"I want to set new standards for politics as a whole"

— You have always been a very stylish, modern politician. You write your own Twitter posts, make funny jokes, speak like a normal person, listen to the band Griby, and so on. And then suddenly: a retouched portrait in a suit and tie; a video where you look and sound extremely official. Why? — Those are the rules of the genre. An election campaign requires a certain seriousness of approach. I was asked the same questions when I ran for mayor [of Moscow in 2013]. It’s a conservative format. My supporters, the people who follow my work, know everything about me. But what mattered to us was an audience less familiar with me. According to the polling we do, 50% of Russians still have no idea who I am. — And you think they want to get to know you as a man in a suit? — You simply have to follow certain rules that are mandatory in politics. — On the other hand, those rules are visibly changing all over the world. — Yes, they are changing. But in none of the elections we’ve observed have we ever seen a candidate without a jacket and tie. — It just seems to me that if, for example, you’re appealing to a younger audience, to so-called millennials, they would find a politician without a tie much more interesting. — We have a year and three months of campaigning ahead of us. We’ll try to speak to every group and find a common language with everyone. But I assure you that even millennials imagine a person in power as someone in a tie and jacket. That’s what the focus groups show; everything shows that. We needed that video to deliver a certain message. Yes, we chose a very traditional format — the kind people are used to seeing from a presidential candidate. But even though I was wearing a suit and tie, I think I was still myself. I was definitely saying words I wrote myself, and I definitely believed every one of them. — You’ve already been criticized for the fact that by declaring your participation in the election, you are legitimizing something that is not really an election at all. — I’ve heard that criticism throughout my entire career, no matter what I was doing. People even say it about fighting corruption: why appeal to the prosecutor’s office at all? You write a letter to Prosecutor General Chaika, whom you consider a mafioso, and by doing so you legitimize Chaika. In fact, that’s not true. It’s a major misconception. The authorities do not need any legitimization — including through elections. It’s simply a ridiculous assumption. Look: there is Sobyanin, who was elected in competition with me, and there is Poltavchenko, who removed everyone from the [St. Petersburg gubernatorial] race. Which of them has more legitimacy? Neither. Sobyanin actually ended up in a worse position than Poltavchenko, because the Pandora’s box of criticism I opened, the discussion of [corruption in the Moscow city government], is still haunting him. He gained no legitimacy at all; he only gained problems. The authorities do not need that at all. Their support comes from elsewhere. Right now, the regime rests on a judiciary under its control, media under its control, and law enforcement under its control — those are the three pillars on which they govern. They do not need any legitimacy. — Then why do they hold elections at all? They spend enormous resources on them. — They don’t operate according to some prewritten rules. Every day, every person — including Putin and those around him — defines for himself the boundaries of what is possible. Say, in 2010, the boundaries of what was possible were that the country could have one political prisoner — [former Yukos head Mikhail] Khodorkovsky. Well, and [his business partner Platon] Lebedev too — two. — There were also the National Bolsheviks, at the very least. — Yes. But still, in 2010 there was a limited number of political prisoners. We knew their names. We knew that Maxim Gromov was in prison because he had thrown a portrait of [Putin out of the health minister’s office window in August 2004] (Gromov was released in 2007 — Meduza’s note). Now we don’t even know how many political prisoners there are in the country, because every day people are being prosecuted for likes on social media. The same goes for elections. First, only Veshnyakov was possible [as head of the Central Election Commission], then Churov became possible, and now they need Pamfilova, who will speak softly but still stuff 11 million votes into the [State Duma] election. In other words, for this regime today, the boundaries of what is possible are: yes, we have seized power, we will try to keep it for life, but we still need the formal attributes. Because Russia is still a European country, it interacts with Europe; we are not Mongolia, not China, and not North Korea. There were elections even in the Soviet Union. Incidentally, that also shows that Russia has always been part of European civilization. — So it turns out you are helping them