Lies about the coronavirus, Putin’s middle class, and pensioners will be exposed to infection on April 22

[music]

Good evening to everyone who is in strict

self-isolation and quarantine, and good evening to everyone else as well.

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

which means we are live with

the program *Russia of the Future*, and I am its host,

Alexei Navalny, or "the madman with pale

eyes," as Milonov called me.

Let's listen to him, because I don't

know a single normal person

who is ready to pay

to vote for that madman with pale

eyes. Really, he doesn't know the political mood at all.

He says he doesn't know a single such person, but nevertheless,

30 percent of people in Moscow voted for me.

Apparently my eyes

seemed perfectly normal to them. Please send me

your questions, suggestions, and

complaints with the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture on

Twitter. We won't be putting them on screen,

but I will be reading them and trying to answer

them during the program. Thank you very much

that so many people have signed up

as sponsors. Right now, there will be a link in the corner,

and under the video player where

you are watching, there is a button that says "Become a sponsor."

So, two thousand

nine hundred eighty-seven people

clicked that button—not just clicked

that button, but actually subscribed

to provide regular support for our

program. Thank you so much.

That's great. Now, of course, we are thinking

about how to entertain you, because for

these three thousand people we will have to

make separate content. We will be doing a little of that—

answering questions and things like that.

And despite the fact that I will begin with the fact that

the topic of the coronavirus is not just

dominating the news agenda—it has

somehow completely scorched the entire information

space. Practically nothing is being discussed

except the coronavirus—coronavirus and

a little bit of Putin. But in any case,

some issues on the agenda are very important, and we

will discuss them.

I will start with Lyubov Sobol, the producer of this

channel, who this week announced her

intention to run for the State Duma.

That is absolutely the right move. More than that, I think

the timing is completely right,

and well chosen, despite the fact that

there is the coronavirus and so on. But still,

the response to Putin's madness with

resetting presidential term limits should be that

all kinds of young, wonderful—and not so

young, simply wonderful—

politicians clearly state their plans and

ask us for support. Let's

watch 56 seconds from our Sobol.

How can we say that we agree

with being treated like this? My answer to that

has always been: in every election, vote against

United Russia, against candidates from

United Russia, and against candidates

who appear to be independents but are

supported by United Russia.

They really do not want that, because

they know that if people vote against them,

they will lose.

Metyelsky, the head of the Moscow branch

of United Russia, lost, and they can lose too.

Along with them, a very important

battle will also be lost by Putin himself, because

the State Duma today is one big

collective legislative Putin. It is

a continuation of Putin, one of his

many tentacles. We can deprive him

of this tentacle. I will be taking part

in

the 2021 State Duma elections in

the Central single-member

electoral district.

You saw how softly our Lyubov says:

this is one of Putin's tentacles, and we can

take that tentacle away from him. And she is absolutely

right. I will repeat once again:

it's great that she has put herself forward, because

personally, I am against the kind of strategy where,

you know, all sorts of politicians sit around

doing absolutely nothing,

and then three months before the election

they suddenly pop up from nowhere and say, "I will run

in this district, I will run in that district." Well,

first of all, that creates a huge amount of

unnecessary competition. Competition

will always exist, of course, yes, but it can be

resolved through primaries. But most importantly,

we as voters clearly understand it, and

after some time we can ask

Sobol in particular: well, you

announced your candidacy—what have you done?

And what are you planning to do? And I would like

first of all to ask everyone else the same

questions, and secondly to see what they are doing—

some useful work. When a person has already

declared their candidacy, we understand that they are fighting for

the support of their voters, that they are responsible for something,

that they are doing something. That is great. Until

specific politicians who

lead people are engaged in

clear, concrete things and

implement specific

plans that are understandable to everyone else,

the opposition will remain weaker than we would like.

That is why I support Sobol, and I urge all of you

to support Sobol, and I urge everyone

else to put themselves forward too, instead of just

doing what happened last time, when, you know, there were only two

weeks left before nominations closed and the messages started:

"Alexei, I would like to discuss with you

my candidacy. Alexei, how

can we talk about support in this district

or that district?" I mean, of course we will talk

to everyone, and everyone will want to get into

Smart Voting, but why not

start working with voters right now,

go out there, go door to door in apartment buildings?

to talk about what’s happening, people

say we should address both the federal agenda

and the local agenda, and it would also be

great if

there were 225 districts in Russia, and in each of them there was

some person who, already now,

under our slogans, under opposition

slogans against Putin, against United

Russia, was doing active work. Yes, that would be

very good. I see Daniil is asking

me a naive question:

“Alexei, why didn’t you run in

the State Duma elections?”

