Putin Backs Down, the “Golden” Zolotov, an American’s Mother Hates America

[music]

Well,

8:18 p.m. in Moscow. This is Alexei Navalny.

Or, "the self-proclaimed opposition leader," as

the Tsargrad TV channel called me.

We'll see—that's exactly right, because

indeed, no one appointed me,

but I do claim that role. And really, this is

television is a terribly interesting thing.

Even homemade television like

ours.

On the one hand, it's very cool

to talk to tens of thousands of

people, answer questions, and have

direct contact every day. On the other hand,

you become a slave to this television format.

Basically, I took a month and a half

of summer vacation, and during that time

every day people kept hammering me: why did you leave

the broadcasts? How dare you interrupt these

live streams? They're important. And, really,

to be fair, people do have the right

to make those complaints.

Because when you create some kind of

media outlet, a means of mass communication,

you've already created a kind of public

good, and your broadcast doesn't belong only to you.

Once you take that public good

away,

well, you're doing something unpleasant, not very nice,

to other people. It's interesting how this

thing works. Thank you very much to everyone who waited for these

broadcasts. Thank you very much to everyone who

criticized me for not doing them

for a while. But I will try

to do better, although

well, it really is a kind of

slavery of sorts: every

Thursday you have to do it, and you can't

just stop whenever you want—unless you have

a valid reason, like mine when

I was under arrest. Today, as I was

told, is not a very good day

to resume the live stream, because

right now, at this very moment,

a truly huge event is taking place in

the world of esports:

the Dota 2 final. Those who don't know anything about

this game or about esports at all—don't

rush to laugh, because the prize

pool for this match is $24 million.

Right now a Russian team

is playing an American one, and nearly 200,000

people are watching it live

on Twitch alone, not to mention Yandex. So

it's a major event. I wish victory

to the Russian side today. They're playing

the Americans—beat the Americans, our

esports players. But in the meantime, let's

discuss

the battle now underway in Russia. It is

the main political battle, and it's very

interesting that Putin, of course, is

a participant in this battle.

For now, he is retreating—and that's very interesting,

very curious. And we need to continue our

offensive. We need to drive this little

man farther and farther back. What

happened? Pension reform, of course.

Raising the retirement age. Putin has, in effect,

declared a kind of default by the state.

For many years, everyone paid

pension contributions. He said: there's no money; I

won't be able to pay you. I'll only be able

to pay those who survive and live

to 65 in the case of men, and 63 in

the case of women.

And I won't be able to pay anything

to anyone else. That is a real default,

because, after all, people spent their whole

lives paying these contributions on the

understanding that at 55 they would start

getting them back, at 60 they would start

getting them back. He killed that. It's a default. And

people are furious, and we are seeing a kind of

real war between the authorities on one

side and society on the other.

The authorities are using various tactics—

persuading, deceiving, talking on

TV shows about how great it is to raise the retirement

age, how pensions will grow. But

people aren't stupid either, and they can see that on

the one hand there is a law that spells out in great

detail how their pensions will be taken

away, while on the other hand there is no law

about how they will be increased, because

the government says: we'll raise

the retirement age and pensions will become

larger. They repeat this everywhere, all the time.

Please give us a legal act,

a government directive, a law, a plan,

a budget document—anything in writing

with an official stamp and officials' signatures

stating that pensions will be substantially

increased. There is no such thing. And so, naturally,

everyone is furious. And despite the fact

that they think they're so powerful,

that they have television and everything else,

and the National Guard (Rosgvardiya, Russia's internal security force), which of course

we'll talk about today, we can see that the guys are, of course,

slowly retreating. We expected this

would happen, and I said on this program

from the very beginning that most likely

this was designed deliberately, and the next

step would be that sometime in mid-autumn the government

would announce that it was slightly lowering this

retirement-age increase,

this rise in the retirement age. But they were

forced to do it right now.

First, a United Russia representative, one

of United Russia's leaders, Senator

Andrei Turchak,

known for the fact that

he was quite credibly accused of

organizing the attempted

murder of journalist Oleg Kashin, Turchak

then declared that United Russia is such a

great party, and suddenly United Russia

Russia—let's say thank you to it: it

has decided to soften this law and

will restore benefits tied to pension

age. What does that mean? For those who

are younger than 55 or

60 and don't really understand, this is important. Say you are

a single woman, you're 54 years old, you live

in an apartment. When you turned 55,

that used to be pension age, and you would start

paying less for housing and utilities, and there were various

other benefits as well, all connected to the fact

that you had reached pension age.

But since the pension age has been raised to 64,

that means this benefit has been delayed for you by 8 years.

You still have to pay for housing and utilities

as before, and in your life, essentially,

in your budget, in everything, it had been

planned that starting next year

you would pay less and save money.

Naturally, this caused outrage—

justified outrage. But as

had been discussed for many years, and now

United Russia (the ruling political party) has said—so far, said—that

this part

it is bringing back. It wasn't easy

for them to do, but nevertheless, under

pressure from society, which kept

continuing, in particular by holding

various mass events. My

last program was on July 1, on the eve of

the July 1 protests; I said

we should hold demonstrations.

They were held in more than 50 cities, and

different political forces all took part.

Despite the fact that this is not a very active

political season, and despite the fact that

there was obstruction everywhere, here and there,

there were large rallies, and

United Russia and Putin understood—they simply

realized they had to back down, and they

did.

A step back under pressure. Now, today,

the outlet Proekt reported—and I fully believe

this information—that next week

Putin will, of course, come out looking like

the hero in a white coat, all polished, saying,

"Well, perhaps we got a little carried away

with the pension age, but folks, let me

in the interests of the people adjust our plans

a bit downward, and for women the pension

age will begin not at 63 but at 60."

Again, we understood that most likely

they would do this under pressure, but

they would do it—possibly in mid-September

or sometime in mid-autumn—but they wanted to see

whether it would fly or not, as in

*Nasha Russia* (a Russian TV comedy show): whether it would work or not.

It won't work, and already this summer they saw

that it wouldn't work, that they needed to

back down once again. A great many

political analysts and journalists generally

often reason like this:

they say he is the sort of person who must never be shown

weakness, that he never retreats. He always

retreats if there is real pressure.

