Utkin vs. Solovyov, police scumbags, nightmare in the metro

Good evening, everyone. It is exactly 8:00 p.m. in Moscow.

That means we are live on air.

This is *Russia of the Future*, once again broadcasting from home.

For the third time already, from home. I’m Alexei

Navalny, or, as I’ve been called this week,

I’ve got a very funny nickname, and who came up with such a

brilliant one if not my favorite,

Vladimir Solovyov.

“toad hopper” — a real “toad hopper.”

It’s hard even to understand how anyone could

come up with

a nickname like “toad hopper,” and why I somehow

latched onto it. And now let’s listen to

Valdemar himself: “This one is just a frog

traveler — actually, no, not a frog

traveler, that’s not right — you’re just

some kind of... what do I even call you without

being too insulting? Just, you know, a kind of

toad hopper.”

We’ll be coming back to Vladimir again

during this broadcast, because he had

quite an epic battle with

the well-known sports commentator

Vasily Utkin. Most people are mainly watching

to see how amusingly they insult each other.

And yes, it is genuinely funny, but it seems to me

that there is an important — a very important, fundamental —

dispute there, so we’ll discuss it. And for the most

dedicated, the very best viewers — those who don’t

show up late,

who start watching the broadcast

right from the very beginning — I have

a bit of recursion for you, also involving Vladimir Solovyov.

In his previous broadcast, he devoted

twenty minutes to me, probably. Yes, in terms of sheer volume,

that’s his record. Today we’ll devote

much more time.

Last time, live on his own

program, he showed a live broadcast of my

program where I was discussing him, and so

now we’re going to watch my live broadcast where

I show his broadcast where — well, you

get it. It’s pretty funny. Let’s

listen and watch, and then I’ll explain

why I don’t mind spending airtime on

Señor Solovyov.

Look what Lyoshik is saying about me.

The program *Russia of the Future*, or

“some strange fruit,” as Vladimir Solovyov called me

this week. Let’s

take a look right away at this wonderful

man.

Navalny will sit there at home, and instead

of showing himself as the greatest of all

time and peoples, he shows himself as

some completely incomprehensible fruit.

Navalny is really showing himself to be a strange

fruit. This week he was practically torn apart

altogether. He’s hosting some kind of

gigantic five-hour broadcasts,

rambling on endlessly today with his sidekick.

You can understand the man, though,

just imagine: at this time of year,

in this wonderfully early spring, he’s

used to spending it in Davos (the Swiss resort town known for the World Economic Forum), or maybe

somewhere by Lake Como in Italy — and instead he’s in Moscow,

walking the streets, and on top of that he has to go on

television and look at the

faces of his own colleagues,

while little Solovyov gets nervous and

takes it out on others.

Just look at his eyes darting around. Alexei, you fool.

Well, that’s...

What do you mean, “eyes darting around,” “you fool”? There are 37,000

people watching us live right now. Please hit

like and comment on

this broadcast. Also note that down below there is

a “Sponsorship” button — well, “sponsorship”

is a silly word — you can become a friend

of our broadcast if you click on it.

And there, please note, there’s also

another link: if you click it, you’ll be able to

send little ducks that will

float across the screen, and that will support our

broadcasts. Why did I say that I don’t mind

spending airtime at all on

Vladimir Solovyov? Because, basically,

I understand his plan. It’s simple:

he’ll say all sorts of funny things

about me, and then I’ll

show them to you and laugh at them,

and in doing so we’ll be promoting his

tiny little godforsaken channel. But I’m actually very

glad that Vladimir Solovyov

has come to YouTube, because here he himself

— since he’s considered some kind of

great and very talented host — and

everyone else will now see

just how small and pathetic he is. Just look:

he has a wonderful studio and a huge

number of people working for him.

40,000 subscribers, some very modest

view counts.

In other words, they don’t even compare with

a small YouTube channel. Why? Because

on YouTube, Señor Solovyov, you’ve

finally run into competition.

On television, for the sake of you and others

like you — lying crooks — they cleared everyone out.

They drove out Sorokina and Parfyonov (prominent Russian TV journalists), all

the others too, so there was simply nobody

else left to watch. And so in your

disgusting shows, where you sit there in

your fancy jacket babbling about something,

well, pensioners have no choice: they sit there, click

— he lies on this channel, click — and on this

channel he lies too, and on that channel as well.

Fine then, let’s just watch this one here,

standing there again with Ukrainian political analysts,

discussing something, shouting — let’s watch him.

But on YouTube it doesn’t work like that. If you lie here,

a person simply clicks away, closes it, and watches

someone else. And here Solovyov has just

realized that as a competitor he is

absolutely nobody. So, Vladimir, I don’t mind

helping promote your channel, even if

you...

we’ll keep promoting it, and I have no doubt that

Margarita Simonyan will buy herself some bots

and inflate her subscriber count, because

after all, such a great chief

Putin propagandist

of the decade probably can’t really be sitting on

a channel with 40,000 subscribers, of course

she can, of course, buy herself subscribers

but even with bought subscribers, everyone

will see just how pathetic you are

compared with any person at all

who set up a camera at home and, without

a studio, without assistants, and without money, simply

speaks some truthful things about what

is happening in their region. Your questions—

please send them to me with the hashtag #Russia

ofTheFuture, and post them on Twitter; they

will put them up on screen, and I’ll read them

as usual, following our quarantine tradition. I

would like to start with a few news items

that weren’t as noticeable because

everything right now is quarantine, coronavirus,

Sobyanin, crowds in the metro, and so on, but

nevertheless, these stories were very

important and deserve attention.

I’ll start with the investigation released

today by Georgy Alburov; it’s on the

main channel—watch it, it’s very

important, because all the news about

quarantine, and really about our whole life,

now comes in the context of this idea that

we’ll be watching you, and if you

do something wrong, we’ll know. You

may think the police aren’t

catching you, but we see you through video cameras

all the time, constantly, always—and even if, as an excuse,

you put something on, they had whole articles

explaining in detail that, for example, the fact that you

walked along with your weight shifted onto one

shoulder to the bakery—that’s recorded, it’s known

that Pyotr Petrovich Ivanov is walking there, and

he has this kind of gait, he drags

his left leg, while Sidorov drags

his right leg. All of this is recorded, and

that’s why the Moscow government’s smart cameras

have recorded everyone, and you can go out in

a mask, even in a Vladimir Solovyov costume (a pro-Kremlin TV host),

however you like, but still, if you

break some rule,

and of course you will, because you’re

supposed to stay home, then we’ll simply fine you

or arrest you, and so on. What’s more, I even

saw headlines saying police officers are being threatened

with the idea that if you, police officers,

don’t wear masks, don’t go around

in gloves, the video camera will see you and we

will hold you disciplinarily liable.

At the same time, of course, the police were given neither

masks nor gloves—nothing at all. So,

this news matters even from the point

of view of this so-called digital concentration camp

because what’s happening is unquestionably a digital concentration camp,

and our task here is that we

must defend our rights to private

life, absolutely. There’s also a very

interesting video by Alburov

about how they continue

to create two Russias: one for themselves,

an elite, comfortable Russia, and another Russia for us,

which gets all the downsides

of what’s happening and not a single

benefit from the fact that in Russia there are, say,

oil revenues. And here, within the framework

of this digital concentration camp, they built it for us,

while arranging a little oasis for themselves.

Let’s watch a minute and a half from

Alburov’s video, which is on the main channel.

Hello, this is Georgy Alburov. Anyone

who has been in Moscow has seen these kinds of cameras

on apartment building entrances. And these aren’t just cameras—this is

Sergei Semyonovich Sobyanin’s pride and joy:

Moscow’s video surveillance system.

Here is a map of the cameras from the Moscow mayor’s office website.

The districts are absolutely packed with these

cameras. It’s impossible to enter a building and not

end up in the frame. Originally, the system

was created to look for criminals, but

in 2019 it began turning into

a system of total control over

Moscow residents. Naturally, since the system

is run by Sobyanin, the Moscow mayor’s office, and

the Moscow police, the data from it

can be bought online.

But besides being completely

corrupt, this system has another remarkable

feature: it is designed in such a way

that not a single

senior official

security official, or deputy ever appears on it, because on their

homes, cameras are never installed. Here is the building

where Prime Minister Mishustin’s children own an entire

floor made up of two apartments. All the buildings around it

are covered with cameras, but on this one there is nothing. On

the building at 12 Rочdelskaya Street, where

camera enthusiast Sergei Semyonovich Sobyanin lives,

exactly 0 cameras are installed.

I’ll even tell you that in Moscow there is an entire

district full of officials, and the cameras

have completely bypassed it.

This means that Sobyanin, fully understanding

how his illegal system

for spying on Muscovites works, built a digital

camp for you, while for himself and the other

Putin-era corrupt officials he

graciously switched it off. I, of course,

had known before that around all sorts of

bosses and officials there are no such video cameras, because

I happen to be one of those people

who, like Alburov and many

other people who are in one way or another

involved in political

activity, are targeted with these cameras, which are used for

constant surveillance. We see how

on all sorts of trashy Telegram channels

police officers, mayor’s office employees, and a fairly

large circle of people have access to these

cameras, and they post various recordings

about us. I understood that the bosses, well...

She’s the absolute top boss.

Of course, she knows that these things work exactly the same way.

That this data would be sold—I understood that.

But the fact that all of Ostozhenka

Those of you in Moscow know, right, in

the area around Kropotkinskaya metro station, there’s just

this little neighborhood opposite the Cathedral of Christ

the Savior, with ultra-elite buildings, new

housing, all insanely expensive—and not for nothing is it

called the Golden Mile.

And there, really, on the territory of this

Golden Mile, there’s a little paradise, like

sort of.

For respectable gentlemen, really—it’s this kind of

gentry zone where there isn’t a single video

camera, and the entire district is covered in the Klub RF investigation.

They talked about it in their video: there is one

video camera there. One

sad, shabby building remains where

ordinary people live—there’s a camera on it, and

you can see who goes in and out of

the entrances. All the rest

So if you bought into it—even if you’re not

an official, but you bought yourself an apartment there for

however many millions of dollars—you can

live in a place where there are no video cameras. That

is, of course, incredibly infuriating. It’s not just

a question

of our right to privacy; it’s a question

of how this forges basic inequality

between citizens. As for cameras, this issue

is widely debated, and it wasn’t Moscow or

Sobyanin who started it—London installed

a huge number of cameras. In principle,

the police do need cameras for police work,

and overall, cameras

do, of course, make a city safer,

make life safer. But if those cameras

can only be viewed by the police, if

there is a mechanism for combating

leaks of all those recordings—if that applies to

everyone, that’s one thing. But if you live

in a ghetto, you’ll have a camera, while if you live in

elite housing, there won’t be a camera on you—that’s

something else entirely. It’s simply the kind of thing

that should outrage, it seems to me,

every person. So please watch

this investigation, think

about it, and by the way, take part

in the political debate on this issue too.

With 62,000 people watching live, Tsap-Tsarap asks me:

“Alexei, what is your overall

attitude toward the Police Ombudsman?” Now I’ll

talk about the Police Ombudsman in fairly

detailed terms—what my attitude toward him is.

First, I

wanted to comment on a short news item.

It passed almost completely unnoticed, but it

is very important: in Arkhangelsk Region,

they appointed a new governor. The previous

crook, whose surname was Orlov,

was removed because public trust

and people’s attitude toward him had absolutely

collapsed. Orlov actively supported

the construction of that landfill in Shiyes, and people

simply hated him, so he left. And then

this new guy came in, named

Alexander Tsybulsky.

