding conferences, making statements, issuing declarations about creating some movement... I have people who work directly with me—my colleagues.

NT: Six people?

In the office? Actually five. There are a couple dozen people who help me on a постоянной основе, but they don’t get paid. And there are thousands of people who support me.

NT: How many people have donated money to RosPil?

About 15,000 people. And the money keeps coming in.

NT: Do you have any idea who these people are—those 15,000?

I don’t know. I know nothing about them and, frankly, I’m not even trying to find out. I’m just glad they exist. That’s the essence of my concept—I don’t need their names, addresses, or phone numbers. What matters to me is that they believe I’m doing the right thing and are willing to back it with their own money. When the moment comes to take part in elections, I will take part. And I’m sure these people will support me in different ways—collecting signatures, participating in movements.

When the moment comes to take part in elections, I will take part.

NT: You’re not planning to create your own party?

I spent quite a long time building a party within Yabloko. I understand perfectly well that any party registered with the Justice Ministry—or trying to register with it—costs at least $2 million a year. I don’t have that money, and even if I did, I would spend it on something entirely different. I’d launch several lawsuits against our crooks abroad, where that is quite expensive. But to spend $2 million just to please some crooks in the Justice Ministry and comply with Surkov’s idiotic rules? There is absolutely no point in that.

NT: But to run for president, you need to collect 2 million signatures.

And I see no need to run for president. Because it is impossible to collect 2 million signatures, impossible to have all your signature collectors certified by a notary, impossible to pass the verification of whether your signatures are genuine or fake. Impossible to get the right to campaign normally. Impossible to raise legal money and use that legal money in your campaign. And most importantly: impossible to receive the percentage of votes that people actually cast for you. So what is the point of my taking part in something where everything is impossible from beginning to end?

Allies...

NT: Who are your political allies?

That’s a difficult question, because it requires using political-science terms that are not very relevant to our reality. If I say we need to attract the votes of nationalists, that immediately drags us into a discussion of who nationalists are.

And liberals—I think some of them will support me too. In fact, I am trying to attract everyone regardless of their political views—those who understand and are ready to work seriously to change everything. These people are everywhere: among the Communists, in huge numbers among liberals and democrats, and in even greater numbers in that broad movement commonly called nationalist.

NT: “Navalny is a nationalist” has become the scare line of late. People recall that you were one of the founders of the Narod movement, that you attended the Russian Marches, and that Yabloko expelled you over this.

Yes, some say I’m practically a fascist, others say I put Tesak** in prison. So here’s what I think: the liberal discourse of Russian opposition politics has become somewhat exhausted. That discourse needs to become more conservative in the sense that it must respond to the real agenda, to what actually concerns people.

Are there problems with illegal migration? Yes: Russia ranks second in the world by number of illegal migrants. Is there a problem of ethnic violence? Yes. The Caucasus issue, the issue of Russians who fled the Caucasus, policy toward the Caucasus—these are all real problems that irritate a huge number of people, I would say 85% of our country’s population. But the moment you begin discussing these issues publicly, those who call themselves liberals immediately say: “This is fascism. We must not discuss this at all, because it is very dangerous. Because if we discuss it, it will lead to terrible pogroms, because the dark side of the Russian soul will come bursting out and Hitler will immediately appear and start killing everyone.” That is not true. No Hitler will appear; if anything, he is more likely to appear if we keep such topics taboo. We need to discuss all this completely openly and propose solutions, rather than pushing it into a marginal corner.

That is exactly why I created the Narod movement—to generate and promote what might be called a national-democratic discourse. That is exactly why I have attended, and will continue to attend, the Russian March as well: so that those throwing Nazi salutes do not dominate it. The “Sieg Heil” crowd is an absolute minority there, but they are the most aggressive, photographers love to shoot them, and so they are the most visible. But precisely because respectable politicians refuse to discuss real problems, this gives aggressive marginals a chance to rise to the top in nationalist circles. Yet the overwhelming majority of people in that milieu are perfectly sane and normal—they’re people from the office next door.