Remember the monetization of benefits (the replacement of in-kind social benefits with cash payments in Russia); there have been many

examples of him backing down under

pressure from society. By the way, that is not

weakness—it's his cunning, his strength. He retreats

if he sees that nothing can be done,

that people have come out as a united front.

Why is Putin doing this now? Because

all their tricks, all their deception, didn't work.

Even this didn't work: they

literally got everyone—all organizations, all

political forces that, in fact,

should have spoken out against

raising the pension age—but they

bribed them, pressured them.

They all completely supported the government's

actions. The most astonishing thing, of course,

in this situation is the trade unions. If ever there were

an organization that should have been

in hysterics, bringing people out, calling for

mass demonstrations, walkouts, strikes—

the trade unions should have done all that, and they

did nothing. And it's absolutely

stunning: at a recent

discussion of the pension-age

increase in the Duma (Russia's lower house of parliament), there was a speech by

the head of one of the independent trade unions—

well, that is, a completely bought-and-paid-for union.

As for the Federation of Independent Trade Unions,

they are rotten through and through.

They constantly support United Russia

and immediately supported raising the pension

age. There are different ones, and among them there is one

called Sotsprof, which claims to be

an independent trade union.

It says it is against the government, and then they

came to the hearing and said that

the pension age should be raised.

An amazing speech. Let's listen for 53

seconds, just to understand

how all the institutional

organizations in Russia, including the trade unions,

have of course become completely corrupt and do not

represent anyone's interests except their own,

that is, the interests of their corrupt leaders. Here are three

seconds from the Sotsprof association:

"Sotsprof has already been carrying out ongoing work on

discussing possible changes

to pension legislation. Today

we can confidently say that our efforts have not been

in vain—the authorities are hearing us." At the same time,

no one even mentions that the main

goal of the upcoming changes is to raise

pensions. Those who say that pension

reform came like a bolt from the blue

are openly lying. And no matter how much the so-called oppositionists

puff out their cheeks,

their level of analytical ability and

their calculations of the economic consequences are

certainly far below those of

the government. Today liberals and

democrats of every stripe

are calling people into the streets, but let's

remember: how many parliamentary

hearings on privatization, or what kind of market

the country needs—they brought in all that talk, and in general they didn’t

pay wages; salaries were delayed for months

they ruined the lives of tens of millions of our

citizens. We call on the opposition to stop

playing to the public and rocking the boat

a representative of the workers comes out and

everyone waits, thinking now he’s really going to let them have it, and he

says the authorities are meeting us halfway

the government knows better what to do, well

of course, they’re just so smart

and in the nineties it was even worse, but

what a spectacular ending, of course: enough

of rocking the boat—and then they bring people out into the

streets. That’s exactly what this corrupt crook

showed us—told us what needs to be done

so that Putin keeps

backing down. They’re now announcing that

next week, according to media reports,

Putin will announce a

less harsh version of this pension

reform, because on September 9 almost

100 cities

are taking part in our protests, and for us this

must be an absolutely clear signal

that we need to come out even more actively, we need

to bring out even more people. Putin is saying this on purpose

so that people won’t

go out, so that they’ll stay home, thinking, well,

it seems like, after all, they’ve already

backed off a little, so I guess I should

fall for that. No—we need right now to

put in even more effort, understanding that

they’re bending under pressure—that is, we need to drive these

guys further and further back, along with

their proposals, along with their

raising of the retirement age, along with

everything else. And there was also this

amazing shot, filmed

from the balcony of the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament), at these

hearings on issues related to the pension

age: there sit people earning

350,000 to 450,000 rubles a month (roughly several thousand U.S. dollars), and please show us

15 seconds of how the discussion was going

and how much attention the deputies were paying to it

leader

what was even going on with them at all

Sergeychuk, the rating of the Russian

public organization in Russia, really

given the price of everything else

Deputy Tatyana Voronina from United

Russia voted for raising the

retirement age and receives a salary of

400,000 rubles, and there she sits looking at something

at pictures. Well, of course, maybe the person needs

to eat; maybe she can sit there and look at pictures

I can sit somewhere too

looking at pictures—boring, and

it’s a meeting. But you came to a hearing on

the retirement-age issue, and this is

the main thing worrying your voters, but

you don’t give a damn about those voters. So

in order for this to concern Tatyana

Voronina

so that she’d be worried, so that she wouldn’t just be looking at pictures

like that but would actually be concerned, that’s why

this deputy from Voronezh, I think

I don’t have the note here, but I think from

Voronezh—so that she would somehow be more

concerned, so that she’d be scrolling through the social media

of her home region and looking at reports

about the rally—how many people came, whether they’ll vote for me

next time, what curses

they’re hurling at me on the forums of my

electoral district. That’s why on 9/09

we absolutely have to come out, and come out

in any case. Again, to the point: you

will see, there will be some actions on the second

and on the eve of it there will be posts, of course

the authorities will first of all try

to water all this down—we all understand that, it’s

a normal situation, it happens every

time. You need to go, and you must not be afraid to go

Here, of course, we just need to remember

the success—the unquestionable success—of the action called

the March of Mothers, which just

took place in Moscow

If you haven’t been following closely, there is this

case called New Greatness—you probably know it

when some unfortunate

teenagers and young people were literally

lured in through social media by an FSB provocateur (the FSB is Russia’s security service)

somewhere he

brought them together, told them how great it was there

come on, let’s go somewhere, to a training ground

we’ll train there, and handed them bottles

with incendiary mixture. They’re about 18—come on,

18 years old; life is interesting to girls

it’s interesting to hang out in this group with

boys, and for boys it’s interesting with

girls

and then there’s also a Molotov cocktail—wow

how romantic and cool. He listened to all this

the security-service provocateur organized it all

and now he’s had them all jailed. And there are two

girls there, one 18, another 19

The March of Mothers was an event that

was organized by several women

and they stated as a matter of principle: we will go

there, and we do not need either permission or

official approval. More than that, as you can see

in this post now

by Varvara Gornostaeva, who is one of the

organizers of this action, that we are not

submitting any applications at all

This march, this march is basically about fundamental

rights and basic dignity: we will go and

we will demand. There was pouring rain there

and about a thousand people gathered

That may not be very many, but that’s not the point

the tremendous success lies in

the fact that a situation arises when people

from the outset basically say: we don’t give a damn

about your approvals, we’re going

anyway. And at moments like these, the authorities

always sense it, and the authorities are always afraid

when people really, directly feel

inside themselves something important that matters to them

Well, okay then—if they detain me for

15 days, if they jail me, then

with their little antennae and false legs,

somewhere there in the Kremlin, they always

sense it. Once again: they are afraid of this. It is

very important, and I believe that our

attitude toward the protest against raising

the retirement age should be exactly

the same. We will, of course, do everything according to

the law; we will submit applications.

