A crackdown on BadComedian. The governor never leaves Paris. Elections: the race has begun

[music]

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

which means we're live on air with

the program *Russia of the Future*, and I am Alexei

Navalny—or a political corpse, as

the media called me this week.

Those media outlets belonging to my favorite, Putin's chef Prigozhin (Yevgeny Prigozhin),

also amused me, of course—our whole office

was entertained by their very funny and excellent description of my

birthday the year before last. They all wrote

about it—I don't know whether they were Prigozhin-linked

or from the old LifeNews-style media—but they

made up a story that at my birthday party

Alla Pugacheva (a legendary Russian pop singer) performed. This time, though, those

records they fabricated didn't seem

luxurious enough to them, so they switched

to a different concept and accused us of the fact that everything

was somehow too cheap and drunken:

a drunk group gathered on the terrace of some

place in one of the business centers in

the southeast; allegedly Alexei himself and

his associates, Lyubov Sobol

and Ilya Yashin, got blind drunk on cheap

alcohol. Then comes a vivid description

of how everyone got so drunk that they started throwing

food around. It's very funny to read,

especially for those who know Yashin, who in

his entire life, by some strange

personal principle, has never even tried any

alcohol at all. He was forwarding these

amusing quotes too, about how he, dead drunk

on cheap booze, was throwing

food products around. I want to begin with a very

funny event that is taking place

right now, as we speak. It happens every year.

You know, there's this thing called Comic Con.

It's very popular abroad, and in Russia

it's fairly popular now too, and there

all sorts of pleasant people gather.

They put on various costumes, they

pretend to be, I don't know,

Sailor Moon or

Catwoman or superheroes or

hetmans, and they entertain one another

and entertain themselves by pretending to be people

they are not.

And in St. Petersburg right now, what is happening is something

officially called the St. Petersburg

International Economic Forum,

but in reality it is, of course, the St. Petersburg

Economic Comic Con, because in exactly

the same way, some rather

unpleasant people—in most cases simply

complete crooks, fools, and idiots—

gather together and dress up in the costumes of

governors, economists, heads of

state corporations, and so on, sit on

panels, and with perfectly straight faces

spout some monstrous nonsense about

how Russia will develop and what they

must do for Russia's development, or

what should not be done for Russia's development.

And at the same time,

hanging over all of this, obviously, is

something enormous, like a giant dinosaur

shouting: you've been in power for 20 years,

and the main reason why Russia

is not developing is that you, a pack of idiots

and blockheads, have seized these posts—

governors, heads of corporations, and so on.

Let's take a look.

Here's the Kudrin video everyone is discussing today. I saw

that it was quoted more than anything else, about

what exactly we must do and who exactly should

do it in order for

Russia's investment attractiveness to grow.

What is standing in our way? Alexei Kudrin gives

wise advice: 70 percent

of our businesspeople consider doing

business unsafe. That is, in general,

it's difficult work, very dangerous and risky, and

the situation with Michael Calvey

shows that once again. On the one hand,

it is said that he has

a high reputation; on the other hand,

for some reason he is being kept under arrest while

there could be a calm, objective legal process.

And after that, let me remind you, I called this

event with Michael Calvey a shock

for the economy. Beyond any doubt, since the beginning

of this year, capital outflow from Russia

has doubled and is now more than $40 billion.

Just think about that, Alexei Leonidovich.

Kudrin—and you see, sitting next to him are

the finance minister, the head of the Central Bank, and

some other people. So, capital outflow

has doubled this year, can you imagine—

$40 billion. Why?

Why doesn't Elvira Nabiullina say,

I don't know, shrug her shoulders and now

say something clever from the usual series:

a powerful thought—

we must improve the investment climate.

Yes, yes, yes, says Siluanov, we must

keep an eye on macroeconomic

indicators. Alexei Leonidovich,

the problem is that you

came to work in the Kremlin in, what, 1996,

and brought with you

some guy named Vladimir Putin, and

then the rest of your thieving

St. Petersburg mayor's office crowd, from Miller

to Sechin and the others, and all of

your gang, which used to engage in

petty bribery, has now been engaged

for 20 years straight—for more than 20 years

straight—in large-scale bribery and

banditry in Moscow. That is why capital is fleeing.

Capital does not want to live together with

you, Alexei Leonidovich,

with your Putin. And the fact that all these

people sitting on the panel

are, again, merely pretending, having put on

the costumes of decent people—they give

comments to newspapers, comments

are being recorded. As I was preparing for the broadcast, I was reading

funny headlines: Sergei Sobyanin had a verbal sparring match

with German Gref over the fact that

all of you

pretending to be decent people

are too cowardly to say even a single

word about the fact that capital is fleeing because

of the kind of political regime this country has

because idiots, thieves, and bandits

are in power. They jailed Calvey, and

they jail all the other businessmen too. Why?

So they can take away their businesses. The people

who belong to Putin’s inner circle

will go on enriching themselves by

taking from other people what they

rightfully earned—unjustly taking it

away. It doesn’t matter—they won’t take money from

just anyone else, because they themselves

can’t create anything. And this isn’t my

just a guess—this comes from 20 years of

observation in this regard. But this is

really like some kind of Comic-Con. Every

year we watch all this, and every year

they, every year,

say the same thing. Today,

Medvedev once again—who knows for how many years now—said

that we will not allow pressure on

business to worsen

They say, we won’t allow it, we won’t allow

greater pressure on business, and

the government is supporting

a bill so that the law on

crimes involving failure to pay

taxes

would have no statute of limitations. That means

it is effectively a lever

for keeping businessmen indefinitely under

the threat of arrest. But of course the funniest part

is this delightful discussion about how

Michael Calvey himself

is supposed to come to the St. Petersburg

Economic Forum, because after all he is

such an important guy, and they promptly

released him from pretrial detention (SIZO), and then Peskov said

it would be good if he came to

the economic forum. But he is under house

arrest—he can’t come. And the Federal Penitentiary Service

says they’ll let him out if

the investigator gives permission; the investigator says something

or other, but so far Michael Calvey hasn’t come

apparently they didn’t process the paperwork. But as for me,

the enforcement officers

used to transport me in roughly this

way

from house arrest—and even without house

arrest. Let’s take a look at what that

looks like. And it would be really great if

Michael Calvey

were escorted in exactly the same way by these wonderful

people

and brought like this to

the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. I thought,

I think it would reflect wonderfully on

Russia’s investment climate. And where was I being

taken, and for what reason?

And they were rushing around with the same sense of importance

taking me like this

iPad

just a moment

your account has sufficient balance

you don’t need to take the documents

that’s entirely possible

Alexei, what are we watching during the break?

Well, here it is

This is a very funny procedure that

I went through many times. You’re not exactly

under arrest, meaning they don’t put

handcuffs on you in this particular kind

of transport. As you can see, I’m even riding in

my own car, but with you there are

like two or three guys—they’re guarding you

they stay with you

they fly on the plane with me. You

can find funny videos online

You have the right to eat, so you get to McDonald’s

they stand at the entrance to McDonald’s, and then they

just hover there—you see, everyone is filming them all the time

people turn around and stare

they probably want some fries too, but

they can’t—these sullen police officers

stand next to you and watch you somehow

while you eat fries at McDonald’s, and

then they take you on further. And it would be

wonderful if Michael, Michael Calvey

were transported like this, and it would

be simply

the most magnificent PR continuation of this

Comic-Con, because by now

this costumed ball would

be splendid—there would be bailiffs, these

guys, though now they wouldn’t be in

greatcoats but in some kind of camouflage

uniform. It would be cool if there were also

balaclavas so that foreign investors wouldn’t see their faces

and all that sort of thing

Overall, this St. Petersburg Economic

Forum

is, of course, absolutely such a useless

piece of junk for the outside world, but a very expensive one. Essentially

it is an annual party

that

this whole crowd throws for itself, a kind of

free business trip for them to hang out

I’ve already seen posts on Instagram

showing that they’ve already managed to get there and

of course, of course, there are huge parties

For example, our team did an investigation into how

Governor Beglov

the acting governor

paid 15 million rubles from the city budget

(about $160,000) to organize this

party for the governor of St. Petersburg, and

in fact this giant

party works like this: first they sit on these

panels, boring or supposedly interesting, and then

of course the band Leningrad performs

And just recently, only a few

months ago, Shnurov (Sergey Shnurov, frontman of Leningrad) said

that he was stopping touring and

would perform only on rare occasions

for enormous sums starting at

something like €150,000 or €300,000

thousand euros — an unimaginable sum

he said, well, for the St. Petersburg forum

and it’s no problem — I just saw it there

everyone is dancing to the song, “What are you ladies kneading”

