Mishustin is a thief, Eldzhey is a cannibal, the coronavirus is a killer

[music]

Good evening. You’re watching the live broadcast of the program

Russia of the Future, and I am its permanent

host, Alexei Navalny.

Or, as various Kremlin media outlets called me this week, a man who has stopped obeying

Western investors, as they described me this week.

That’s what they were calling me.

Various Kremlin media outlets. I forgot to mention

that it is exactly 8:00 p.m. in Moscow right now.

Please send me your questions,

suggestions, wishes, and complaints on

Twitter with the hashtag for Russia of the Future, and I

will try to respond to as much as I can. We have

a terribly funny situation going on with

the donations we collect through our

program. It really is quite an

important tool for us right now, when we are

constantly under attack. As soon as we

test some new system, they shut it down

— or, if they don’t shut it down, they come up with

some conditions that force us

to disconnect it ourselves. So today we have a new

system.

Let’s see whether it survives longer than one

broadcast. Please check the description;

you can send messages of support that will

float across the screen. Well then, let’s discuss

various events, insult our

officials, and remember that in

fact

we’re insulting them too cheaply.

Apparently, for the past couple of months

— because, interestingly, Vladimir Putin

today at the Human Rights Council

announced that he is instructing officials

to consider tightening

punishments for insults, first of all, and

second, to look at mechanisms for

refuting false information and for more

thoroughly prosecuting those who

violate the honor and dignity of various

people. But you understand, when Putin

talks about refuting false information,

he certainly does not mean refuting

Channel One or RT (Russia Today).

And I think in the next couple of

months we will see another wave of increased

liability for telling the truth — for the truth

that I, we, you — all of us ordinary

people in Russia — write online about

this government and these officials.

Because when you write the truth about

them, it really does, in a sense,

sound like an insult.

Because, well, they really are

crooks, thieves, occupiers — technically, that

could fit under all sorts of

definitions of insult. Before, the fine was

1,000 rubles (about $16 at the time); now it will be

10,000 or 15,000 rubles (roughly $160–$240 at the time).

That’s clearly where things are heading.

Nevertheless,

regardless of how much we may have

to pay for

speaking the truth, we will not give up

that right, and we will call things

by their proper names. And of course I want to begin

with this very important something-or-other that nobody understands,

nobody knows when it will happen, and in general

nobody knows what will happen — but everyone wants

me

to immediately explain, among other things, what

needs to be done about this unclear thing,

which is these constitutional amendments

that will apparently be introduced

on April 12 by means of some unclear

procedure. And when I say it’s unclear,

that’s not just a figure

of speech, it’s not an exaggeration — it really is

exactly like that. If I ask you right

now, guys, when will the vote take place?

you’ll say: we don’t know. Guys,

how will the voting be conducted?

You’ll say: we don’t know that either. We do know it is

not a referendum and not some procedure

equivalent to an election. It will be something

separate,

designed by Ella Pamfilova (head of Russia’s Central Election Commission) in such

a way that it will be easier to rig everything there

regardless of the actual results.

And what exactly people are supposed

to be voting for is also completely unclear. For example,

today —

or rather, last night — there’s this man, Pavel

Krasheninnikov, one of Putin’s գլխավոր lawyers,

a sellout lawyer. He used to be in

the Union of Right Forces party, was supposedly a great democrat

and a leading democratic legal theorist,

a legal scholar — and now, for

many years, for Putin and United Russia,

he has been helping cook up their disgusting

laws. So, this Krasheninnikov said

that it is possible

the Constitution, in terms of text, words, and letters,

will grow by 50 percent. In other words,

they really must be planning to stuff

something extraordinary in there. My hypothesis

is that everything most important —

that is, everything most vile and

directed against us — will be introduced

at the second reading. Especially since

Volodin has already said that by the second reading

some very “interesting” little amendments are being prepared

that we’ll talk about later.

The consideration of this second

reading had apparently been scheduled for

early February, the 11th or 12th. Now they

seem to be doing it in a way that piles in

a lot of assorted nonsense. You’ve heard, for example, that

they want to call Putin the Supreme

Ruler. Putin, through Peskov, rather

modestly said: I have no

connection to this initiative. He didn’t say,

I’m against being called

the Supreme Ruler. He said, well,

I don’t know, I have no particular attitude toward it.

So, I

I think, I assume, that the most hellish part

trash, satanism, and some genuinely serious things

that Putin wants to cram into

the Constitution in order to extend his

power indefinitely. They’ll be introduced

precisely at this second reading

when people are already getting tired of

discussing all this. So many analytical

articles have already been written, and that’s exactly when they’ll slip the most

interesting parts in there. But what,

really, are we supposed to do? I discussed this on

the previous program, and I’m discussing it again on this

program because the question

keeps coming up. Many politicians have already

announced full-fledged initiatives: vote no,

show up decisively for this vote

—whatever exactly it is, since that’s unclear too—and

vote no; that way we’ll keep it all under control.

None of this is very clear. There’s also a whole

manifesto by Citizens of Russia (a Russian civic initiative)—a good manifesto,

and all these Citizens of Russia people are great,

and it’s quite possible that participation

in the campaign is necessary. But I’m simply urging everyone

not to launch any initiatives yet while it’s still unclear what exactly will happen there. At the very

least, don’t announce anything right now.

I think that over the next couple of

months, all of you—all of us—are just going to get our heads

spun with the film *No*. Watch it—it’s

a good film.

It’s a film about the referendum that

took place in Chile, when that referendum

became the turning point that led to

the removal of the regime. Roughly

speaking, there was Pinochet, who had been president

forever, and then he extended his term.

He held a referendum with

one question: did you want

the term limits to be changed so that

Pinochet could run in the elections again? And

everyone assumed the population would say yes. But then one

fine day, people suddenly

got organized around that referendum,

made it happen, and they all came out and voted

no—and that became the beginning of the end of

Pinochet’s rule. Let’s watch a short

clip from that film. It really is

very good, and it’s important to talk about it

because everyone is going to endlessly

speculate about it—those who’ve seen it, those who haven’t,

those who understand what it was about, and those who

don’t.

They’ll all be shouting: the film *No*, in the film *No*,

everything was explained there—how it’s supposed to be done.

One minute of the trailer for the film *No*, excuse me.

They began—this is not a joke, but a hint at his

victory

[music]

This helped, relatively speaking.

[music]

His parents gave it to him.

Debates and slogans—I'll erase this in the same way.

By the ports, all the more so near the ravine.

And the website de jure from Morocco.

Uh,

It really is a great film.

You should watch it.

We even organized public screenings

of this film back in 2013, if I remember correctly,

during my mayoral campaign. Of course, it presents

things in a somewhat simplified way—just

a PR perspective: the main thing is to organize

a great campaign, come up with great

slogans and great visuals, and then everything

will work out. But the most important difference,

I’ll repeat once again, is that I still think

we genuinely don’t yet understand what needs to be done

in connection with these amendments that

Putin is introducing, because it’s unclear how exactly

he is introducing them. Even people

in the State Duma and the Kremlin don’t fully understand. The main

difference

—the fundamental difference between what

is happening in Russia and what happened in Chile—

is that there, there was a formal

referendum. There was a referendum with a question

asking whether you wanted Pinochet to

be able to run in the elections again, and you could

come and say, “No, I don’t.” If

the majority of people had said, “I don’t want that,” then

that would have meant he couldn’t run.

It was a formal procedure within which it was possible

to fight. What’s happening here

is something else entirely. As I said at the start, this is not

even clear—it’s some kind of vote to approve

amendments that by that point will already

have been passed by the State Duma. Besides that,

there will be all sorts of completely different

amendments there. Do you want—taking them all together—

do you want this? Do you want

pensions to be raised, pensions for retirees to be indexed?

We do—so we vote yes.

Do you want Putin to have more

powers? We don’t. Do you want some

stupid State Council? We don’t. So should we

vote no? But there are thousands of things like that.