Because I’m not allowed to. Putin, on the other hand, is allowed

to run again and again—he reset

One of the more popular tweets on my

Twitter lately was when I wrote

that an interesting thing is happening with

our Constitution: the Constitution

explicitly prohibited Putin from running for

a third consecutive term, and it does not allow

him to become

president once again. But the Constitution explicitly

allows me to take part in elections at any

level. Nevertheless, in practice

I’m not allowed onto the ballot, while Putin is running for

another term. That’s how everything

is arranged.

Despite the fact that I won in

the European Court of Human Rights and

proved that the cases against me were

fabricated, I am still, supposedly,

a repeat criminal, and therefore I

am not allowed to run. So, Ivan

Bukhonov asks me, “Alexei,

tell us, how accurate is the information

about a possible lockdown of Moscow? We’ll talk about that later

when we discuss the coronavirus. So, what

does ‘closing Moscow’ even mean?

What, are they going to block the roads with tanks and not

let anyone into Moscow or out of

Moscow? I think that’s unlikely and

generally impossible. But in principle, I

support tightening quarantine measures, and

now, well, schools have finally

closed. I think universities should have been closed long ago

—all universities.

Because more vigilance is better than

less vigilance. But as for some kind of

apocalyptic scenarios, like

you know, all of us sitting at home,

streets being patrolled by soldiers in

full gear, shooting at people for

trying to run to the store for a loaf of bread—

of course that won’t happen. In no

country in the world is anything like that happening, and in

that sense, there is definitely no need to give in to

panic. Moscow is not going to be ‘closed.’ If anything

is shut down, it may be certain institutions, which

would only be a good thing. This morning I went

to check in, like a criminal, at the

criminal supervision inspectorate

(the penal enforcement inspectorate)—that definitely should have been shut down long ago too.

It’s a breeding ground for coronavirus there; those

poor employees sit there, and

all sorts of people come in, including people

who lead fairly asocial

lives. It’s obvious that it’s just a chaotic mess

where all kinds of bacteria and viruses

spread. You could certainly

for example, for two or three months

suspend the work of such institutions and

in general, of such government bodies

whose necessity is not exactly

obvious—sorry for putting it that way, but

I mean, you could suspend the criminal inspectorate

temporarily for several months

and of course that should be done. So,

Vladislav is asking about

the Constitutional Court. I’ll explain everything now, but

before moving on

to the term reset and the Constitutional Court,

Putin, this week, generally speaking, right now

with this new run of his, has had to

talk a lot. He is constantly making appearances, and

of course he is spouting some truly

astonishing nonsense. Basically, he always talks this kind of

astonishing nonsense, but now, against the backdrop of

what is probably, among other things, nervous

tension—after all, this is an important

moment for him—

to go ahead and reset all his terms, that is,

to do what he denied for all 20 years, and

now he still has to keep a straight face and

go through with it. So apparently

some things are kind of slipping out

—he just keeps talking, talking

and talking, he can’t

stop. Let’s look at several different quotes from him.

One of them was especially good: this week he was once again

outraged by the rise in gasoline prices.

And that’s amazing. There are compilations

—many different compilations—showing how he

every year, several times a year, for 20 years

in a row, is outraged by the

rise in gasoline prices. And for the last several

years, he’s been outraged that

gasoline prices are rising while oil prices are falling. Let’s

listen to what he said this

week: “AI-92 gasoline over the year has risen not even by 10, but

by 44... appreciate that...”

“I’m not even talking now about the fact that

oil has fallen by almost half. Well, fine, it would be good

if prices stayed at the previous level.”

“Wonderful. Profits have been cut in half...”

“The Ministry of Energy is keeping

the situation under control. We need to understand that, in

principle,”

“gasoline includes many components... but nevertheless...”

“I understand, I understand, nevertheless...”

“We’ll work it through... did you hear that?”

“All right then, enough—give them a kick.”

“Pay attention to this, all right? Over the year...”

“Well, all right, over the previous months...”

“Oil prices collapsed, simply collapsed.”

“It used to reach 65 to 70, now it’s around 30...”

...”

“Take a look at it somehow, all right.”

Such an amazing dialogue, so there it is.