“boobs, if you want a drink, then buy”

a liter of vodka, and they’re all jumping around

some vice governors

businesspeople, and these state

corporate big shots, and they’re partying there

they came there on public money, even

very poor regions too — Udmurtia, for example

paid 700 million rubles (about €7–8 million) in order

to send its delegation, and

separately they paid 120,000

rubles (about €1,300) for this blonde girl, some assistant

to someone there — I saw that the Udmurt forum

was actively discussing how she went there

because all of this has turned into, like,

“Come on, Natasha, let’s go to St. Petersburg and hang out

at the economic forum,” and so all this

riffraff from all over the country comes there

says some strange words, then

disperses again, in order to, well,

basically, as they say, go on being

an obstacle to the economic

development of our country. That is the objective reality.

That’s what it is.

Siluanov and Kudrin were arguing there again

Kudrin said Russia would grow only

by 1 percent, and Siluanov replied,

no, no, no, no — Russia will grow by 2

percent. Meanwhile, the whole world is still growing

faster — by 2.5 percent or more

developing countries, countries that are

poorer and worse off than ours, are growing faster. So

that means we are falling behind the entire

world

precisely because this gang is sitting there, and the gang

comes there every year and acts smug

send me your questions with the hashtag

#RussiaOfTheFuture, and I’ll try to answer them

The next topic I want

to talk about is very important. I think in

every program I repeat that it is very

important. I’m going to keep pushing it, and until September 8

I’ll be talking about it

endlessly, because it really is

very important. Elections have been announced, and now

today the elections in Moscow were announced. You

are probably saying now, “What elections?”

“Nothing has actually been announced.”

But they have. Elections in St. Petersburg have also

been announced, and Beglov, whom we

already showed, has submitted his documents

having somehow appeared at the election commission, amazingly,

before the commission had even started work. But

there is an official time and date

when the election commission begins work, and yet

Beglov submitted his documents and posted a video

showing how he submitted them before

the election commission had started working, and that of course

shows the whole style of this campaign

and it is very important. So don’t you dare now

tell me that these are some kind of, I don’t know,

small, meaningless elections. They are taking place in 22

regions. Yes, in Moscow it’s the City Duma, in

St. Petersburg municipal and gubernatorial races, but

overall, is that insignificant? No. These elections

will largely determine the political

landscape and, in general, the format of political

struggle going forward, because

for the Kremlin these elections are crucial. They are approaching them

in a completely new way. Look at

Beglov himself: he joined United Russia, and

back in 2002, when it was founded, he was part of it

he even headed — not just belonged to — the Supreme Council

of United Russia. So if there is such a thing in

this country as a super-United Russia man, someone who was there

from the beginning, a founder of the party — that’s him

and he is running in the election as an independent candidate in

Moscow

Open the papers and read them — everyone is writing that

the directive is this: United Russia

will not be participating in the elections. All

United Russia candidates will be disguised. They will be

some chief doctors and vice rectors who

are even allowed to criticize the authorities. In other words, in

these elections, for the first time, United Russia

will effectively not exist at all. We have seen

that they have been moving toward this for quite a while, and

Sobyanin has never run as a United Russia

candidate, but this time

it looks like they will not merely

distance themselves — they will even slightly

criticize United Russia, and we will see

whether they can — well, the Kremlin will see, and we

will see too — whether this

elementary system of deception works, when they

present not a bunch of United Russia people, but a bunch of

independent candidates. These independents are running

in single-member districts. It’s unclear — I mean,

you and I understand perfectly well, and we

can tell some bureaucratic

mug from a normal person

of course. But the question is whether

the average ordinary voter will be able to tell the difference

whether you and I will be able to spread the idea

of Smart Voting and get everyone to vote

in a coordinated way. And the question is whether

the Kremlin

will be able to fool everyone

effectively enough, effectively remove

some undesirable candidates, while at the

same time leaving some candidates in place

so that some illusion of

competition remains

This is very important, because in these

elections they are testing out their future

general strategy, in which there will be no

United Russia — there will be something else. And in

these elections we must — what’s a polite

equivalent for that word? Let’s put it this way —

we have to give them a proper drubbing

We have to come out and make them feel it; we must

upset them, because look at what

they are doing right now in

St. Petersburg itself

Beglov is not running as a United Russia candidate, so he needs

to collect 90,000 signatures. That is an enormous

number. Today our штаб (campaign headquarters) released

a recording showing how these signatures

are being collected. I can already see that all

St. Petersburg media outlets and forums are simply flooded

with reports saying things like this:

they are forcing teachers, forcing people in kindergartens,

and in the St. Petersburg metro they are being forced

to hand over employees' signatures, and people are simply

walking around collecting them, even though on the territory of

the metro this is not allowed. Let's

listen to how, in St. Petersburg universities,

students are being persuaded and pressured

into signing.

I don't want to talk.

But this is supposed to be voluntary, and we

are doing it consciously.

We are on the premises of our

institution.

Well, the main point is that in our district

we need to protect it from the Moscow

jackals. Why is Bortko doing this?

Because if we leave, it won't be very

good. He doesn't say it directly, but that's the kind of

message coming from the administration.

Like all other city department heads, they received

instructions because elections are coming up.

The governor may be new, and I ask you

to support his candidacy.

Somehow, back in winter,

now they say we need to

support the nomination of candidates, not

the voting itself. Well, this is probably some kind of bureaucratic

procedure, I understand, but still

he says, in so many words, let me tell you:

it turns out you are forcing me here

to make others sign and collect signatures too.

No? If that's the case, then don't.

No, I just want to explain to the person that

we are interested. Well, I understand your

I understand your concern, but, well,

you understand that at the same time you are

asking me to break the rules.

What exactly are you teaching us to do?

Have you ever gone this far for

Do you understand? It has literally gotten to the point where

a student says, 'I won't do it,' and then

the deputy dean says, 'Well, try to understand our

position,' and in astonishingly direct

terms explains the entire structure of power:

'You have to understand, this is the authorities. We come to

them asking for something, and in response they

tell us: well, support this candidate,

and we have to support him.'

'Otherwise we'll be devoured.' But why should they even

be devoured? And why are officials

protecting themselves like this, when in fact

that is simply part of their official duties? And the most

interesting thing, yes, the main question of these

elections: everyone knows that here in St. Petersburg

they will now force people to sign

for Beglov, or pressure them, or, people say,

coerce them, forge signatures—90,000 people, and another

300,000 people will know perfectly well

how all of this is happening.

Out of principle, these people will still go and

vote for anyone against Beglov,

or

the authorities will be able to deceive them. Will we be able, together with

you, as I already said, in the literal

sense—the viewers of this program, we

are numerous enough, there are several

hundred thousand of us, enough of us

to make this work,

to persuade millions of people across

the country, all residents of St. Petersburg,

to tell them to go to this

link, this SPB link, and

take part in Smart Voting, or

won't we succeed? That is really the main question

of the political struggle around this.

A political struggle is unfolding around it,

and this will determine the future

landscape. By the way, note

that on

our website, for municipal deputy candidates,

SPB, new options have appeared

that make it possible to generate

your own campaign page. In other words, we built an entire

system that helps candidates

take part in these elections. And of course, if you

register there, you will receive

the name of the person to vote for in your municipality,

and the same applies across the rest of

the country if there is an election there and

a major

race. If you register,

Now, people here are asking a lot about Smart

Voting. We are getting questions about why

we need to leave our address. The address

you provide is not because we want

to know where you live, but so that we can

understand who is running in your district

and then send you

the name, so that everyone living in that district

votes against the United Russia candidate for the same

person. In the gubernatorial election too,

you can vote for anyone against

Beglov; there are two rounds there. But in all other

elections, you need to beat the United Russia candidate in a single

round. That is difficult, but possible if

we all vote

the same way. So, guys, Smart

Voting. I can see people asking me now:

please explain why

Lyubov Sobol was registered. Is this

some kind of cunning move by the authorities?