They’ve already said there will be thousands of amendments.

All of it will be bundled into one package.

You’ll have to come and say yes or no, and

in fact, whatever you say

won’t immediately change anything, because it

will already have been adopted. For now, the

setup seems to look like that. If it

ends up looking different, we’ll make

a decision then. But right now there’s no need to run

ahead of the train. Putin has a plan

in his head, and he’s gradually

feeding that plan to his people, and they’re making parts of it

public. But we don’t know the full picture, and

we’ll find out soon enough, when

we actually see the object of the vote—the amendments themselves.

Then we’ll decide everything. But for now,

it seems to me these are fairly pointless

conversations. This is definitely not a situation

where we have to decide immediately, and if

we don’t decide right away, that means we’ve somehow already lost.

Nothing like that is happening. There’s no need, in that sense, to

rush anywhere. The main event

of this week—modestly, I’d say, in my

opinion—is of course our investigation.

What was published about Mishustin has

I think, extremely important

political significance. Why? Because

Putin's task in appointing Mishustin was to

charm and deceive everyone, and to play

on the contrast: there was Medvedev,

whom people supposedly liked just yesterday, but now

he has turned out to be

disgusting, ruined, and useless to anyone.

Bad Medvedev, go away, go away — it's safe

to say 'bad Medvedev.' But here he is,

good Mishustin, and look at him, he is

a technocrat, and he seems — well, Medvedev also kind of

looked like this funny

little guy, and that irritated a large part of

the population — his jokes,

his iPhone, Instagram, social media,

just generally some kind of strange and ridiculous

behavior.

Mishustin, on the other hand, seems like a more traditional

little fellow, a pudgy sort of guy.

They put him in as prime minister and immediately started

inventing a legend around him — that he is

a technocrat, that he did something

very right and proper in the tax service. And it

was fundamentally important for us to release our

film. We were really upset that for several

weeks — a couple of weeks after his

appointment — journalists started, well,

but we understood what choice to make:

to do the investigation, because we had

materials, a huge amount of material

on Mishustin. We had had it all along, ever since we

first came across him in one of our reviews,

and realized: this is our kind of target, and we started

collecting it. But yes, everything was clear — well,

the guy is a crook, that was completely obvious, and

we were just waiting for the right moment. He did not seem

important enough to talk about

— and then bang, he suddenly became very important.

But his corruption is so obvious that

journalists were publishing this part of our

investigation elsewhere

and then again.

But nevertheless,

we still have a lot to tell about him.

We've talked about it — let's watch a small

excerpt from our investigation. A reminder:

if you haven't watched it yet, watch it; if you

already have, please help

spread it. This is of fundamental

importance. Let's finish watching, and then I'll continue talking about it.

These are not just Mishustin's estates, but rather

a property with a fairly complex ownership

structure. All the documents are now

classified, but as I already said, in the past

these documents had long been available, and we have

the ability to unravel the whole tangle. Before

us are 2.6 hectares (about 6.4 acres) of land in the elite residential community

Cotton Way on Rublyovka (the upscale area west of Moscow). Here, behind

an enormous fence and even taller

pine trees, the Mishustin family's mega-dacha (country estate) is hidden from view.

We can see a garage of almost 300 square meters (about 3,230 sq ft),

a tennis court, a small

football field, and a main house of 861 square meters

(about 9,270 sq ft).

There are also two more houses of 450 and 250 square meters (about 4,840 and 2,690 sq ft), and here is

another small house of 150 square meters (about 1,615 sq ft), and

yet another house of 741

square meters (about 7,975 sq ft) — nearly 3,000 square meters (about 32,300 sq ft)

of various buildings in total. In 2005, this plot

and the huge 900-square-meter house on it (about 9,690 sq ft) were

registered in the names of his children, Alexander and

Alexei.

They would later become students at an elite Swiss

school. The next figures in our story are

Mishustin's father and mother, in whose names

this part of the dacha is registered — nearly 8,000 square meters (about 86,100 sq ft).

And this plot here

is the most interesting one: it is connected to two more

important figures in our investigation.

It now belongs to Mishustin's sister,

Natalya Stenina, and she assembled it from

ten plots, most of which

she received in 2009. Of the 12,000 square meters (about 129,200 sq ft),

9,000 — that is, 70 percent — were gifted

by a certain Alexander Udodov. Along with

the plots, houses of 741 square meters

and 147 square meters (about 7,975 and 1,582 sq ft) were gifted as well.

Because of the snow there, and those pine trees

that make it hard to get a proper look, maybe

someone got the impression that his estate doesn't look

all that impressive. But

believe me, this is truly super-

mega-luxury real estate in Nikolina Gora (an elite Moscow suburb): two and a half

hectares (about 6.2 acres), enormous pines — and this is

seriously expensive. So of course, as soon as

we found this plot and saw that

it was owned by the minister for taxes and

duties, everything immediately became clear about

Mishustin. That is exactly why it is so important

to spread this and talk about it, so that people

understand too. And we must not let

Putin play on this contrast and

spin a story that now

the government has become better: Medvedev was

bad, and now Mishustin is good. Absolutely not.

[__] a crook. Here is one of the biggest

schemes that was going on in

the country. You ask me whether I should talk about

public procurement,

or something else, some contracts?

Of course that matters too. But one of those

outstanding schemes that kept happening

and is still happening — I first heard about it

when I was still in college, and

it is still going on to this day — is the scheme

of so-called VAT refunds, and tax refunds in general.

As a matter of principle, with tax refunds in

Russia — I looked at today's

statistics, and even according to official

figures, Russia loses 17 billion rubles a year

— 17 billion rubles (roughly hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars).

That is the equivalent of four city budgets lost to these

VAT fraud schemes. The famous Magnitsky case

was about exactly this,

very roughly speaking. In primitive terms,

this scam works like this: you

You register some company,

then forge documents claiming that

your company paid VAT, and you go to

the tax office and say, you know, there’s

an official mechanism: if you sold something

abroad, the state budget is supposed to refund your VAT

to you. So you come in with

forged documents and say, we

exported goods,

please refund us VAT—1 billion rubles

(about 10.8 million USD), and crooked tax officials, if you’ve

made a deal with those crooked tax officials for

a share of the money, will

refund it to you. Hundreds of billions, I think,

in reality,

objectively, the amount was probably in the trillions

of rubles that were stolen through

these VAT refund schemes. This is

outright fraud, and involved in this

fraud are crooks like these—

businessmen.

But the key people, of course, are, logically,

the tax officials. Without them, this would be absolutely

impossible.

One of the people who

was involved in these schemes, at least

that’s

what the press wrote, and there was a criminal

case opened, searches were carried out—

was businessman Alexander

Udodov.

And this Alexander Udodov is the main

business partner of Mishustin.

His sister’s as well, and so on. So how can this

man be prime minister? They literally

didn’t even do it through

some scheme where, you know, you had to buy

furniture that cost 1 million rubles

(about 10,800 USD), but we buy it for 1.5 million rubles, or

you needed to build something,

the construction cost 100 million rubles

(about 1.08 million USD), but we spent 150 million rubles on it; 50

million was laundered. In this case, though,

they simply, literally, took money straight out of the budget.

All you needed was a piece of paper for a VAT refund.

Mishustin settles it, Udodov gets

huge amounts of money, and that’s how they

pulled it out,

pulled out this money. That money—

I didn’t mention the Magnitsky case for nothing.

What was the essence of the Magnitsky case?

There, the scheme wasn’t about VAT

but about corporate profit tax. Police officers,

together with tax officials,

seized companies—companies that were running

real businesses and paying large

amounts in taxes. They carried out corporate raids,

took over the firms, seized their incorporation documents,

and then, on behalf of those firms,

they sent letters to the tax authorities, came to

the tax office and said, you know, last

year we paid corporate profit tax

of 2 billion rubles

(about 21.6 million USD), but we paid it by mistake, please refund it to us.