And in one of his first interviews,

he said that he was firmly

against the project at Shiyes station. Guys, this is because

you know how people say protests

don’t work? They absolutely do work.

It seemed like nobody cared about this Shiyes issue,

and at some point all of it

started to look kind of fairly

marginal, like a fringe protest. Everyone said,

“We’re sick of this news from Shiyes,

they’ve set up some kind of camp there,”

“who knows how they live, some kind of drifters,”

“some random people.” But they didn’t give up.

They really did hold rallies and organize actions.

Let’s watch 30 seconds from one of

the actions they held there, in their own area—

right under their noses.

10 billion rubles of budget money—we are for

separate waste collection, right?

[applause]

Life is already everywhere.

Life exists not only at the station.

[music]

[applause]

After all, in a region like that, to hold

a rally of that size—you don’t always see that even in Moscow.

And in the cold, too. And all the smart people told them,

all the know-it-alls said, “It’s all

useless. They’ve already decided they’ll build it.

On one side there’s Chaika, on the other

Rotenberg, and Sobyanin somewhere in the mix—

of course they’ll crush you there, all of that

will happen.” But people didn’t give up, and in

the cold they kept going to their rallies and shouting

into megaphones, “Shiyes! Shiyes!” And now a new

governor has come in. I have no doubt that he

will, one way or another, after some time

start quietly lobbying

for this construction. Yes, there are

interested parties there who want to make

billions from it, and they will keep trying. But

a representative of the authorities who wants

to remain governor there can no longer

politically afford to support this

construction. He has to say only what

people will accept. That’s a big lesson for all of us.

There are 65,000 people watching us live,

so now, about the Police Ombudsman—let me tell you directly

about the search that was carried out at the home of

the person who conducted the search at our place.

Vladimir Vorontsov is a man who runs a

public page that is fairly popular—very

popular. Not literally all, but practically

all police officers—well, tens of thousands

of police officers—read his VKontakte public page.

He also has a popular

Telegram channel. He himself, strictly speaking,

is a cop, so now it’s called

Police Ombudsman, but originally it was just

a play on words—it was “amusement.”

the police, and Schneck, by the way, was also

once conducted a search at one of the foundations

in one of the offices of the Anti-Corruption Foundation

for corruption

after which he resigned, and

being just a cog in the machine, he has

a legal education, he has

an understanding of this system, and as a person he

didn’t go into private security; instead, he decided, well, I

will defend the rights of cops like

me, and that is basically what he does:

he goes around—well, you understand what the police system is

like, especially at the highest levels

it’s a hellish snake pit where the bosses

devour the weak, and higher-ranking bosses

devour the others, and all of it trickles down like that

through this huge vertical chain, and they simply torment

the unfortunate people working on the ground

forcing them to fill out these

piles of paperwork, dumping on them a huge

number of orders and assignments

that are impossible to complete, and constantly

they strip them of bonuses, constantly

they get fired—so the life of an ordinary

police officer is just

the kind of hell their superiors have created for them, and

this Vorontsov steps in and defends ordinary

cops from other cops in command

If you were fired illegally, then he goes

to court for you; if they didn’t pay you

your bonus, he goes to court for you, and

he tells these stories about how

some cops

the bad ones, abuse other cops

the good ones, or maybe not very good ones

but at least ordinary, simple people without

connections. He has turned into enemy

number one for the Interior Ministry. Really—when I wake up in the

morning, I open Twitter and see

some messages from him that he had posted

on his Telegram channel: “They’re searching my place at night, they’re

breaking down my door.” And I thought, wow,

what on earth—they’ve really gone after the guy

over some kind of bribery provocation or something

they were trying to pin on him. Let’s take a look.

And they did it with maximum pomp too—they broke down

the door, brought in an unimaginable number of

police officers, and then they lead him out of the entrance, and

there they are already waiting with cameras

to give it maximum coverage, like, look,

we’ve caught such a terrible villain. Thirty

seconds of footage of this Vorontsov being led

out of his apartment building

there he is being dragged along

I mean, you can see the number of

people involved. The man lives with

his wife and child, who were naturally

terrified by all of this. This poor guy

is in Maryino (a district of Moscow); he’s my neighbor from

Maryino. Right now I live near Avtozavodskaya (a Moscow neighborhood), but

I’m renting there too; otherwise, I spent my whole

life living in Maryino, and he lives there in that

Maryino area where there are lots of surveillance cameras

They brought in FSB special forces and everything

else, and I thought, my God, what are we

It’s clear they hate him because

he defends people just like himself. So what are they

actually charging him with?

They are literally charging him over comments on

VKontakte that someone wrote there under the name

Vladimir Vorontsov

saying that in

the Tyumen region, some people had fallen ill

—local cadets at some training school, apparently

and really, they opened

a criminal case because someone on VKontakte

wrote such a comment. They opened

a criminal case.

A search, the door broken down, the search underway, and

this Vorontsov

—the Police Ombudsman. And at the same time, well, I

think that the people who were at his

search and broke down his door, overall they

first of all, they more or less

sympathize with him, or at least they understand that

they themselves will be treated just as unfairly

sooner or later, and they’ll come to

him and say, like, “Vorontsov, protect

us as a lawyer, or write about us

on your channel so we get some

kind of

PR support.” But even so, all of them

still obey this

system, which with this particular

special zeal is fabricating this criminal case against

him. Why am I dwelling on this

in such detail? Well,

because first of all, right now there is a very

important moment. I’ll talk about it in much more detail

on the program, but in

a sense this is a moment of truth for all

police officers. Many of them are watching this

broadcast. I’m addressing them now, and I will

keep addressing them now and after

this quarantine and after the coronavirus

Either hatred toward police—in the comments, with people calling them

“trash” and so on—will simply grow

dramatically, or right now police officers

will be able to show some kind of human face

because they are, they really are

victims of this system too, in fact

It’s just that right now society

is divided because we are locked in our homes

while they are out there supposedly protecting us

and even among them, that one

who is treated as an outcast, and yet

he is the one defending them

and they still eagerly devour him. Why?

Because this criminal case, good Lord,

is so blatantly unlawful

Three minutes of Googling—and let’s suppose

that Vorontsov himself even wrote this

comment

and they opened a criminal

case against him. The deputy governor of that very

region—the Tyumen region—says

literally the same thing. It’s about the fact that

at a local academy they found people

cadets who have been infected with the coronavirus

the coronavirus, and he wrote about it

and the deputy governor is talking about it too

saying that we have an outbreak at this

college. Moreover, she appears in the video

and says, let's watch it—3:01, and

a second outbreak

is at our Ministry of Defense institution

number two

where today, similarly, we received

a very serious outbreak among

the cadets

this whole story is unfolding and

the information is being verified at this stage

all the necessary services

are involved in this work, but a great deal

of time is being spent identifying

the circle of contacts who in one way or

another had contact with these people

well, you see, this is basically just

an ordinary reposting of news that

was circulating, but they opened a criminal case, and

well, police officers, yes, of course, your

superiors give orders to go after

people like that poor Vorontsov

with his VKontakte (Russian social network) community and his

Telegram channel, a big Telegram channel, and

he writes, frankly, unpleasant things, but you

know, unpleasant things about the bosses—well,

why devour him like that? I mean,

after all, he created a police union—why

I've generally always supported him, and

I often post about him because he

created a police union, and cops won't be

so vicious, like dogs against everyone, if

their rights are at least somewhat

respected

because they live there like slaves

completely impoverished, completely powerless, and

they think that all the rest of us should live

even worse—it's just this kind of

escalation of humiliation

so if a police

union appears and someone starts defending

housing rights, benefits, and so on—mostly

just everyday issues like that

dealing with cases of unfair dismissal

or forcing you to buy a printer with your own

money—he handles lawsuits there, files cases in court,

deals with things like that. But if

your bosses tell you to go after him,

at least don't do it with such gusto, you know, rolling up

your sleeves

at least do it half-heartedly somehow

because it looks bad, because in

the end there will be no one at all left to

protect you; the public will hate you

and even people from your own system will

dislike you intensely because, well,

because things like this are happening. Not

everyone will like one another, because

there, man is a wolf to man, absolutely

in the police right now there is a system in which

man is a wolf to man; everyone

hates everyone else

they are constantly trying to set each other up, and

they fire people, jail them, take their money, and so

on and so forth. This is, of course,

a system that exists by wolfish

rules and can never really become

a proper law enforcement system for

all of us; it will only make our lives even more

wolfish. I'll say more about that. It seems to me

this is the main topic of the week. 79,000

people are watching us live

so send me your questions. Here,

Olesya is asking me: in your view, what are

the reasons governors have been getting fired? Well,

the most recent ones who were dismissed—it is obvious

they were the ones who had major failures there

because of the coronavirus, really major

failures. And in Arkhangelsk Region

it's also, of course, about popularity. That's why I say

it's extremely important to do information work

because if you go around and convince people

around you that this

governor is very bad, proving it

saying, let's hate him, let's not

support him

vote against United Russia (the ruling political party). Putin

governs through opinion polls

they bring him polling data

showing that these governors have ratings lower

than the floor—so let's replace them. And that's what they

do. So it's extremely important to go after and

expose your local bosses

now, here's a very popular question

Mayday asks me: if, for example,

I'm walking down the street and a person nearby wants

to check whether I've gone more than 100 meters

from my home, and how do they determine where my home is, where

my registered address doesn't match—my registration doesn't

correspond to my actual place of residence—well,

this is a common question: if I

went 120 meters away, what can they

do to me? So, this 100-meter rule is basically

a made-up nonsense provision

the only 100-meter rule that exists is that you must not

walk your dog farther than

100 meters from your home

when it comes to going to a store, it says

the nearest store, meaning the nearest

grocery store or the nearest market

if you want, say, household goods

then it means the nearest household goods store

if the nearest household goods store is

three metro stops away from you, then

you go to that household goods store. That's how

it is supposed to work, and that is how it

works. But it's just that the Russian authorities

have gone crazy over this issue

there really is a complete legal vacuum there

no one understands how to

apply it, neither the police nor the officials, but

nevertheless they run around scaring people. So I

advise that in such cases, the main thing is not

to fight with anyone or make a scene. You

just go and say—well, that is, you say...

First, you shouldn’t leave home unless there’s a real need to.

So if you’re going to the store

or heading somewhere on essential business,

you calmly explain that to the police officer.

Show your passport, or say, yes,

I live a kilometer away, but this is the store I need.

There isn’t a market closer to my home.

The nearest market to my home is 650 meters away.

I go there regularly; that’s where I need to go.

The police won’t slap your hands for that.

I would firmly but politely push back.

I always advise turning on your camera and recording.

Because right now the main thing

for the Russian authorities

is to keep saying that we are to blame for everything,

that we’ve done wrong, and just a couple of hours before this

broadcast I saw fresh news reports:

Moscow City Hall was once again

upset that people had gone out for shashlik (barbecue/picnics).

And this whole idiotic shashlik line—

supposedly everyone is going out for barbecues,

everyone is strolling around, no one is observing quarantine,

and of course, according to the surveillance cameras,

blah blah blah, we’re going to tighten restrictions, we’re going to

make things worse for people.