NT: Fair enough: in politically unstructured societies, where there are no normal political parties expressing the interests of different social strata, people tend to unite on the basis of blood ties or religion. But suppose you come to power—what would your nationalities policy be?

Wait, I haven’t said the most important thing yet. Why are there so many illegal migrants in Russia? Because people come to Russia from the former Soviet republics, above all from Central Asia, because there is appalling poverty at home. But the agencies responsible for migration here are just as corrupt as all the others, and so people from places like Tajikistan end up in Russia by any means possible—or rather, by illicit means. And they live here in conditions close to slavery. They have no rights at all; their existence here is terrible. And that creates a double danger.

First, if they lose their jobs or break a leg on a construction site, they cannot get any medical care and die in these horrible trailers and basements. In other words, they have no human rights at all—and in that sense I defend migrant laborers ten times more than any certified human rights activist, because I say this: every person must have rights, and crowds of people who are unregistered anywhere and completely rightless are genuinely dangerous. Left without work and without money, these people turn to various crimes simply to find money to go home or buy food.

The second danger is that both officials and employers find it much easier to deal with rightless migrant workers than with citizens who can demand their rights. “You want rights? Get out—I’ve got a line of migrant workers waiting.” And what are Muscovites supposed to do? Either accept that they too have no rights, or remain unemployed. So the problem of illegal migration expands the zone of lawlessness in the country.

What needs to be done? When a person arrives, they should have insurance so they can receive medical care. These people must be guaranteed the right to basic amenities, the right to an 8-hour workday, the right to a minimum wage, to vacation time, and the right not to be thrown off a construction site. Why is it that when I travel to the United States, to get a visa I have to provide documents showing how I will support myself and my family, I am fingerprinted at the border, and I experience no shock over this? And I do not understand why we cannot introduce exactly the same rules for those coming to Russia. If we solve these problems, we will remove a great many fears associated with migrants. Finally, one more point: by bringing in super-cheap, unskilled labor from Central Asia, we worsen the problem of low labor productivity. There is no need to introduce new technologies, no need to increase efficiency—there is poverty, destitution, people living 50 to a basement, doing everything by hand, so why bother? That, essentially, is what my nationalism consists of.

NT: But your opponents fear that by rallying national patriots under your banner, you may end up following their populist—or even chauvinist—rhetoric.

It’s simple: either you have views and a position, and then you follow them, or you follow someone else’s lead. I have a definite political position and, I would like to think, a consistent one. It is completely open; I’ve just laid it out for you. I’d like to think it attracts people. So any attempt to “go along with” someone else, as you put it, for tactical reasons would only create problems for me and drive sensible people away.

NT: And how did the story of the Narod movement end?

For various reasons, the movement never fully came together organizationally. But ideologically, I believe we formulated a very sound platform, and that platform was accepted; by and large, all the major nationalist organizations and democratic activists agreed to work with it.

No one from the Kremlin has ever talked to me or tried to make contact with me.

NT: Liberals, democrats—people from Yabloko or PARNAS, for example—do you see them as possible allies?

They are undoubtedly my allies, but we must not confuse two things here. In these movements and parties there are activists and supporters, and then there is, so to speak, the general staff inherited from the 1990s: people who were part of the government or close to power, whose political lives were spent largely in official cars. They carry a burden of responsibility—for different reasons: for what failed, or for some of their actions. People are tired of them—and that can happen to any politician, myself included. That is why they are not especially popular even in liberal circles.

NT: Yes, but they have experience behind them. Boris Nemtsov, for example, was elected—not appointed—as governor of Nizhny Novgorod in a very difficult time, and he and others have government experience...

Soon we’ll have so many people with experience in the state apparatus that wherever you spit, everyone will have rich experience in the state apparatus. But you know, if you want to reform the GAI (the Soviet/Russian traffic police), the last thing you should do is recruit the most experienced traffic cops for the job. Yes, they have that kind of experience...