If you went to the tax office like that,

they would first laugh in your face,

then, if you demanded they review it,

they would review it and never

refund you anything. People who

legitimately reclaim VAT

because they actually

exported something and want their VAT back—they

fight for it for months and years,

go to court, create scandals, and so on. In these

cases, people would come in and say, return

our billion, please—we

accidentally paid it in tax,

and it was refunded immediately.

And after that, in particular,

Olga Stepanova, one of the senior

tax officials, would buy herself another

country house,

or a place in Dubai, on Palm Jumeirah,

you know, that famous

luxury area with insanely expensive

villas. Or she bought a villa in Anapa,

cars, property on Rublyovka (an elite suburban area outside Moscow).

We did a major

investigation into this. In fact, the people with

whom Magnitsky worked were also investigating

this. There, all of them—

the police officers and tax officials—became fabulously

rich because of it.

So, Mishustin was operating at the very

top of this scheme. The police, some

Olga Stepanova—those were more like middle

management.

Those tax officials were working somewhere down here, while

Mishustin was at the very top, and his

businessmen were handling the biggest and most

important operations. They could not have been done

without him, without absolutely corrupt

security officials from the power ministries and everyone else.

So in that sense, the mafia came into

the government in a very, very

serious way. And that’s why it’s surprising that the Kremlin

let all this through. Now, as for the connection between Mishustin

and Udodov—they play hockey together.

These are people

like Udodov who, as we showed in our

investigation—well, you understand, he

doesn’t just carry over suitcases full of

cash. We may not see the suitcases, or

whether it was a GAZelle van or not,

or dump trucks, KAMAZ trucks hauling money—

you can’t trace that. A truck left, a truck

drove away—we didn’t see it. We can

only assume. But the guy simply gives

a deed of gift for land on Rublyovka

worth millions of dollars to the sister

of the country’s top tax official, and no

law enforcement agencies, no

security services supposedly noticed. Why? Because

it was all happening at the highest level. This was

corruption on a level worthy of Putin himself.

I repeat: this is simply a scheme by which, without

doing anything at all, you can take from the budget

as much as you want—just come in and say...

Please return the VAT refund paperwork to us, and then move on.

Fill it out for any amount, if you have

the head of the tax service there, he

says to issue a refund. From that, you received

many, many billions more, I think

than that.

Of course, Mishustin's involvement in these schemes

benefited both himself and many different people; it

played, in our corrupt system,

a very positive role for him personally.

Why was he appointed? Because he's the kind of

guy who's one of their own, a normal dude.

And separately, of course, there's the absolutely hellish issue

of Mishustin's sons' apartments, but

good Lord. You know, speaking about

him, he's this technocrat, a cunning man

who had things arranged there—but yes, a cunning man, okay,

supposedly a smart man, with a large

number of advisers.

So, he has children, and they were soon going to turn

18, and he wanted those children

to have apartments simply gifted to them by some unknown person.

He wanted them to have

apartments, but he didn't have an extra 400

million rubles (about US$4.3 million), so some

businessmen, to whom he had just signed off

on two billion there so they could steal it from

the budget, then later kick some of it back

to him in the form of apartments for his sons.

Well, somehow in his mind there remains

some clever scheme with offshore companies, fronts, something like that.

No problem at all: Udodov buys

the apartments,

hands them over for four months to the restaurateur, and then

the restaurateur Novikov gives one to one

and then the other to the other son. It's incredible, if you

noticed—we were genuinely delighted

when we found this. First Novikov had

two apartments, and he gives one to one son, and then

the other one a few months later, and we couldn't

understand why—why didn't he immediately

give the second apartment to Mishustin's second son?

The apartments there were mirror images, absolutely

identical apartments in the very same

building.

And then we simply realized that he—

that son, at that moment, Alexei,

no—Alexander, was not yet 18 years old.

If a child is under 18, then his property

has to be listed in the declaration of his father, the official, whereas

as soon as he turns 18, that's it—

no one will see the apartment. Well, not exactly no one,

because it's still visible in Rosreestr (Russia's state real estate registry),

it's visible everywhere; the chain is right there, and we

traced it. It's so obvious that it simply means

you were handed 400 million rubles (about US$4.3 million).

So don't doubt it: these

people whom Mishustin brought into

the government, they will carry things out

to the fullest. Right now they're

looking around there, getting settled, and they won't do anything else

except enrich themselves—they

they won't be doing anything else. There are 39

thousand people watching the live broadcast.

A reminder that there's a link below; by clicking it,

you can send in these wonderful

little donations, like the ones running along the bottom of the screen,

and support the Anti-Corruption Foundation

so that we can carry out these investigations.

Let's move on to the question about

I'm being asked whether we'll file again

applications to the court regarding the designation of

FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) as a foreign agent. We will keep

demanding, endlessly if necessary, that this label be removed from us—

this so-called 'foreign agent' label.

As I explained here, they sent us, through

some shady Spaniard of theirs who

didn't even know the name of the organization,

US$500. We returned it long

ago, and now they're basically just

making excuses. In any case, we're suing, we're filing in

court; there is a procedure for being removed from

foreign-agent status, and we have

fully complied with it.

We are not going to let this go, because

it is now very important for them, everywhere, in all

their articles, to say something like:

'Navalny from the Anti-Corruption Foundation,

which has been designated a foreign agent,'

'pseudo-investigations about Mishustin

were published by an organization designated

as a foreign agent.' And a person who

doesn't understand these things—a grandmother watching TV,

for example—thinks, 'My God, it's been declared a foreign agent,

that must mean it's officially a spy

organization.' That's exactly why

they do it.

Viktor Medved asks about the army.

A lot has happened that undermines

trust in the Russian army, from

hazing to kidnappings and other things we've seen, for example.

Share your opinion: what should someone do if

they are facing conscription, and in general

what is your attitude toward the draft? I've said many times

that I am categorically opposed to conscription. I

consider it nonsense. We need

a professional army, because today

the people serving should be professional soldiers,

because the equipment is complex, the weapons are complex,

and there is simply no need there for any

18-year-old louts.

But what can you do? Go study somewhere and get

a deferment on that basis.

And if they've taken you, then there's nothing to be done—

you have to serve. But overall, the army right now

is a tax on the poor. That is, if

you come from a wealthy family, you will never

be drafted into the army—you will find a way

to avoid it.

Only people from poor families go to serve, and that

makes poor families even poorer,

because a young man is torn away from them.

Now Pasha Bulakhov asks me, Alexei:

why is no one in Russia discussing

the term 'peak Z' abroad? It is

the official name for the current process. I

don't even understand—I have never heard that

term, for what it's worth.

I don't know what it means when 5,000 or 40,000 people are

watching live.

Let's move from the big picture to something smaller.

We were discussing the government, and yes,

the government has one main

task, of course: to make sure that

people's incomes rise, because Putin's

approval rating depends on people's incomes. They

aren't rising, and they won't rise. All they

will be able to do is manipulate the statistics. They

will simply tell you, "Guys, you

know, according to our data, your income

was, like, 10 percent higher last

year." And you'll say something like,

"Judging by my pockets, no, it's the opposite — prices

are rising, salaries are the same." "No, no, no, no,

this is statistics, this is science. Science

has proven that your income has increased,

so don't even argue." That's the kind of

dialogue we'll get. But overall, of course, all

this trash and impoverishment will

continue. I want to draw

attention to how important it is, and how possible it is,

to force the authorities to fulfill their obligations

and secure social guarantees for yourselves. You

know, we actively help trade unions. I

support strikes, and I cover even small ones.

I want to tell you now about a strike

that happened this week — a micro-strike,

I'd even call it a kind of blitz strike,

which happened and won. Because

the authorities, on the one hand, cannot

fulfill any social promises, and on the

other hand,

they are terribly afraid of admitting

the very fact that social promises are not

being kept. They fear the people who come out and

say, "Hey, pay us our wages,

do something." They fear those who

find the courage to say something about it,

and they instantly meet those

demands. This week there was

a strike in Bogdanovich — there is a town called

Bogdanovich

— yes, the stress is correctly on Bogdanovich —

in Sverdlovsk Region (in Russia's Urals).