Muscovites are not showing themselves to be sufficiently

responsible, they say, and by doing that

they’re not just seriously

annoying me—and probably you as well—

they are also lying outright. And in fact,

I think it’s very important to understand, and

to explain to others, that indeed in

Russia, in Moscow, and elsewhere, there are quite a lot of

irresponsible people who break the rules.

Probably during the May holidays

when the weather is good—right now it’s Easter,

then the May holidays, and everyone will go somewhere—

that will be very bad, yes, people really will go out.

People really are being irresponsible, but

they’re not irresponsible because they’re

somehow stupid or dim-witted; they’re not

being responsible

because, damn it, for a month and a half before that

they were constantly told that the corona-

virus was nonsense.

People aren’t virologists—that’s what virologists are supposed to

understand. No, ordinary people don’t understand any of it.

They don’t know what they’re supposed to do.

Some share of them—say, 30 percent—sat down,

read up on it, understood everything, and stayed home.

The rest watch television, and that

television, starting in January—

while in Germany they had already begun preparing in January

for the coronavirus,

buying additional ventilators and equipment,

setting up all sorts of additional

facilities and so on in countries around the world.

There was already major preparation underway—not in every

country, but in many countries around the world. And in

Russia, what was happening at that time? The very people

who turned on the TV,

who switched on Vladimir Solovyov (a prominent pro-Kremlin TV host), damn it,

saw people coming on and saying,

this is all nonsense. For a month and a half they

were brainwashing people, saying it was all

nonsense, no worse than the flu or ARVI (acute respiratory viral infection),

that it was all just panic, and that

people were trying to make money off it, that this virus

had been invented by the Americans against

the Chinese. They also said that

no one except the Chinese was getting sick from this virus.

Remember? That was a popular version.

Sure, the Chinese are getting sick, but why should we

worry at all? Let those people over there—

maybe something will happen to them—but we,

we Russians, we’ve got blue eyes, fair hair,

we’re Russian, nothing will happen to us.

That’s what people were being told, and then

some of them started repeating it to each other.

And now, right this moment,

the Moscow government is creating

an information center.

So yes, they’re setting up an information center, but

in the Russian sense, it will be a center

for lying about the coronavirus—you can

have no doubt about that. When we look at

who they put in charge of this

coronavirus information center,

one of whose tasks is supposedly

to debunk fakes—it turns out to be a buddy

of our Vladimir Solovyov, this shady character

by the name of Dr. Myasnikov.

He’s a TV personality and the chief physician of one of

Moscow’s hospitals. In fact, he became widely

known because, while serving as

chief physician of that hospital, and as a

lackey of the authorities, when the journalist Golunov

—remember, he was arrested, and now we all

know that the cops who

arrested him were themselves arrested too—it was

an absolutely unlawful arrest. But back then the

authorities were saying it was right that

Golunov had been locked up. Golunov felt unwell,

he was taken to a hospital, and the chief physician of that

hospital was Dr. Myasnikov, and alongside

the Solovyov programs, he was the one who

threw Golunov out of his hospital and went around everywhere

saying that, yes, of course, this man

should be dealt with.

He even disclosed some of his medical

information. And now this person

is heading the information center. And he

spent a month and a half—let’s just remember

what he was saying. If we’re talking about

the coronavirus epidemic, it will die down,

I think, within a month, by

mid-April.

What does the coronavirus cause? What do we know about it?

Basically, sneezing and coughing.

Do you think the flu doesn’t cause the same thing?

It does. There are hundreds of coronaviruses,

and people keep acting as if this is something unique.

It won’t be five, it’ll be six—something along those lines.

There will be some minimal mortality. In

Russia, as of today, we have zero deaths—why are you

panicking? 140 million people and 200 cases,

not people dying, just people sneezing and coughing.

There are no severe cases—this panic is absurd.

The individual risks are zero, basically.

Literally zero.

Once again: 200 infected out of 140 million people.

Of course, you shouldn’t go looking for trouble, you should

show maximum

calm, because nerves don’t help anyone

at all.

And these, these

so-called COVID dissidents, or from the point of view of

Moscow City Hall, irresponsible people, they

repeat these exact same words. Why

do they repeat them? Where does an ordinary person

get information about, I don’t know,

medicine, what’s happening, viruses?

You and I aren’t virologists. He was told this

by Dr. Myasnikov — he’s on

television. Dr. Roshal (Leonid Roshal, a prominent Russian pediatrician) too,

he’s on television too, the most famous

doctor in Russia, and he was pushing the same

nonsense — that it’s no more dangerous than a common viral respiratory infection,

that it’s nothing serious, that it would quickly

pass, and so on. But Myasnikov

was saying all this — “Good Lord, 140

million people, 200 infected, 10 dead,”

those exact words are repeated by all the people

who ignore self-isolation,

ignore quarantine, and go out walking around.

Because Myasnikov and Roshal said so.

That’s the main thing — some kind of chief authority figures

in the country.

A TV host on Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel), who

hosts programs where people

dress up as different organs

of the human body.

That same person, on a previous program,

showed — gathered a whole bunch of doctors, I don’t

know whether they were real doctors or not,

they were all sitting there in white coats, taking turns

saying this nonsense, this coronavirus

is no scarier than the flu, so

if for a month and a half

you told people this, and these are

more serious people from television,

doctors, professors, hospital chief physicians,

then when someone says, “Petya, why did you go out to the dacha (country house)

and want to have a shashlik barbecue there?” he says,

“Of course I went. I saw the professor, I

saw hospital chief physician Myasnikov,”

“and he told me — I turned him on and he said there

that by mid-April everything

would be over, and the risks of individual

infection are zero.” And now they take this man

completely seriously and

put him in charge of the coronavirus information center,

and all these average Joes

who ignore quarantine, they tell each other,

“I saw him, the one in

glasses — he said the risk of infection

is zero, and now they’ve appointed him to some

top post. Let’s go have a barbecue, guys,”},{

“bring everyone along, we’ll take them all,”

“and 10 two-liter bottles of Ochakovo beer (a Russian beer brand), and we’ll

grill shashlik and off we go.” Then they infect each other.

That’s exactly how it works.

And with these ambulances, with these

ambulance lines — the entire internet is

absolutely flooded with videos of ambulance

queues. What’s more, the drivers of these ambulances

say, “We brought in a patient, and we’ve been waiting

five hours to hand them over, everything is completely

jammed.” Well, let’s take a look. A hospital

in Khimki (a city just outside Moscow).

Moving on — at Infectious Diseases Hospital No. 19, they just

admitted someone there.

They stood there for nine hours after bringing in a sick woman, and now

it seems

it’s just going around in circles like this.

All in one night.

Who isn’t here — Unit 1, 120, 57, 24, 45, and

even private ambulances.

24, 45, 57, 5, 59.

45, 55, 5, 2.

Even 2 is here, 50, 3, and 4, 35 to 45, 48, 35, 48.

...

All right, enough, I’m not going to read any more.

I thought all the drivers had already

fallen asleep.

Everyone has seen this sort of thing. Right now I have

several such videos listed in my script.

I’m not going to show them — the internet is simply packed with them.

So what does the government do? It

says these are lines for disinfecting the vehicles.

Come on — each one has a driver inside,

each one has a patient lying there for hours,

they all have relatives, each one has

a paramedic inside. I don’t understand — I don’t know what this

lie is. They spread these videos, they

say it’s fake, but the authorities

still keep saying it’s a line for

disinfection. And again, some average guy who

watches TV says, “Well, actually

everything’s fine, some kind of lines

there? There are no real lines, it’s

just a line for disinfection.” And this lie

is what leads to people not observing

any quarantine, not observing any

self-isolation.

We have 89,000 people watching us live right now.

And here’s Vadim writing an angry message

in all caps: “Stop calling

what’s happening a quarantine. You’re a lawyer,

you understand that there is no quarantine.”

You’re doing this on purpose, Vadim — I applaud you.

But really, what word am I supposed

to use for it? That’s a perfectly fair question.

There are also several questions from Viktor Medvedev.

“Alexei, why don’t we currently have

a state of emergency here?”

“Alexei, why won’t Putin introduce a

state of emergency?” Oops — Vadim Usmanov

writes: “Alexei, does Putin have any intention of introducing

a state-of-emergency regime?”

No, he’s not going to introduce a state of emergency. But we

should be demanding it, because as I’ve already

said, under the law a state of emergency means

that you have to stay home, because under a state of emergency

or quarantine, they compensate you for your

losses — and Putin doesn’t want to pay.

He won't, he doesn't want to — he wants to keep everything.

He wants to keep the money for himself and for his own people,

for those people who have always been carving out

a reserve fund for themselves during every

crisis. He doesn't want to pay, so he

calls it by different names. But Vadim, do you

want me to use what term exactly —

self-isolation or a non-working week? Well,

this is de facto a quarantine. It's just

an illegal quarantine. What is happening

in Russia right now is a kind of global

violation of the rule of law, under which

a quarantine has effectively been imposed, and it is illegal.

And around it there has grown a huge

number of instructions, subordinate regulations,

orders, and so on — about police, about

doctors, and so forth. But all of it is absolutely

illegal.

Because there is no quarantine in Russia,

not a single one actually, without

a state of emergency. People ask me

the question: how am I supposed to get around

the rule about staying within 100 meters of home?

It's absurd, because there is no state of emergency.

But my friend keeps asking the same question,

and the explanation is very simple: they

don't want to pay.

They simply don't want to pay, and that is why

they will keep substituting all of this for as long

as they can keep coming up with substitutes. So

they continue to lie and say that the situation is not

that bad. Just give us — instead of

instead of showing

a million different messages about how

some people are behaving badly, these kinds of

charts — let's show a chart. It's without sound,

I'll comment on it. This mortality rate

from coronavirus — if you look,

you see, there, that second little yellow line

there — that's coronavirus. You've seen that

there were a lot of messages saying, well,

what nonsense, fewer people die from coronavirus

than from the flu, let alone cholera. But

now look at the mortality rate

compared with other diseases. You

can see it yourself: swine flu, cholera, all

the recent epidemics — now, repeating

this chart — that is, right now the corona-

virus is real, and it is the deadliest

mass illness that we

have encountered. This should not push us into

panic, but this is simply the truth. This

truth needs to be told in order to

convince people to stay put, because

forcing them to stay home is, well,

simply impossible, because they

have been listening to Dr. Myasnikov, Solovyov (a Russian TV host),

Margarita Simonyan (a Russian state media editor), and all the rest.

A gigantic brainwashing machine

spent a month and a half telling them that all this

was nonsense, and now we are blaming

people for going out for шашлык (shashlik, a barbecue/picnic).

There are 2,000 people watching us live right now,

so let's take a question from Bashkortostan (a republic in Russia).

I'll answer it. Samvel Semyan asks me:

"Alexei, in your opinion, for what purpose

have they stationed soldiers with Kalashnikov

rifles?" I don't know whether that's true

or not true; I haven't seen such videos from

Krasnodar Krai (a region in southern Russia).

But with authorities like these — monstrous thieves and

absolute madmen — anything can happen there.

So I wouldn't be surprised for a second

if in Krasnodar Krai

they put armed men there, or people with

dogs, I don't know, with poisoned

darts, with bows, with anything at all, because

in Krasnodar Krai the people in power really are bandits,

thieves, and [__].

that's who holds power there. One of the complaints

sent to me before the broadcast was that in the previous stream,

at 1:08 I said the word "stupid," maybe.

I was discussing Vladimir Solovyov (a Russian TV host), after all.