pretend that our elections are like Europe’s. — No, I’m not helping them in anything. I’m doing what I think is necessary. I live in Russia, I have a certain experience and a certain understanding of how to fight this regime, which I find repulsive and disgusting, and which I wish did not exist. To that end, I’ve done different things. I’ve taken part in rallies — very small ones and very large ones. I’ve investigated corruption. I’ve participated in elections. I’ve boycotted elections. Now I’m participating in elections again. The most important thing for me is that I believe in what I’m doing. I believe my political efforts are benefiting the country — in the broad sense of the word. And the country desperately needs an attempt, in this election, to create real competition of ideas, real tension and electricity. Because if that doesn’t happen, we’ll see the same scenario we’ve had since 1996: a campaign nobody notices, debates nobody takes part in, and a predictable result. In recent years, it’s not just that the winner is known in advance — the entire course of the campaign is known in advance, and usually that means nobody does anything. So tell me: who has already announced they will take part in the 2018 campaign? Well, Putin… — Putin hasn’t actually announced it. — Fine, but we understand [that he will run]. — So you think you’ll be running against Putin? — I have not the slightest doubt that Putin’s strategy is to rule Russia for life. Yes, that rule may take different forms. One way or another, there will be someone from the authorities. Zyuganov has announced [that he will run for president]. Yavlinsky has announced it, Zhirinovsky has announced it. (In fact, only Yavlinsky has unequivocally announced his candidacy — Meduza’s note.) And which of them is actually campaigning? None of them. — Still, in Russia no one has ever started campaigning a year and a half before an election. — That’s exactly the problem! I don’t want it to be that way! I am campaigning. I have a platform. I’m raising money, reporting how much I’ve raised and where it came from, reporting how many volunteers we have, how many signatures we need, how many people have already registered in our system. And what about everyone else? Is Yavlinsky, whom I regard very warmly, running a campaign? Right now the Yabloko party has stopped receiving state funding. What money are they going to use to campaign? They’re doing nothing. — So you want to force Yavlinsky to campaign. — I want to establish new standards in politics in general. I give interviews, I explain things, I answer unpleasant questions. And I’ll keep answering for as long as necessary. I’ll read every post criticizing my platform, and I’ll respond to them, and I’ll keep that dialogue going, because that’s how it’s supposed to be. That is what a politician’s job consists of. I would like everyone — from Putin to [Sergei] Mironov — to do the same kind of work. It would be very good for the country. — Did you discuss your intention to run with any representatives of the authorities? — I discussed it with no one. Listen, we filmed our video in great secrecy, renting an office in Moscow City for five hours because we didn’t want to discuss anything in our own office. We have no doubt that there is a direct [wiretap] line here — we were afraid that if [the authorities] found out, they would simply leave me in Kirov and not let me return to Moscow. To edit the video, we rented a hotel room, crammed into it, and worked there all night. I am an independent politician. Everything I do, I discuss with people I respect and trust, with experts, with my team, with my family. I certainly did not consult any authorities, and frankly, I don’t know anyone there. — No one at all? — I saw [United Russia General Council Secretary Sergei] Neverov in court when he sued me. I’ve never seen Volodin in my life, never seen Kiriyenko in my life. I’ve seen Putin on TV. I saw Ivanov at an Aeroflot corporate event when I was on the board of directors. I saw [Rostec head Sergei] Chemezov at an Aeroflot board meeting; he came to one session once. — And how did your family react to the decision? Did you discuss it with your brother? — I didn’t discuss it with my brother — how could I? Write him a letter? Through the Federal Penitentiary Service? Then an unlimited number of people would know about my plans. Of course I discussed it with my wife, because you can’t do this if you don’t have your family’s support. The children are too young to discuss it. Yesterday Dasha came in and said: “I watched the video, and apparently we’re in the news. Why is everyone being so quiet?” — So you didn’t just tell her? — I discuss such things with my wife. The children are minors, so their parents make decisions for them, for better or worse. (Laughs.) We were preparing all this in a certain degree of secrecy. And I also discussed it with members of my team, because for them it’s an important decision