But we will not even enter into any negotiations

because either, under the Constitution, they give us

approval—or rather, not approval,

not approval: they simply must

respond, okay, because that is how the law

is structured. In any case, we will still go. And personally,

my attitude is this: fine, if you want

to come after me,

to lock me up for 30 days for

speaking out against raising

the retirement age, in the interests of

millions of pensioners and in the interests of

tens of millions of future pensioners,

then go ahead, jail me. But even so,

speaking rationally, from the point of view of

politics—fine, I would like it

to be like this: this whole corrupt crowd

of deputies,

and officials—they are for raising

the retirement age, while we are out in the streets, and

let them disperse us for opposing the raising of

the retirement age. Then we will see whom

the public sympathizes with. During the Mothers' March

(a protest in support of women and children facing repression), that was exactly how it was—they said:

well, if you want to disperse us, then disperse

the Mothers' March, the women who came out

against the fact that you are keeping an 18-year-old

girl, some miserable young woman, in a SIZO (pre-trial detention center),

when she is sick and crying, and

literally, in court, at those hearings,

she was crying and saying, 'I want my mom.'

Well then, go ahead and disperse us. That is exactly the kind of

attitude we should have.

And no other. Here we need to clearly

understand and clearly realize that, according to

any poll, 95 percent of Russian citizens

are completely on our side, and

okay,

we want to see that no one wants any

detentions, no one wants any of these

crackdowns.

But this will not scare us. Let the city

hall and the prosecutors issue whatever they like,

whatever they call these warnings.

On the eve of every event, some

police officers constantly catch me near my building entrance and read out

something from a piece of paper. One idiot stands there with

a camera like this, and another fool

reads: 'The prosecutor of such-and-such district

warns citizen Navalny...'

Honestly, I could not care less what exactly

he is warning me about—that I supposedly have no right

to speak out against you stealing my

future pension, or the pension of my

neighbor? No—I will speak out.

And I urge everyone: on the 9th, in the description of

this video, there are links to the Facebook

group and the VKontakte group

for your city. Join your local group and

take part. Putin is retreating; now we need

to keep pressing him.

Otherwise, they will deceive us again. And you see—hello,

probably many of you have already understood

what is going on. I want to talk with you

indeed about the investigation

that we released today. Of all

the many, this is probably my most

favorite: Vitya, Vitya Golden Head—he

is called the director, the director,

the commander-in-chief of the Russian Guard.

It is interesting, actually funny, that according to

the law it is in fact called

the National Guard, while 'Rosgvardiya' is some kind of

self-designation—just as, at the beginning, I said 'self-

proclaimed leader of the opposition'; likewise, they have

'Rosgvardiya,' though nowhere is it

written that way—it is simply the National Guard, according to its official registration.

Ukraine also has a National Guard, so in this

Russian political mythology there is

some supposed punitive force from the Ukrainian National Guard,

whereas in Russia, supposedly, there is no National Guard—in Russia there is 'Ros-

guard.' But in fact it is also called the National Guard.

It is the National Guard too. But this Viktor

Zolotov, Putin's former bodyguard—where did we even

learn about him? Simply because

this character is such a favorite of mine.

Because his entire story, and the story of

his political rise, is even

more striking than Putin's. We first saw this very man

for the first time—this man who is now

engaged in dispersing rallies—we

saw him at a very real

unauthorized

demonstration, in fact. So,

look: this young guy who is in

this corner—for me it is the right corner, for you on

the screen, whichever way you are viewing it—in short, in

the place where he is standing above everyone else—that is Yeltsin's bodyguard,

Viktor Zolotov at the time. He is standing, I think,

on a tank during an

unauthorized gathering

of extremists, because some kind of

GKChP (the State Committee on the State of Emergency)

—

set up by various ministers

of the Soviet Union—was the lawful

government. But nevertheless, they

went there and organized what today would be called, in those damned nineties,

as they would say now, in the 'wild 1990s,'

an unauthorized gathering and effectively

overthrew the government in the Soviet Union. And now

these guys—this Zolotov, for example—well, it is not even

that he turned 360 degrees, not even that he

changed shoes in midair; they

went tumbling head over heels, changing their

political views every second and

every second saying some new

things. And from that tank...

from the security detail of the man who organized

the most successful unauthorized

events in modern Russian history, he

turned into this kind of general,

with golden epaulettes, who now

lectures us about how he will

uphold constitutional order, that he will not

allow unauthorized gatherings.

Most importantly, he turned into a fantastically

rich man, literally just

a fantastically rich man, and his

official income—you can go and look it up,

his income there was, what, in 2016, 6

and a half million rubles (about $100,000 at the time), which is slightly

more than mine—I think mine was 5

in my last declaration, a long time ago, so

it's not a small amount. In any case, he has six and a half

million, also not a small amount. But at the same time we

did an investigation—you can look it up

on our site—his daughter has a 500-square-meter apartment (about 5,380 sq ft), I can barely even

say it out loud, a 500-square-meter

apartment. He also took for himself

a dacha that used to belong to Mikoyan

the legendary Soviet people's commissar (government minister) of the Soviet era,

who, well, I mean,

who served for a very long time under many

Soviet governments, as you understand,

throughout all those years in the leadership of the USSR.