I like Nemtsov, he’s a great guy, but the times are such that they simply do not have support right now.

...And opponents

NT: Whether they do or don’t have support—without real elections, that claim cannot be tested. Suppose you became president tomorrow—where would you get your people from?

You know, I don’t believe this country suffers from a shortage of capable people. The people who support me work in corporations, in academia, some are even in government service, and they are already giving me a great deal of qualified help.

The problem is selection: you need to choose people who will not trade their time in power for money, who will voluntarily renounce enrichment, who will say, “We will enter government with what we have and leave with what we have.” And here I do not need people with experience in public administration; I need people who sincerely support this idea.

NT: So among those currently working in decision-making positions, you wouldn’t keep anyone?

No one, of course. The people who are there now are the product of negative selection. They would never have made it to the top if they were not involved daily, even hourly, in some nasty little schemes—even the most decent among them, the ones usually called the “liberal wing.”

I saw this in one of Russia’s federal regions. I am absolutely convinced that if tomorrow you got rid of everyone... Well, not “got rid of”—fired them... nothing would stop. Kindergartens and schools would function perfectly well, water would still run from the tap, nothing would change at all! People would realize something had changed at the top only when they noticed: “Why aren’t we being called to meetings anymore?” There would be no breakdown, no collapse, no disintegration.

NT: Is that based on your experience as an adviser to the governor of Kirov Region?

Yes. I worked there for a year and saw everything from the inside. For a number of ethical reasons I do not want to talk about it in detail, but the fact is this: either you accept all the rules of the game, or if you do not, you simply become an ineffective, bad governor. You won’t receive funds from the center, no one there will be friendly with you, and you will ruin your relations with all the elites. Because besides the governor and his team, there is the regional police, the FSB, the chief federal inspector, a huge number of branches of various pointless federal organizations, and an endless stream of federal crooks—ministers, deputy ministers, department heads, and so on. In other words, it is a huge swarm, and if a governor and his team are inside that swarm but refuse to play by its rules, they will not be able to survive, and everyone will say: “Yes, he was a terrible governor, he failed at everything.”

Putin’s system is built entirely on corruption; that is its main foundation. Putin used the system that Yury Luzhkov (the longtime mayor of Moscow) invented and created—he just made it much worse than Luzhkov did. Under Luzhkov it was the same: every district head knew he had to rig elections, clear everyone out, and he could steal as much as he liked, but he was given a task—to make sure the pipes didn’t burst in winter, that the streets stayed clean, and that he took part in the endless Moscow festival.

NT: What else did your experience working in the region teach you?

I became convinced that there is no “vertical of power”: Moscow can pound its fist on the table all it wants, but the signal does not get through. This vertical of power does not exist; it is incapable of making and implementing decisions—the failure of the “Affordable Housing” project and all the other national projects is clear proof of that. The vertical does not even have a serious repressive apparatus, thank God. It can only siphon off money; it cannot make decisions.

Second, I became convinced that the motivation of every official without exception is money, or expanding their powers in order to make more money. And third, I became convinced that all these people can be kicked out and replaced with new ones.

NT: The authorities have one tool that works well: co-opting human rights activists, bloggers, and politicians in order to make them complicit. All, of course, in the name of the good, the noble, the eternal. Has the Kremlin tried to approach you?

Everyone asks that for some reason, and no one believes me when I say they haven’t even tried...

NT: What about Putin’s people?

No one has ever had any such conversations with me or tried to make contact with me.

NT: You spent half a year at Yale University. What did that give you?

The chance to talk with very smart people. An understanding of how American politics works, how international politics works. I realized that all those stories about decisions in America being made by some elite clubs, that it’s all a conspiracy system—that definitely isn’t true. It really is an endless interaction of different groups that are born and die every second. Yale is a super-liberal place, but I did not hide my views there at all: people disagreed, argued, but it did not provoke any idiosyncratic hostility, and certainly no one branded me a fascist...