What happens is that the price of oil falls, while

gasoline prices go up. And this is, this is little

Patrushev Jr. (the son of Nikolai Patrushev, former head of Russia’s Security Council), the head of the council

security, the former head of the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service), and we

hear: yes, we just sort of

told him, he didn’t know. It’s going up? Well, actually,

all right, my colleagues and I will work through this

issue. What does that even mean? Could you please

work through this issue? Yes, Vladimir,

Vladimir, we will work through this issue. In

2014, let’s listen to the same thing.

They were saying exactly the same thing: how can it be that the price of

gasoline is already rising? There are some

things — he was told about this, and publicly too. I

already spoke about this when we met with the project,

for example, gasoline prices, prices

for food products.

This needs to be dealt with, and it needs to be dealt with

in such, in such, in a situation like this, under such

conditions, it has to be handled, no matter who

criticizes it, specifically in manual mode (direct personal intervention by the top leadership), and

get to work. So in 2014 he says

that now they’re going to handle this here in manual

mode and work through this issue.

Four years pass, and then comes

2018. What does Putin tell us?

But if we come back to it, I can

talk about it in more detail, but, but

overall,

even though it’s under manual control, overall

it worked, and I hope it will continue to work the same way.

Keep working so that there simply won’t be

any spikes in the growth of prices for

petroleum products next year.

That was in 2018: the government will not allow it.

And nevertheless, spikes

do happen, despite the fact that the price of

oil is falling.

And so their answer is always the same: we’ll work through

this issue. Everyone knows why the price

of gasoline is rising: because we are in the realm of

monopolies. Whose?

Putin’s best friend Sechin’s. Because

he was the one who created these state or

state-backed giants; they have taken over the whole country.

Monopoly in Russia is, generally speaking, the main

word in the economy.

And here Ksyusha asks me:

Alexei, how far does the price of

oil have to fall for Putin’s system to collapse?

Is there such a calculation? No, Ksyusha, there is no such calculation, and

unfortunately there cannot be one. If we are talking about

the possibility that the price of oil could fall very sharply

and there would be much less money,

dear Ksyusha, Putin’s regime will not

fall on its own. It will not go away without

some effort on our part. Look at what is happening in

Venezuela — there is simply

an absolute economic collapse there, and yet

the Maduro regime still stands. What happened

in Zimbabwe? It was completely destroyed. You saw

the many photographs of how people, in order

to buy a bag of chips, were hauling

money in a cart — literally in a

cart stuffed with money, billions

and trillions — and yet Mugabe’s regime

did not simply fall. It requires some

effort from us. But of course, when we

look at all this, in particular

when he comments on gasoline and pretends that

there is no elephant in the room — this giant elephant

called Sechin’s monopoly — I [mean], all the rest of it,

the entire gasoline trade is squeezed by it,

as if it doesn’t exist. It’s just absurd.

‘Work through this issue’ — it’s like a joke about

working through it. Two years will pass, and then they’ll say:

Guys, so how are you working through

this issue over there? Yes, Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin’s first name and patronymic, a formal mode of address), we

were working through the issue last week, and

starting this week we will begin working through

the issue even more actively. Well, all right, but

just remember that there is no time

to waste. Please, keep working through it.

We will keep working through it.

And that’s how it goes — just this endless

discussion of who knows what, because

in reality nothing is being done. And

continuing on the subject of Putin’s interview,

right now I myself am waiting with great anticipation

for

— well, that’s not quite the right way to put it —

I’m eagerly waiting for the next episode in their

series to come out.

This amazing series, which

is produced by the state news agency TASS,

what’s it called — *20 Questions for Putin*?

Putin is asked questions,

and they post them. It’s actually great, I mean

the journalist who undertook

this whole thing clearly started it as

some kind of sycophantic project, and there

are people helping him. I already talked about it here on the program:

they put fake statistics

on the screens when Putin is spouting

obvious nonsense. But nevertheless, the questions

they ask are fairly interesting, and it’s clear that

Putin, being absolutely prepared for

these questions, knowing that these questions

would be asked, still answers with such utter nonsense that when we

look at these questions and the answers to

them, we can understand the depth of the bottom to which

we will sooner or later sink

if Putin remains in power, because

one person

Let’s listen to his answer to the question

about the salaries of the heads of state corporations.

You understand, it clearly bothers him — this, this

is a very important question, truly

very important, because the whole country

is baffled as to why there are such gigantic

salaries for Sechin,

for Gref, for Miller — far higher than everyone else’s.

And Putin appoints these people, and

Putin sets their salaries. But when

he gets this question, he’s like: well yes, I don’t like it either.

Listen, by the way, speaking of incomes,

how does that square with our state corporations?