But so far no one has been registered.

Lyubov Sobol, Ivan Zhdanov,

Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Milov, and others

—all these good people—have submitted

their documents today. They could not be

refused; they handed in the paperwork.

Next, these people have to collect signatures

just like Beglov, except they will collect them honestly

because Beglov cannot collect them—people

simply do not want to sign for him, and he cannot do it. And that is not our problem.

method

and it is very difficult to do, so I

urge everyone to help these people; we also

are trying to help not just these five

and are actively supporting not only them, but all

independent candidates. We will create a

special signature collection center, and no matter where

you live in Moscow, you will be able to come

to a single location, so you do not have to look for a candidate’s штаб (campaign office)

candidate and be left at [ __ ]

regardless of which candidate is running in

your district. It does not matter to us — we will

support them. Whether we ultimately support them or not,

they have the right to take part in the elections, and we

will support them with our signature

so come to our signature collection center

to sign up as a volunteer — we need

people. The St. Petersburg team asked me

to say that they need an election lawyer

— write to their штаб (campaign office), in other words, get involved

This is real and very important politics

— real politics. Politics is not

that [ __ ], excuse me, written in

Telegram channels, discussing some

thing. It is what is going to happen by

September — that will be real, and

there will be a real clash. In Moscow, there are 45 State Duma deputies

and among them, United Russia members or

disguised United Russia members number 38. So

our task is to make that number smaller. If there are fewer of them,

then one way or another we will have secured

at least some small victory. If there are more of them,

then it means that you and I

have lost. That means our Smart Voting

failed to persuade people. Of course, it would be easier

to stay away from politics and say,

well, let it pass, because if we

lose this Smart Voting campaign, everyone will

say: Navalny launched Smart Voting,

but he lost. It is risky,

risky, because if it loses, then will

my personal popularity somehow

decline because of it? Of course. But

nevertheless, I still think it is important

to do everything possible in order to

take this fight to United Russia, especially since

to be honest, if we are not talking about

candidates, this does not really require much from people

— register on the website,

then come on voting day and

vote for the person whose name

the system gives you. You get a surname — say,

Ivanov, Yashin, Sobol — you go

and vote for them. That is all. It is not

hard. What is hard is persuading

large numbers of people to take part in this

Now let us discuss a few

brief things — I will answer a couple of questions

Beslan asks: I want

to develop Smart Voting in Taganrog

but I could not find any addresses or phone numbers. How

can I do that? Beslan, look, if you

are in Taganrog

and there are elections in the city itself

or in the federal subject (region)

then you do not even need any штаб (campaign office)

to organize. You just need to

promote Smart Voting

because everyone who has registered in

your region, and in Taganrog in particular,

will receive the name of the person they should

vote for. Smart Voting is not

designed in such a way that it requires a штаб (campaign office)

If a штаб (campaign office) were needed there, then, Beslan,

the police would come to that office. We

are trying

to do everything in such a way that

there are as few things as possible

that can be seized,

taken away, or blocked. It is an

internet campaign, but it has to reach

a large number of people, so just

promote Smart Voting, especially

if in your region

elections have been scheduled. There are 22 regions.

So, Alexei, when will you conduct the analysis by

region so that we know whom to vote for?

asks Azamat Dagaev. Azamat, well, you understand yourself

that when candidate registration

is complete, then we will say, because

if I tell you right now, for central Moscow,

vote for Sobol, I fully understand that

Sobyanin is terribly afraid that

Sobol could win against whatever pro-government figure is running there

and therefore they may

simply not allow her onto the ballot, as they have often done

before. Or Yashin — of course, if I tell you

that if you live in Basmanny, vote for

Yashin — well, it is pointless to talk about that now

because registration has not yet

been completed, and Yashin could be removed from the election, and

then you and I will be sitting here

thinking, good grief, what are we

supposed to do now?

There are no good candidates left;

all that remains is some trash —

a disguised United Russia candidate and some kind of

phony riffraff — and then you and I will still have to

figure out which of that fake crowd

to support simply in order to

reduce the chances of United Russia

getting through. That is how it is, and how it will be

We will see

closer to the time. Once all candidates

are registered, by the end of the summer it will actually

be clear whom to support, and then we

will start naming names. Right now, we need

to attract as many people as possible

by explaining to them the general idea of

consolidated voting for one

candidate against the United Russia candidate. The concept

is fairly complicated for people who do not

understand politics. All hope is that

you will help explain it. A collective

question from Viktor Medvedev: how can your

movement be helped by teenagers aged 14 and

older adults over 45? This is a collective

question from teenagers and older adults, but

Likewise, first of all, those who...

if you're over 18, you can simply come

and vote, and everyone else—there's the internet.

You've got a keyboard, you've got friends, you've got acquaintances.

If you have friends and acquaintances, urge them

to take part in my vote—there it is.

The most important help is this: if you live in Moscow or in

St. Petersburg, or anywhere there are elections, help

the opposition candidate. If there's

an opportunity to send 100 rubles

to someone's election campaign,

to one of the candidates who can gain traction, send it to them.

Send 100 rubles—that's how you need

to participate. Alexei asks me:

"Alexei Popov: why didn't you yourself

run in the elections to the

Moscow City Duma? Have you forgotten? I'm a

convicted repeat offender; I'm banned from taking part in

elections. Putin doesn't want that

and is afraid that I would take part in

elections at any level. So not in the

Moscow City Duma, not for president, not even for district deputy

in a local district.

I don't know, Marino or Danilovsky district,

I can't run.

And I want to, and I will fight for that, but

right now, legally, I can't. Let's

talk about Sobyanin and Guzeeva—

in effect, Sobyanin's Guzeeva,

and all these wonderful people we

released our investigation about.

Many thanks to everyone who supported it.

It was sitting at number one in the trends

despite the fact that it was 25 minutes long.

We spent a long time dealing with all these people.

Why did it seem so important to me, and

why am I so glad people supported it?

A lot of people did. As I already said

in the video itself, I really want to explain to everyone,

damn it, that officials are much

richer than people usually say they are, that

this so-called official income is

complete nonsense. And when we hear

about these big sums—most often

5 million rubles, 4

million rubles, 10 million rubles—

look at the income declaration of any

major official. They all receive, let's

say, from 400,000 to 700,000 rubles per

month. That's a lot of money, but the truth is

that their real income—the income we don't

see listed as income in their declarations, and on which they

pay no tax at all—their real income

consists of the fact that they are effectively

handed several more

million dollars or tens of

millions of rubles in the form of in-kind

benefits: apartments. Apartments are supposed to go to whom?

Who is supposed to be given an apartment? Well, you know—to those

who have housing problems, or

even, let's say, to an official

who has come to Moscow and needs to be given

an apartment. The standard is 18

square meters per person. If you don't

meet that—if you're living in a dorm, or you have

a tiny apartment, you're living with your grandmother,

grandfather, nephew,

and, I don't know, your crazy great-grandmother—

you file an application, and they tell you: well, in your

apartment you're short by this many

meters, so based on

the standard of 18 square meters per

person, we'll give you an apartment. Since, in

general, apartments aren't given to everyone else.

Even this arrangement raises ethical

questions. But when a family of

three people,

already provided with a giant apartment of

200 square meters, gets another apartment for free or

almost free—another 150 square meters—

well, that's just outright

lawlessness, guys. It's no different

from them simply walking in, you know,

to the state treasury vault

with a suitcase, loading up 70 million

rubles, and driving off with the suitcase. In that

case, we'd be shouting:

they're thieves, they stole 70 million! But

how is this any different? It isn't, absolutely

no different. It's even worse.

It's a completely legalized bribe. And

what's more, who are all these people? They're

just some real riffraff.

Let's look at a large part of the video.