There is a district hospital there, but as you

can naturally imagine, this

hospital is an absolute hellscape.

Despite the fact that Sverdlovsk Region

is not some especially poor region

by Russian standards, it's actually a fairly

wealthy region. But there, just about everything

is absolutely awful. For example, the sheets used to

wrap corpses were then simply

washed and dried, and then

some

actual living people were made to lie on them.

And there was much, much more like that. In the appeal

announcing the strike, these medical workers

honestly sounded simply

heartbreaking, because they even had

salaries of 11,000 rubles (about $120–$130). They talked about wages,

but the description itself — and why they didn't

act for 20 years — well, they endured it for many years, and

finally, thanks to the Doctors' Alliance,

many thanks to them, they simply decided

to record on video what everyone already

knew. Let's watch this — these

1 minute and 37 seconds actually helped

them win. And look — pillows, blankets,

they said there wasn't a single pillow that

was clean and white; none of them were in good condition.

And here they all are — the mattresses, just look.

Blood... How do you work in such conditions?

Everything is extremely hard. We work, but

we've ruined our health. I had surgery

for women's health issues, and it wasn't because of

anything other than washing in cold water.

Years of this — arthrosis, arthritis.

Both knees — I can barely walk, you understand me.

No, this isn't because of age; it's all because

of the conditions we're in, because we

walk barefoot through water. Our hands have arthritis,

our fingers are twisted.

It's just ужас (awful), impossible.

All these hands are bent and damaged. What kind of

life can you have on 11,000 rubles (about $120–$130)? It's impossible to live on that.

[inaudible]

My God, where can I get money? Someone borrows 5,000 rubles,

I'll have to borrow too. It's impossible, and it's such humiliation,

constant pressure, humiliation,

if not outright insults. So did this

woman tell us anything new? No.

It's a standard story of poverty and humiliation in

the Russian provinces, but she

told it, you see. We helped

spread this video, and it was seen by

hundreds of thousands of people, each of

whom basically understands it too, because in

essence,

if this woman had told this

story to you, or just to someone — you

know, "I work, our salary is 11,000 rubles,

there are no conditions at all." She's not even a doctor,

she's just support staff. We have to

wash in cold water,

we have absolutely no

conditions. I see a bus and I cry because

I don't have money for the fare. We have

some monstrous shower room, by the way.

Speaking of which, let's take a look — the bosses came running over immediately

to inspect the shower room. 43

seconds. "As laundry workers,

when you come to work, you are supposed to, before

starting your shift, take

a shower, and

after work I also have to take a shower. Here,

look at the shower room here for

the laundry workers.

Well, I understand that it's impossible, yes,

to use it — it's cold here, actually.

In summer, of course, maybe you can,

but it's very cold here. In winter it's

completely unbearable — we don't even open the door

you could say."

Go to your local district hospital and

ask them to show you the shower room for

the laundry workers—I have no doubt that

it will be roughly the same, even if in

Moscow, where you live, I don’t think it will be

much better. So, on the one hand,

there’s nothing new here, but people just, well, they

had already talked it all over, and then we

declare a strike. But it turned out that

in Bogdanovich, a town in Sverdlovsk Region,

even if it was just a few people who weren’t even

doctors and who were in

a terrible confrontation with the chief physician,

when they announced they were going on strike,

you’d think: what will happen? Everyone will laugh

in your face, you’ll be fired. No, no—it works

differently. And they came running right away—or rather, the first

thing the authorities did—what was it?

That’s right: they didn’t refrain from calling the police.

The police arrived and started blocking this

workers’ union, and then

later that night they were stopped when they

were driving to the neighboring hospital,

and simply prevented them from going because

they started saying that everyone there was drunk

and that they would conduct a

medical sobriety test; if you refuse now, well,

then that means 15 days in detention.

Come with us for the test—and they

forced them to go, making them lose a whole hour.

Naturally, they found nothing.

But that’s how the authorities act: they try

to intimidate you right away. But if you’re not scared

and you tell them, bluntly, to go to hell,

then all these poor women

said the same thing too: yes, and we immediately

went on strike—it’s unfair, mm-hmm, and we’re getting just a pittance.

And the next thing the authorities always do—

what do they do? They send in

the vice governor, who promises to allocate

money to these people right away, meaning

they talked about payments—and then they paid

wages for the forced downtime, and

they promised to fix everything; money is already being allocated

already in

administrative proceedings were already beginning

against the chief physician, and the chief physician

had started saying, “I’ll destroy all of you.”

The chief physician is already being held

administratively liable; they issued

him a reprimand, and the head of the health department

was immediately reprimanded as well.

The vice governor—let’s take a look—

is promising to pay the money.

And one more point, because this is

still one of the key issues

in terms of the comfort of people who

are staying in the hospital. Besides treatment,

there should also be certain

conditions, including food, which is by no means

a minor matter, and the quality of that

food, especially for people who

are ill. I have a proposal:

as quickly as possible,

determine the amount needed for repairs

to the hospital kitchen

and, accordingly, for replacing the equipment so

that we can use the governor’s reserve fund

to finance this work separately,

namely these repairs.

So, as I already said, the chief physician has been brought to

administrative responsibility.

The regional health committee

has also received an official notice. Why? Well, because

they can’t—you understand, you cannot

just crush a district hospital. You can,

of course, bring in the National Guard (Rosgvardiya), and you might even

be able to beat these women in

Bogdanovich,

but, first of all, it’s not certain that in Bogdanovich

there won’t be some kind of uprising, because

these people live there, and people go to

the district hospital—that’s just how things are.

Second, if you do that, then

you are admitting that you are incapable of

solving a single social problem.

That’s why strikes work. They work all over

the world. I’ve said this many times

before, and I want to stress once again that

there are simply statistics on how strikes have ended

not just over one year, not over

ten years, but over the last hundred years, and in 90

percent of cases—even 95 percent—

the strikers’ demands are met if

they are persistent enough. And to

continue on this topic, I’ve got a question from

a user with the amusing nickname “Cockroach Slippers,”

asking what I have to say about

the ambulance drivers’ strike in

Yekaterinburg. I don’t know the details,

but if there is a strike, I can say one thing:

let them strike. That’s right. They’re being paid

some laughable amount of money, the ambulance drivers.

ambulance drivers.

And as for the rest—I remember, I read that they

were being transferred from one contractor

to another, and they were being forced

to resign so that they would no longer work under

standard employment records but instead be registered as

individual entrepreneurs. Naturally, they’re afraid that they’ll

lose certain benefits and that it will become easier

to fire them.

They are absolutely right to strike. But

this is exactly about making sure money is allocated

for decent wages and proper

employment contracts. If you just lie there—well, as the saying goes,

water does not flow under a лежачий stone (a Russian proverb meaning nothing changes unless you act). I understand perfectly well

that someone watching me now is saying,

“Damn it, I’m a taxi driver—who am I supposed to

strike against?” Or, “I work as a designer,”

or “I’m a store clerk working for Makhmudov,”

“where exactly am I supposed to strike against Makhmudov?”

Of course, this mechanism of strikes

is not instantly available to everyone.

But for those who do have access to it—and that’s

millions of people—there is no

reason to earn 11,000 or 18,000 rubles and live in poverty

forever. If you do not demand more, you

will never be given anything. If right now you

work a little and, really, just a little...

in fact, by simply not being afraid of even one bit of pressure from

the authorities, you can achieve

much, much more. Timofey

Platonov asks me: Alexei, do you not

think that all this hype around

the virus was created deliberately to distract

attention from urgent problems? Let’s

discuss the coronavirus. Timofey, I don’t think so.

