The first attempt is always the hardest

Hi, this is Alexei Navalny, and you

are witnessing an experiment. We decided

to make a real

interactive

video blog. It will have a pretty simple

format: it’ll just be my talking

head. I’ll talk about

current issues and answer your questions.

Maybe at some point we’ll even

get advanced enough that I’ll

take phone calls or reply

to text messages or something like that. In any case,

for now we’re experimenting, recording this

first segment to understand whether everything

here is good enough. Is my face straight

or crooked? Is the sound good, is

the picture good? And is any of this interesting to you at all?

Will you watch this online? Well,

at least quite a lot of people

wrote to us and asked us to record

things like this. What I want to talk about now

is one small detail. It just

made me laugh today. You know that

literally yesterday they dismissed

the head of the Federal Customs Service, and before

removing him from office, they searched his home.

There was a search, and we all watched—or at least

those of you who use

the internet watched—the huge amount of cash

that was seized from his home.

Well, not seized, but found in his home. And he

was removed from office, with the statement that

there was no criminal case against him; he had become

a witness. And the new head of the Federal

Customs Service, a man named Vadim

Bulavinov, said something that

made me laugh. He said:

“As head of the tax service—the customs

service—I will begin by carrying out

purges and fighting corruption.” But that

really is very funny, because

he said this at the very moment

when standing right next to him was the former head

of the customs service, Mr. Belyaninov,

in whose home, two days earlier, they had found

those 66 million rubles (about 66 million RUB). Well, if you want

to carry out purges, then just look

to your right or your left, where the former

head of the customs service is standing—the man whose home contained

cash in a shoebox, and whose

house the Anti-Corruption Foundation found,

the house—the video of which I want to show you again

right now. So here you

can see: on the day of his

dismissal, the Anti-Corruption Foundation filmed

this video of a house worth 200 million

rubles (about 200 million RUB). The head of the Federal Customs

Service—who, in theory, is watched over

by the police, the FSB (Russia’s security service), and his own

internal security service—was living in this house

worth 200 million rubles (about 200 million RUB). Here you can see

the camera zooming in on the roof; there are these

little windows on top. That’s a swimming pool. He has

a swimming pool in the house. And we know for certain

that that money—66 million rubles (about 66 million RUB)—and

the value of this house—200 million rubles (about 200 million RUB)—260 million in total,

just from what is visible to the naked eye,

could not possibly have been honestly earned by the head

of the Federal Customs Service. I’ll be honest, I’m

going to open one more tab for you now—this is

Wikipedia, just the biography of our

customs official—and let’s look together.

Since what year has he been working? Since

1999 he has worked at

a federal state unitary enterprise,

first Promexport, then

Rosvooruzhenie—so since 1999

the man has effectively been a state

official. Since 1999 he

has been accountable to that same FSB,

to his superiors, to President

Putin, who appointed him, and over that

time he became a multimillionaire. He

quite openly lives in a house that

he could not afford. He keeps

shoeboxes at home, but I suppose

that’s exactly what should be the target of

these purges. Something just started playing here—

Indian music. The thing is,

I borrowed this computer from Kira, and I’ve discovered—we

now know that Kira is apparently a fan of something,

something... I hope someone doesn’t start singing now.

What is this?

We seem to have broken your computer. Apparently, on that note

our test

will end. I

don’t know. That’s it.

Thank you.