When it comes to market-rate salaries, a manager here

it really doesn’t add up when they’re paid badly. I

agree with you. Listen, it really gets under my skin

— it bothers me too. So, a top

manager earns a million rubles a day.

Somehow, taking everything into account, but as for that, I

wouldn’t go that far. No, about that — I don’t know, but

it’s definitely too much, I agree with you.

I agree with you. Well, if I agree,

you can’t imagine how many letters I’ve actually

written saying: guys, you have no right

to pay such gigantic salaries. All

Buru once made a really great

Just create, in silence — well, not exactly in

silence, except for my voice — can we

just show right now how this

website works? Its address is maniivbk.info.

There’s nothing there except a counter. You

see, if you go there right now, you’ll

just stare at the screen and watch

how, in real time,

the numbers keep rising. Look — while I was speaking just now,

they earned 1,300 rubles, 1,400 rubles

— Kostyan, 1,100. That’s how it works.

That’s how it works, and, and...

And these are still data from two or three years ago.

By now they’re earning much

more. If you go there, you won’t be able

to take your eyes off it. Probably, if we hadn’t

removed that counter by now — and before

this moment, if it had kept going, they would already have

each earned 17,000 rubles,

which, as we know,

is considered a middle-class salary in

Russia. We’ll definitely talk about that.

Everyone knows this, everyone discusses it

endlessly, everyone is endlessly outraged, and

everyone understands perfectly well that it is specifically

Vladimir Putin who is the person

who allowed them to receive such

salaries, because the pay of the heads

of state corporations in Russia has long ceased to be

market-based. It is far higher than any

market salary, and certainly higher

than what these people ought to be earning

if they were working in a market

economy, especially considering that they

have wrecked things. Just look at the achievements

of Miller

as head of Gazprom, or

Sechin’s achievements at the helm of Rosneft.

These people have simply failed at their jobs.

They have wrecked the companies; their market capitalization

has shrunk. I mean, come on —

they are very bad managers, and they

receive fantastic salaries that

even very good managers in the

West do not receive. Putin personally made all this happen. He

understands that people don’t like it,

and so he acts like, well yes, it bothers me too,

but at the same time, like, what can I

do? Well, that’s how they were appointed — not

because we’re like that, it’s just life, and that’s

— well, it’s simply hypocrisy, of course.

It’s always very unpleasant to watch, but the

size of this hypocrisy, its scale,

keeps growing and growing. Today — well, the other day —

the day before yesterday,

Proekt (an independent Russian investigative outlet) released something exactly on this

topic.

An absolutely excellent investigation.

You can find it on YouTube, you can

go to their site. This investigation is connected with

the mistress of Eduard Khudainatov, a

guy who used to head the company Ros

neft. I mean, I don’t know him personally, but back in the day

when I was suing Rosneft and

all that mess, I wrote letters about him too. Then he was replaced by

Sechin. It’s generally believed that he

is one of Sechin’s money men. In the

Proekt investigation, they stubbornly do not

say this outright, but it is basically

implied. Apparently they’re afraid that

he’ll sue them. Anyway, this man

headed the state oil company Rosneft.

The investigation concerns a woman named

— Lord — Marina Amafia, Marina

Amafia. She is, I don’t know, his common-law wife,

his mistress — call it whatever you like.

In general, Khudainatov’s personal life

doesn’t really interest us in itself. What does interest us

is that somewhere on Kutuzovsky Prospekt (a major avenue in Moscow)

you can find this Marina

Amafia’s flagship store, and what she does is

produce perfumes, and a bottle there

costs $10,000. When I

looked, I didn’t even suspect that such a thing

could exist. It’s hard for me to imagine how

there could be a person, even a super-rich

person, who would buy perfume for 10

thousand dollars. It’s just so absurdly

beyond reason — and simply meaningless.

Such a thing shouldn’t even exist.

Perfume for $10,000. But there is a

special legend behind it: that there was some mega-

perfumer who once made perfume

for Napoleon, and Napoleon was so

delighted with it that he supposedly said

it would be for him alone, and no one else

was to dare wear it — but then

the perfumer killed himself, and the legend says

— this is all written on the website of this

Marina Amafia.

The perfumer killed himself, then apparently someone

informed on him to Napoleon, and Napoleon supposedly said he should be

shot, and

the recipe was lost until it was revived in

a descendant of that perfumer, by the name of Marina

Amafia,

to whom, of course, through her genetic code,

the exquisite recipe for this

perfume was passed down, and that is why she now produces it.