Of course, I won't show it all, but I will

show part of this video

where they're listed. You don't know a single

one of these surnames. This really is some kind of

petty riffraff, each of whom we are

basically handing tens and tens

of millions of rubles. Here's a clip from the video—listen

and remember the names and positions.

This is important: Yemelyanov, Alexei

Alexandrovich, head of the Moscow Department

of Cultural Heritage. His apartment is

almost 180 square meters. The new apartment is worth 90

million rubles. Shakhmuradova Sabina

Ruslanovna.

Head of the Directorate for Coordinating Work

on Land Management Facilities and

District Operations in the Department

of City Property of Moscow.

Dilerov Ilnur Ilesurovich.

No one even knows who he is. He worked

as an assistant to the Minister of Economy of the Republic of

Tatarstan. On the Moscow mayor's office website, there isn't

a single word about him. Next: an apartment of one hundred

forty-four square meters. The owner is

Natalya Vladimirovna Kuznetsova,

deputy head of the directorate

for coordinating the activities of the

construction policy and development complex

of the city of Moscow. Just so you understand: there's

Sobyanin, he has a deputy, Khusnullin,

Khusnullin has a deputy, and that

deputy has yet another deputy, and

you and I are giving him an apartment worth 70

million rubles.

Please hang in there, dear viewers, we

are continuing. Apartment 144

square meters. Logacheva, Yekaterina Ivanovna.

Deputy head of the department

for territorial bodies of the executive

authorities of the city of Moscow.

Stepanov, Maksim Sergeyevich, born in 1989.

He is not even 30 yet, our

Maksim Sergeyevich. He works as

deputy head of the department

for urban planning policy of the city of Moscow.

Another owner, not much older,

is Boris Alekseyevich Bulloy.

He is Deputy Press Secretary to Sobyanin.

I will not even get into the fact that this

position is ridiculous, but in 2012

the Presidential Property Management Department already allocated him

an apartment in an elite residential complex on

Starovolynskaya Street.

But please explain to me: why the hell does he need

another apartment from us? What is he doing

in our building?

25,000 people are watching us live, and

before I move on with the continuation

of this discussion about the apartments,

just now, during the pause, people came to me

and told me that this wonderful

young man, Ivan Mezentsev,

whose recording you heard from St. Petersburg, he is

a student at the St. Petersburg Law

Academy and recorded that very conversation

where he was being pressured to sign up for pro-government campaigning,

and is now receiving some kind of threats. They are telling him,

"Come on, let's meet there and talk it over," well,

it is clear the scandal has already spread across the whole city over

an obvious violation of the law. It is obvious that

the Central Election Commission should do something about it.

If it will not do anything, then at least

it should discuss it. I just want

to say: you there,

you crooks hounding Ivan Mezentsev,

please back off. We are going to

protect him, and of course we will not let him be

pushed around. Still, let me get back to the apartments. Two

people on this list simply

stunned me. I mean, all of it outraged me,

of course, it infuriated me when we started

digging into this building and saw that

they had simply built a building supposedly for people on the housing waiting list

and then gave themselves apartments there for free, and

also handed them out to various minor hangers-on. But two

people really stand out.

Larisa Guzeeva, who is not even a government official.

Well, sure, maybe someday

Sobyanin—and I hope we will pin him down either in

court or by some other means—

they will have to answer for this, and he will

say something along the lines of, "Well, you know,

we gave apartments because they were

civil servants. There is a regulation under which

we can give civil servants

certain subsidies, apartments, and so on."

That would all be complete nonsense, but at least one could

construct some kind of logic. But what the hell

is Larisa Guzeeva doing there—a wealthy

TV host who clearly does not need any improved

housing conditions, not a civil servant, who

has never been any kind of civil servant? She

got an apartment there. Why? Or rather, we

know why: because she fawned over

Sergei Sobyanin during the election, because during

the campaign she was posting those messages on

Instagram. You remember: "It is not an easy choice, but I am for

Sergei Semyonovich," she literally wrote.

"If you do not like Sobyanin—suitcase, train station..."

and so on. In other words,

we now understand how it

worked. She grabbed an apartment, and to everyone

who does not like it, she says, "Suitcase,

train station, and off you go." This is my

city, and the city of the wonderful Sergei

Semyonovich, who gives me tens of

millions of rubles. Maybe you yourselves

should be the ones leaving, dear Larisa

Guzeeva, together with your Sobyanin. Maybe

you will give the apartment back. Maybe you will

stop lying on TV shows that

you never lived in the city center and never

received a single

square meter. Let us watch these few

seconds: "Not a single day in my life have I

lived in the center, for example—not in St. Petersburg, when

I had my own apartment, not here. I

have always... in this same example, I never

had... it was never possible, there were never

rich lovers or husbands, never,

and no one in my life has ever given me

a single square centimeter." With all this

such a neat, elegant narrative: no one

ever gave me anything, no one ever

gave me anything—and then, bang, it turns out an apartment

worth 90 million rubles was simply

bought with

taxpayers' money and handed to you as a gift, and suddenly everything

does not look so good anymore. And Larisa Guzeeva

refuses to speak with me, and Larisa

Guzeeva closes the comments on Instagram

so as not to see these questions and not

hear these questions, and continues

posting little photos with boxes,

little videos, as if, as if nothing is

happening.

Those of you who watched the video remember how

she told me that she would not

talk to me because

she does not know who I am. But she never

received anything at all; everything she has

was earned through backbreaking labor. All these

people are built the same way: they tell stories about

their backbreaking labor, how they simply

toiled and broke their backs,

and therefore they somehow deserve to take from us

these huge, fat chunks. Well then,

then let them at least start

a dialogue with us. Let her come out and honestly say:

"I am an honored actress, I acted in the film

*A Cruel Romance* (*Bespridannitsa*).

And you all know my lines from it, I..."

I looked for love but never found it, so

now I’m going to look for gold, and I live by

that principle. Everything is

fine. I’ve praised Sobyanin too, so

let him explain. If it’s all so legitimate, he shouldn’t

be afraid. But they won’t even do that. They

despise us that much.

That’s exactly why Smart Voting in

Moscow is so important. And Dinara—well, Russia

covers all of this up. The second figure

who probably made an even bigger impression on us than

the first one—despite all the garbled nonsense around his name—

made a striking impression. It’s just some kind of incredible—

I’m sorry—this gloomy-looking guy, Boris

Alexeyevich.

Please show him to us. This is, damn it,

the deputy press secretary. Good Lord, who

even is this deputy press secretary?

And I don’t mean to insult

all deputy press secretaries, although

it seems to me that it’s not a very

common position. It’s pretty rare, isn’t it?

There aren’t that many people in the country who

have a press secretary, let alone a

deputy press secretary. So apparently

when the press secretary is especially busy

with something, the deputy

press secretary steps in.

And this deputy press secretary—he’s

not even 30 years old.

They gave him one apartment—how big was it, 170

square meters, and it says right there in the records

that the state, the Russian Federation, is

transferring it to this tattooed creep

who isn’t even 30 years old—we’re giving him

a 170-square-meter apartment. There you go,

Boris Alexeyevich, an apartment from us. Enjoy it.

He moves in, he’s happy, and then he says,

“Listen, maybe you could give me another apartment

worth 80 million rubles?” And Sobyanin says,

“Well, I suppose somehow 80 million rubles won’t

hurt.”

Sure, I’ve got some pensioners somewhere

there,

who’ll be demanding that I buy free

medicine, or that something in a

hospital needs fixing, or that children are sick with

dysentery—but all that can wait.

Let’s get Borya Buloy, the deputy

press secretary, another

apartment. And I’m not making this up—this

is all in the documents. The documents show that

they gave him one apartment worth over 100

million rubles, and then another apartment

worth 80 million rubles.

What do you call that, sweetheart? Aren’t you

going to burst? Seriously, can someone explain to me

please—I invite

Buloy, Boris Alexeyevich, to record

a one-minute video

address through our program so that he

can explain everything: who he is and where he

came from, and what exactly he does that is so

extraordinary. Is he some kind of orphan,

maybe? I don’t know. Does he have no arms or legs?