Please write to me with your comments and

also any complaints you may have,

or corrections, or suggestions for improving my

broadcast. Last time I hosted for two hours and thirty minutes and got a very

mixed response, actually. The feedback

was like: "Come on, two and a half hours? We've got nothing

to do, we're sitting around, we put you on in the background,

you're chatting away and we're listening." Others said:

"No, please, never do that again."

So I'll try not to go for two and a half hours again, but

still, there are so many things that I

want to discuss with you, and you seem to

be watching just fine — 95,000 people

live.

That's a huge stadium. That's really cool.

Thank you very much for watching us. I can see

it floating by right now. If you want

to send more of those little ducks, there's

a link below — click it and send

the ducks. So, the bad but real

news is that the main thing happening

right now is this:

the coronavirus is moving into the regions, and that

phrase itself — "the coronavirus

is moving into the regions" — when applied to

Russian reality, sounds

a little frightening, and rightly so,

because we all know that the regions in

Russia — the very phrase "a Russian region" —

is practically synonymous with poverty.

Russia's regions are very poor, and Moscow

has taken all the money for itself. If in Moscow

even now Sobyanin (the mayor of Moscow) is already saying

that medical capacity is nearly exhausted,

then what is happening in the regions is, well,

a nightmare. So stay home and

try not to get sick — things there will simply

be very bad. And we really

are afraid of the Italian scenario,

which may repeat itself, but for us, even now,

the Italian scenario is already happening de facto.

The difference between us and Italy is that

when we say "the Italian scenario,"

we mean that everything is full, people

are lying in the corridors on

On these very cots, and doctors are running around.

We simply don't have enough doctors.

The Italian scenario is exactly the same.

That's what's happening now: people are lying in the hallways.

Only they're lying on bare mattresses.

On oilcloth-covered ones, with no sheets and really nothing at all.

There is nothing; the doctors have no protective gear.

Pokrovskaya Hospital

This is the second program in a row where I've talked about it.

I said that there had been an appeal from the doctors there.

They said: we have no protective equipment.

Then Beglov, that crook, lied—the head of

St. Petersburg—saying that everything was fine.

Now there are new videos from this Pokrovskaya

Hospital.

St. Petersburg, excuse me, is not

Samara or Saratov; it's not some impoverished backwater.

This is St. Petersburg.

Putin's favorite city. The videos show how this

is all happening now in Pokrovskaya

Hospital.

In one of Russia's richest cities.

Well, you can see it all: people are lying in

the hallways. The only difference is that there,

these unfortunate elderly people are lying there.

They have a torn sheet—or no sheet at all.

Just a torn pillowcase.

An oilcloth-covered mattress, and there are no

nurses bustling around, because there simply are no

nurses at all, because

Russian healthcare has been dismantled

over recent years. There are simply no people left. But as you

say now, the doctors are saying the right things, but

where are you supposed to suddenly find, across the whole country at once,

10,000

anesthesiologists and 10,000 intensive care specialists?

They don't exist, and there's nowhere to get them from. That's why, that's why they

are lying. They are simply starting to lie now

about infection rates in Russia.

Bashkortostan has once again distinguished itself on a massive scale.

Last time

I talked about the situation in the

Republican Hospital, and there it

simply turned into an infection hotspot.

Because the chief doctor, together with the head of

the local health authority, really did not

want to test anyone. As a result, the hospital

had to be shut down. We showed it, we can see here

the hospital was closed; they simply shut the doctors

and everyone else in. They also started lying

when the leader of the union

Doctors' Alliance published this video.

A criminal case was opened against her for

"fake news," even though now everything there

has been confirmed.

It's an infection hotspot there; everyone in the hospital is sick.

They are under quarantine.

But nevertheless, for telling the truth, against that

person they opened a criminal case.

Right now in Bashkortostan, it continues.

New epidemic clusters are simply emerging.

I published a letter from the chief doctor of one of the

hospitals in the region. Please show it.

If you have it—his hospital, yes, this is already

yes, this is not in Ufa; it's his hospital.

It was repurposed into

a hospital for coronavirus patients.

This man sent it to local businessmen.

In this letter he writes that

"Guys, here is a list of items that are lacking."

And is there a second page of this

letter? It's right there—I mean, page 2.

Show that page, let's take a look at it.

Carefully: a list of items that

our hospital needs, where there will be not only

a hospital, but at the same time also

dormitory housing for all the doctors, because they will not

be allowed to leave.

That is to say, for a month you move into

this hospital, start treating everyone, and

only after that do you leave, so as not to

spread the virus. So, what they lack is

toilet paper,

spoons, bowls, kettles, towels—basically

everything. How is it that in oil-rich

Bashkortostan, there is a hospital in

which there are no spoons, no bowls—nothing at all?

Nothing. And yet the man in charge of Bashkortostan,

President Khabirov, a disgusting, vile

utterly

hypocritical crook and thief, pretends that

everything is fine. And his health minister

naturally also goes out and holds

press conferences. At those

press conferences he says—guess

who is to blame for everything?

Of course, the doctors' union. Let's listen.

The work is coordinated; there really are

certain flare-ups, especially on

social media, which we nevertheless interpret

as an attempt to destabilize the situation

from within. These are our so-called

unorganized trade unions that

are trying in every possible way to pour out negativity. But I

am convinced that the colleagues who are there

working did not come there simply

out of vocation; they also understand what the

situation is. We had been preparing for this situation already.

You see, according to him, the unions are

unorganized and are just venting negativity

on social media. I myself wrote about this because

I even signed an appeal to Khabirov

about this hospital.

But if you at least want some good publicity,

bring them toilet paper and those spoons,

because how are doctors supposed to spend a month treating

patients without leaving if they have nothing?

You

crooks, you stole everything; your hospital

has nothing, but of course the unions are to blame.

And this is not just at the level of Bashkortostan. We have

Health Minister Murashko.

You probably don't even know his last name yet.

We have a new health minister, after all. You

know Golikova, Skvortsova, but the minister

now is Murashko.

This Murashko is known for the fact that he was

the health administrator in the Komi Republic.

Back when Gaizer was the head there

of the republic, the one who, as the authorities are now telling us,

according to the Investigative Committee, created

an entire criminal group, and they stole

everything under the sun there, and Murashko worked with him

and he himself was a witness in the case about

of course

the purchase of CT scanners at some

absolutely astronomical price. And now this

man is the health minister. And what does he

do? Instead of fighting

the coronavirus, he personally files a complaint with

the police against the Doctors' Alliance trade union

to have them prosecuted and investigated

for saying that there is a shortage of

protective equipment.

But this is just—it's simply indescribable and

unthinkable. And meanwhile, if you ask

them, and

each of us should be asking this

question directly to the healthcare leadership

and to the head of state

— Putin, the government: what exactly is

Russia's strategy for fighting the corona-

virus? What is your plan, guys? And there is

no answer to that. In other words, there is no plan at all.

No. In Moscow they are still saying something

or other, but in Moscow it's clear: we are taking all

the hospitals,

we have a huge budget, and we will convert all the hospitals

right now into hospitals for corona-

virus patients, we are buying, trying to buy

new equipment, ventilators, and we are giving bonuses

to doctors.

But in the regions, what is your strategy?

What is the plan? Take Smolensk, for example: a nursing home.

In that nursing home

there is already an outbreak of coronavirus in the nursing home,

a coronavirus outbreak in a nursing home—this is

the kind of thing that should be setting off flashing red

alarms. A person dies—what do the local authorities say?

They say that yes, this person was

infected, but died of

cardiovascular disease.

Seriously? They even lie about that, too.

Constantly. In Bashkiria (Bashkortostan), in that very

place, the lying there is just absolutely fantastical.

At the same time, after the scandal, after

127 people in the largest hospital

were, according to official data,

infected with coronavirus, the prosecutor's office and

the Investigative Committee

announce: we are going to conduct

an inspection, something wasn't being complied with there, and

they say: we are conducting an inspection because

127 people in the hospital are infected, and

simultaneously, along with that, there comes out

statistics from the оперативный штаб (government emergency response headquarters), which

say that not that many people are infected at the same time—

the numbers do not even match after that, how many

people are infected across the country and in all

the regions.

We look at Bashkiria—show us

this statistic, please.

The Republic of Bashkortostan—there is nothing there. Where are those, where are those

those

127 sick people? They are not there. Everyone has

recovered. In other words, these people are simply

falsifying the statistics.

It's just—at the same time, one person sits there

and the Investigative Committee says you have 127

people sick, while others say, no, everyone here has

recovered, and now there is only a very small

number of patients there.

This is just, simply, a lie on an absolutely

fantastic scale. This

lying goes on and on and

on, but it will become harder and harder

to fight it, because in these

hospitals there will be people, and every

person has a mobile phone. In five minutes

— I hope they have already prepared this video, I

sent it to the producers while they are working remotely —

and 100,000 people can be watching us

live. Hooray, 100,000 people. And I would

like 100,000 people to watch

this video that has just come in from

Vladivostok.

This is exactly the kind of place where

they bring coronavirus patients, and at the same time

it is also a place where

coronavirus patients who also have tuberculosis are kept, so

it is literally a high-risk group.

Vladivostok—tens of billions were recently poured into it

for holding a summit,

they built bridges and a university, and so on.

Putin went there, and everyone

said they would make it into a kind of showcase,

a cool display city. And Vladivostok really is

a great city, one of the best cities

in Russia, very beautiful, with great people, and, well,

it is as if they built some kind of facade,

but behind the facade—well, something must have

been left for healthcare too. Here is a video of a person

simply describing his stay in this

dispensary for coronavirus patients.

An absolutely monstrous hospital. City of

Vladivostok, 4th Flotskaya Street.

A specialized hospital.

Since I have chronic—chronic

tuberculosis, I was brought here

for isolation. The conditions in

the Vladivostok TB dispensary, to put it mildly,

are Spartan. We had heard that before, but for them to be

this bad—this is really too much.

The author of this video had the bad luck to end up in

the hospital with pneumonia.

His ward is full of cockroaches, where he

is staying as a temporary patient after taking a test for corona-

virus. This is what they brought me for dinner today. I

fortunately did not even

touch it, because the situation

is like this—you are about to see. You see?

They are crawling everywhere, and it all looks like

a nightmare.

But this is definitely not a dream, because sleeping here

is impossible. Today I was lying there and shaking off

cockroaches.

Unfortunately, I can't fall asleep.

And it's not that I'm just not sleepy—I thought maybe it was something else.

Maybe I'll finally get some sleep in the hospital, because...

I didn't know that I might have...

coronavirus. For now, it's all happening at home, very...

suddenly, and it still hasn't turned into anything more serious.

There isn't much attention being paid to it here, and I just can't...

argue with that.

Because I lay down, and cockroaches started...

crawling over the pillow. You really don't want to think...

that it'll somehow pass and be fine—no chance.

In theory, this video should interest...

Rospotrebnadzor (Russia's consumer safety and public health watchdog), because in this...

case...

compliance with the hospital's sanitary regime is clearly...

plain to see. At the very least, the chief physician ought to...

be ashamed if this is what things look like in...

the inpatient ward.

You see, as this local TV report said...

it's a kingdom of cockroaches.

Anyone who ends up there by chance...

is basically just another victim. That's the difference from...

Italy: in Italy, it's horrific—they lie in...

corridors. Here, people also lie in corridors, but they don't...

sleep, because they're afraid cockroaches will crawl into their ears.