That’s why the perfume is so expensive and exclusive,

costing $10,000 a bottle. And all of this is financed by

none other than Khudainatov himself,

who worked at the state

company Rosneft. And in Proekt’s investigation

it is recounted very amusingly that

Of course, all of this is a perfect example

of Putin's aristocracy. This young woman

Marina Amafia was once a woman by the

name of—I don't remember exactly, something ordinary, like

Marina Porosenochkina, or something like that.

Marina—I don't know—Petrova, some common new surname.

She worked somewhere at McDonald's, just normally,

worked there, then worked as a flight attendant.

Then she met Khudainatov,

changed her last name to Amafia, and

declared herself a direct descendant of the aristocracy,

a direct descendant of Napoleon, and then went all in.

A billion here, a billion there,

private jets,

palaces, everything else. Let's take a look

at 50 seconds from this investigation.

Khudainatov's lover owns

an estate in Zarechye, on Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway

(an elite residential area outside Moscow).

Its approximate value is 5 billion rubles.

In the company's founding documents,

Marina Amafia lists her address in

Cyprus.

It is the Coral Sea complex of luxury villas in

the city of Paphos.

Approximate value: €600,000. Marina

Amafia drives only luxury

cars: Bentley, Mercedes-Benz, and

Porsche.

Eduard Khudainatov's son, Alexei, also

owns a luxurious estate.

Though recently he put it up

for sale for nearly 2 billion rubles.

Eduard Khudainatov's own house

is located nearby, a 10-minute walk

from Marina Amafia's mansion, and the land alone

there may be worth more than 2 billion

rubles.

Khudainatov's first wife, Marina, owns

a mansion in the Rechnoye settlement;

it may be worth around 600 million rubles.

The same goes for the house of Eduard's brother,

Khudainatov, Zhan, who settled in

the Zhukovka-3 settlement.

This is Putin's aristocracy, you understand, and all

of this is given to them by the state-owned company

Rosneft—our state company, yours and mine.

But for some reason it did not give you

a pay raise, it did not give you

better healthcare, it did not give you

better education, but to some

obscure women it bought billion-ruble

houses. Khudainatov himself, back in the 1990s,

described in his biography how he

built a cafeteria somewhere in that

town. Well, that's wonderful, excellent.

He built a cafeteria and still managed to rise

into the oil business, and that's all very well, let

him be a rich man—but not

that rich. You can become rich

by heading a state company, but he

did, and now they sit there in

their beautiful chalets and their

castles, which they buy in

Russia, Spain, Italy—wherever they want.

They douse each other in perfume that costs

$10,000 per bottle, and really

they are the masters of life. What is so

disgusting is that everyone else—and

Putin looks at all this and says, well, yes,

well, it bothers me too, it rubs me the wrong way,

but maybe somehow we should start

investigating the origin of this

wealth? But no, that does not happen

at all.

Unfortunately. Take a look

at the investigation—it's very funny, I see

a lot of people, 49,000 people may be

watching us live, and our link for online

donations

when ducks swim across the screen, or

Medvedev pops up there, or whoever else—but

this was Margarita Simonyan's people who knocked it out

last time, again. This all started

when the investigation came out

about Margarita Simonyan. She has a budget of

20 billion rubles. Last time,

as I understand it, throughout the whole

broadcast, for about five

minutes there was some problem, but they

put this link for

online donations on the screen, and now they brazenly

—as I understand it—

it isn't working, I'm being told. Well,

what can I say: Margarita

Simonyan is spending 20 billion rubles

that she got from us on

very, very useful and effective work. I

always wonder at moments like this:

did they really sit there holding meetings,

deciding, let's make some kind of

attack on Navalny's donation link, yes, let's do it,

this will be our strike right in the back.

I mean, of course it's unpleasant.

You wanted to send me

200 rubles to support the work, and you

couldn't send it. Well, okay, but I

am simply curious how much money

they wrote off for this little stunt. 50,000

people are watching us live.

Danil asks: what do you think about

the amendment related to the supremacy of

domestic law over international law?

I see a lot of questions here about all sorts of

institutional matters.

Nikolai Dolzhenko.

Nikolai asks where Ruslan

Shaveddinov has gone, where they moved him to hide him—we

don't know. About Ruslan Shaveddinov,

only one thing is known: one

fine morning, the day before yesterday,

he woke up and was told, pack your things,

we're taking you away. They took him somewhere,

they drove him to an airfield, as his fellow servicemen wrote to us,

and after that contact with him was lost.