We see him here, but maybe in reality

it’s only a head, and everything else is

bionic, and he’s some kind of—I don’t know—

super-injured person, and he can’t

live without two apartments in elite

residential complexes? Explain it to us, Sobyanin, and

you explain it too, Buloy—who are you people, why

are you handing apartments out to each other?

It’s very important to understand this. And this isn’t just about

Moscow officials—the same applies to

federal officials, the same applies to

regional officials,

the security services, and everyone else.

Their salaries are nothing but dust compared

to the apartments they

receive—and then receive again, as

you can see in Buloy’s case. And in this

sphere, this is far from the only such case.

Then they get efficiently divorced, or

register some of their children somewhere, and get yet

another apartment. These are people

who extract, in the regions,

tens of millions of rubles, and in Moscow, hundreds

of millions of rubles, from these “gifts,” and

somehow all of this gets ignored. In fact,

no one talks about it, and I really want

people to talk about it. I asked many people—

even our own Ivan Zhdanov, director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation,

to raise

this issue somehow during the election campaign,

so that Muscovites would know more

about what kinds of apartments they’re buying

for people no one can even account for.

Now, if it were a deputy mayor, fine—I

mean, I’d still be against it, but I’d understand

the logic. A deputy mayor—if he’s poor, maybe we

buy him some kind of apartment, again

at 18 square meters per person, or 25—he’s a

deputy mayor. But when we’re buying apartments for a

deputy press secretary, I will not

accept that, and we will

fight it. Let me answer some questions.

About Guzeeva.

Ivan Stein writes: “He’s not lying—they didn’t gift her

those square meters. She earned them

in Sobyanin’s service.” Well, you could put it that way,

yes. In a sense, she did earn them in Sobyanin’s service.

Buloy, too, steadily “earns” them, and

the paperwork for all these apartments gets processed.

What matters to me is how it works—there are dozens

of people, Rosreestr (Russia’s state property registry), legislative acts, and

so on. Not a single document appears out of nowhere.

So once again, I appeal to

employees of City Hall and Rosreestr

—to the people who work under

the supervision of various Buloys and all

the rest of those guys: if you know anything about

this, write to us through the black box. Just remember

there’s no feedback there, so if you want

us to be able to contact you,

leave your email, because it’s an

absolutely anonymous way to communicate with us.

We need documents showing how they did this.

Everyone got it—how this scheme was set up, who

signed off on it, who else was involved in schemes like this

took part. Vovka is asking, not Alexei.

What’s the story with the fact that

film director Nikita Mikhalkov’s income was concealed?

It’s a genuinely very interesting story.

Mikhalkov heads a state-run

theater and, by law, is required to publish

his financial disclosure, but it’s missing, and apparently that

is connected to the fact that last time he

published his declaration, and it showed 500

million rubles in income (about US$5–6 million), and everyone kind of

well, was pretty stunned by the fact that, somehow,

you know,

wow, our Nikita Sergeyevich

has really done well for himself. We understand what kind of

schemes are being run there. And he also presents himself as

some grand nobleman-type figure,

a statesman, when this isn’t really

public service at all on the part of a public figure—

it’s a businessman latched onto the state budget, and

as you can see, not just latched on a little, but

to the tune of half a billion from the budget, because this

year he probably made even more.

That’s why they’re hiding it. We’ll look into this

situation more closely. They appointed a bodyguard,

then removed the bodyguard—just like that.

That’s basically what the personnel situation in

the country looks like. At the St. Petersburg Economic Forum,

they were discussing why

nothing is happening here, why our

economy isn’t developing. Well, this is why.

That’s what’s happening. And yesterday, I think, they removed

the acting governor

of Astrakhan Region, and nobody understood

what the hell had happened, because

this was Sergey Morozov himself, the man who

had been appointed there—he was one of Putin’s bodyguards,

that is, Putin’s personal bodyguard. I don’t mean—

I mean, I don’t want to say that

being a personal bodyguard is something bad.

No, it’s fine. It’s just strange that they

appoint them as governors, and as governors,

as we can see, they’re very bad, because

they appointed this one—well, let’s

watch 36 seconds from his

press conference. You’ll understand right away—well,

the guy was a bodyguard, and his level of

thinking, and his understanding of politics in general,

are exactly what you’d expect from a bodyguard. He speaks Russian and

uses stock phrases, and he’s afraid of himself, and

afraid of those strange people

who are looking at him and filming him. Thirty-six

seconds of a bodyguard who almost became

governor: I want to assure you that

the achievements of Astrakhan Region

will be multiplied, and the projects already underway will receive

further development. The principle of my work is

constant dialogue and constructive

discussion of tasks and ways to solve them, that is,

with my team, experts, and other

interested parties. I assure you

that the goal of my work as acting

governor will be service to the people and

the development of our region’s strong economy.

That’s it.

You can see the man is suffering through every

second of his public speech. His entire

job consisted of—perfectly normal work,

absolutely respectable, all jobs are important—

his job consisted of, basically, Sergey

securing the perimeter so that nobody

could get close—standing there with an earpiece and

blocking the perimeter. Why are these people

being appointed governors? So he

was appointed governor, acting

governor, and there were supposed to be

elections in September, but as you can see,

the residents of Astrakhan would have

said: are you out of your minds? Who even is this?

What is this? He comes in and says,

what are you going to do? All the achievements

of Astrakhan Region will be multiplied.

But nobody wants to vote for him.

Nobody.

They ran a poll and found that

nobody wanted to vote for him, so they removed this

same guy and appointed some other

former security-service type, another one just like him, from the FSB (Russia’s security service),

the same sort.

And everyone is looking on and asking: explain why the кадровая

policy is like this. What’s more, this is the second

time it’s happened now—there was exactly the same kind of case

with that same Zinchuk, who was appointed—

Senychev, who was appointed in Kalin—

ingrad Region, also a former Putin bodyguard.

Putin’s.

He was appointed, spent a little time

as governor, and became famous for his

press conference—he came out,

spent 30 seconds there, turned around, and left.

Let’s watch. I think we’ll

talk about it again when the third such case happens,

on this topic.

A fine mind, buried in the sand, so to speak.

The main, first, and only

press conference of the governor.

Holding press conferences is not a governor’s main duty,

to answer questions from the press

and the public—come on, press conferences—

but what is very important is that people in the region

should at least roughly understand who

you are and what you’re going to do. But people can’t,

because Putin has this

personnel reserve.

And this is exactly what it looks like: just some bodyguard.

Around him, there’s Seryoga grilling shashlik (meat skewers), all good,

Zhenya

is dancing to an accordion, Seryoga and Kolyan

too—and then when everyone gets a bit drunk,

they’re great at shooting pistols at

bottles. Yeah, let’s appoint this one

as governor.

Send him to Astrakhan Region, and that one to

Kaliningrad—well, what have they got there,

like, Zhenya, Seryoga, and they don’t understand a thing.

Couldn’t handle it? Fine, to hell with him.

We’ll replace him. And somehow this is supposed to pass for a system.

that there would be at least some explanation

for why these people were put in charge

of regions where millions of people live

and there is absolutely no explanation for it, which is exactly why

nothing works at all. What kind of business can there be?