I really don’t. This is actually a genuinely

quite serious problem. Today,

economist Maxim Mironov calculated

and published a chart showing that if

the coronavirus trend continues upward—the increase is fairly linear—

the number of infected people is rising, and if

this continues for some more

time, then soon millions of people will be

infected with this coronavirus. That does not

mean they will all die.

But I see two extremes in the discussion.

Some say that basically we are all

going to die, it’s horror, a nightmare,

everything is a catastrophe,

and we must immediately put on

and wrap ourselves in plastic bags. The other

side—more often, really—is the brash

Russian citizen saying: all this is

nonsense, this coronavirus was invented just like

bird flu was supposedly invented not long ago, and so

on and so forth. In reality, that’s not true.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and it seems to me

that, first of all, we still need

to understand that this is quite a serious

situation.

For example, if I ask you, in relation to

this careless attitude toward the virus:

what was the worst catastrophe in

human history over the last 150

years? You’ll tell me: the Second World

War—20 million dead, or 25 million,

just in our country 30 million dead, or 40 million

by various estimates.

In 1945, in the Second World War, the First

World War, and

so on and so forth. But in fact,

the truth is that possibly

the greatest catastrophe in the history

of humanity—not even just of the 20th century, perhaps

in all of human history—was

the Spanish flu of the early 20th century. It killed

almost 100 million people. Well, now

no one can calculate it precisely anymore, but in

some countries, a third of the

population died. It’s interesting: we study

history, yes, we all know about war, we all

know about, say, I don’t know,

the Cuban Missile Crisis or some

political events, but most of us

know very little about this very

pandemic that simply wiped out entire

territories and significantly changed

probably even the course of

human development. We cannot assume

how things might otherwise have developed, but the impact

of that Spanish flu was absolutely

colossal. It was a mega, super, enormous

catastrophe that we do not know very much

about. Only those, only those

who are interested really know. This absolutely does not mean

that the coronavirus will turn into a new

Spanish flu. Medicine today is completely different,

some people say. But on the other

hand, now there are completely

different means of communication, and

the number of people constantly moving back and forth

is huge. Today they were in the city of

Wuhan, tomorrow they’re in Moscow, and then in

New York, and then somewhere else. The number of such

people is enormous. And in that sense,

it’s quite interesting to read the news that

the prime minister

Mishustin said that he was closing

the border with China in the Russian Far East,

and he did close it, but Moscow still receives

10 flights from China every day—even now, 10 flights

from China. In that sense, movement and contact

still continue, and on a massive scale.

The footage we are seeing from China is

quite, quite striking. For example,

this is what street disinfection

looks like in a city. Let’s take a look.

Uh.

[applause]

[music]

It really looks like some kind of

strange footage from disaster movies, and

there is a lot of this kind of footage now from this, from

the city of Wuha—Wuhan, or however it’s pronounced, I

won’t lie, I don’t know the correct

stress. It shows completely

empty streets, no cars. This is a huge

city, by the way. It’s not just

some kind of, you know,

little town or village you’ve never

heard of. It’s a very large city. I myself

noticed recently, when I was returning from

Thailand,

that there were Chinese people in every airport, in huge

numbers—especially in any Asian airport—and

in the airport, most of them were already then,

two and a half weeks ago,

wearing masks, and you could clearly see that they were

tense, even though those were only the first

initial steps. But even then, in fact,

Chinese social media was flooded

with these vivid, frightening

videos of how a person is simply walking down

the street and then collapses. And this is one of the

notable things about this coronavirus:

fairly young, healthy

people who do not particularly feel unwell

just suddenly collapse and die,

and after that, anyone approaching them has to

do so in full protective gear, as in

this video, for example.

[music]

Work.

[music]

[music]

Yes, people really were collapsing in the streets.

It looks frightening, it is

frightening, and at the same time

the New Year celebrations were also taking place,

the Chinese New Year, which stretches over a longer period.

Let’s watch 14 seconds. Here you can see

that in one place they are collecting bodies, and in

another place there are fireworks and celebratory gunfire there,

they are celebrating Chinese New Year.

Interestingly, one of the

news stories coming out against the backdrop of all this

whole situation

is terribly irritating all the Kremlin

propagandists. I wrote about this on

Twitter — they all started worrying

and getting nervous. It’s the news that over there

the Chinese are building a hospital, and they announced

that they would build one in seven — well, in ten

days.

One hospital in 10 days, the next

hospital in 15 days, and really, I mean,

this would seem to be positive news

for all of us. But interestingly, the whole

Russian

pro-government PR sector is not

just upset and worried, but because

of course the difference in the speed of construction is striking.

It’s clear that this is

an extraordinary situation there, but still

these videos — let’s watch 43 seconds

and see how simply a hospital gets built.

It is so different from everything

we have seen in Russia when

an extraordinary situation happens,

for example floods, and Putin tells everyone

to build housing,

and then a few years later it turns out that

they didn’t build a damn thing for anyone, or

they built something useless. This happens often.

Let’s take a look at

the hospital. Forty-three seconds.

[music]

Uh

[music]

Ah

[music]

Actually, when you look at this and look

at the previous video — that’s why I put

the two clips together — yes, here we simply don’t

have a situation where they were wrapping bodies and then

using some kind of posters or drying materials

to give them to ordinary

patients lying in beds, and

and this construction of a hospital in 10

days really becomes

frightening. What will happen in Russia

if there is an outbreak of this corona

virus here?

Well, let’s hope that doesn’t happen, and I

think that in principle the right and sensible thing

is not to get too nervous and not to worry too much,

but nevertheless to follow

all the reasonable recommendations that

are being given around the world, and in fact even

Roskomnadzor (Russia’s federal media and communications regulator) is giving fairly sensible advice. Essentially,

it all comes down to one simple thing: wash

your hands thoroughly, wash your hands, because

people sneeze; more polite people

sneeze into their hand, then they grab

a handrail in the metro, then you grab it, and you

touch, a million times during the day,

your face, your nose, your food.

So wash your hands very thoroughly,

preferably several times a day.

Don’t eat in places where the food might

raise any suspicions. In fact, in all the recommendations

this is one of the first things mentioned,

especially for those who

are in China: don’t eat anything

animal-based, don’t go near fish, and all the more so

don’t eat at markets, because

the main hypothesis right now about the origin

of this virus is that the Chinese

are fond of eating all sorts of things —

marmots, snakes, everything under the sun — and they prepare it

in rather questionable ways, and it is quite

possible that from some animal, like a marmot,

this strain — strain

of the virus passed to humans. Quite

possibly. This has not yet been proven,

but at least the main recommendation

is definitely not to eat anything

exotic.

Don’t eat in places where they prepare exotic food.

In general, for now it’s best to put the brakes on

any Asian street food or casual dining, and wash your hands.

If you happen to sneeze yourself, then in order

not to pose a threat,

there is an interesting recommendation: don’t

cover it with your hand. If you need to sneeze, do it like this.

Yes, I really did read that in some

guidelines. In short: wash your hands,

and if something like this is going on around you, put on

a gauze mask. That’s something you can

realistically do. Looking at what

is happening, I have no doubt that

humanity will defeat the coronavirus, but

nevertheless it is quite possible that this will be

a major story. Therefore,

I return to the question I was asked

at the beginning: this is definitely not

some kind of fake or

made-up story invented by

pharmaceutical companies or someone else

in order to make money. This is

a real thing that exists

entirely in real life. Pasha Balabol

Akhav or Bulakhov explains to me that “exit,”

a term I didn’t know, means a prolonged

carefully planned process of stepping away

from Putin’s position as president, with

a culmination in 2024. I would

argue about the “carefully

planned” part. What we are seeing

happening with the Constitution is not at all

something that looks like

a carefully planned process. That is,

probably — well, Putin somehow came up with it.

a framework in my head, and I talked about it

a lot in the previous program, but there

was nothing even remotely carefully planned

No, if it had been carefully planned,

there is no way Mishustin would have ended up at the head

of the government, because, well, it’s all obvious

with Mishustin—they would have found someone more

interesting, and some are simply

well, an obvious crook, and anyone knows that

any person driving past the fence

of his dacha (country house). By the way, speaking of fences, there was a funny moment

when we

were filming all this and took a photo

for the record by that fence, and then

a passing taxi driver stopped and ran over

to take a picture, wide-eyed—so this is where

this place is located. Let’s

take a look.