And we do not understand whether he was sent

deep into Novaya Zemlya (a remote Russian Arctic archipelago), because now he

is in some place not far from there.

There is an airfield there, but maybe some kind of

communication is possible if you arrange it with someone.

He could at least send word to his fellow servicemen, or to us,

send a message saying that Ruslan is alive and

well.

You could send someone deep into Novaya

Zemlya—it is enormous, actually, and there

there is no communication at all, and apparently twice as many

polar bears, plus

as far as we understand, some people

are being sent somewhere even farther away, even farther north.

There is also Alexandra Land, where

there is no communication whatsoever, only

satellite phones, and three times the

number of polar bears.

Polar bears, apparently. But of course, despite

the fact that I am joking, I am very concerned about what

is happening. And, in any case, if you

work for the Defense Ministry and have any

information at all—this is really a bit of a disgrace—

someone has apparently been kidnapped and taken away by boat,

we cannot find him; please let us know

what is going on. There are a great many

questions. I can already see questions about the Constitution,

about the Constitution.

What are we supposed to do in connection with this, and how do you

see it? Last

Thursday, you and I were here, and last Thursday

we were discussing it precisely while those

votes were taking place in the regions of the Russian

Federation—in all regions of the Russian

Federation there was a special

vote initiated by United Russia, and

after that the amendments were to enter into force

legally after some time; then

Putin was supposed to sign them, was supposed to

have to,

was supposed to review them, and the Constitutional Court was to consider them.

And in fact, I had planned that even on this

program—that is, a week later—you and I

still would not yet be able to discuss that all of this

had been adopted in an emergency manner,

because there was still the Constitutional Court, and there

was supposed to be some lengthy procedure, as

required—an open hearing, and so on.

And this is astonishing: the Constitutional Court—

the program was on Thursday—

the documents were submitted to the Constitutional Court on

Friday, and on Saturday they announced a

closed session. That is, in

principle, the most important hearing in the

history of the Constitutional Court,

with a nationwide vote approaching

and very important issues at stake—we expected that they

would at least stage some kind of circus, with various

lawyers and non-lawyers coming out, and all sorts of

Valentina Tereshkovas speaking to the Constitutional

Court: 'Dear Constitutional Court, we

believe this should be done this way,' and there would

be some people making speeches with pseudo-

legal opinions. In general, all of this

shows very clearly how important these amendments are to Putin

and how he is simply

trying, at a truly manic speed,

to get them adopted. That is exactly why they

scheduled their vote for April 22,

right in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak.

We will discuss all of this, but for now just consider

this: the court, in a closed session,

began deliberating on Saturday and

had already issued its ruling by Monday. And moreover,

they themselves are ashamed of this ruling, because

as I said, it was a closed session,

and to this day they have not even said who was

the reporting judge in this case; they have not disclosed

information on who voted how, who was for it and who was

against it, because this is an absolutely, massively

unlawful decision. And the court—

perhaps this is a bit harsh in wording, but nevertheless

there is simply no other way to put it—

it is a gathering of lying, elderly

prostitutes who, in reality,

traded away, well, simply their, you know,

cheap buckwheat and cheap cafeteria food,

well, of course, official dachas and official

apartments. As far as we can tell, just from a quick

look, there are no

super-rich people there.

Each of them was given a dacha in Moscow, a dacha outside

St. Petersburg, an apartment in Moscow, an apartment outside

St. Petersburg, and he built for himself this kind of

little socialism inside the Constitutional

Court. But basically, those people who

simply sold all of us out for their lousy

official apartment—because there are no countries in the world

where leaders have extended their own

powers through a referendum and

those countries then lived well. The court,

these very elderly

people understood perfectly well what they

were doing, and they did not even release their

super-mega-lying decision. It is just that when

you read the official text, and there it

officially says, in effect, that all this

can be done.

The number of terms is not a major

problem, because in Russia there is—

attention—

developed parliamentarianism, real

multi-party politics, and the presence of political

competition, as well as an effective model of

separation of powers. I mean, we all

know—and even people who support

Putin do not try to assure us that in Russia there really

is

political competition or parliamentarianism.

They rather say that we very much

do not need all that European stuff,

we do not need it, no and we do not need it. But these lying

scoundrels, in all seriousness,

say that Putin can extend his

term, his term, for as long as

he likes, because, well, there is such great

competition—after all, anyone can

take part in elections, and political

parties exist here, and parliament

is wonderful. They say this in complete seriousness,

people who work in

The Constitutional Court does not deserve

any respect at all, I mean,

someday, in the beautiful Russia of the future,

in law schools they will

study them as people who never really

were outstanding lawyers, by and large.