too: they will be subjected to pressure, possibly much harsher and more dangerous than what I face. Everyone supported me, and I would say that the amount of doubt among them was much smaller than the amount of doubt and unresolved questions in my own head. — What were your doubts? — Well, whether people would be ready for this road. You see, after the mayoral campaign, [Nikolai] Lyaskin and [Konstantin] Yankauskas still have criminal cases hanging over them. Lyaskin hasn’t left Moscow for three years; he’s under travel restrictions, and Yankauskas spent a year under house arrest. For nothing. Everyone fully understands what the consequences may be, so for me the important question was whether I had the right to do this, knowing what might happen tomorrow to my relatives and loved ones, friends, acquaintances, colleagues. — The same could happen to you. So there is the question of how your announcement correlates with the trial in Kirov… — (Interrupting.) It doesn’t. I can say right away: it doesn’t. The moment the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the sentence had to be overturned, I knew all this would happen. I understood that the Supreme Court would certainly overturn the sentence, but would most likely do so in the format least comfortable for us. At the same time, we had our own plans and thoughts about a presidential campaign. The two things simply overlapped technically. — In any case, you made this trial even more political than it already was. Now, if the judge decides to convict you, he is directly affecting the course of the presidential campaign. — I think the judge decides nothing there. The decision has already been made — or rather, the procedure has been set by which the decision is handed down to him. — And your candidacy does not affect that decision? — Everything affects everything, but the influence runs the other way. These trials were invented so that I would not participate in elections, so there would be something to discredit me with. These trials will accompany any activity of mine as long as this regime remains in power. Since the end of 2010, there has not been a single day when I was not involved in some kind of case. — So what do you yourself think — will they register you in the end? — I know only that I have the right to be registered. Our campaign is devoted to making sure we are registered. We will do everything to create a situation in society in which even the Kremlin understands that we must be registered. — Right now you mostly talk about participating in the election, and that motif is in the video too: “real elections are not only about victory.” It gives the impression that winning is not the main thing for you. — I’m not saying that. Of course the main thing is victory, and I will work toward it. We will do everything possible; we are preparing 100,000 observers. But I’m not a naive person, I know all about these elections, I know what they will be like in Chechnya, in the Volga region, in Mordovia. I live in the real world. But if you take part in an election without aiming to win — then what’s the point? — Well, to establish yourself as a legitimate federal political force — say, the second or third strongest in the country. — That is exactly why I see the struggle for power as a long process with different elements, and elections are one of them. Power will quite possibly change hands not as a result of elections, but elections can be one factor. Anti-corruption investigations, rallies, publications, articles, elections — all of this matters; life is diverse, and I use whichever political instrument is effective at a given moment. — I still don’t fully understand why it is effective now. It looks a bit like an act of desperation. We spoke with you five years ago, and back then you said there was no point in participating in elections and that instead a million people should be brought into the streets. Now street politics is dead. Participation in elections looks like a last attempt to cling to something. — No. It’s not a linear story. It moves in a spiral, in a circle, or according to some other unclear logic. At the beginning of 2011, when I was running the campaign “Vote for any party except United Russia,” could I have imagined that one of the consequences would be rallies of 100,000 people? That would have seemed absurd. But those rallies changed Russia; the old political regime came to an end. — Not for the better, frankly. — For the worse. We did everything we could to make the country change for the better. In the first month of the protest movement, it seemed as though it had worked: gubernatorial elections were restored, and so on. But then came a harsh period of reaction, and that led to the country and the regime being transformed. A completely different Russia emerged. And the regime, in its new design, destroyed the protest movement by making it very unsafe, jailing dozens and hundreds, intimidating huge