Well,

uh,

he also secured a nice little plum property for himself.

It was state-owned; this dacha was not

private property before, but now

it has somehow ended up in the ownership of

this remarkable general.

And

his income simply does not match

his spending, his standard of living, and the

standard of living of his relatives, so for me

there's nothing even to prove. As

journalists say, we can't

make accusations without fact-checking, but for me this is

the fact-check: when I see that a

person has assets that, by our estimate—we

calculated them at 700 million rubles (roughly $11 million at the time)—while

his income is 6.5 million rubles,

well, that is the fact-check for me.

That's why I say, yes, I consider him

corrupt. There is not a single

rational explanation for where

he got that money. And this isn't even

just some random official, you know, some

agriculture minister.

He's the head of the National Guard, Rosgvardiya (Russia's National Guard), call it what you like.

This is a man from the security services who stands

as a guardian of public order and embodies

order itself. And order in Russia

apparently means that this powerful man

who of course could never have been engaged in this kind of

business, will sit on our necks all his life

receiving taxpayers' money,

while somehow ending up with property worth 700

million rubles. Today we released

a follow-up investigation that in many ways

explains where Zolotov

got this money. Many people could have taken it,

but I don't think this could have happened without

Zolotov knowing about it. Let's watch this clip,

about a minute and a half long, and see

a minute and a half excerpt from our video

so you understand what we're talking about.

Just a year earlier, food was being purchased from

different suppliers

depending on the region, and then

the bosses realized: this is a huge

piece of the pie.

They granted the company Druzhba Narodov Meat Processing Plant

("Friendship of Peoples")

the exclusive right to supply food

to Rosgvardiya without any tenders or

competition. But somehow the owner

of this enterprise, through a chain of companies,

turns out to be a former officer of the Internal Troops,

Boris Zaurbekovich Kantemirov.

Kantemirov is a direct subordinate

of Viktor Zolotov, the head

of Rosgvardiya. Rosgvardiya buys wholesale,

through billion-ruble contracts, food at prices higher

than what it costs in retail stores in

Moscow.

The most outrageous example we have is

cabbage, because here it costs

look, 14 rubles 89 kopecks, while they

buy it for 46. Fruit juice in

the store costs 76 rubles per liter,

they buy it for 87. One thing I know for sure:

the people robbing you are not

the people you beat with batons and shove into

police vans. It's not the people who go to rallies

who profit from what you eat,

selling you worse meat for more money. And when you

detain protesters, you yourselves are making sure

that

your bosses can go on stealing money even from

your food.

When the guys from our

anti-corruption team came to me and said, listen, we found

contracts showing that Rosgvardiya had somehow started

buying food at much higher prices than

last year,

well, I thought, okay, probably

inflation, plus they stole maybe 10 or 15 percent,

maybe 30 at most—let's take a look. And then

they said, no, Alexei, not 30 percent, they

marked it up and stole—you won't believe it—like,

last year, in November of last year,

they were buying onions for 16, and now

they've started buying them for 60. And I, just as a joke,

said to them, ha-ha, I bet they're even

paying more than the store price, like

I was joking. And they said, yes, they are buying

through billion-ruble contracts and enormous

wholesale batches at prices higher than these

same products cost in the store. Well, that's exactly what

I showed in the video, in fact. And of course,

look, it's clear that

corruption is everywhere, but the sheer brazenness and

obviousness of it—so many people know about it, right?

Rosgvardiya (the Russian National Guard) has 340,000 personnel there.

The accounting department alone has about 500 people.

Add another 200 FSB officers (Federal Security Service) attached to them.

They’ve also got some people in internal departments there,

internal control, checking them,

some other people—and there were documents,

and they brought them into this accounting office, and there

some kind of budgeting department handled these papers,

and people are sitting there, a woman accountant, for example,

there are 30 of them in the office, and they’re told, well,

we’ve decided to buy onions at four times

the normal price—but this woman buys

onions in the store herself, so she understands that now

she’s going to have to sign off on something, and it’s

more expensive than in the store. She perfectly well

understands that out of those two and a half

billion,

just under a billion will be stolen at a minimum.

She signs it, then probably tells her husband,

“Can you imagine? They stole a billion from us

through food procurement.”

And all those FSB officers know, everyone else

knows too, but somehow they just look at it,

shrug their shoulders,

or who the hell knows how it works in practice for them.

Because the scheme itself

is completely insane—Medvedev signed it.

By the way, that was our mistake: we forgot

to mention in our investigation

a very important fact, and the BBC reminded everyone of it today:

a secret government order,

classified as a state secret,

saying that some

Nikanor office gets all the procurement contracts

for Rosgvardiya’s food supplies, through

this one company. Everything is bought at three times

the price. Such crude schemes—

they probably didn’t even steal this blatantly in the 1990s

(the chaotic post-Soviet decade) . And now, of course, a lot of people

keep asking me a fairly direct question:

the video says that

either Zolotov

or Medvedev or Putin stole it, or some

combination of them—but personally, I think

who was the main one in this scheme, who somehow

took the biggest cut?

I’ll answer directly: I think it was Medvedev.

Based on the totality of the evidence,

and by the way, we didn’t include all of it in the video.

There’s also a very long post—read it.

The people who built this whole scheme are

directly connected to Medvedev. In particular,

this Kantemirov guy,

a former Rosgvardiya employee, a former

member of the Internal Troops, from which

Rosgvardiya was created—he was the head

of the archive there, which is funny in itself: the head of the archive

of the Internal Troops later became this kind of

businessman. So, he worked

as CEO in various, various

companies

that belonged to Vinitsky.

And we know this Vinitsky from our

investigation *He Is Not Dimon to You*.

He isn’t in the film itself, but there are properties connected to him

in the huge text

attached to the film. In particular,

remember that famous house

on the Bezborodko embankment in St. Petersburg,

with those super-luxury apartments and the elevator

that brings your car straight into the apartment?

Well, Medvedev-linked companies bought

that building from this very Vinitsky.

He’s also a graduate of St. Petersburg,

then Leningrad, University.

So yes, it’s indirect evidence, but

our whole mafia seems to have come out of there.