What kind of overall development can there be if any person

can wake up and tomorrow just

be told, “Thank you,” with no explanation whatsoever

for why Chertkov

was appointed governor—a former bodyguard

And I’m not, of course, trying to judge them personally

they may be stupid, they may be smart, but

the job of a governor is a bit different

it’s a different field; you can’t just

We already have many regions that

are headed by former bodyguards. It really

looks like a deliberate personnel

policy

This whole pipeline—those who ride around in

the motorcade, all these people from the inner circle

all these details point to one thing: physically, the people who are there

next to you, carrying your suitcases, the ones you

talk to in the car—whatever else

the bosses may discuss in the car, they talk about ordinary

people with the drivers and the guards

and then: all right, let’s say they’ve gotten to know

the common people—so let’s appoint them governor

Go ahead. Everyone stays silent, and that’s why no

development is going to happen under Putin now

I want to talk about the police

I want to defend them, and I want to criticize them too

Well, in defending them, I want to scold the system, not everyone personally

There is, in fact, one real thing that

really irritates me a lot, and I saw that

a police union

that the authorities refuse to register, and the public

ombudsman for police officers spoke out for the right

of police officers, and I very much want to

support them in this and criticize our system

which is genuinely engaged in idiocy. Do you

know that police officers, like security personnel in general,

have effectively been banned from traveling

abroad? They were banned from traveling to certain

what used to be called “capitalist countries” in the Soviet sense

that is, capitalist countries. So if you are a

police officer, then most likely your

international passport is sitting in your boss’s safe

and you can travel only to places where you may be allowed

to go abroad—to former

Soviet Union countries, except now

Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Georgia

You can go to China, Cuba, and

Vietnam, and that’s basically it. What I want to say is that

this head of the Police Ombudsman public group

went to court on behalf of all

police officers, and the Supreme Court ruled that

yes, this idiotic and wild ban

is legal. But what exactly is legal about it, and what

is normal about it? We may feel differently

about police officers, sure, but they are

still ordinary people, and we certainly do not

want them to become worse

more hounded, more corrupt. But

when, you know, an ordinary cop

with a family wants to go somewhere

he wants to go somewhere cheaper, where the sun

is shining. He wants to go to Turkey, or maybe

to Bulgaria, or to

Spain—just like any person who

earns, say, around 45,000 rubles a month

or 35,000 rubles a month and has been saving all year, and wants to go to Turkey

so it’s all-inclusive, so that in the evening I can

drink as much beer as I want and eat grilled

sausages

or shawarma, and so that I don’t have to

buy ice cream for my kids—they can just

run around and grab ice cream there because

everything is already paid for. That is a perfectly normal desire

perfectly normal. And do we want

police officers to have the chance to take a

good, affordable vacation? We do. But instead we tell them:

go to Vietnam, go to

Cuba. I actually took the time to look up

the average package tour to Cuba, Vietnam, or

China, and because of the obvious cost of

airfare, it is twice as expensive as a

trip to Turkey, Spain, or

Bulgaria

Why? For what reason, really?

What kind of idiocy is this? What state secret does

the average Russian cop know? That he has

a cucumber lying in his lunchbox, or that

not everyone spends the evenings drinking instead of

doing their job? That district officers

are buried in pointless paperwork and

don’t do a damn thing except fill out

forms? That’s all

There are no other secrets. Well, also

every detective in the country is formally cleared for

state secrets because, supposedly,

there are informants who tell him things, and

the operative just makes it up himself

sits there inventing it: “Informant Buttercup

reported to me that at such-and-such an address

drug deals are taking place there,”

and then, you know,

the newly recruited informant, Agent Buttercup,

puts that slip of paper in the safe, and that

is considered a top-secret

document. Let’s be honest: this is of little

interest

to the intelligence services of NATO countries. All

police officers all over the world travel around perfectly calmly

and all these security-service people—fine,

say they are super-special people

with access to especially super-mega

state secrets

maybe there should be special rules for them. But

there are hundreds of thousands of cops in the country, and all these

security personnel—why the hell torment them? The

Level.Travel portal compared prices for

package tours in Russia and in Turkey, and it is

absolutely astonishing statistics

because we can see that the cheapest

tour to Alushta costs 44,000 rubles

while the cheapest tour to Alanya in

Turkey costs 24,000 rubles. In other words,

vacationing at home is twice as expensive, and

We—there are actually millions of us.

People.

Police officers, FSB officers (Russia’s security service)—all of them, basically.

the participants right now and spread this idea.

Outward, to everyone else—we tell them:

Guys, if you want to take a vacation,

you don’t need to steal more, or

steal at all, or extort bribes,

because your vacation will cost twice as much

as it does for the average Russian.

The average Russian can go to Turkey, but you

for some reason have to go

to Vietnam or Cuba, as if some secret

Israeli intelligence service, for all I know,

might recruit—who knows—

an operative from the city of

Naberezhnye Chelny in Vietnam just as easily

as it could in Turkey. I mean,

it’s truly idiocy—legalized police

idiocy. And once again I want to say that

of course we need a normal police

union, the kind that exists in every

country, so that police officers can fight for their

rights. Because police, the National Guard (Rosgvardiya, Russia’s internal security force),

and everyone else in this whole system—

they have no decent pay,

no housing, nothing at all, endless

paperwork,

endless overtime, and on top of that

you can’t even travel abroad and have a proper

vacation. The issue isn’t that they have to go

abroad specifically—the issue is that

you should have the opportunity to отдыхать well

and cheaply. Unfortunately, vacationing in Russia

is fairly expensive, and I know that from personal experience.

For many years I didn’t have a foreign passport,

so I know perfectly well that, you see, my most

expensive trip was to Altai (a mountainous region in southern Siberia).

Expensive airfare, expensive

accommodation there—going to Europe was twice

as cheap.

So why are we tormenting our

cops? I want to speak up in support of

them and call on them to organize unions.

And next I’d like to talk about some

—moving from praising police to criticizing them—

about some strange people who

look like—well, let’s take a look at

this video. Who do you think

these people in the video are?

[music]

[music]

I’ve been flooded with questions here about Evgen

BadComedian. Of course I’ll say something about that, but

for now let’s get back to the video. Who did you see

just now? You’ll probably say

police officers. But if you look closely,

these are some kind of Russian, hard-to-identify

Sonderkommando-type squad—people in masks.

On their backs there really is

a patch that says OMON (Russia’s riot police), but in fact, if you—well, I

looked closely, our lawyers looked closely, and we

concluded that these are not police officers.

They’re just local private security guards.

This footage is from Shiyes in Arkhangelsk Region,

and this is simply how, as you can see,

they operate—not as police, pushing people out,

but sort of pretending to be

police. And what have we seen lately? Let’s

take a look at this photograph,

the much-discussed one from a school in Vladivostok.

What do we see in the photo? We see

a girl who was amusing herself by

putting on a police uniform and having

some kind of costume party.

Everyone lost their minds, and this girl’s parents

were fined for the unlawful

wearing of a police uniform. Even though this is

obviously not a real police uniform—it’s like, you know,

when someone dresses up in

nurse costumes and

goes to some party, or

dresses as Catwoman or something. It’s

just a costume performance. Nevertheless, they were fined. And now let’s look

at this video too,

this clip, also very well known, from

the FIFA World Cup.

Why were the participants in this

action jailed?

Pyotr Verzilov, Nika Nikulshina, and whoever else was there—

for unlawfully wearing

a police uniform. So I want to officially

notify the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs

for Arkhangelsk Region and the Russian

Ministry of Internal Affairs that I demand

that this whole riffraff that

is dispersing people in Shiyes be treated exactly the same way.

Lock them all up, bring them all

to administrative liability for

illegally using insignia

and distinguishing marks. Or, if they are police officers,

come on—they’re wearing sneakers, they’re clearly not in

proper uniform. Make up your minds: if

they’re police, then let them

dress according to regulations and take off those

weird things they use

to cover their faces. They cannot

cover their faces in this situation; helmets

they may wear, but they cannot hide their faces.

These masked storm-trooper types cannot. Either this is

just security guards pretending to be

police officers so they’re less likely to get

smacked around by local residents—that seems

obvious to me. Second, I demand and I call on all

residents of Arkhangelsk Region and Komi (a republic in northern Russia)

who are protesting to file complaints.

Let all these lowlifes be fined

in exactly the same way; let every one of these clowns

be arrested for however many days as well.

And the police officer I want

to criticize is this absolute

[__] named Yevgeny Kryukov, Major

Kryukov. Let’s take a look at his

photograph—put it up on the screen—because

he’s terribly afraid that everyone will

see him there and say his last name.

And this is a photograph from Yekaterinburg,

where, after the wonderful local...

The residents seem to have defended it for now.

They defended their park, where they wanted to build a

church. And now they’ve started, little by little, using this kind of

method. Remember, on the previous program

I said that the authorities had backed off, but now they

would slowly start using administrative pressure and so on.