numbers of people, introducing repressive laws, fines, and so on. What I’m trying to say is: there is no dogma when it comes to choosing instruments. The regime changes, we change, some tools of struggle become more effective, others less so. Some are possible, others are not. Right now, holding rallies is simply very dangerous for most people. I’m ready to go out anywhere, but people will say to me: sure, they won’t jail you, but they’ll jail us. That’s how the authorities operate. Did I take part in the 2011 elections or not? I did. — Well, in a sense. — I probably influenced United Russia’s result more than any party that actually took part. In the [2016 parliamentary] elections I participated to a lesser extent. In this presidential election I am participating directly. And if I am barred from it, that too will change the situation immediately. — How? — How? If once again we see the same old favorite characters in the arena — Putin, Yavlinsky, Zhirinovsky, Zyuganov, Mironov — then this procedure cannot be called an election. — But that is exactly what happened with the Duma election, and everyone swallowed it. — Everyone swallowed it? Turnout in St. Petersburg was 25%. Some swallowed it, some didn’t. This too is a dynamic process. No one knows what the consequences will be if, for example, only 15% of voters turn out for the presidential election. They probably won’t be good for the authorities. In any case, I don’t want to be a political scientist and speculate about things I do not control. I know that there is an election now that I am ready to enter. I don’t want to be like those people — including good people — who wait for some moment and think that in 2016 Putin is too strong and will crush everyone. They say: why are you running now? They will destroy you, and you will never become president. But I don’t want to think in those terms. It’s idiotic. I do not have a lifelong mission to become president. I have a mission — however pompous it may sound — to fight for good against evil. — All right, then let’s talk about methods of struggle. You mentioned Yavlinsky. He is, of course, the perennial candidate, but it is obvious that if both of you are on the ballot, you will take votes away from each other. Over the last 15 years the opposition has repeatedly tried to create some kind of coalition, and all of them fell apart. Do you have a strategy in that regard? — No strategy is needed. It’s a meaningless waste of time. If, in the mayoral election, instead of meeting [voters] in the courtyards of Vykhino and Zhulebino, I had been negotiating so that, say, [Yabloko candidate Sergei] Mitrokhin would withdraw and I would be nominated as some kind of unified opposition candidate, I would not have won ten times more votes than Mitrokhin. We need to stop this masochism. — But you yourself were actively doing exactly that just recently, including in the Duma elections. (Navalny urged opposition party candidates competing against each other in Moscow’s single-mandate districts to come to agreements among themselves — Meduza’s note.) — Yes. I spent two years on that, and it failed. I admit that. We need a fundamentally new opposition; we need people who actually work. Not people who appear once every four years and say, hello, we’ve crawled out of the dungeon and now we’re going to take part in the election. We need people who engage in political activity between elections. I have a perfectly normal attitude toward Grigory Alexeyevich (Yavlinsky); he is a good politician. But I will build a coalition by appealing directly to people, not to an establishment that thinks it controls voters. — So you admit that your regional campaigns came to nothing? Then how will your methods be different now, and what lessons did you draw from that experience? — The main lesson is that we are not allowed onto the ballot where the authorities consider it dangerous. We ran in four regions; in three of them — Magadan, Kaluga, and Novosibirsk — we were not allowed to run. If we had been allowed, we would have won seats [in the local legislatures] everywhere, and the coalition’s fate would have been different. In Kostroma we were allowed in four weeks before the election, and we simply didn’t have time to organize the campaign (The Democratic Coalition supported by Navalny won 2% of the vote in the Kostroma regional Duma election — Meduza’s note). In any case, subsequent events, not only in the regions, convinced me that party politics in its old form has to be abandoned. It cannot be revived by artificial means. That is why I am running now not from a party — even though that would allow me to collect 100,000 signatures instead of 300,000. But I don’t want to run around people whose only usefulness is that they hold a license. That license is worth nothing. — And where does the money for all these activities come from? You reported on the first fundraising drive. Will the strategy continue to be the same — like Bernie Sanders, collecting small donations from ordinary people? — Absolutely not: it was Bernie Sanders who had the same strategy we had in 2013. But in reality it’s simple — we have no other options. Bernie Sanders refused super PACs (formally independent groups supporting candidates that can spend unlimited sums on a campaign — Meduza’s note), but we have nothing to refuse. It’s impossible to find any large money here, and even if you do, the FSB will come running to catch you with it. In the Moscow election we raised 104 million rubles in donations. For a federal campaign, we need ten times more. Based on the first day, we understand that we can raise it through small donations and avoid any risks. But of course we will talk to entrepreneurs, hold fundraising dinners, and so on. Money is the lifeblood of a campaign; without it, nothing will work. But the strategy of collecting small donations is the safest and, so far, the most effective. — All right, let’s assume you are registered. How will you build the campaign? The same way you did in Moscow — campaign cubes, meetings, and so on? Or do you have new ideas? — I do! My idea is that every day I’ll be on Channel One, then on NTV, and spend the rest of the day on Rossiya-24. (Laughs.) That question doesn’t make much sense, because here too they have left us no alternatives. This is politics, I would say, in its primitive form, but with the addition of the internet. That means person-to-person campaigning, door-to-door campaigning — plus major work in the part of the internet not controlled by the authorities, because we won’t get very far on VKontakte or Odnoklassniki. We have people. That is the main thing. I’m proud to be one of the politicians who can count on mass support from grassroots activists. Not many people can attract 5,000 volunteers on the first day of a campaign. They signed up with us, and I value that very highly. — Are you planning to travel to the regions? — Of course. — Will you go to Chechnya? — Quite possibly. But here’s the thing. The need to go to Chechnya is connected with the possibility of placing observers there and getting a result. So we will travel to those regions where we can actually win a percentage of the vote. I have no doubt that in the Caucasus, the ideas in my platform — including anti-corruption measures — will find enormous resonance. There is not the slightest doubt that in Dagestan and Ingushetia we have many supporters — or rather, not supporters, but simply people who are sick of all this and see far more injustice than people do in Moscow. But if in the end it’s still going to be 99.9 [percent for the authorities], what is there to gain? — And there will probably be provocations against you there too, people with eggs, and so on. — Oh, we’ll see plenty of people holding eggs. The authorities cannot argue with me on substance, so they will hire masses of these characters for 500 rubles to throw various objects at me… Good Lord, I’ve just arrived in Kirov, and there are people standing there shouting, “Navalny is a thief!” And then those same people fly back to Moscow with me on the same plane. — And they stop shouting? — They stop shouting, sit there calmly, looking at souvenirs. — Let’s talk about the substance of your platform. The word “Ukraine” appears in it only once. — Good Lord, are you really going to ask about Crimea? I was already afraid this wouldn’t happen. — What can you do. — I have answers ready; you just formulate the question. — If you come to power, what happens to Crimea? — We begin by holding the fairest referendum in the world there — with international and Russian observers, with a long period for all sides to campaign, and with the release from prison of everyone jailed for opposing annexation. And the results of that referendum will be the starting point for creating a roadmap and understanding how to solve this problem at all. — But you understand what the results would be. — I have said many times already: the problem of Crimea does not look solvable in the foreseeable future under any government. Just like the problem of Northern Cyprus, the Falklands, or the status of Jerusalem. — And what would have to happen for it to become solvable? — Nothing. Apparently, time has to pass. When there is a huge united Europe without visas and borders matter less in general, then it will pass and heal. I hope relations with Ukraine as a whole will heal too — for that, we need to fulfill the Minsk agreements [on de-escalating the conflict in eastern Ukraine]. Because right now Ukraine is a very large European state that is hostile to us. That is a tremendous problem for Russia. But the problem of Crimea does not look solvable; it is the legacy the Putin regime will leave behind. So Crimea will develop slowly, no one will invest anything there, it will have an uncertain status for many, many, many years. And our great-grandchildren will still be discussing what to do with