Besides that, this Kantemirov,

the formal owner of the meat

processing plant—more than that,

he

was buying land around one of

Medvedev’s properties, the so-called

Maslovo estate, also on Rublyovka (an elite area outside Moscow).

It’s in our long, detailed

write-up—take a look.

That property is there; right now you can see

an aerial shot over the village of Maslovo.

We didn’t include it

because the film was already overloaded. So the point is,

he was buying, essentially creating

a security buffer.

He owned the land around this

house, around this property,

which, as we believe, belonged to the Medvedev

group. And how do we prove it belonged

to the Medvedev group? More than that, there is even

a document from the Accounts Chamber, which

checked this and found that these

wonderful people—Kantemirov and the others—

bought it for 15 percent

of its cadastral value. So it wasn’t just

sold to them—one way or another, all of this

is connected to Medvedev. Medvedev

signed the secret order.

So personally, I absolutely believe that

Zolotov is of course making money from this, and

so are Medvedev’s people.

Does Putin know about it? Of course Putin

knows about it. But obviously there are some

special services, and in our country

everything is preserved that way, so it’s all one big

mafia. But these two people—Zolotov and

Medvedev, and Medvedev first and foremost—

are making a great deal of money off all this.

For us this is an important case, and

we’re asking everyone very strongly to

spread this information and get it

above all to those very fighters,

the Rosgvardiya troops, so that those people

whose brains are constantly being washed, those

people who are being told about what kind of

extremists are supposedly gathering—so that

they understand a little more about their

superiors.

They probably understand it already, of course, but

they can see everything—they’re not blind. But good Lord, they’re not

somehow out there over scraps of meat for these people...

You hear that conscripts are making money off this?

They really did raise it for them, and it’s not even...

the fat content, but the percentage of connective tissue.

They used to buy meat that had

8 percent connective tissue,

but now they’ve raised the price and are buying meat at

a higher price, and it has 14 percent

connective tissue — basically some kind of

cartilage.

What they’re actually serving them is some kind of meat

made up of scraps of cartilage that, well,

that they’ll later be fishing out

of their soup and tearing at with their teeth like this.

That’s how they’re stealing money, and I really

want that when these servicemen

are gnawing at this god-knows-what kind of meat with

their teeth, at that moment they understand who

the real extremist is, and who is actually

hated — and who it is they want to hit with a baton.

This is very important, so please help us

spread and get this

information out.

What’s interesting is that lately

sports media have become quite

political. It was noticeable during

the World Cup, and it’s especially

clear from such a great outlet as

Sports.ru, where recently some of the

best — and, I’d say, politically

sharpest — interviews have been coming out.

Last week, one of them really blew up

the internet, and I also really

liked it because it was given by

Svetlana Khorkina, a famous Russian

athlete.

She’s an accomplished athlete who, at the young age of 18,

became a champion for the first time.

She put up great results, and to our great

regret, for some

damn reason she joined United Russia (the Kremlin’s ruling party). Read

that interview — it’s very revealing.

First of all, you can tell

the caliber of the human material

that is engaged in lawmaking.

There’s no doubt that Khorkina is an

outstanding athlete. But why are you sitting in the

State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament) if you basically

have no idea what you’re doing

and are just repeating this nonsense about how

Russia is now

respected, and Putin is so

wonderful, and yes, I sat in the

State Duma — well, I mean, all of

that is clear enough. This is really a story

about our State Duma: they’ve

packed it with athletes and entertainers, and they

are, to put it mildly, roughly like this:

they’re not exactly

the best lawmakers, frankly speaking. When it comes to

legislation, they operate at not

the highest level, and they don’t always

understand what is even happening around

them, what these papers are, and

what any of it actually means.

That’s the State Duma for you.

But that’s not even what struck me. What struck me

was how

Khorkina simultaneously

manages to make

the United States the object of her hatred and criticism. In

the interview, it just keeps coming up constantly.

I’m looking at it now — read the quotes yourselves.

Things like: “What about torture in prisons? You don’t

have information about the hundreds of

prisons in America.” They ask her about torture

in Karelia or the Komi Republic, and she says, “But in

America they torture people too — you just don’t know it.

Terrible things happen there.”

“African Americans are being killed in

the streets.” In response to something else, she says,

“People are being killed all over America, there are

school shootings,” and so on. “Do you want it to be like that there?

We have things very good here.”

How could Svetlana Khorkina

say something like that? And yes, to be fair,

American prisons probably are not

ideal, and

yes, there really are school shootings.

But if you hate it there so much, then why

did you, Svetlana Khorkina, go

to America to give birth and make your son

an American? Back in 2005, Komsomolskaya Pravda

(a Russian tabloid newspaper)

— my favorite newspaper, the one that tells

you how I eat lobsters — reported that

Khorkina went to the U.S. to give birth and

gave birth there. What does that mean? There are

countries with citizenship by blood, and countries with

citizenship by territory. Russia follows the principle of

blood: if you are a Russian citizen and your wife

is a Russian citizen, or your husband is a citizen

of Russia, then no matter where your

child is born, that child will be a Russian citizen

because they were born to Russian citizens.

In the U.S., the system is different: any person, even

if they entered the U.S. illegally,

or were dropped there from a plane with

a parachute, or

if you’re, I don’t know, a spy or whoever,

or somehow dug your way into the U.S. —

if you were physically born there, if the act of birth

took place on U.S. territory, then you are

a U.S. citizen. You can — that is, you can

renounce it, but you can also

be a U.S. citizen. And as the media again

reported, and as Khorkina herself confirmed in 2010,

her son is a U.S. citizen.

And let’s not kid ourselves:

when people are not abroad on a work trip,

not diplomats, not studying there, or anything

like that, and they specifically go there to give birth —

not just happen to be there and give birth in the U.S. — there’s nothing

terrible about it, but when people specifically go to the U.S.,

it’s obvious they are going there specifically

to give their child a

gift, and so that later they themselves

will have a simplified opportunity

to naturalize there, if they want to.

Emigrate—and Khorkina did it, come on.

Let's honestly admit exactly that.