Come on, Volodya lives there, we know that.

Careful, pull in.

Okay, good—look at that, Zhora

got interested right away.

But this is a real feature of our

country: everyone around knows, it’s just that

a person works as a taxi driver, and he knows, yes,

that yes, they live right here. There’s nothing in the declaration,

nothing at all, but Mercedes cars are constantly driving in here

Mercedes—they live a luxurious life here

obviously spending millions, but he

pretends to be one of those honest servants of the people

That’s a Russian peculiarity, so this

government needs to be taken down, the way they took down admir

the notorious Chuvash governor—bring back

No, he took himself down. Mikhail Ignatyev

became famous at the beginning of this year because

first he said that opposition

journalists should be “wiped out,” and those people

who—this is already a legendary quote—

make money off various schemes, and I think

they need to be “wiped out,” as people say

they need to be wiped out. And this governor of Chuvashia was an incredibly brazen man

this governor of Chuvashia, now former. Our

team—I congratulate them on the fact that they

certainly, our headquarters in Cheboksary made

a contribution to bringing down this

Ignatyev. They fought him, made videos about

him,

for many, many, many months, but in the end they managed

to defeat him simply thanks to his own

sheer arrogance and stupidity. This

video—those famous four

seconds, four seconds that killed

the governor of Chuvashia. Let’s watch where

he made a dog out of an EMERCOM officer (Russia’s emergency services)

Well, it was a joke, sort of, supposedly a joke

they joked, had a laugh, but overall

I understand why it infuriated everyone, including

the Kremlin, which later tried to put on

a brave face in a bad situation, like, well, they

were outraged too—they expelled him from

United Russia, and then they removed him altogether from the post of

governor, because, well, this Ignatyev

he sort of didn’t say anything outright, but

he acted out the very essence of it all: you are

serfs, and we, you know, we kind of love you

pat you on the cheek, condescendingly, because that’s how we

treat you, all cooing and baby talk

we bought a fire truck, firefighter, and now you

get to drive around in a pretty vehicle

now jump a little—well, he jumped a little

they both laughed and went their separate ways, and it was so

blatantly over everyone’s heads

that it simply became impossible any longer

not to remove this governor, because they

understood that, for example, our headquarters in

Cheboksary next time would simply

destroy United Russia in the elections through

Smart Voting if they didn’t remove him

because we would simply

show this video, keep showing

it

and that’s it, we wouldn’t need any other campaigning

at all.

And that is exactly why the same kind of boorishness

that happened in Crimea

was nowhere on television, but simply

the officials themselves have become so, well,

accustomed to the role

of the kind master toward us, as if we were some kind of

you know, all of us rather dim-witted

simple folk, that they don’t even hesitate

and today Crimean officials

posted the photos themselves, literally

posted photos saying: look how kind we are

we came to congratulate them on the anniversary

of the lifting of the siege and Victory

There are only four siege survivors (people who survived the Siege of Leningrad) living in all of Crimea

and these are very, very elderly

people, and they brought them flowers

a medal from the Kerch City Council, and a loaf

of bread, and then, without any embarrassment at all, they posted

photos where four female officials, dressed in

fur coats, are standing next to an obviously poor elderly woman

and giving her

a loaf of bread. Can you imagine that?

I mean, the idea was apparently that

symbolically, we came to you, a siege survivor,

and gave you a loaf of bread

please, have something to eat. Again, this is

a demonstration of just how far these people

have drifted from reality, and they are not playing

at being masters in relation to us—they

genuinely believe that we are some kind of

people, some mass of idiots who

are always begging for something, and we

help them, treating it all in this paternalistic way

They have already announced that, of course,

they are being fired, expelled from United Russia

but again, why did this happen? Simply

because of social media, because on Twitter

people started getting outraged, then on Facebook

then on VKontakte—outrage works

the spread of information works

when the Kremlin, through its own

social media monitoring system, saw that

everyone had simply gone furious and they had to be removed

they remove them. But with Medvedev, all the same,

they sent him into retirement—that’s for sure.

It took a long time to set this up, but

people went furious, and it was no longer possible

to go into new elections with Medvedev.

As for Chaika, we proved that he was a major

corrupt official, and it was already impossible.

It still took years, but it was

impossible to leave him there.

They moved him and made him a presidential envoy to

the Caucasus, but he was still removed from the prosecutors' office.

But the more outraged we are, and the

more we speak out, the faster some kind of split will come.

It really works.

You just shouldn't think that

what we're outraged by is nonsense.

In fact, that's everything, because this is

the approval rating of this government; for them, everything

will collapse and fall apart if we all

criticize them out loud, publicly. But as long as we

stay silent, the reverse mechanism works.

When certain specific officials

subject people, not on a mass scale but individually,

to some strange, completely groundless

discussion of some, well, simply

random people—those people,

some well-known creative figures, they

really do get scared.

One individual official can intimidate such

completely different people as rapper Eldzhey

(Eljay), Ivan Urgant, and comedian Dolgopolov—they

just

literally showed us this January

how all of this works. Let's start with Eljay,

because that's the funniest

story of all. Eljay sings songs,

travels to different cities, and performs in

clubs. There shouldn't be any such problem with rapper Eljay, but

he definitely doesn't talk about politics; he doesn't comment on

anything at all. But there is always

some deputy who gets offended.

And really, so, there in the city of

Chelyabinsk, there's a deputy from A Just Russia

(a Russian political party). He is not a full-time deputy;

he works somewhere in a blacksmith

shop.

Well, fine, a person works in a blacksmith

shop, and he doesn't like Eljay—that's

normal. Some people don't like Eljay.

Let them listen to Klavdiya Shulzhenko (a famous Soviet singer),

singing 'The Volga River Flows.'

Such people have every right

to exist, everything's fine. My dad

turns on the TV, and if something like that is playing,

he says, 'What idiotic music, put on something

normal. These people don't even look human.' But

some people like Eljay, some don't.

But here the deputy is genuinely

nuts: he goes and files a complaint

in which he literally accuses

Eljay, and I'm quoting, of promoting alcohol,

drugs, risky

and dangerous suicidal behavior,

cannibalism,

I mean, the guy literally wrote

'cannibalism.' Eljay eats people? Eljay

is promoting cannibalism?

And that's not all. Cannibalism,

sadism,

debauchery, and also—good Lord—

the disinhibition of sexual urges and

various sexual perversions. He certainly 'disinhibits,'

apparently. There's supposedly this whole sphere

where people live, and then Eljay arrives,

disinhibits it all, and in Chelyabinsk people

suddenly begin en masse to engage in sexual

urges, various sexual

perversions, and cannibalism. I mean,

some strange deputy from a

blacksmith shop has every right not

to like Eljay.

But then the police actually get involved. First of all, they open

an investigation.

And secondly, everything in the country is already arranged

in such a way that if the chain starts with an idiot deputy,

the police will start carrying it out. If there is

an idiot deputy and a police force that

obeys an idiot deputy, then everything else follows.

It works: Eljay was banned from performing

in Chelyabinsk. Chelyabinsk is a city of over a million people,

a huge city. It's not even

some territory that's supposedly

emphatically conservative or

trying to present itself as super-conservative,

like Dagestan (a republic in Russia's North Caucasus). No, this is Chelyabinsk,

a completely normal city. Yet these

deputies and these police officers don't rush to

investigate why the air in Chelyabinsk

is unbreathable and everyone is getting sick with

cancer. No—Eljay brought cannibalism,

and that's what they act on. The same thing worked

with Urgant too. There was no real

mass outrage there at all. We saw

with the governor from United Russia (the Kremlin-backed ruling party) that this really

does work: there are a few

degenerates. They may be sincere

degenerates, or degenerates who are

just hypocrites wanting to use someone

for PR. Just a few people said,

'And Ivan Urgant...' Unfortunately,

I can't show you either his sketch or his

apology that he made, because

you understand, something like that could get the show shut down

or get him fired. Because despite

the fact that Urgant is one of the most

famous people in Russia, and probably

one of the most beloved people in Russia,

everyone adores him.