Well, they’ve opened a criminal case over

insulting a police officer. The “insult”

consisted of the fact that this

bastard, Yevgeny Kryukov, as you can see,

was walking around in plain clothes, filming with his camera

to record everyone and then

later, apparently, use it somehow

against people. And someone there

flipped him off and cursed at him,

swore at him. Since he had the camera, he recorded all of it.

So they found that person and

opened a criminal case against him.

The funniest part is that this

person against whom they opened the

criminal case

was actually one of those who supported the church. But in

this situation, I honestly don’t care

whether he was for the church or against it, because when

some media outlets published a photo

of this Major Kryukov, those

lying, disgusting snitches

opened a criminal case against a person

because, in plain clothes—well, you can see it yourself—

some jerk with a camera and a cap

is running around filming you there, but you supposedly don’t have the right

to tell him to get lost. Of course you do have

every right to tell him off, but they opened

a criminal case for insulting an officer

in the line of duty. How exactly am I

supposed to know that this is an officer

on duty?

Then let the officer wear his uniform,

his cap and all that, so everyone can see that

he’s on duty.

But first he changes into plain clothes and then

wants to drag people through the courts. And when his

photo was published,

the Interior Ministry office for Sverdlovsk Region demanded

that the officer’s photo be removed. So I

would like all of you to take another look

at this disgusting, corrupt piece of trash.

Please, let them file

a complaint against me for insulting a police officer

named Major Yevgeny Kryukov, and

let him be ashamed, and let his neighbors and

fellow residents spit in his face for

doing something this vile against his own

fellow

countrymen. Now, questions—BadComedian.

BadComedian—everything is flooded with questions about BadComedian.

Of course I’ll say something about it.

BadComedian—just in a moment,

but before we get to BadComedian, let me say

please, about one more thing. Since we started talking about

Yekaterinburg, I can’t help but

mention one magnificent man. There really is

a magnificent man living there, just

the kind of man who, you know, understands how to live

beautifully—who understands *dolce vita*.

That’s the governor of Sverdlovsk Region,

Yevgeny Kuyvashev.

He’s been governor for two years.

How many working days is that? Well,

about 400 working days, if we count only

working days—maybe a little more.

Out of those, he spent 100 days abroad.

So, our штаб (campaign office/team) released

an investigation, and we pointed out—I mean, we didn’t just

estimate it, we officially counted his trips: seven

trips to Paris. Can you imagine what

the governor of Sverdlovsk Region could possibly be doing

that requires him to fly to Paris seven times in two years

on taxpayers’ money?

These weren’t private trips.

If it’s a private trip, fine—go ahead. There’s

vacation time; go wherever you want, we don’t care. Go to

Cuba, like the police officials do, or to Vietnam.

Want to go to Paris? Fine, go relax there.

Spend a day in the town of Kyshtym

or somewhere else for all we care.

Kyshtym, by the way, is in Chelyabinsk Region, which is basically

next door to Sverdlovsk Region.

But no—he went to Paris seven times, went

to New York, went to the UAE, went to

China. And when he went to Paris, he spent just

on souvenir products from the regional budget

300,000 rubles (about $4,700 at the time).

Let’s watch a short investigation by our

team in Yekaterinburg.

Over the past two years, Yevgeny Kuyvashev

made 45 trips lasting

at least 110 days in total, and we paid for all of it for him:

flights, accommodation, interpreter services

if needed—all of it

is financed from the budget. The governor

naturally prefers not to stay in any

modest hotels, but exclusively in

luxury rooms in expensive hotels.

Many media outlets wrote about this and published

his travel expense reports—for Paris, for example,

which, incidentally, over

the last two years happened no fewer than seven times.

In other words, Parisians see our governor

more often than local residents do.

And from this expense report it’s clear that the governor

spent 2 million

400 thousand rubles (about $37,500 at the time) on three days in Paris.

Meeting with partners: 100,000. Accommodation:

three days of lodging

cost 250,000 rubles (about $3,900 at the time). There you go.

Actual VIP service at

Charles de Gaulle Airport—what the hell do you need that for?

Why should we have had to pay for all of that?

Sure, when the president flies somewhere, that’s understandable, but

otherwise—same as everyone else. When I fly to

Paris in order to get to Strasbourg,

for example, I fly via Paris or via

Frankfurt. Totally normal: you show up with a bag, get on

a train or call a taxi, get where

you need to go. Then if you have

some gubernatorial business to attend to,

why do you need VIP service?

Why does the governor of Sverdlovsk Oblast need to

go to Paris seven times? I would like

all residents of Sverdlovsk Oblast

to know about this and ask why

they should have to pay for all of it. The

best part is that on June 16 our штаб (campaign headquarters)

is organizing a rally for the resignation

of Governor Kuivashev, and he is a very

unpopular figure there. Well,

in fact, he was elected only because

Yevgeny Roizman was not allowed to run in the

election. And so, in order to let them

hold this rally, he supposedly approved the application

but sent people to

a swamp, literally. Let’s

watch a short, just a short video about how

Governor Kuivashev sees the place where

a rally for his resignation can be held.

20 minutes by tram from the center, plus another 10

minutes on foot.

And here we are in a park—no, actually, a forest

where they sent us to hold the rally

on the 16th for Kuivashev’s resignation.

[music]

Yevgeny Kuleshov is so afraid of seeing us

in Labor Square that he is sending us

four kilometers away, to this

deserted area. There is at least

one objective reason why we

cannot agree to this alternative,

and that is the number of participants. We stated

at least 3,000 people. Look at these

paths—there isn’t room here for even one

thousand. We will submit notice for other

central sites in the city.

We will definitely hold the rally in the center, but

it is already clear that Yevgeny Kuivashev

is afraid, afraid because

his seat is wobbling under him, and he understands that he

could easily lose it. So all we have left to do

is gather, come out, and

state our demands: Kuivashev

must resign. Of course, I call on all residents

of Yekaterinburg to take an active part in this

rally. Whether it is approved or not, it

must be attended, because

Kuivashev cannot be governor.

I mean, guys, he is just—first of all,

he’s stupid, and second, he’s also brazen and

just some kind of lover

of strange luxury. Seven times, in

two years, the man went to Paris and New York.

What business could he possibly have there? He cannot have

any business there. Before moving on to

discussing Evgen, first of all I will respond

and read his comment on Shtein’s post,

which concerns this. He writes:

“No badge numbers, faces covered, operating in a crowd—

that’s a bandit, not the police.” I absolutely agree.

All these bandits must be brought to

justice.

Before discussing BadComedian, I

still cannot help but support the blogger

from

Krasnodar, because Kuban (a region in southern Russia) is just an

anomalous zone of lawlessness. It’s just

complete chaos there. There is

a blogger there, Kharchenko, who speaks not

very favorably, not very complimentarily, about

the local authorities and talks about various

problems, and they literally tried

to kill him. And they tried to do it in such

a way that they contacted him,

pretended to be police officers, and said that

they had some compromising material to give him. And

when he came to this meeting, they

shot at him, stabbed him, and told him

to get out. And this is a standard situation for

Krasnodar, a standard situation for

Kuban. Of course I want to support this person.

Let’s watch a minute and a half

from his address from a couple of weeks

ago. A person contacted me, just

called me from a hidden number,

introduced himself as a police officer, and

explained that he had very

interesting video material—not just

one video, but a whole flash drive about what

was happening in one of the district

police departments—about how people there

beat detainees, about how people

plant drugs, about how

they draw up reports against people who

in fact did nothing at all. And this

person said that he himself works in

the system, and frankly I do not know his

specific goals, what exactly he wanted.

I needed to go to Fadeeva Street.

Fadeeva.

That’s in the airport district here, for those who

are not from Krasnodar and don’t know. He set a time

at a bus stop. I arrived at the place, walked up,

stood there for 10–15 minutes—no one was there.

I turned around and started walking back, and that’s when

the most interesting part happened. From behind

me

someone called out, that is, they shouted to me,

‘Vadim!’ Then he fired once

and missed; the second shot hit me in the

area—you’ll see all these photos—

around the spleen area, and likewise

the third shot also hit. At that moment,

from behind, I was struck once

in the right side area, as I

understand it, with a kick.