And, basically, well, she absolutely could have.

To put it plainly there, honestly speaking, well, as for me, in

United Russia, I support Putin, but

our country does have shortcomings, well, like

our healthcare is bad; I work

in United Russia, and I'm trying to improve all this.

I draft laws in order to eliminate

some of the shortcomings that still exist in

our country, but for now healthcare

is bad, and for now things here are still not

very good. So I went and gave birth in the States.

No problem—I gave birth, that's all. There's nothing

terrible about it, for God's sake. It's not an act

of betrayal. No, there's nothing awful—you

did what many people could have done

themselves.

You said that healthcare in Russia is bad.

All 145 million people understand that.

You said that in

Russia things aren't exactly great, including

the maternity hospitals, quite often, and this whole

system,

the obstetric care system—millions of women know it

and run into these problems. You

decided to insure your future

child. So don't now

look us in the eye and feed us nonsense about

what a terrible America it is and what a

wonderful Putin is, while at the same time keeping

somewhere at home in a safe some kind of

blue booklet—I mean, maybe the child hasn't yet

been given a passport, but that

piece of paper that will let you

get that blue passport there, and he

will travel visa-free to Europe,

travel visa-free, and will be an American,

a U.S. citizen—this kind of hypocrisy

is simply disgusting, of course, just outright.

They lie even where there's no need to lie, but

who would even reproach her? After all, an athlete

generally implies a fairly

international lifestyle—you have to be

traveling somewhere all the time.

But no—even here they have to not just

lie, but also shame people. Read this

interview: the correspondent says, "You

have a negative view of events in

Russia—why are you telling me only negative things?"

And she goes on to shame us, saying that we

are doing something wrong. So basically, here's a mother

of an American who hates America.

It's very revealing—please read it.

When I went on vacation in the last

days of June, that was the last program,

I assumed that when I came back here

and

there would be a lot to say about the September 9 elections,

the Single Voting Day (Russia's nationwide election day).

On that Single Voting Day,

we are holding our protest action, a Single Day

of Protest against raising the retirement

age. But it seems that in Moscow

there are supposedly some elections.

What is there to say about them? Write to me,

please, with the hashtag #Navalny2018, about what

you would actually be interested to know about

the Moscow elections. Well, I see the metro plastered

with Sobyanin.

They've hung little screens everywhere that are

supposed to provide

some information to passengers, and there

it's just Sobyanin popping out of those little screens

nonstop. And this isn't paid for out of

an election fund—it's "information" about

how the city is developing.

Go into any

multifunctional public services center to get documents

or whatever else—there are little calendars

with Sobyanin, and Sobyanin is everywhere.

Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere—he's all over Facebook too.

You log in and there's advertising everywhere, arranged rather cleverly.

It's not advertising for Sobyanin—it's

advertising for that TV channel which

promotes itself with stories about how

our beautiful Moscow is becoming ever more splendid under

the leadership of Sergei Semyonovich, and this is

absolutely, definitely not campaign advertising

for Sobyanin. But the thing is, we

understood that this was exactly how it would be. They always

do this. These people have

administrative resources, they are cynical and

crooked, and naturally they will spend billions of rubles

from the budget on

promoting themselves. But we somehow

would have liked the candidates running

against Sobyanin to do something.

To at least be somewhat noticeable. I

have only seen one guy—some

figure from SU-155 (a bankrupt construction company),

an organization that cheated many

shared-equity homebuyers. He was let in on purpose

so that he could play the role of

the villain in this election, with ridiculous

slogans like "I'll whip everyone into shape." But overall, there's

nothing at all. Nothing is happening in this election.

Again, I have something to compare it to, because

it's interesting that at this same time,

five years ago, on August 24,

at our headquarters in 2013, we were celebrating

a milestone: by then we had set up

1,000 campaign cubes (street campaign stands), and

a couple of days later I held a rally

in Sokolniki at which there were several

thousand people. What are the candidates doing now?

It's not very clear. But again,

the thing is, you ask me the question:

do we go to the elections or not, do we boycott

them or not? I want to say once again:

to repeat:

there is no desire to boycott a second election

in a row. But let's be honest: an election

where there's Sobyanin and everything else is just

a competition for second place between

some, forgive me, Balakin and

Sviridov—

only an idiot would go to these elections.

Well, you’d have to be a complete idiot to

go to these elections, and here I’m very

interested in the position of all those

slightly odd people who, during the

presidential campaign, were running around us,

circling us, attacking us—political analysts and everyone else—

and telling us that you have to go to any election

no matter what, because voting is still a choice, and that’s good.

And that what Navalny is proposing—

a strike, a boycott of the elections—was

supposedly something terrible. But now

they’ve all gone silent, and I’d like them

to explain to me now why I should

go to the Moscow vote—what’s the point?

In the current Moscow elections, this is

where they keep repeating the same argument: you still need

to participate, it matters, it’s an institution, or that

candidates have an opportunity

to address the people. But with these

elections, they can’t even

repeat all that without shame, because

there is nothing here. And I’m not even going to

call for any boycott; I’m simply going to

keep saying: if you’re an idiot, then go

to these elections. But if you’re a normal

person and you want to take part in something

that is actually part of the country’s

political life, then on that day there is

a great opportunity in Moscow.

Please, come to Tverskaya, to Pushkinskaya

—come out. That day there will be a protest

against raising the retirement age. That’s where

there will be politics.

And at the polling stations there will be anti-

politics—just some kind of sham.

Let me answer some questions. Sokolova

Alexandra: “Alexei, what about the court cases in

Khabarovsk? They barred Alexei Vorsin.”

We really did have a great candidate

who would have won the mayoral election

in the city of Khabarovsk, but they didn’t let him run. That’s to the

question of how I’m supposed to feel about

elections when

our candidate, who collected signatures, is not

allowed in—he was registered and then removed

from the ballot for some completely

made-up

reason. I can even tell you exactly why

he was removed. There’s a form there,

an official document where he has to list

his property, his own and his spouse’s, and it

says there: “candidate’s (spouse’s)”

property. So he filled it out for himself, but he

is unmarried, so he filled it out only for himself.