The slush fund

NT: Returning to your anti-corruption investigations. Do you follow the publication of income declarations by senior officials? What do you make of them?

Of course I do, because that is also one of the tools of my work—to compare their official declarations with the traces of their activities that I come across in my investigations. For example, Igor Shuvalov’s wife became $10 million poorer this year. In reality, all of this is ridiculous. These people’s incomes have reached such a scale that they now need to legalize at least some of it, otherwise it becomes completely unclear where Shuvalov got his enormous estate near Skolkovo. So they traditionally legalize their income through their wives. Some legalize it through stock market transactions, but the overwhelming majority of their money goes directly into offshore accounts, and here they show only what they actually spend.

NT: In your estimate, what percentage of their real income is reflected in those declarations?

On average, no more than ten percent. These declarations are, well, some kind of glimmer of the real picture, a rather vague projection. They are useful mainly for tracking who is more cunning and legalizes something, and who simply takes everything in cash and keeps it hidden at home or in Swiss bank accounts. But the practice of recent months—with Gaddafi, with all these children, and so on—has shown that if there is a will to find something, it is not especially difficult. In the age of counterterrorism, when the entire financial system is structured so that any person can be tracked, it is not hard—if there is the will.

NT: Do you think Medvedev might now develop such a will?

And about whom would he investigate? The people who work with him every day? What would he do with that terrible knowledge? Throw himself out of a window immediately? He would have no other option left.

And besides, he also knows what everyone knows: that in our state there exists a system of cash rewards for senior officials, developed during the campaign against Yukos, supposedly so that the evil “Khodorkovsky people” would not bribe anyone. All these people receive cash every month at one of the state banks, and everyone knows in what amounts.

NT: In addition to their salaries?

In addition to their salaries, of course.

NT: Can you name the bank?

It is one of the major state-owned banks. I know it and you know it. I did not follow the cash handout process with a video camera, but I trust my sources completely because they have not lied to me before. A person at the level of a minister receives at least $70,000 a month in cash. It is recorded nowhere, but everyone knows about it. This system was built by the country’s leadership.

NT: Is it budget money?

It is money from a bank with a controlling state stake. I won’t claim that I know all the details of this black bookkeeping...

NT: But you are convinced it exists?

Yes, I am absolutely convinced it exists. There is a cash flow that is manually regulated, and everyone involved has an interest in it. Both those who distribute the money and those who make the decisions are interested in there being rooms in state banks where cash is kept and from which it is literally wheeled out in rolling suitcases. A huge number of people know about this: employees of that bank know, the people who received the money know, and so on. Lots of people know it. Just as thousands of people at Gazprom know when one or another scheme is taking place. But they can always say: where is the videotape showing the money being handed out? There is no videotape. Yet.

NT: Don’t you want to become rich?

Like anyone else, of course I would like my family to have a higher standard of living. But I’m a decent lawyer, and my family is provided for quite decently.

NT: And doesn’t your wife Yulia say, “Have a conscience, buy me a fur coat”?

Well, I do buy her a fur coat.

NT: You live an hour from the city center.

Well yes, I probably could buy an apartment in the center—but I deny myself that, because it’s a lot of money, and if I spend it on an apartment, I won’t be able to torment Gazprom. And tormenting Gazprom is much more fun. But I can’t say that my family or I deny ourselves any reasonable comforts.

NT: Alyosha, do you believe there will be light at the end of the tunnel?

Maybe it sounds funny and naive, but I believe in the victory of good over evil. That is, I believe that the obvious injustice that is happening, the obvious stupidity and absurdity—these things will end, because people understand what is good and what is bad.

** In 2022, he was added to the list of “terrorists and extremists.”*

*** Maksim Martsinkevich, the leader of the banned fascist-leaning organization Format 18, was sentenced in 2007 to three years under Article 282.2 after an incident during a debate at the Bilingua club hosted by Maria Gaidar and Alexei Navalny.*