I will repeat once again, and I want the whole

country to understand: Kuban is a zone

of absolute, abnormal lawlessness, and there

the entire leadership simply needs to be arrested—

all of them, every department, the whole

top of the city, the whole top of the region,

the prosecutor’s office, the police, the FSB (Federal Security Service)—it is just

a gathering of bandits. We ourselves know perfectly well

that even the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) was attacked by some drifters

in Cossack uniforms at the airport, and it

ended in nothing. And then it was just

lawlessness again and again, constantly.

Now the carmakers have written...

In a collective letter, they complained about

the work

of the Krasnodar courts. This is an unprecedented

situation, when cowardly businesspeople

first from car manufacturers, and then also from

an Italian bank, wrote because

the Kuban courts (in southern Russia) came up with a scheme

by which corporations can be robbed. They

simply issue unlawful rulings

— completely standard ones — ordering compensation payments.

Somehow, you've got a piece of paper from the court,

and suddenly everyone is supposed to pay for parts

and some enormous sum of money, and in this way

tens and hundreds of millions of rubles

are paid out by these car companies.

And again, these businesspeople

and foreign companies are incredibly timid

people — they already wrote, almost hysterically,

a collective letter to the higher, uh,

judicial body of Russia, asking, "Will you

look into what is happening there in Kuban

where these very real bandits —

like Kushchyovskaya (a village notorious for organized crime) mixed with prosecutorial

gangsters — are simply carrying out their absolute

lawlessness. The entire leadership of Krasnodar

Krai should simply be arrested, all of them.

The heads of the law enforcement agencies

in Krasnodar Krai are just bandits,

real bandits, absolutely real ones. I

am, of course, amazed by those people who still

manage to do anything in Krasnodar Krai,

to speak any truth at all, because

it's worse there now than in Chechnya.

BadComedian — what can I say about

BadComedian? Well, listen, I receive

complaints about these copyright issues all the time.

Remember, *He Is Not Dimon to You*

was blocked for a time over copyright

claims, and we understand that this is not

about copyright — it's the authorities using

the copyright mechanism in order to

block content.

The same thing happened with the investigation into

Chaika (Russia’s former prosecutor general). What is happening now is

outright censorship and a real attack

by the authorities on Yevgeny himself,

BadComedian, because they want to

shut him up. Let's watch a short clip

from his video to remind ourselves

what he was talking about: "Hello, my name is

BadComedian, and it occurred to me — should I

shut down my channel? Why? Because

I've been in court for half a year already.

Attempts to strike the channel began in the summer of 2018,

and the legal battle has been going on since early 2019. And this also

answers the question of why it takes me so long to make

a review. The thing is that for alleged

copyright infringement, I was sued by

the film company Kinodanz, or as people

call it colloquially, because all its films

flopped at the box office — KinoFail.

Based on expert opinions, for example

from Oleg Motin, the studio claims that despite

the fact that the law does not set specific limits for

quotation,

my review somehow managed to violate them.

The point is that for every film the company made,

KinoFail received money from the Ministry

of Culture of the Russian Federation.

So in essence, we taxpayers

are paying ourselves for an attempt to censor

criticism. And there is no one behind me — I am

just a user of the Runet (the Russian-language internet), and without other

users like me, without you, the viewers, I am

absolutely nobody. No matter how you feel about me,

you

and I — all of us — must have the right to express

our opinion,

especially when we criticize something made with

our money."

What I see now is a tendency

to say that, well, in fact nothing

terrible happened. At first everyone got worked up,

and then, of course, in stepped

Sobchak, quietly starting to help out there,

to whitewash these crooks who

went after BadComedian and shift

the agenda to talk of a settlement — haha, hee-hee.

But in fact, I think this

must be treated with complete seriousness. I

fully agree with the post written by

the editor-in-chief of Sports.ru,

Dmitry Navosha, who writes that this is

an outright attempt at censorship, and he rightly

recalls that there was a similarly scandalous

and absurd story when Match TV

tried to strangle Sports.ru

using exactly the same methods. Why is this

happening specifically to BadComedian? Well,

he himself answered that question. In

that video he says: well, there is

no one behind me, I'm an ordinary blogger. As we

discussed on this program, what is it with

some obscure deputy

press secretary — why should he be

bought apartments? And there in the Ministry

of Culture, Medinsky, and the Cinema Fund

— they hate him, because

some random guy on YouTube

with a camera, all on his own, managed to grab

this whole Cinema Fund by the throat.

Because you and I really do understand it, and we

say it ourselves all the time. I only recently

started watching him, but I already say the phrase:

some movie comes out,

and my wife says to me, 'Will you watch it?' I say,

'I'll wait until BadComedian releases a review,

then I'll watch that and laugh at this

movie there.' And they hate him for that,

because they sit there discussing it in exactly the same way:

'What kind of nonsense is this? So apparently

some nobody on YouTube

— he's nobody at all, just a lone guy, while we

here have suits, and we have ties, and we

have flashing official lights, and Medinsky has a penthouse worth 200

million rubles, we have big business, we

sit here — and yet, just listen, they're all worked up,

just imagine, people are sitting there, some kind of

Funky, but they say, "Kolyan, here's what we'll do for you..."

"We'll give you however many million rubles

and this much in distribution.

We'll support you, we'll move things around for you,

some

shift some screenings, push back these premieres,

those premieres.

And to the theaters they say something like,

"Theaters, sit quietly. We're the ones here

who matter.

This is supposedly a serious business, and then on

YouTube there's this random BadComedian

who really ruins everything for them. He

has already created this image of the Cinema Fund (a Russian state-backed film financing body)

as a bunch of crooks and thieves.

My son Zakhar, who's eleven,

has been watching BadComedian for a long time, and somehow

they mentioned Funky, and I said to him, "You know,

that Funky guy at random?" "Of course I know the Cinema Fund,

they're outright bandits.

They steal tons of money and make terrible

movies."

"How do you know that?" he says. And that's

such a weird question, because by now

everyone knows about it, since millions of people

watch BadComedian, and they

hate him because he's one person

who breaks the game for these big shots, and

they really want to devour him.

And the simplest mechanism is copyright

claims, lawsuits. But we've

been through this many times. It's just that we're

relatively big and have

some legal muscle, right? We have lawyers

who've been handling lawsuits for a long time. They come after us, and we

fight back, we're prepared, we raise

money, we don't depend on anyone. They

thought, "He's alone, now we'll

take him out through copyright. Well, what

assets does he have?

A YouTube channel. When this arrogant bastard

realizes we're about to block

his YouTube channel—and YouTube is fairly

strict about copyright—he'll

be

singing a different tune. That was exactly

the kind of conversation they were having, because really, what

does BadComedian have? Sure, he'll open

another YouTube channel, but getting back to millions

of subscribers will take quite a long time.

He'll have to grow again, and how will he make money?

And

he'll lose a huge number of viewers

while rebuilding. And during that time, we

can live more or less comfortably here,

so let's squash this brazen

scumbag." That was the dialogue, exactly.

That was the dialogue.

I don't doubt for a second that

of course it's those very same

big shots, not just some

pathetic film company. It's this whole

mafia that basically hates

YouTube, hates all the people they

can't control, because they genuinely believe

in complete seriousness—not just as some

passing thought or assumption—

this is actually one of their

core ideas: they think that you and I

are all supposed to obey them, that they are

our bosses. And these big shots, and even

some people who've entered into video

partnerships with them,

they think everyone else should

obey them because they're at the St. Petersburg Forum (the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum)

forum,

and we're on YouTube; because they're rich, while

we're just here, you know, with this chair and

this wall and a cat in the window—this is

our set, our whole backdrop.

So since we're like this, they say, "Well, if they're

so smart, why are they so poor? And if they're

poor, they should sit quietly and not

show off." And of course I want

to support

BadComedian. I want to support everyone

who gets targeted regularly—not just him.

A lot of independent channels are attacked

specifically through copyright; we ourselves

run into this constantly.

I want to support everyone, and I want to

urge everyone simply to spread this

information and push back against these bastards

in every possible way—from Smart Voting (an opposition tactical voting strategy)

to spreading information to going out to

protests. Thank you very much to everyone who watched.

See you next Thursday.

[music]