Cockroaches, that is.

It's an absolutely nightmarish situation, and this is...

Vladivostok. Look at what kind of car...

Governor Kozhemyako has—what an...

luxurious life the local elite lives.

This whole ruling crowd...

that's in power...

falsified the elections, and as a result of those...

rigged elections, they're sitting there...

and they just don't care. They built all sorts of...

their own vanity projects, their expo center...

You should have renovated hospitals instead, but you didn't do a damn thing.

You didn't repair them, and so now, when it comes to...

the virus spreading to the regions...

the main thing awaiting us, unfortunately, is...

on the one hand, total chaos, and on...

the other hand, complete silence and cover-up.

Alexei Alexander...

Zhuravlyov writes to me and corrects me:

"To be fair, at Pokrovskaya...

Hospital, people were lying in the corridors like that back in...

September."

All the more so—if they were lying there in...

September, then that means...

that even in peacetime, in September...

the surge capacity of our...

healthcare system was such that people were lying in...

corridors—then what the hell, excuse me...

did we spend such a colossal amount of...

money on everything under the sun for?

Why, then, did we go and get ourselves...

the FIFA World Cup? Sure, it was great...

we have fond memories of the...

World Cup.

But we built six or seven stadiums...

at unimaginable, indescribable cost...

and now they're falling apart, yes—and yet we didn't build...

a single hospital in St. Petersburg.

So now, in some clinics...

the only thing we can say is that at least cockroaches aren't running around. To wrap up this topic...

of the coronavirus spreading to the regions...

what I just showed you from...

Vladivostok actually wasn't...

the worst thing I've seen. The worst thing...

was a report by Proekt (an independent Russian investigative outlet)...

Proekt, which just recently...

published a good piece—read it—about...

what is happening in the Russian hinterland...

that is, in the regions, as the virus spreads there...

a completely classic situation is unfolding there.

The virus arrives...

some hospital has to be put under...

quarantine. Quarantine is declared—and then that hospital is...

effectively gone. In other words, there are no hospitals left, and...

people with all kinds of conditions—a broken leg...

a broken arm, whatever else...

I mean, people... and the main causes of death...

here are still cardiovascular diseases...

and cancer. Our country is full of sick...

people—young and older alike.

There are huge numbers of...

people with disabilities, huge numbers of...

chronic illnesses. People's teeth hurt...

and that hospital has been closed for quarantine...

and there's nowhere to turn. And this is absolutely not...

an exaggeration. There are lots of...

interesting exchanges there, but they simply...

recorded audio of a person who had fallen...

A woman—a woman fell from the second floor.

I don't know under what circumstances, but...

she obviously had some injuries, and a paramedic came to her...

and said, "You know...

we have nowhere to take you. There's no hospital to take you to."

This is a district center, and this is... this is Ulyanovsk...

Region.

This is Ulyanovsk Region. It's not like...

some tiny settlement somewhere...

deep in the taiga where only lumberjacks live and you have to...

fly people out by helicopter.

Ulyanovsk Region is a densely populated...

part of the Russian Federation. There's an aircraft plant there...

you understand? In the city of Ulyanovsk, this is...

generally considered a relatively advanced region, and...

there, literally in a district center, in the middle of it...

people are being told, "You know...

you fell from the second floor...

you may have broken everything, but we can't take you anywhere."

Let's listen.

I'm helping everyone too.

[music]

Why?

[music]

[music]

It's 2020, a nuclear superpower, you turn on the TV...

and damn, they tell you all about...

our greatness and how powerful we are.

And of course, of course, healthcare in...

Europe has supposedly fallen short, and their utilities and housing services...

are expensive, and they say people there are lazy.

So of course, in Russia, supposedly...

life is still better. But in 2020, a doctor says:

"I can't do anything—we don't have an X-ray machine, we don't have this...

we don't have that, we have nothing. I can give you a phone number..."

but to put it bluntly, this is what's happening

right now, and this really is

this coronavirus story will, of course, end, yes

that's right, all of this will be extended, it will

all last longer than we think, and all these

the same Khabirov from Bashkortostan (a republic in Russia), he

he has already essentially said outright there that

this will last until summer, and Putin will probably

say the same thing: at a minimum, all of this

will continue. It all depends on how

quickly, well, we reach

this peak, the peak number of cases, after which

there will be a plateau, that is, a large

number of infected people

it will not increase, but it

will remain at the same level, and it will still be a lot, but at that

point you cannot end the quarantine, that is

it's not like once the number of cases

stops growing, we end the quarantine

no, we will still be stuck in quarantine during

this plateau, and this will most likely

last at least until summer, and in general, it's not even

we cannot treat people. It's just

an absolute nightmare. Who is to blame for this? Let's

think about it. In 2020, the authorities have

a great answer for that, as usual

the authorities simply have their

universal answer. The governor

of Kurgan Region, Shumkov, he

on the one hand wrote a fairly honest

post. He simply published it and said plainly

that, you know, guys, we don't have

ventilators

we only have 30% of the required number, and

Shumkov also writes that we don't have oxygen

we only have 50% of the oxygen supply, so, well, okay

a ventilator is complicated equipment

but there is no oxygen in Kurgan Region

but notice what he says next

please look back at it: he writes that

but we won't talk about what caused it, this is

simply something we inherited, you see

from our

from those who came before us, and

of course, read his post and

you can leave him a few

nice comments on the subject. I didn't

mind taking the time; I went and looked at his

biography. The guy has been working

as an official since 2004, and a high-ranking one at that

an official, a deputy governor, that is, he

he personally, this very Shumkov, is the authorities

for 16 years already—longer than Yeltsin and Gorbachev (former Soviet/Russian leaders)

combined, probably longer than

Brezhnev (Soviet leader), maybe, I don't know. Well, together with their

beloved Putin, that's 20 years, and if we

take Putin alone—Putin has been president

and the country's leader, and in fact, as they say

he has worked in the Kremlin since 1996, and they

still tell us, damn it,

there's no oxygen, there's nothing, cockroaches are

running around

and we just happened to end up here by accident

right where the cockroaches are running. Well of course, this is

the heavy legacy of the tsarist regime

and then the democrats ruined everything too

and they keep saying it, they

keep saying it to 104,000 people

live on air. Let's conduct

a mass propaganda campaign on this

because every person

whether a propagandist, an official, and so on

who so much as squeaks about

how, you know, this is the kind of healthcare we inherited

—no, it wasn't inherited. Twenty years

is enough time to

rebuild everything, fix everything, and get everything done

but you did absolutely nothing. And actually

one thing from around the country

is funny—well, no, you can't call it

funny

the way they are even trying to do anything at all

can be seen in the example of disinfection

just so it's clear how

disinfection is being carried out in Russia, here's one

simple fact—I actually saw it on Rosbalt

and this is happening in apartment building entrances, right

people are simply filming how

fake disinfection is being carried out in their

regions, and there was an article on Rosbalt

"Top 10 best videos of performative

disinfection"—a top 10

because the whole country was laughing at

these videos confirming

that it's all lies, a sham, and embezzlement of funds

that is happening right now. The best

entry in that top 10 is 56 seconds long

[music]

[music]

well, your building management company

is using nanotechnology for the treatment

those were videos from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Saratov

and this is happening all across the country right now

this is the kind of disinfection that's being done. Money

is being allocated for it, and, well, in the end

this will lead to

one extra person getting sick, and that one person

will infect 10 more people, and then all of us

will be stuck under this quarantine longer

which isn't exactly a quarantine, but still, we

are living under it. You can send questions in the comments

or to Russia of the Future on Twitter

the questions can actually be about any

topic

Alexei Makarov asks me

Alexei, how are we going to populate Siberia and the Far East

with young people, not just

the big cities, but also small towns and settlements that have been declining since the 1990s

Well, right now is definitely not the time for

resettlement. But, Alexei, my view is

that there is no such thing as simply "populating" a place

because it doesn't work that way

that may have been possible in the Soviet Union

to just send people somewhere, but now, for Siberia and

the Far East, you need to create conditions

taxes need to be lowered

or abolished, because these are places that are often very

difficult to live in

Vladivostok has a great climate.

Khabarovsk's climate is already less pleasant.

If we want people to move there instead of

leaving, we need to make it so that it is

worthwhile to live there. Life there may

be harder because of the climate,

but people should be better off, and until we

make it so that in Siberia and the Far East

people can live a little more prosperously

than in the European part of Russia, people simply won't go there.

That's the only way. Because if you're there

poor, and on top of that you've got mosquitoes flying around

the size of this, and temperatures there are

-40°C (-40°F), then of course you don't want to live there.

But only with measures like that—after all,

that's how places can develop normally.

The northern

part of the United States—Alaska—

is developing just fine. Why? Because

in Alaska

people receive real money,

their own share of the oil and gas

that is extracted from Alaskan land and sold,

and then given back to the people. That's why people live in

Alaska, and the population there is growing. Here, meanwhile,

if you live in Novosibirsk, Omsk, or

Tomsk, how much do you get from the oil

and gas being extracted there? Zero.

You get nothing. It all gets taken to Moscow.

Of course, the main scandal—and not just a

scandal,

but unquestionably the main full-scale

event of the week—happened

the day before yesterday—no, not yesterday, the day before yesterday—when

Sobyanin caused massive traffic jams

in the metro. Because this event

perfectly demonstrated to us that

the authorities,

in the form of officials and various

law enforcement bodies, really do make

everything around them worse.

People are staying in quarantine, they

are working, and so on. Basically, everything

done by people who are not law enforcement or

officials is, in one way or another, for the good of

the country—or mostly for the good of

the country. But these people really

objectively do harm. They cannot

do anything properly; because of their own

stupidity and heavy-handedness, because of their

constant strategy, this kind of approach

to solving problems, they only make everything

worse. We live, we work, we pay

taxes.

And it seems most of us are engaged in

something useful, while they really

make our lives worse. That's an objective fact.

It's not an exaggeration, because this cannot be called

anything other than wrecking

and sabotage. It can't be called anything else. This is not

some accidental thing. So, in Moscow—well,

that is, Moscow—

at first, by some signs of it,

didn't seem quite so stupid,

not quite so backward, at least in

comparison with somewhere like, say,

Krasnodar. There, they would have simply told everyone:

you'll be allowed to move around only with

passes, and come pick up those passes

in person, and then queues would have formed everywhere.

Let's take a look.

I mean, yes, before the coronavirus

we would have looked at that and said, well,

there's a queue, idiot officials made it so that

people have to stand in line. But now, in the time of

the coronavirus, we have to call things

what they are: idiot officials created a place

for the spread of the coronavirus, because

it cannot be called anything else. And Moscow,

because it's rich, said:

we'll, like, make everything digital,

passes on phones and all that; we'll

build a digital concentration camp, but it will be

a digital concentration camp. You'll suffer,

you'll struggle, but at least you'll be dealing with

a mobile phone, and supposedly

you won't have to come into contact with anyone

in person, because, well, we're

such a rich city.

With a budget of almost 3 trillion rubles, Moscow

can afford that. But then came

the very day when the passes started working,

and we saw—and the footage spread ahead of everything else—

every newspaper published it—what an enormous

crush there was in Moscow.

You saw the metro map: at a great many stations,

indeed at practically every metro station,

there were police officers who created

small hotspots for the spread of the coronavirus.

Let's watch the video recording.

[inaudible]

And who are you? Why are you making people queue?