And the election commission said, “Oh, but you

were supposed to take a pen and cross out the word ‘spouse,’

but you didn’t cross it out. That’s it, you’re not

a candidate, we’re removing you.” It’s insane. To which

he said, “Are you idiots? It’s your

form, your paperwork. Why would I be crossing things out on your form

when I don’t have a spouse? I listed

my own information, that’s all.”

It sounds wild. Of course he was removed, and we went to court,

and we’ll keep filing lawsuits, but you understand

what the courts are like. So in Khabarovsk there will be

no real mayoral election. There is a great

candidate there; he would have been a great mayor, but

there won’t be any real election there.

RK Protv asks me, writes: “Did Putin simply

decide to boost his ratings for himself,

like he’s going to appear now as some kind of hero,

the savior of the people?” He will try to

portray it that way. The question is whether he’ll

manage to fool everyone like that now.

To say, “Oh, I had nothing to do with it,

I’m not the one raising the retirement

age here at all. I’ll help, I’ll save you, guys,

from the bad government.” I don’t think that

will work very well. Polls show

that people understand Putin bears

personal responsibility for this. He is responsible, he

is pushing the retirement-age increase, and

our task, including during the September 9 protest,

is to talk about that. We have

7,000 people watching right now.

“Alexei, will you go to the court hearing for

Konstantin Saltykov on September 3 at

2:00 p.m.? The case will be heard on the merits,

and he needs our support.”

Konstantin Saltykov is a wonderful

young man who has already been kept

in jail for several months simply because

during my detention he somehow got caught up

in the middle of that mess, and they needed

to grab someone else and drag them in under

some charge, and so now he has been

held for several months, accused

of having

supposedly done something to police officers,

even though there is plenty of video evidence.

I can’t go to the hearing on September 3 because

I will be a witness, so for his case

I’m needed as a witness, because as soon as

I enter the courtroom, I’ll have been present at

the hearing.

Then of course they’ll say, as they always do, that

Navalny cannot be a witness

because he came in and

heard it all. But of course I urge everyone

to come and support Saltykov.

He is a genuine political prisoner.

Alex Bass asks: “What do you think about the

elections in New Moscow, in Shcherbinka?”

There are local elections there, for local

municipal bodies. As I understand it, there are some

good candidates there. Our party

supports these candidates, and they are

really in a difficult position, because

well, everything I said about

the elections in Moscow—don’t go—also

applies here. They were probably sitting there hearing even my

message and thinking, “Navalny is burying us now,” because

I called on everyone not to go, while for them

it’s important that people come and vote. Well,

that’s just how it is, guys. I can’t take

any other position. I can’t call on

10 million people to go to fake

polling stations just because in New Moscow there is

There are several good candidates, and to those who

live in New Moscow (the expanded administrative area of Moscow), I appeal to the voters:

take a look—if these guys are running

in your districts, come out and vote for

them in the local elections, for the municipal

assembly—but not in the mayoral election.

As for the elections—Dmitry Dmitriev, will you

provide legal and financial assistance

to those detained at the September 9 protests? We have always

provided it to those detained, and we will continue to do so.

What does financial assistance mean?

We pay fines that were imposed unlawfully.

Well, not exactly we pay them ourselves—we organize a system

for collecting money, where everyone chips in to cover

the fines. For all our rallies, for everyone involved,

we pool the money together and pay them. But

legal assistance is handled by our headquarters, and

everyone works on it. We will absolutely continue

doing that, and we already are. It’s just, guys, don’t

get too fixated on the idea of very strong legal

support. I’m a lawyer myself,

and lawyers are constantly with me—well, not

constantly, but yes, they go to court hearings, and when

I’m detained, two attorneys come out.

Has it helped me? Not at all. Every single time I was

jailed for 30 days.

No lawyers, no legal assistance

really work in Russian courts. Don’t

overthink that. You should be thinking

about the substance—you should be thinking about the fact that you need

to come out for this, that’s the point.

Ignoring everything else, and being ready

to be detained that day over this.

That’s what you need to understand. And when Putin

realizes that 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 people across the country are clearly

saying:

"Man, you want to steal our money, and

we don’t care what you’ve become or how much

you try to scare us with detentions—we’re going anyway,"

then fine, they may be able to detain 1,000

people. Maybe across the whole country they can

detain 3,000 people, 5,000

people—fine, let them. They can

put several hundred people under

administrative arrest; they can jail

people on administrative charges.

But you can’t jail 100,000 people,

so people still need to go out.

The chance of ending up among those couple

of hundred

who are detained or jailed for 10 days

is real—of course it matters.

But you still have to go, because otherwise

you won’t push back against this; there’s no other way to move them

or stop them, and they’ll go on robbing us

and stealing from us. And then, 10 years from now, when you’ve

lost several hundred thousand

rubles, or a million rubles (roughly thousands to tens of thousands of U.S. dollars),

you’ll think: what an idiot I was,

I got scared of some lousy 10

days in detention. I should have gone then; they wouldn’t have been able

to keep paying themselves proper money. It would have been better

if I had gone then and rattled this government—but

I didn’t go, I got scared, and now here I am,

ending up in this situation.

Alexei, people are asking: tell us who

is still participating in the elections in

the regions? We have someone running in Volgograd,

there are people in Tambov who wanted to run,

but they were removed; in Krasnoyarsk some remained at one point.

It’s all on the website.

There is information on our headquarters’ website and on our social media.

Accordingly, in the regional

social media pages as well. These are all small-scale

local elections where a few individual

people may be able to get through, but overall, in

what we might call major races—like the mayor of Khabarovsk

or the Tambov regional legislative assembly—we were running there,

but under outright lawlessness they removed our candidates because

we were winning those elections.

Unfortunately, they still won’t let us get access to the equipment.

What’s their latest excuse about the equipment taken from the office?

What’s the newest pretext on that issue?

Good question. They don’t even have a new

excuse—they just aren’t returning the equipment.