But in a clash where

a degenerate and a police officer are involved, even Ivan Urgant—well,

more precisely, a degenerate deputy and a police officer—

even Ivan Urgant can't win, and so he

runs to apologize. And with comedian Dolgopolov,

it was the same. Who was offended

by comedian Dolgopolov's sketch? Some

nut from Mytishchi (a city near Moscow), some guy

—basically a madman—wrote a complaint, and the police started

checking into the whole thing. And where is comedian Dolgopolov now?

Dolgopolov is in Israel, and for that

they didn't need any kind of popular masses at all.

There is no nationwide outrage at all—nothing.

All it takes is some degenerates, a police officer, and

working together in their little alliance, they can simply crush whoever

they want and whatever they want. If they don’t crush us,

it’s only because we’re not afraid, basically.

Usually, a normal person—like Eldzhey

or Urgant or Dolgopolov—they don’t want

to get involved with these people because

they’re afraid, or they just don’t want

to waste their time, and so on and so forth.

In any case, they’re not prepared

to go through what the Anti-Corruption Foundation is going through

and so they’re forced

to give in. And that’s highly contagious.

Just imagine: any deputy

sitting in the State Duma is already thinking, “Holy hell,”

“if this guy—good Lord—from Chelyabinsk, from the

Leninsky District Council in Chelyabinsk,”

“Andrei Zelenin, got nationwide PR

for driving the ‘cannibal’ Eldzhey out of Chelyabinsk,”

“then tomorrow I’ll file a complaint about something else too.”

But then along comes the wife of this

Ivleeva.

She says it’s offensive, that it’s a disinhibition

of the sphere of sexual urges, posts things on

Instagram—I’ll file a complaint against him.

PR from every direction, and then on top of that she’ll

apologize to me on Instagram.

There’ll be even more PR, and it just

keeps rolling along—more and

more and more and more. I talk about this

often on the show: this whole

theme where someone was supposedly offended, someone

pretends to be offended and demands that

people apologize to them—this is simply

the main political mainstream in Russia.

And by the way, as for Dolgopolov,

why did the police go after him so actively?

Why did they go after him despite the fact that

some obviously deranged person filed a complaint against

him over this joke? It wasn’t at all

because of the joke about Jesus. It was for jokes like this one:

Dolgopolov says, “For 19 seconds I’ve noticed that after the elections,”

“the entire population

of our country literally split into

two parts, because now on one side there are

people who support Putin, and on the

other side, people who know how to read

and write, you know, and do logical reasoning.”

That, in fact, is the main reason.

Everything else is just aggravating circumstances.

Because probably if he joked about

religion while also saying that

Putin is actually a great guy,

and that the opposition are just a bunch of losers and

freaks, he probably would’ve gotten away with it.

So, roughly speaking, it sounds pretty strange

when I want to pass along these words

of support to very different people, one of whom

I don’t even know personally—like Eldzhey, Urgant,

and Dolgopolov—but I still want to say it.

It seems to me that all of us should do this, regardless

of whether, in fact,

we like them or don’t like them, whether we like

their work or not. Both some and others have simply

run into a wave of idiocy

backed by the authorities, and they’re forced somehow

to apologize or change some part of their

behavior model simply because one

idiot

wants to get famous, and the state

is structured in such a way that it always

supports these idiots.

Today, probably the last segment of my program,

which has already

been going for 1 hour 3 minutes, with 58,000

people watching live,

let me remind you that there’s a link below

through which you can send donations

that float across the screen. So,

the very pleasant video we saw

this week—well, from the point of view

of a good Christian, I probably shouldn’t

rejoice at such videos and shouldn’t

rub my hands with glee, but damn, it’s very hard

not to, because today we saw how

those police officers were led in handcuffs through the courtroom

who planted

drugs on Golunov. Let’s watch these

wonderful

few seconds.

And how could freedom accidentally end up in your pocket?

[inaudible / unclear transcript]

[inaudible / unclear transcript]

at home.

We need, by means of distortion,

therefore the download is being carried out from 10 to

about restoring the channel’s seal and

graduate.

There are six of them today, and as of

right now, I think there are still two more

and the hearing is still going on. As of now, six

people have been arrested.

And all these police officers—

finding themselves in Golunov’s situation, or I’d even

say in the situation of any one of us,

a person who, without the slightest guilt, is dragged

off there for taking part in a rally—well,

it’s interesting to watch how they change.

They see this very system

that will now devour them and won’t

listen to anything. It’s even interesting that the one arresting

them is Judge Karpov, who once put me under

house arrest, who has an enormous

number of absolutely unjust decisions to his name.

He even appears in the Magnitsky case (the case surrounding Sergei Magnitsky).

This Judge Karpov—and they see this

system, and they sort of seem to be trying

to prove it; they were saying that

they are innocent.

One of the defendants says, “I believe

that I am absolutely not guilty, but I do not need

give me a preventive measure that is not

connected with deprivation of liberty, so that I do not

feel morally oppressed and can

prepare evidence of my

innocence.” He says all this to the court; he

also has a lawyer, and he understands that

Nobody gives a damn about his lawyer, or this whole

system in general.

If someone there in the Kremlin said that you can be

devoured,

you won’t get a single gram

of justice, whether you’re a cop planting

drugs or an honest person

on whom the cops planted drugs. But if he’s not

a journalist and journalists didn’t stand up for him, this

system works in such a way that it will just crush you.

Someone writes to me that five former police officers

were sent away for two months. The system will tell you

what it wants; it won’t even listen to you. The fact

that these people are guilty

doesn’t mean we feel sorry for them. That’s absolutely

true. But I saw people saying

it’s wrong to rejoice. At first I said that

it’s kind of un-Christian

to rejoice. But these eight seconds—

let’s look at how Golunov, being

an innocent man—these bastards,

they knew he was innocent, they planted

drugs on him, they wouldn’t let

his lawyer see him, they brought

him to court, they handcuffed him to a radiator and

kept him like that. His lawyer found him

in exactly that state.

Yes, let’s watch.

A person

should be handcuffed to a radiator there

and kept like that. When they

did this—and obviously we can

be sure he was not the first person they did this to—

by the way, even

the official charge brought against them

states that they

together with their boss created

an organized criminal group that

was engaged in planting

drugs on people. In Golunov’s case, they first obtained

the drugs from who knows where, then

planted them on Golunov. Well, if it was

an organized criminal group, then they

were obviously doing this regularly.

Their boss, who is now appearing

as a witness for now, yes—but with what

confidence he simply made up

the story about how Golunov was bringing in

drugs. I mean, now, from the vantage point of 2020,

when we know this whole story,

we can see just what an unbelievably

monstrous thing it was: people simply planted

drugs on a man in the street, and then on

television they told these

damn convincing versions of events, simply

inventing everything out of thin air. Let’s look at this

disgusting policeman who gave an

interview

to Vesti (a Russian state TV news program): “All we knew was the name

Ivan and a mobile phone number. According to

the information, this person was distributing

synthetic narcotic substances

on the territory of both

the Western District and the city of

Moscow in general, mainly in nightclubs. We

established that this citizen

regularly visits

foreign countries, that is, flies

to Riga—that is, to neighboring post-Soviet countries—

which gave rise to the suspicion that

the narcotic substances intended for

distribution could be transported by him from these

foreign countries.”

Just think what a lying animal he is.

And this was the same man—a high-ranking

official, the head of the department for

drug control at the Interior Ministry.