The Constitutional Court is simply

a bunch and a rabble of random people who

were pulled in from somewhere, from some

universities, seated in office, given those

gold chains, and they started thinking that

they were

prominent lawyers. But supposedly their very

position obliged them to

sit there for many years and

grow a little, try to become

something like genuinely

more or less distinguished figures in the field

of law, and they turned out to be, quite literally,

complete cheap hacks.

And people really will study this and

discuss it, and it is an incredibly shameful story.

I think some of them are watching this

broadcast, and they will be upset, they will

be indignant: how can they be called that?

You call them bad names, but there are no good

words to describe you. In fact,

you are cheap sellouts who sold absolutely

everything. As a lawyer, I am simply

outraged. Of course I take it to heart,

because it is impossible — they actually

literally wrote that

when deciding whether Putin can

reset his term limits or not, one must

take into account specific

historical facts

and factors. In other words, they mean that

they are effectively saying, almost verbatim: the country is

surrounded by enemies, and right now we need a leader

like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

That is what these lawyers are saying. And yet, in

this same composition, back in 1998,

they considered the same question

regarding Yeltsin: could Yeltsin

run for a third term, because

there had also been changes to the Constitution?

And they said: no, Yeltsin cannot, but

Putin can, because the specific

historical factors are completely different now.

But of course we expected this decision,

because the chief

of the Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin,

is known, widely known, for the fact that

in 2014 he wrote an article

like this.

He likes to show off, he writes articles,

he apparently thinks of himself as a great

thinker, and there he wrote, literally,

that serfdom, for all its

drawbacks — that is, serfdom in

Russia, in Tsarist Russia — was one of the

main bonds holding together the nation's internal

unity. It was no accident that peasants,

according to historians, said to their

former masters after the reform: you were

ours,

and we were yours. That is what they want.

You understand, they... I released a video on this

topic today, and in it I talked about how

they think we are their serfs.

Because

they really do have that attitude.

They sit there with their gold chains, in

their Mercedeses, and this whole

marinated mafia atmosphere

they give off — they genuinely think

that we should come up to them, bow down,

and say, guys, like,

we are yours, but you are a little bit ours too.

Serfdom is what makes us one.

The fact that you stole all our money while we

sit here earning 17,000 rubles (about 170 euros / 185 US dollars)

and got classified as middle class — that

is what makes us a united nation. What a

wonderful thing.

You put the stable hand there in the stable,

by the stove,

and he is grateful, because he

understands that he is a fool, that he cannot

do anything on his own, headless and helpless.

Right, he is useless, but the master guided him,

and that is the unity of the nation.

And this was written in 2014 by the man who

heads the Constitutional Court, so how

else can I call him except the chief

— well, of course, I do call him that, yes.

And then they will tell me: come on, Alexei,

you are a politician, why are you insulting the head

of the Constitutional Court? The chief of prostitutes —

that is what he is. I cannot put it any other way.

He betrayed all of us, he sold all of us out for

some shabby official apartment of his own.

Putin will stay there, he will remain in power until

we finally remove him from

power, but by that time Russia

will have fallen dramatically behind, and simply

all of us will be in very bad shape. When I

was talking about how

the Constitutional Court was about to

approve all of this, approve it, approve it, and

it was supposed to consider it all

week, and after some time all of this was then

to be signed by Putin — and do you

know that when Vladimir Putin was only

just starting this whole mess, he stated

quite clearly that he would sign all of it

only after the people had voted.

It was said there word for word: let us

listen — in this case

that alone is not enough.

They came and said whether they want

or do not want the citizens of our country

to in fact be the final

authority that either accepts this

law or rejects it.

And only after people have had their say

will it either come into force or not. It was stated clearly:

after the people vote.

We’ll discuss the voting before the vote.

It’s a fake, but it was said nonetheless.

After that, people will sign, they’ll vote, and I...

will sign it. What happened in practice?

The Constitutional Court, in a closed session,

meets over the weekend and issues this,

decision saying that everything is perfectly fine.

There are many different amendments there, a huge

number of them, and the objections to them are absurd.

There are supposedly no issues with any of the amendments; everything is just fine.

Putin signs it instantly, just

immediately.

Not even taking time to think, not even pausing

for a moment, as if something were actually happening there, either

in our old man’s head

or, I don’t know, some kind of process is underway.