it. — Right now, Crimea is the territory of which state? — Right now it is, of course, the territory of the Russian state. The Russian budget pays everyone’s salaries there, the authorities function there, so it would be foolish to deny that it is Russian territory. That in no way cancels out the illegality of sending in troops and everything else. — You mentioned a Europe without visas. At the same time, another point in your platform is a visa regime with the countries of Central Asia. That always provokes a nervous reaction… — It provokes a positive reaction! A wonderfully positive reaction! There are romantically minded people who think it would be nice to abolish visas and borders altogether — but there are not many of them, not only here, but in Europe and the United States as well. No one there is eager to abolish the visa regime with Russia either. More than that, one of the reasons European countries refuse to discuss visa-free travel with us is the absence of a visa regime with Central Asia. — And how do we know that? — We know it from statements by official European bodies; it comes up constantly in negotiations. It is obvious that without a visa regime with Asia and the South Caucasus, Russia would simply turn into a transit point between Uzbekistan and Paris. It is said that my support for introducing a visa regime — an absolutely sensible and correct measure — is some sign of hidden chauvinism. But what I want to say here is that all my proposals on the so-called conservative agenda — including the visa regime — do not go beyond what any normal European politician calls for. I do not see the introduction of a visa regime as either a nationalist measure or something politically threatening to anyone. — Well, it can be called a discriminatory measure. You say: let’s live in an open world — but not everyone. In some countries we support freedom of movement, and in others we don’t. So it turns out we are discriminating against people from those countries because, for example, they are poorer. — Are you a person of liberal convictions? Presumably. — More left-wing, actually. — Well, fine, left-wing, liberal — in Russia all that is complicated. As a person with those convictions, do you think Russia should abolish the visa regime with all countries? Afghanistan, for example? — I’m asking you. — And I’m answering that we are forced to have a visa regime with many countries. There is no discrimination here, no hidden agenda. That is simply how the situation has developed. The problem is not Russia. The problem is that in Tajikistan the salary is one dollar. And whether there are jobs here or not, in search of a better life, in search of money, people will keep coming here. That is how the world works. We must introduce a visa regime in order to exercise some control over migration policy. — Another important aspect of your platform is the fight against corruption. You are an expert in that field — but don’t you think the authorities are now co-opting that agenda? Ulyukayev was jailed, and every week some people from the security services are caught taking bribes. — People were asking me the same thing even before the Serdyukov case. Remember, cases were opened over VTB, and then there were several other such proceedings? Back then people also told me: Putin is co-opting your agenda. And then there was Oboronservis, and everyone said: Putin has co-opted Navalny’s agenda — but the case ended in nothing. My answer is that this is not an “agenda” and it cannot be co-opted. It is a real problem, and people see it. If they see that everyone around them is a thief and no one is fighting those thieves — more than that, gangsters and accomplices of killers like Chaika are running the prosecutor’s office — then there is no anti-corruption fight, it is a sham. When officials and heads of state corporations receive two or three million rubles a day, that is the same corruption, just legalized. So this is not an agenda that can be co-opted. Only one thing can be done: actually start fighting corruption. But Putin will never do that, because his political regime is built on corruption. — And how are you going to fight it? Clearly it is systemic. You’re not going to put millions of people in prison. — There is no need to imprison millions of people. People get used to anything. They will work under any system. What matters is that the top of the government actually operate according to the rules written on paper. Ministers should not be flying their dogs around on private jets; the president should not be turning his son-in-law into the country’s youngest billionaire, as happened with Putin and [Katerina Tikhonova’s husband, Sibur board member] Kirill Shamalov. There needs to be a law on illicit enrichment, and if they catch some guy whose salary is 20,000 rubles but who owns a house in Spain, a criminal case should actually be opened against him. Then everything will start working. Because