What the hell was I supposed to direct here?

[inaudible]

So there's a huge line at the entrance to the metro, and

a police officer is standing there checking each person's

pass, taking everyone's paper slip and

verifying it. And now, of course,

Sobyanin—when this wasn't just

outrage, but people were simply

furious. And here's why this is

so criminal: we're supposed to be sitting in

quarantine, but this is a city where

12 million people live, and the Moscow

region has another 5 million or so—probably even more;

no one even really knows exactly how many.

And at any given moment,

in order to keep functioning,

to supply all these

enterprises that cannot be shut down,

shops, utility services,

engineering infrastructure facilities,

delivery workers—in other words, the people who

show up to put food on the shelves

that we later buy wearing masks and

gloves—those people have to travel to

work. And they were all gathered together

so that they could get infected there, and that's what happened.

After getting infected in those dense crowds, they

would then go on and infect us. It

looked very—well, naturally, everyone

went furious. Sobyanin (the Moscow mayor) almost immediately

reacted within a couple of hours and started posting

tweets: oh, we did everything wrong, oh,

this means the Moscow government made a mistake, and

now we’ll think about how to do all this

next time in a more digital way. We

will start working on it—there is this idea, you know,

we’ll think through how to do it, basically.

It’s now mid-April; the massive outbreaks in

European countries were in March.

Since March, we’ve been talking about nothing else

—this has been the main issue on the agenda, period.

Actually, the press has been covering all this since January;

it’s been happening in many countries; as I said, in

Germany they had been preparing since January, but here they

are only now starting to think it through, and now

of course they’re blaming each other. Sobyanin

says that everything is entirely the fault of

the police; the police point at

Sobyanin. There are already a large number of

publications with various insider accounts, and

they’re not lying: there was a specific, direct

instruction to the police. Literally, they were told

that not

even a mouse should slip through. That is exactly what happened,

not a single mouse got through. But

if you tell police officers, basically,

that not even a mouse should get through, what

is a police officer supposed to do? Well, usually, once he

is put there, he simply starts

demanding things he doesn’t even understand himself.

And besides, as I already said, the status of all this

wasn’t really very clear—who had the right

to go and who did not have the right to go. We

know one thing: in order to

organize something like this at every

metro station, to place several police

officers there—this is a huge operation

that was obviously prepared at

joint meetings of Moscow City Hall and

the police themselves. The police had no reason

to do this on their own; we know that the police, the

less work they have, the better. If they were

forced to involve that many officers,

to deploy them and provide them with

whatever support and resources were needed,

they would have had to leave some forces behind and

transfer others from different sites. They would not

have done that if they had not had

a clear political order.

So without taking responsibility away from

the police officers who were doing something stupid,

we of course understand that it was precisely

the political authorities who did this. And what

did it look like in practice? The best video, of course,

is the one where everyone was told, basically,

that not even a fly should get through, and there stands

this idiot in uniform just yelling there

while a crowd is moving past: “Show your IDs!”

“Law enforcement, medical workers,”

“employees, your IDs!” People are asking,

“What IDs, for God’s sake?”

No IDs were required. That is,

there were those digital passes, but

he himself doesn’t understand what he’s asking for; he’s shouting

about IDs and simply sees no

human beings in front of him. Let’s watch.

No, they turned on the wrong video for me. This is one

of the lines at a metro station; I can show

many like this. There is actually

please show

the video recording of that overzealous

police officer who is standing there and

shouting, because that really was

the symbol of everything that was happening that

day. There is a video—they’re showing me that there isn’t

the video, but it will appear; we’ll

find it. In principle—well, look.

They held this meeting, and from there it was all

basically obvious to anyone. We

know this; we’ve ridden the Moscow metro,

we understand that checking anything at

the entrance to the metro is simply impossible. At

Avtozavodskaya station in normal times,

if it’s six in the evening,

just getting into the metro at all

without any, you know, police

pass checks—there is already a line there, a very dense

crowd standing there and moving

in tiny shuffling steps in order to get through

the turnstile just with their cards. And

this isn’t hard to calculate: we have

a Moscow metro passenger flow of 6

million people a day on average. Well,

on a normal day it’s not 9 million people,

it’s 6 million people. And the

Moscow authorities themselves said that

passenger traffic had fallen sixfold—to 1 million

people. The question is: is it possible, with

any number of police officers involved,

to go and check some kind of passes and

match them against passports for a million

people? Fine, let’s say

it’s half a million people—come on, no way.

Of course not. That is exactly why in

metros around the world there is this

automatic barrier thing,

because manually, in no

metro system, can you check anything.

That is the whole feature and purpose

of a metro system. And there sits some City Hall official and

the head of the transport department, and

they had a meeting. Sobyanin was sitting there,

Liksutov (Moscow’s transport official) was sitting there,

the head of the metro was sitting there, the head

of the Moscow police was sitting there, and

there were a bunch of other people too. They

must have been saying to each other, basically:

“Right, so in order to stop these people from going

around,”

“and in order for them to understand that we are

serious, we’ll scare them now, and

one day we’ll simply place

cops at every metro station, and they

will check digital passes.”

They’ll see this once, and then they’ll

be afraid of us, they’ll get scared. But you do

understand how this was set up. And this is

literally how it was discussed, exactly like this.

They don’t comply.

We need to punish them once now, and they’ll

stand there and understand that they need to get

a pass. They won’t let you into the metro without it,

and you’ll think twice

next time. And it genuinely never occurred

to these people, because this is their

only way of solving every problem.

We’ll put up barriers and ban something, and

that’s their answer to everything: to elections,

to poverty, to raising

the retirement age, to absolutely anything.

We’ll put up some kind of checkpoint and ban everything for everyone, and

we’ll demand additional passes. Well, they did.

If we have the video, tell me,

can we show that police officer now?

No, we can’t—and unfortunately not the police officer either.

That’s a shame, because there’s a great bit where he’s

standing there yelling something like,

“Show me—”

“present your pass,” basically. I mean, they really

I’m sitting at home, I’m doing this program

from home, and I’ve got

disposable gloves here. I made sure to

buy them. When I go out, whether to the market or to

the store, I put on gloves.

I wear a mask because, although I don’t seem to have

any symptoms,

I assume I’m not sick, but then again,

what if I’m an asymptomatic carrier? So if I

cough near someone, they could get infected. And people

are staying home, and people are being kept under this idiotic

quarantine that isn’t really a quarantine. People

are getting poorer every day, people are losing money.

Yes, that very video. And what

you’re showing me on the screen right now—this is

exactly what I wanted to be shown. People

are losing money, they’re obeying this damn

quarantine—for what? So that later

you can create a crowd like this, where everyone

gets infected? This really just wiped out

everything, completely nullified it all. We paid, well,

fine, let’s take Moscow residents alone.

All this has cost, probably by now, a trillion

rubles.

The total losses are in the trillions of rubles, and

for what? Why are we doing this?

So that some idiot from city hall, together with an idiot from

the Moscow Main Directorate of the Interior Ministry, can just wipe it all out. Let’s watch.

The very video I wanted to show—

let’s watch. What’s going on, you almost broke everything here.

Sorry about that—home broadcast,

broadcasting from home. By the way, they did the same thing

at the same time

at the entrances to Moscow. People were getting out; we have

video of people simply getting out of

buses and walking on foot because

the same kind of [__] blocked all entrances to

Moscow. The way Moscow and

the nearby Moscow suburbs are structured, it’s basically

all one city, really.

Administratively, yes, it’s technically a different federal subject (region),

but in practice—take Reutov, for example—that’s

basically Moscow. Or Mytishchi—

that’s the same Moscow too. People are going to

work there in exactly the same jobs,

as sales clerks, couriers, and so on.

And they just blocked everything off. Let’s watch.

So who ended up being found responsible for this?

That part is astonishing in itself. On the one

hand, Sobyanin seemed to acknowledge all of it; on the

other hand, well, someone is to blame, and that person needs to be

identified. If something like this happened in

any European country, objectively speaking—

and this is not an exaggeration, this is my view—

what happened was effectively an operation

for mass infection of people. If you

imagine a malicious spy

who wishes Russia harm, who wants

Russia to fall apart and its resources to go to

some foreigners or whatever,

then the worst thing he could do right now

in Moscow is exactly this: he should

organize crowds of people in enclosed spaces.

And at the same time, they’re banning people from traveling

by car, even though in a car you

are either alone or with someone who is most likely

a family member, someone who’s already

moving around the same apartment as you anyway.

In that sense, infection in a car is far less

likely. It would be much better if people traveled

by car rather than by metro, but no—

it has to be the metro.

They have to organize crowds there so that people

stand packed together. I hope we’ll see that video.

This is the children’s entrance—it hasn’t been opened.

Only IDs shown open and unfolded.

ID open and unfolded.

Health Ministry staff, security services, emergency services.

You may step out and film it, and for today—

[music]

There you go—they put some fool in uniform there,

and he’s shouting, not even knowing himself what he’s demanding.

But he’s used to demanding ID. That’s how our country

works:

if you’ve got an ID,

then you’re a person; if you don’t have the right papers (slang for official ID),

then show them—or get out of there.

That’s what he was told, so there he stands.

And some other donkey, just a higher-ranking one,

told him: right, go over there

and demand documents from everyone. And he doesn’t even know

what exactly to demand. And that higher-ranking donkey

was simply told by an official from

the Moscow city government that not a single fly

was to get through, and that all these

ordinary people—because for them, for the officials and municipal employees,

there’s a separate line saying

that they

don’t need passes—but these

regular people, some ordinary worker trudging off

to Auchan (a supermarket chain) to stack carrots

on the shelves—let him

learn that he’s supposed to obtain a digital pass.

passes, and these digital passes at that.

They’ve already broken down — there’s an enormous

number of rejections right now, just

today I saw the entire internet flooded with reports

that

that car passes were denied to

thousands of people because their first name, patronymic, and surname

got mixed up somehow. For example, I’m an individual

entrepreneur, and I have the same

same initials, and

the same tax ID as Navalny, and I have

the same full name as Navalny, and in that case the system

throws an error and denies

the pass. And there are already lots of people who need

to travel, because this individual entrepreneur

is hauling carrots that we

want to buy — we need food — but he

will be stopped at the entrance

and then chased down. So who

came up with this brilliant idea? And most importantly,

who will be held accountable for it? Show me. I

saw on Twitter today from Vadim

Korovin two screenshots of just

absolutely wonderful tweets. Here

you can see at the bottom it says that Moscow

stores

have already been fined 21 million rubles (about $280,000)

because, apparently, they

on the floor

put down those little stickers

to keep a distance of 1.5 meters (about 5 feet), but they’re not

complying with the conditions meant to prevent

customers from crowding together. And at the same time,

the chief infectious disease specialist of the FMBA (Federal Medical-Biological Agency)

the Federal Medical-Biological

Agency — says that of course there won’t be

an increase in cases because people

are crowding in the metro. I mean,

just imagine what a corrupt bastard

they are: at the same time they fine stores, and

no one will pay, no one will answer for it, no one will resign

because at the entrances there were

several hundred huge crowds of people

and many of them may have come away infected.