They simply took everything. The situation is such

that we can’t even demand from

any particular agency that our equipment

be returned, or even ask them to present, as you put it,

some fresh excuse—because

we go to court, and the court says:

you don’t actually know which organization

took your equipment. You show us

video footage of some men in plain clothes

carrying everything out, but we don’t know—maybe it was the Ministry of Internal Affairs,

maybe the FSB (Federal Security Service), maybe the National Guard,

or maybe you carried it out yourselves. We

don’t know anything, so goodbye.

Naturally, one of the main issues, one of the

main topics of discussion in this campaign,

this summer, has been VKontakte and all these likes

and jailings over reposts. I’ve spoken about this many times

on my broadcasts, many times, saying

that this would intensify. It already is

intensifying, and it will continue to intensify. I explained

that this is being done deliberately so that

you’ll be afraid to write anything. That’s why

it’s being done so demonstratively.

There’s no need to think that these are just some

idiots in power, just stupid

little cogs somewhere in Altai Krai trying

to jail

a young woman over her posts or reposts or

likes. No—this is a deliberate campaign so that

you look at this, and then before writing

"Putin is a thief," you think, damn, should I write it or not?

Should I post it? Damn it, I’d better not.

That is exactly what all of this is for. People often

ask me what my attitude is toward

VKontakte, whether I’m going to

leave VKontakte. So, for me there are

two things here. First: VKontakte

is unquestionably participating in the imprisonment of people.

It is participating directly. This is a group in which

there is Center "E" (Russia’s anti-extremism police unit), and there is VKontakte; there is

a connection between these people. Together they

consciously jail people—absolutely, that’s how it is. And

we—Leonid Volkov

published information about our people from

Ufa, our supporters

whose case files contain direct

evidence that even without a court

order, on their own initiative, simply

a police officer writes to the administrator of

VKontakte

and says, “Give me information on these people,”

personal information—and VK says, “No problem,”

“tell us what you need, we’ll send it,” and they do. Well, that is

quite simply a criminal violation, which

VK commits without even a court

request, by handing over information. So

it’s not just VKontakte—VK is part of

Mail.ru Group

which means Mail.ru hands over your

email, and VK hands over your correspondence

at the first request, without any court ruling. I

am sure of it; there is evidence

that

shows this. So they are certainly

helping put people in jail. Will we leave?

No, not yet, because

Facebook only works for

the biggest cities. When we create

groups for rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg,

Facebook still works, and maybe in

large cities like Yekaterinburg and

Novosibirsk

but elsewhere it’s only VKontakte, so we are forced to

use it. But I simply urge you

to understand that everything you

write on VKontakte, all your private

messages,

whether you participate in certain groups or not,

whether you write or don’t write—all of it

is monitored, and at the first opportunity

can be handed over to the FSB and the MVD (Russia’s Interior Ministry)

and everyone else. In other words, this is absolutely not

a safe network, but a network that directly

works against its own users. We have to

use it because it’s huge, we are forced to work through

it. So, well, I know many people will

write to me saying I said

some nonsense here: first I said they

put people in jail, and then that we somehow

aren’t leaving. But for now, that’s how it works. I’m

telling you how it is. For us, what matters is

the ability to create these regional

groups on VKontakte

but at the same time we understand that they simply

behave like—excuse me—

they betray their users, they

help put them in jail. Whatever they are saying now

about changing something—they are doing it

because they have run into mass

outrage, outrage from their own

customers. But they will keep doing this to you

because they belong

to Usmanov, and for Usmanov the only

way to preserve his billions is

for Putin to remain in the Kremlin, and for Putin

the way to stay in the Kremlin

is to jail those who are outraged

by his prolonged stay there, including on

social media. Quite simply, everyone

involved has an interest in getting you jailed

for a like. And I apologize for

such a not very optimistic ending

to the program.

But I do have an optimistic

ending for you—about a happy man. There is

this journalist, Valery Fadeev

well, “journalist” is a stretch—more like a guy from

various TV talk shows, you see him there

all the time, on Channel One. He used to be

the secretary of the Public Chamber, and he still

is the secretary of the Public Chamber (a state-backed civic body)

he coordinates various things and

is a member of the central штаб of the All-Russia People’s Front

he holds various positions and speaks everywhere

in particular, recently—let’s watch these 13

seconds—how he talked about

the need to raise the retirement age

for 13 seconds.

And the retirement age objectively

has to correspond to average life expectancy, because the so-called

period of life after retirement—and excuse me

for these crude words—we have a lot of

people who live too long.

Do you know why he loves the government so much?

And why the government loves him? Because he is

a happy man for whom amazing

things work out—things that

you could never pull off. He is the editor-in-chief

of *Expert* magazine. It’s a terrible

trash heap of waste paper, I mean a magazine nobody

needs, where they constantly praise

Putin, of course. For a pro-Putin

propagandist like Fadeev, money was needed, and

so he pulled off the perfect scheme:

he got a bank loan

using their old unsold

magazines as collateral. That is, they printed

all this worthless trash paper with portraits of

Putin on the front cover

Well, nobody buys this waste paper—who

needs this junk? So it sits somewhere,

a million copies of these magazines sitting in some

warehouse, and he took out a loan against this

waste paper. Then he didn’t repay the loan, and

the bank went ahead and

seized these magazines, saying, “Okay, well,

if you’re not paying back the 35 million

rubles (about several hundred thousand U.S. dollars), we’ll take the magazines.”

But how much are they actually worth? As waste paper,

well, probably—what? Maybe

I don’t know—200,000 rubles total (roughly a few thousand U.S. dollars). But

he got 35 million for them. You know, it’s like

if we had some leftover

campaign materials from the elections—our newspaper print runs were seized

back then

a year ago—and now we’ve rolled them up and don’t

know what to do with half a ton of newspapers,

and if someone bought that half-ton of newspapers from us

for 35 million rubles

that would never happen for us. But for Valery

Fadeev, it did—and that is why this

a happy man who will continue

to go on television and tell us about

how it is supposedly right to raise the retirement

age, and how wise our parties are

and the government, while on September 9 we must

go out into the streets and tell him, Valery

Fadeyev,

we do not believe you. See you

next Thursday, thank you.

[music]