right now we will never be able to convince a traffic cop not to take a 500-ruble bribe, because he knows perfectly well that the governor’s wife drives a Lexus bought for 5 million rubles. That’s all there is to it. — You also propose raising the minimum wage to 25,000 rubles a month, and making minimum pensions even higher. That sounds like populism — where is the money supposed to come from? — It is not populism at all. Populism is the opposite: repeating things from the early 1990s, when our economists said that all the weak should die, and then the strong would lead us into the beautiful Russia of the future. That’s nonsense. Look again at the American election. The main topic of discussion was the minimum wage. In the Democratic debates, that was practically all they talked about. — It was discussed, yes, but now it’s clear there won’t be any $15 an hour across the whole country. — Not across the whole country, no, but in New York State there will be from 2018. In other states it will be $12, $13 an hour; one way or another, it is set by law everywhere (in fact, in no American state does the minimum wage exceed $10 an hour — Meduza’s note). Russia needs this. We cannot pay a person who works eight hours a day less than 25,000 rubles. — I’m all for it. But where does the money come from? — There is enough money. Even now, many public-sector employees are paid more than 25,000 rubles [per person]. What we are saying is that we need to stop institutionalizing poverty. We are saying that Alisher Usmanov cannot be buying himself a yacht for 600 million euros if he pays a miner 18,000 rubles for working underground. (The press service of Metalloinvest, a company owned by Usmanov, later said that the average salary of employees at the Mikhailovsky mining and processing plant in 2015 was 38,700 rubles a month excluding bonuses, and that ore extraction there is done in an open pit rather than underground — Meduza’s note.) — In America too, there is a huge gap between ordinary employees and bosses. — There is a gap, but there is also a minimum wage. That’s the point! We are saying that labor must have a minimum value that allows a person to remain a normal part of society. 25,000 rubles for underground work is also very little, but there has to be some threshold. There is a low wage, and there is a destitution wage. — I’m just interested in where the money technically comes from. — Once again: this will not be an unbearable burden on the budget, because the budget usually already pays more than that. Reducing the costs of corruption will give the country and business enormous additional resources. And most importantly, through economic growth. The platform says so directly: overall, inequality and poverty can be defeated only through economic growth. Introducing a minimum wage is one of the measures that will force the economy to start restructuring a little. In particular, it will affect labor productivity. Labor productivity is a colossal problem in Russia. How is it dealt with now? Let’s hire three guys and pay them 12,000 each — that’s much easier than working on efficiency, hiring one person, and paying him 60,000. Labor productivity is not developing here, in part because labor is indecently cheap. Wages in Russia are now lower than in China. And why is labor cheap? In part because the population has low mobility. The owner of a mining plant knows that local residents have nowhere to go; they’ll come work for peanuts because they still need to eat. In America, if a person earns too little in one state, he moves to another. In Russia, there is no such mobility. And why not? Because there is no damn housing, it’s impossible to move anywhere with a family. And so on. So when we talk about fighting inequality, we are talking about comprehensive measures. A tax on the super-rich, a resource extraction tax — that’s from above. From below — raising the minimum wage. In the middle — tax exemptions, and ending the overregulation of small sole proprietors so they are not driven into ruin. — You also write in your platform that Russia must overcome its political isolation. But is there not a possibility that by the time the active phase of the campaign begins, that isolation will resolve itself? The new U.S. secretary of state is a recipient of Russia’s Order of Friendship. It is not impossible that France will now elect the Putin-friendly Le Pen, and in Germany the similarly sympathetic Alternative for Germany is becoming more visible. Will there be anything left to overcome? — I believe in the cyclical nature of politics. It’s a pendulum. First liberals were winning everywhere, democrats were winning everywhere, the left was winning everywhere. They came to power in Europe and said: let’s accept huge numbers of refugees. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and the right has begun to win in order to correct that. That is normal; that is how politics works. However, it would be naive to expect Russia to emerge from isolation simply because something changes in Europe. The Jackson–Vanik amendment [which imposed economic sanctions on countries that restricted their citizens’ emigration] was adopted in 1974 and repealed only in the 2000s. The issue with Jews had long since been resolved, everyone could leave for wherever they wanted, and yet the amendment remained in force, and Congress kept extending it. In other words, there is enormous inertia in the foreign policy of European countries and the United States. That is the first point. The second is that in order to emerge from isolation, we ourselves have to do something. To begin with, fulfill the Minsk agreements. After that, a significant part of the sanctions could be lifted. Then stop constructing the West as an enemy. — Well, we’re already friends with Trump now. — Really? Every time I turn on the TV, it’s Palmyra, Aleppo, “foreign sponsors of ISIS,” the same old thing. — Well, I suppose Obama is still sponsoring them for the moment. — This will not stop, because Putin cannot solve domestic problems. He cannot create a functioning judicial system, he cannot fight corruption, and so he constantly turns to foreign policy, as all authoritarian leaders do. [Zimbabwean President Robert] Mugabe does it, Lukashenko does it, they do it in Kazakhstan, in Uzbekistan, in Azerbaijan. As long as we use foreign policy to solve domestic problems, build an image of the enemy, and talk about what is happening “over there,” it will all remain the same. — So there won’t be any kissing with Trump. — At the level of rhetoric, of course, passions will cool, there won’t be personal animosity, the number of contacts will increase very significantly. But listen, nobody was as friendly with Putin as Obama’s Democratic administration was. The “Reset” button, remember? We’ve been through all this already. The Obama administration opposed the Magnitsky Act — they didn’t want it. And who did want it? Republicans. So what, are Republicans going to disappear from Congress now? — By the way, since we’re on the subject, have you ever thought that in some ways you resemble Trump? You’re also against the establishment, also fighting migrants, also in favor of gun ownership. — Before you, Bloomberg asked me exactly the same thing, and I begged them not to put in the headline that Navalny is the Russian Trump, the way they previously wrote that Navalny is the Russian Assange. No, I think there are no parallels, and no clichés from American politics apply here, because everything is completely different. For example, Russian liberals are American Republicans. Here, people who call themselves liberals speak not just from an ultra-market position, but from a brutally market-fundamentalist one, along the lines of “all the poor should die.” Why are they liberals then? Who knows why they were called that. Why are “liberal economists” the ones criticizing me for trying to introduce a minimum wage? I don’t understand why they are called liberal economists. They are some kind of libertarians from the 1920s. Yes, on some issues [we overlap] — I support reducing the role of the state, I see no problem with gun ownership among the population, and so on. But overall, drawing any parallels is fairly meaningless. — And with Yeltsin? You are often compared to him too. — I get compared to everyone. To Snowden, to Assange, to Sanders, to Trump for some reason, to Yeltsin. That’s just how people’s minds work. There is nothing connecting me to Yeltsin — not in origin, not in methods of work, not in belonging to the establishment. Except perhaps that I’m tall and fair-haired. — It’s just that in your video you say that there have been no real elections in Russia since 1996. So in 1996, was Yeltsin really elected? — I believe the 1996 election was falsified. Nevertheless, it was a real clash between Zyuganov and Yeltsin. I watched the recent film about Nemtsov with great interest (“A Man Too Free,” a documentary by Mikhail Fishman and Vera Krichevskaya — Meduza’s note) — there’s a scene where Nemtsov sits there reasoning: yes, Zyuganov is of course going to win now, and that’s normal, the cycle will turn. In other words, everyone understood that Zyuganov was about to win. And perhaps if that election had not been falsified — and Zyuganov had won, and that pendulum of changing power had started to work… I take a philosophical view of this. Everyone thinks I blame Putin very strongly for the repression I am subjected to. Of course I blame Putin, but I also think there is a kind of sacred retribution in it for the fact that I, when I was nobody in politics, just a student, actively supported the shelling of the White House (the Russian parliament building during the 1993 constitutional crisis), the dispersal of parliament, and was an extreme Yeltsin supporter and an extreme Chubais supporter. Yes, we were like that, and now we are all paying for it. Me included.