There is a mathematician, a physicist and mathematician,

and a well-known election analyst,

Sergei Shpilkin — he even made a calculation

using just a very conservative,

lower-bound estimate. He calculated that if

the probability of getting infected in that crowd

increased by 5 percent, then that already means

several thousand people infected, or

five extra days of quarantine even by the most minimal

estimate. That is, five more days of quarantine again

means a cost to the economy of hundreds

of billions of rubles for five days of quarantine

in the giant city of Moscow. And by some miracle, all they did was remove

the head of the Moscow Interior Ministry department — not even a formal reprimand,

nothing for the mayor of Moscow. Maybe Putin

came out and said, “Well, Sergei Semyonovich,

you really messed up, don’t do that again,”

something like that? No. Instead Peskov comes out and says, yes,

in Moscow today there was, of course,

a huge crush of people — the citizens are to blame.

The citizens of Russia showed their

carelessness, and that forced

the authorities’ hand. They failed to show proper discipline, you see, and

forced the authorities to introduce

these passes.” Peskov, who

was with Putin at the hospital in

Kommunarka (a Moscow hospital that became a major COVID-19 treatment center),

and by law should have been in quarantine,

completely ignored that quarantine, yet he actually

blames all those poor unfortunate people who

were late for work, who were on their way to work

unlike him.

Come on, seriously — on a weekday,

who exactly was heading out at 10 a.m. for entertainment?

Were they going for shashlik (barbecue)? No, they were going

because they had to. I don’t think

they were heading off to get drunk at parties,

or for barbecues, or, I don’t know, to a strip club,

or to a disco on a weekday when all this

was happening from 6, 7, 8 in the morning until 11.

No — people were going to work

in order to help all of us get through

this coronavirus crisis.

But now they’re really being blamed for everything, and

the Moscow mayor’s office, and then

Minister Murashko, the health minister,

also says that, well,

of course the population failed to feel

a sense of responsibility. Don’t you see? Once again, we

are to blame — we didn’t feel

responsibility. They’re out there lying, they

first told us that the coronavirus

wasn’t a problem, and now these

poor people are suffering because their pass

system broke down. These idiots couldn’t

simply sit down and calculate

that if 20,000 people enter each metro station

and there are two cops

checking passports, that will create a huge

bottleneck. I mean, that’s a first-grade-level problem.

They couldn’t foresee that, but

of course the population is to blame, we’re to blame for all

of it, people are such fools, people don’t

observe quarantine. And there was an excellent post

written by the well-known doctor David

Matsov, I think — or rather,

if I remember correctly, he wrote it on Facebook,

not in an interview. It was a long post, and he said directly

that he didn’t even know what words

to use, because this is simply

the complete undermining of everything the quarantine

is meant to achieve. What are we even fighting for? What is all this

for? You can’t go anywhere,

you can’t even go to the store, all these people are running around

like crazy trying to get masks,

trying to get disposable gloves — so what the hell

is the point of all that if they

pull this kind of stunt in the metro?

That’s why I said: this is not an exaggeration,

this is not my political rhetoric — this is

a real fact. The people who are in

power are simply doing harm, because they

can’t do anything, don’t know how to do anything,

they are incapable themselves.

But look at how this is being done in other

countries. It was a nightmare in Italy,

it was bad in France, and very bad in

Spain. In Spain, there really was

some moment when

it seemed like it would be just like in Italy, I mean

it was a country that had been hit hard

which was considered, well,

things were not going very well there. What

does the Italian metro look like? Let's take a look.

This was Madrid, and it was these measures

that, among other things, made it possible to improve

the situation, and at least there, too, now

there isn't the same wild growth as

there was before, because, well, people are sitting in

their meetings, and the officials' task is

what? To herd everyone in, apparently.

The task is to show that they're tough, while

we're not, and that we have no rights, none at all.

The task should be to make sure people do not get infected.

So if you have a huge number of

police officers, maybe they should stand there

for example, and hand out masks. But no, we

never even considered that, basically, because

if you have a police officer, then

you are supposed to use that police officer to prohibit things.

You know, that's what they have right in front of them:

tools.

Money, police, courts. So, money is needed

so it can be stolen; the police are needed

to ban something here and there and

to punish, and, I don't know, repress; the courts

are needed to say that the police

acted lawfully. Now, I have

a question from Kristina Borisova:

Are we really going to tolerate this kind of

treatment of the people all the way until the very end of

the lockdown? And what if the epidemic does not

end this year? First of all, that is

possible. Sobol gave an interview to a well-known

economist who is now at Princeton,

a Russian-born scholar working there,

Oleg — I may be pronouncing his last name

incorrectly — a very sharp guy. And on

Instagram she interviewed him, and he

said something interesting there,

Hyok, I think his surname was, yes — he said

this phrase: "I think I've come to terms with the fact that

I may not fly on a plane until

next year." So it is entirely

possible that this, in one form or another,

will remain with us much longer than

we might assume. And whether we will

put up with it — well, that is a question for us and for

everyone else. Will we tolerate it? And

it's not that I'm suggesting going out and

publicly violating quarantine rules,

that would be completely stupid. But we

must destroy this government's approval rating.

This should not just be some abstract

discussion like, "those bastards caused this in the

metro." We need to write about it, discuss it everywhere, that

means: Sobyanin, you caused all this, you

have shown yourself to be a person who is incapable of

governing a major

city. Draw the conclusion: if you are such an idiot

that you do not understand that two police officers cannot

do the work that 35

turnstiles at that station used to do,

then you should not be working there. Get out. Resign.

We will not vote for you,

we will campaign against you, we will

go after you on social media.

Only then will they start moving, because

why else — why does Peskov have the nerve

to come out and say that the people are to blame?

There are no real elections, because they believe that

if there is no political competition, no

public pressure, and the people stay silent,

then they can keep getting more brazen. We just must not

stay silent. Right now, that simply means

talking it over with neighbors, speaking up, writing

something on social media, and having

a big, important conversation with our

police officers. And I wanted to talk about this

in more detail, even though

I have already been live for 1 hour and 30 seconds.

Apparently I won't manage to make this one any shorter.

This time, it seems, the program

is being watched live by about 107,000 people,

so I will dwell on this in more detail.

The police ombudsman, that same Vorontsov

I mentioned at the beginning — I saw

that he promoted this livestream several times,

so I assume that this program is being

watched.

I know for sure that many are watching me,

and police officers are probably watching

a little more than usual since March.

Not only police officers are watching, and right now we are at

as I said at the beginning of the program, an important

and critical moment, from which we will

emerge either into a situation where

everyone will simply hate the police

three times more than before. But

we know that, for historical reasons, for

reasons having to do with how our

state is structured, the population does not like

the police. And the police repay civilians in roughly the

same coin, because

they believe they have a very difficult

job and that no one understands their situation,

because they carry out the orders of stupid

superiors. At the same time, when they themselves

become superiors, they

turn into stupid bosses too and give

the same kinds of orders. And basically these are two

separate

parts of the population. But what is happening

now will undoubtedly lead to the fact that

people will, quite justifiably, begin

to use the harshest words and expressions toward

the police, and police officers will

be the object of well-deserved hatred. So

guys, especially those who work at the bottom,

down on the ground, out in the field, when

they were told — and we know very well you were told —

that you have to go out and churn out 15 citations.

every day, whether you like it or not, on the internet

you have to churn out these reports, these quotas of yours

your boss is an idiot, and you still have to do all this

these quotas. But good Lord, if your

boss

is an idiot and a moron and demands something from you, then

why do it with such zeal, with such

wild stupidity, to do what

is happening now

what the whole country can see? Because the main

the main piece of information content in

Russia right now is these videos

of people being detained, and they are monstrous

women in Moscow—just look

at how many officers it takes, how many

police officers, excuse me,

to detain one unfortunate elderly woman

who, in their opinion, had gone too far from home

43 seconds in. On April 15, police officers

did not show their identification

Right now they are taking your mother away on the basis of

unknown demands. Right now I want to go with

them, to accompany her, and in the scuffle

these kinds of police officers do not

show documents, and the National Guard (Rosgvardiya) too

these are the kind of police officers they send in—they

make unclear demands of citizens

do you understand? So fine, what terrible thing

could this woman possibly have been doing? Fine, they came out

the police took away an elderly woman

so elderly women are not allowed to go outside

because, supposedly, they are in a risk group

she is walking with her son—where is she going, again?

To a disco? To a bar to drink beer?

Obviously she was going somewhere on her own business

probably to the store or somewhere else, maybe, but

an elderly woman is going somewhere with her son

what possible reason could there be, even the slightest,

to grab her like that and shove her

into that bus? Why does she need to be

detained? But I showed 43 seconds—this is

a long video, you can find this

policeman

this huge brute of a man

is cramming her in, shoving her in the back, pushing her, and the worst part is

the main thing is, his mask

is hanging somewhere down here, while he is with his own

big face right this close

to her. If any of them was sick, then one hundred

percent they infected someone else. Why are you doing this?

And I saw discussions of this too

among police officers themselves, and

I mean, the police, you understand,

say that on the one hand they are wrong, on the other hand

they immediately start defending it, like, well, but

she was violating something. She could not have been violating anything

I mean, this woman obviously hardly

just stabbed someone with a knife, right?

It is highly unlikely that she had just, like, robbed

a savings bank (Sberkassa, a Soviet/Russian savings bank)

She was walking down the street. Even if she had violated

something—let us suppose she was 10

kilometers (6.2 miles) from her home and was simply walking

I do not know, strolling down a path—that still cannot

even remotely justify the fact that

she is shoved around and detained by the police

causing clear harm to her health, well

through stress and everything—she is obviously not well

obviously, in Russia there are no

people over 60 who are perfectly healthy, and this woman

clearly is not someone in excellent health

several police officers are shoving her

And I am saying: police officers, you should

be outraged by this first and foremost

these same briefings are happening to you too, you

sit in these communities, tell your

superiors: we are outraged

It should work in such a way that

Putin finds out, and all the top brass of your

corrupt leadership says, you know,

from monitoring we can see that our

ordinary cops are actually outraged that they

have to deal with this crap, and for that reason

you need to stop doing it

with such enthusiasm. At the very least, why shove this

woman around? And then there is the woman with

a child—there are two angles of it, I will show them—but

it is simply monstrous. So first,

in one case, a woman went out to the store, and right next to

her apartment entrance she was shouting: my child is at home

my child is at home—and they are detaining her

the young woman went to the store—what the hell are you doing,

she just stepped out to the store, and they decided

for some reason—no, just look

they are hauling away a young woman while her small child is at home

what they are doing to this girl, you can see it

look, look

native patrol qumo

That is why I am saying: police officers, the whole country will

hate you. Maybe you personally

are not directly involved—I hope so

most of you are not taking part in this and

have nothing to do with street patrols

and may be just as outraged by these

images

but you need to talk about this to your

superiors, because what is happening

apart from the organizational idiocy

flashing lights, a whole bunch of police officers

detaining some woman who went out

to the store to buy groceries—for what?

So that you can file one more report

and report to your superiors that you

have produced a sufficient number of reports

Take a closer look at this video from another

angle

[music]

Well, sure, perfectly normal: a woman is screaming

she is yelling, my child is at home, and they are shoving her somewhere

again, let us suppose that

fine, let us say it is not all so clear-cut, she was not

and these neighbors are lying, these completely

random people saying she was going to

the store are making it up, not speaking honestly

they were bribed by the State Department and are lying; in reality

this woman committed a crime, she

went out, bought a bottle of beer, and sat in the

courtyard drinking beer in subzero weather

at night despite the temperature checks, or were simply loitering around

aimlessly in the courtyard, and at the slightest thing they need to be

hauled in like this and written up on such

grounds, for allegedly violating

quarantine. But we don’t have a quarantine regime, we don’t have

a state of emergency either. You can’t treat people like this.