Golunov works for Meduza,

and Meduza is based in Riga, so of course he traveled there.

And they came up with this whole

story: he buys in Riga and sells in

nightclubs. Every word of it was a lie, from the first

to the last. And he says it so

convincingly. And there’s another

absolutely, extraordinarily vile scoundrel

who must be mentioned,

who unfortunately now sits in the Moscow City Duma.

Those of you who didn’t go out and vote in Smart Voting (an opposition tactical voting strategy)

—thanks to you, this

piece of filth is actually sitting there

now as a deputy on our backs, passing

laws. Let’s read the post he published

on the day Golunov was arrested. The same kind of

animal, making everything up completely. He writes: “I

spoke to an acquaintance

in the operative services, whom I’ve known since the ’90s.”

By the way, that’s just a marker: when

you hear a journalist or some

politician or anyone at all start

spouting this kind of nonsense—“I spoke

to an operative I know, and he told me

some insider details”—it is always a lie, one hundred percent

of the time. Any story about “an operative I know”

is always a lie. Please put the

post back up. And there he says that his

operative acquaintance told him that yes,

that’s how it was, they found everything during the search

of the apartment too, they did everything by the book.

Just sit there and wipe off the fingerprints. And now we

know that all of it was a complete lie.

There was nothing. The photo supposedly from

Golunov’s apartment was simply

a fake. There were no swabs, nothing was done.

It was a pure, absolute provocation.

Corrupt cops planted drugs, and the place

for them is prison. And the same goes for scumbag

journalists like this Medvedev,

who

simply saw that the system

had decided to devour an innocent man, but

you feel obliged to play along with that system. And nobody

is forcing you to say it, yet he invents

lies on purpose,

a story about some operative who

confirmed everything. Why does he do it? Well, because

he’s a scoundrel.

Because he’s—sorry for using so much

foul language on this program, but—

the last [ __ ] and now she’s in prison

Smart Voting is needed for deputies so that

that’s what [ __ ] is about—not electing them, you see.

A lot of people argued with me, saying, well, the Communists

there are bad ones and not-so-bad ones; you can support some of them

instead of others, but at the very least, people like these

scumbags who help put people behind bars—we

do not elect them. People like that run only from

United Russia, and we need to remember them, remember

them—and it’s especially important to remember this in the Golunov case.

But right now everyone is celebrating, and I’m

glad too that those corrupt cops

were jailed. But let’s discuss honestly

what the investigation is telling us.

It says they found that everyone who wanted to jail

Golunov was a criminal group of

police officers in Moscow’s Western District. The question is:

why did they want to frame Golunov? The answer

to that question—there is no answer. The answer

is that these people

planted drugs on him, but they were

just the executors, while the people who ordered it were

completely different people.

And those who ordered it were high-ranking

FSB officers who have now been completely

taken out of the line of

accountability. Interestingly, I read in

some media outlet—apparently one familiar

with the inside story—that

these six police officers were supposed

to be detained by the FSB.

But for several weeks, the FSB special forces

—or whoever handles arrests there—

the people responsible for such detentions,

kept saying, “Not now, we’re

busy, we can’t,” so it kept being postponed

again and again. In the end, they were

detained by the cops themselves.

So why didn’t the FSB’s Internal Security Directorate

want to make the arrests? Why? Because

the hit on Golunov was ordered

by the head of the Moscow FSB, and it was ordered

because the leadership of this

Moscow FSB office are corrupt and criminal

and make money, among other things, from this whole

funeral business that

Golunov wrote about. And even before a lot of people

started talking about it later, we

published an investigation.

It was about that very FSB officer, Medoev,

Medoev, an aide to the head

of the Moscow FSB.

His name came up immediately, and we

did the simplest thing: we just

went and looked at what kind of property

Medoev owns. Let me remind you of a few

seconds from the video we made back then.

Senior FSB officer Medoev bought in 2016

a 200-square-meter apartment in one of Moscow’s most

elite

and ostentatious residential complexes,

Italian Quarter.

One square meter here costs 1

million rubles, so his apartment cost

200 million rubles accordingly. Now we need

to walk another 200 meters along Kazakova Street

and we see a building where

the Medoev family owns a 180-square-meter

two-story apartment. One like that costs 80

million rubles. And now I’ll make the situation even clearer:

behind this building there is this

kind of

1,000-square-meter mansion.

An FSB father and son somehow

own property worth hundreds

of millions of rubles. It’s obvious how.

After that, I don’t even remember whether it was

after our investigation, but *Novaya Gazeta*

showed an entire settlement. Let’s take a look

at where Dorofeyev, the head of

the Moscow FSB, that same Medoev,

and representatives of this funeral racket live.

It’s just a cozy little insiders’ club—they

all split the money there together. Some

provided protection for the others, and when

Golunov started digging into it,

they turned to their protectors in the FSB and

somewhere over shashlik (barbecue) said, well,

“There’s some journalist snooping around the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road),

guys, take care of it. We didn’t buy all these houses

for nothing, did we?” They said, sure, no

problem, they’ll handle it. The drug control people,

the police in the Western District,

“Please go and package up

some guy there—we’ll send you

his details right now.” And off they went,

planting drugs on him. That’s exactly how it happened.

Let’s take a look at that little settlement.

[music]

[music]

So, to show how it all works: here live

the FSB bosses—Dorofeyev, Medoev,

the Moscow FSB leadership—and just over the fence, over the fence is

that very funeral mafia in GUP Ritual (the Moscow municipal funeral services company), where

they installed their own people, where there are huge

turnovers in the billions, and from those

billions they built themselves

houses and devoured anyone who tried

to get in there—like in the movies: “This is our cow,

and we milk it.” Can you imagine how many people they

really imprisoned—or, I don’t know, maybe killed—

people who were not some kind of

famous journalist? How many people like that

were there, like Vanya Golunov, except not journalists

whom others would stand up for, people everyone knew,

but just some Kolya Ivanov—and because of these

uh,

they could jail absolutely anyone like this.

“That guy is looking at my wife like that—

here’s $10,000, plant something on him.”

That’s it—they plant it, and the man goes away for seven

years. “I want to take over his business, and he’s

my business partner and doesn’t want to share—

here’s the money,” and that one goes away for eight years, while

this one gets the same kind of sentence. For

drug charges they hand out enormous terms. If

everyone hadn’t stood up for Golunov,

if there hadn’t been such obvious blunders,

he’d really get seven or eight years

they—they’d pin the whole thing on him

they showed photos from a different apartment

a whole drug lab, and all of that, of course

journalists found it out, exposed it—but if

this had been just an ordinary person, he would have

that’s exactly how it would have gone in court

this Pavel Karpov—the judge who

was issuing the detention order—he shouted and

yelled, “Guys, these aren’t photos, they’re not from

my apartment, I don’t know anything, there’s nothing in

my apartment—I’ve got wallpaper, and here, look,”

“in these photos there’s wooden

paneling or something on the walls.” And in court they told him

him, “Yes, I have no grounds not to

believe the investigators. Eight years in prison.”

That’s how it would work—and that’s how it

happens every single day to people

thanks to this government. And even though now these

police officers directly responsible, the ones who

planted the drugs, are being jailed, our shared

demand should be that

the people who ordered it should be imprisoned too, because they

are still working in the security services

and, of course, they are far

more dangerous than those who simply

plant drugs. Those are just

ordinary police officers—[ __ ] greedy crooks

but these people are genuinely dangerous

scoundrels who are ready to destroy

people’s lives with long prison terms for the sake of their rotten

dachas (country houses). And even more dangerous are the people who

know all about this, and yet

still keep in the leadership of the FSB (Russia’s security service) those who

do these kinds of things. And that person

—you know the name of that person—is Putin. He

wants to stay in power forever

at the head of Russia. We must fight

every day, together with you, and discuss our struggle

and coordinate it. Among other things, we will do that

on Thursdays through our program

Thank you very much to everyone who watched this

broadcast. See you next Thursday

bye