Navalny on regime change
Text version
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I’m not one of those people, and it seems to me
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many of us, who think that the regime
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— Putin’s current regime — is doing something
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extraordinary or super important for
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holding the country together, and so I see
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absolutely no apocalyptic
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scenarios in them leaving. They’ve imposed on us
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the idea that this whole
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country of ours, where we have Muslims,
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Christians, and Buddhists, and such a complex
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and vast country — and that one man has grabbed all of it
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in his mighty hand and is holding it together, and otherwise it’s all
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cracking apart. It’s not cracking apart, and it won’t
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fall apart. Nothing will happen to it.
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It has existed for 1,000 years and will exist for another thousand
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if tomorrow, let’s suppose,
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we wake up one fine
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day and aliens have taken Putin to
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the moon, nothing will happen, nothing will occur,
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there will be no apocalypse, and there are no
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preconditions for Russia’s collapse, despite
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the difficult situation, its multiethnic makeup,
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and so on and so forth.
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So what exactly is supposed to happen? Why
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if the regime changes — what does
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regime change mean for us? For us, regime change is
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not the Kremlin blowing up. For us, regime change is
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not necessarily the shooting of some people
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and replacing them with others. For us,
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regime change is
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following the laws that
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are already written down on paper. If tomorrow this
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regime starts doing everything it is supposed to do
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under
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the law, elec-
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criminal cases, fights
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corruption, and the courts start working as they are supposed to
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under the law — then regime change will have happened. That’s
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all. In other words, we don’t need some kind of
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fantastic flash or some kind of super
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event. No — just do what
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is written on paper and in the rules. And when
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that changes and everything starts working, regime change will
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have taken place, and nothing terrible will
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happen. We’ll simply live normally.
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We won’t need to create any
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parties anymore; probably we’ll just
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raise and bring up our children, because
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we will have fulfilled our historical mission.
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We will make it so that a police officer does his job properly,
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a judge judges properly, and officials
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earn and spend only as much money
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as they are supposed to earn. And
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Shuvalov doesn’t live in a giant palace
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that he bought with a bribe from Abramovich — that’s
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all. So I urge everyone to treat
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— well, this phrase was mentioned here — that
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“regime change” sounds like this:
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Indeed, it has become a cliché with
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a whiff of deranged rhetoric, but in essence regime change
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is simply carrying out what is already
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supposed to be carried out. Nothing
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apocalyptic will happen after that.
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Russia will not collapse. We’ll wake up
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in the morning, brush our teeth, and go to work.
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There will just be a different regime. That’s all, thank you.
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Thank you.
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[applause]