What kind of

idiocy is this? And most importantly, what are we

trying to achieve with this? What will it lead to?

Will people comply more because of it?

No. It will lead to people

finding more sophisticated ways not to comply, not to

mention the overall harm that

is being done. He simply committed

something monstrous. There was a horrific video today—today a man

a police officer from Nagatinsky Zaton (a district in Moscow)

really, all of them, every one of those

I showed today—like that one where

an elderly woman is shoved on a bus,

or that one where they’re detaining a young woman, and

then those police officers who

detained a family walking—a man, his wife, and

their child—and right in front of the wife and

child they detained that poor

man just because he was walking down the street

in front of his child, and the child sees it. What kind of

thoughts will stay in that child’s head for the rest of

his life? Let’s watch.

Why are you doing this? What

is going on? You know what—charge me with

insulting police officers if you want, but these are

just degenerates, absolute

real degenerates. A woman is standing there with

a child, crying, and the child is watching all this, while

they really just picked on some guy.

He went out for a walk with his child. Yes, he

broke the rules, because technically he wasn’t supposed to

go out for a walk—right now you’re not allowed to go walking with

your child. But he went out for a walk.

So what, did they have to twist his arms behind his back

right in front of his wife?

A citizen of the Russian Federation living in

that building has to scream and cry and

beg, saying: “Please explain to us what

is happening. Why are you taking him away? For what—because

he was walking down the street?”

That’s why I’m saying: police officers, any

police officers—really, law enforcement in general,

the security services—you should be talking about this.

You should be speaking out.

The prosecutor’s office, the National Guard (Rosgvardiya), ordinary

beat cops, patrol officers—they should

they should be speaking up now and

explaining things to the public, and persuading one another

that this must not be done, and certainly not

engaging in this kind of nonsense.

Yes, exactly—this kind of brutality, this kind of

bestial behavior. How can you do this? You yourselves

have children, you yourselves have wives, so

just imagine if you were being hauled away

right in front of your child, and your child were

sobbing—that’s trauma for life.

And for nothing, really—just so that, supposedly,

at roll call some thickheaded

sergeant or, I don’t know, captain can say,

“Good job, Kolya, you processed one guy,”

“we fined him 500 rubles (about $5–6),” and for

that you do all this? Why do we even

need the police? What’s happening

right now—first of all, we have a colossal

surge in domestic violence. I’ve gotten a huge

number of messages. Right here I’ve got

appeals saying that activists are asking

law enforcement

not to punish quarantine violations

but to pay attention to people lying at home beaten after assaults.

Do you think they’re going to listen to these pleas instead of politics?

To people’s desperate appeals? Have you seen how they’re

listening to pleas right now? No, of course not.

They were told to arrest people, and meanwhile

there’s the housing issue—you understand what kind of

country this is: people live with several families in

one home, in a single apartment.

Divorced families live together in one

apartment.

People live there with their own family and also

their parents, and an elderly paralyzed

grandmother, and

all of this becomes extremely complicated, it

becomes unbearable. And then there’s a child

demanding, “What do you mean? I want to do my

online lessons, and nothing works. Give me

a computer, give me

working internet.” Everyone is losing their minds, and against this

background domestic

violence is absolutely flourishing. We are definitely

going to have a wave of divorces after this.

There are statistics from China, by the way:

after the first fairly long and strict

lockdown, there was simply a huge

spike in divorces. Here, what we’re going to get first is

stabbings first. Just look, by the way, at how

alcohol sales have risen. I

saw a magazine publication that

published statistics showing that people have started buying more.

And I was sure that all

online retail stores would be

rolling in it, that business would be great for them,

that everything would be selling. But their statistics

show these graphs where

everything that fell goes one way—basically

everything dropped—and in the other direction, only

one thing grew, only one bar went up:

alcohol. People are drinking heavily. They sit at home, they

drink, they fight, they argue, they

slash each other with knives, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re

decent or indecent, well-mannered

or ill-mannered,

intellectual or not—

living under this stress,

especially against the backdrop of having no money—just

imagine: a person didn’t earn anything at

a car repair shop,

and now everything is shut down, and he or she was paid by the job,

or he’s a waiter who had a small

salary and tips—now there’s no money, none at all.

No money for rent, you know, you can’t

pay for the apartment, and your wife looks at you like that.

and with her eyes she may be signaling the waitress herself

angrily, saying, "Do something, get us some food."

There’s nothing she can do. By the way, we’re

seeing a rise in petty theft right now.

Just notice how, these days,

it’s constantly in the news, and even just on social

media you see reports: hubcaps stolen, windshield wipers taken off,

mirrors ripped off cars.

It feels like I’ve gone back to

1993.

Because back then it was exactly the same. When I

bought my first car—it was a

VAZ-2108 "Eight" (a Soviet/Russian hatchback)—I used to take the wipers off it

at night and carry them home because

in my military town, drug addicts

would steal those wipers and sell them.

Now the same thing is starting again. People just don’t have

any money, everyone is on edge, and our

police are only making it worse by

walking the streets during the day and grabbing

random people who are simply walking along.

They didn’t organize any protest, they’re not infecting

anyone—they just went out,

maybe with a child, shuffling along on their own business, and they get

twisted around, beaten, their arms wrenched behind their backs,

zapped with stun guns. So, dear

police officers, either you start talking about this yourselves,

or everyone will quite deservedly

hate you—including those who aren’t

personally guilty. Fine—but hatred toward your

system will grow. And to everyone else:

don’t stay silent about this. You just need to

keep talking about it constantly. You need to

be endlessly outraged, to spread

these videos. And when a video like this—

a detention like this—

of a man being detained in front of his wife and child

is seen not by 200,000 people on VKontakte (Russia’s social network), as

it is now, but by 20 million people, then

maybe they’ll start changing something. That’s what happened with the

metro.

They canceled everything almost instantly.

Why? Because this affected

hundreds of thousands of people—one million people

went into the metro, ran into this, and

cursed and swore at

the authorities all the way to work. So they

reversed it immediately. So until

all of us start cursing out these

authorities, they won’t repeal anything.

By the way, when all this

is over, we need to seriously

think about whether

the money in our, generally speaking,

rich oil-producing country is being allocated properly. In my presidential

campaign, I had been thinking about this for a long time.

campaign.

I had specific points saying that we need to

reduce the number of these uniformed personnel,

while paying them higher salaries.

But their numbers should be cut, and more should be allocated

to healthcare and education, because

look at EMERCOM (Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations).

The Ministry of Emergency Situations.

Have you noticed any real work from them

lately? What are they doing? Nothing.

Because they’re not doing a damn thing. Do you know

how many personnel there are in the country? 288,000.

Three hundred thousand people. I just

looked up an article today out of curiosity about

the size of the armed forces.

Let’s just take a look. You can see

that by around 25th place, our number of EMERCOM personnel

is larger than the army of Germany. If

we take 300,000 EMERCOM personnel and

340,000 National Guard personnel,

we get the sixth-largest

army in the world. I mean, guys, this force

is bigger than Pakistan’s army,

a major country that is

constantly on the brink of war with India. In other words,

that’s an army in a state of combat

readiness. It’s bigger than in Korea,

which is constantly on the brink of

war with North Korea. What are these people doing

right now? Is there any real

help from them, any benefit at all?

Sure, of course, there are fires

and accidents, and some

part of that personnel is still

involved. But on the one hand, we have

a truly gigantic army

of people who are poor and receive almost nothing,

especially those in the National Guard,

who at least get something, while in EMERCOM they’re paid basically nothing.

They’re paid nothing, they do nothing, they don’t help us in any way.

Why did we build this Ministry

of Emergency Situations into such a flashy structure?

Good Lord, Shoigu (former head of EMERCOM and later Russia’s defense minister) was already covered in medals back then,

there were all these planes,

and we were told that we had this super-

structure that would protect us in any

emergency. But it’s obvious that

an epidemic

has always been among the most likely

possible emergency

situations. An epidemic happened—and they’re completely useless.

And as for the argument that internal troops are needed

to provide

some kind of internal problem-solving,

in places where the army is needed—there’s no point in that either.

So maybe we should cut them back,

for example by a factor of four, raise your

salaries twofold, and give the remaining money

to healthcare. This is

a crucial question, and it’s very important not to

forget it when all this is over. It’s important

that we do not forget it.

People ask me what will happen if

Russian oil loses its value.

Well, we’ll know the answer to that question

very soon, because Russian oil

has already lost value—or rather, not just Russian oil,

but oil in general. Not that it became worthless,

but its price has fallen.

And that is happening right now, and we

will see the answer to this crucial question

that should concern all of us.

Right now, but it seems to me for sure

nothing good will come of it, because he

So this week Putin once again

made an address, and this

the government was shown to us, and we

once again saw that they themselves do not understand—miracles aside

even just an objective observer—they

not a person who is, you know, an opposition

politician like me

you could say that I go looking for, yes, whatever

flaws there may be and draw attention to them

in the authorities, and show that this leads nowhere

the opposition—the opposition criticizes the authorities and

and tells us

that it would govern better than the authorities. But even

if you look at it completely objectively

they simply do not have any strategy

You may not understand the authorities’ overall strategy

toward the coronavirus

—the point is that no one understands it

What is happening there, at the government meeting

and these measures they

are talking about—they show that no

help will be given to anyone. We see countries

that have never done anything like this in their lives

In America, they are giving $1,200 to every

person; in Canada, 2,000 Canadian dollars

to every person in that country—countries where

it would have been unthinkable

that they would simply hand out money. They

are handing it out because they understand that otherwise

it’s game over

people will not survive. And more than that, there is

a huge scandal going on—not around

whether to allocate the money or not, but the scandal

is about people saying that $1,200

per person is far too little if

we are asking people to stay home

regardless of whether they lost their job or not

you get $1,200, and that is far too little

to compensate for

the overall losses to the economy. That is what the fight is about

Here, no one at all, no one even

thinks to

discuss this. More than that, there is this kind of

reverse strategy: let’s somehow

not ask for too much, because then

the government will come up with some measures

special ones, and Putin announces these

measures, and you hear some figures there like

200 billion rubles for the regions

some 12,000 rubles, basically the minimum wage

in aid—every enterprise that

has suffered will get, for each employee,

the minimum wage: 12,000 rubles

Those 12,000 definitely will not save anyone

Putin—and let’s watch 46 seconds of their measures

their plan: the government has already proposed

a program of interest-free loans for

paying wages. The term of such

loans is six months. I have already spoken about

the need for additional financial

assistance to the regions, so I propose

to additionally allocate

200 billion rubles to ensure

the stability and balance

of regional

budgets. I propose providing small and

medium-sized companies in the affected sectors

with financial assistance from the state

The amount of support for a specific company

will be calculated taking into account the total

number of its employees as of

April 1 of the current year, based on

the amount of 12,130 rubles per

employee per month. And so people ask me

“Alexei, what do you say about

Putin’s latest address?” I will say that

I see confused people who for 20 years

sat on enormous oil money, for 20

years told fairy tales, and when a real

problem actually happened, they do not know what

to do. But, you know, just in case

they need to lie and they need to keep

—sorry for the word—showing off

“The regions need money, and I have made the

decision to allocate 200 billion rubles,” with

that kind of emphasis: 200, an additional 200

billion rubles