Because we can see, sorry, just how

important it is to get all this done as quickly as possible.

I mean, it gives the impression that he

read something like: the train is leaving, the plane is taking off,

it’s flying away — they need to

push this thing through immediately. And of course,

of course, it’s very upsetting and outrageous

that across the country, when the legislative

assemblies were voting on this,

as far as we could see, there was very little, well, any kind of

real resistance apart from Moscow.

No one even tried to challenge any of this. In

Moscow there were some genuinely great speeches.

Let’s look at Shcherbakova’s speech.

I’ll show you the deputy who, by the way,

incidentally,

also brilliantly mentioned Simonyan and this whole pack of

our parasitic characters, which provokes

extreme outrage at the fact that our people

are being treated as completely stupid, as if

they could be fooled this cheaply.

Having gotten carried away, the political technologists were in full

earnest convinced that, by force-feeding us all this, they had

already raised generations of brainwashed

consumers, and that people like Tessa, Margarita Simonyan,

Babayan, and the rest of those mischievous types

had already knocked out the last remaining brains in the older

generation. Let me remind you that we are not

addressing people who came to him not to

pay attention in that hall and hoping that they

are gravely mistaken. This is the cheapest kind of

con job, on the level of ‘what, are you too scared to challenge it?’

or ‘too scared to jump from the twentieth floor?’

It’s aimed at people who have completely

forgotten how to switch on and use

their mental faculties.

Deputies elected through Smart Voting

are doing a great job, and that’s why I count this as a plus

for Smart Voting, because even if

we weren’t able to outvote them across all

federal subjects (regions), the very presence of

such people — the kind who

annoy United Russia, who at least

can get to the podium and say something publicly —

is already very important, because

they already have to be taken into account. But there are very

few of them, because we devote too little time to

regional elections.

And we have regional elections coming up in

September, and already — I can see it, I talk

to people — ‘Guys, let’s do something about

Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Cheboksary, and so

on,’ and they say, ‘Good Lord, who cares

about regional elections?’ But this should

interest everyone. In practice, it is very

important and absolutely right to be involved in all this,

because if we don’t

do it, then there won’t be, there simply won’t be, people like this.

No one will be sitting either in

Chelyabinsk or in Novosibirsk, and that

means there will be no network

of resistance. Because as soon as

some really cool guys like that appear,

like deputy Bondarenko there — I often

show him to you here, in the Saratov Duma (regional legislature), in

the Saratov Duma.

Well, he has an enormous amount of

public support, and that means

practical opposition. We need to support exactly

these kinds of deputies and candidates.

Support them. We need to devote a great deal of

effort

to Smart Voting and campaigning. You may be sitting

in Moscow, but you can influence an election

in Chelyabinsk if you want to influence it.

So then, what happened next?

We saw that after

Putin signed all of this, the rhetoric changed

very sharply. Sorry that I’m

repeating a bit of what I said in

my video on the main channel today.

It came out today, and I was so struck by these words

from Kiselyov, when he said that

Russia is not viable. That is really

a major upgrade of everything

they had been saying before. Because after all,

before this, the narrative was that

our dear Russia is huge and wonderful,

it has always been great, future Russia

will be magnificent, the present is wonderful,

and the past is amazing — all that old

Pobedonostsev formula, I think, repeated

in different variations even now: a great

country needs a great leader. Now all of this

has turned into this: you’re told that in

fact the country right now isn’t all that

great, and it isn’t viable at all

without Vladimir Putin. That’s just — well,

an incredibly powerful few seconds. Let’s

watch Kiselyov: ‘held together with string,’ to put it mildly.

Let’s be honest: Russia without Putin

is not yet viable. Our political

system is unfinished and unbalanced.

There are 8,600 people

watching the broadcast right now. I hope they’re as

outraged as I am. ‘Held together with string’ — I mean,

it really gives the impression that there were

some smoking ruins lying around,

with naked ‘Papuan’ tribesmen running over them in the 1990s, and everyone

was walking around naked, and then Putin came and, with string,

stitched it all together. And now, for 20 years,

he’s been tying it all together, but it still...

haven't connected it until now, and so now

right now he is holding all of this together, and this

I think what was said is very important

by Kiselyov, because this will be the leitmotif

of everything that is about to unfold

next, the April 22 vote, and here I see

a question: "Alexei, why is there no

single position on the Constitution among

the opposition? Why not adopt a unified

position in public debates?" I don't know what

"show debates" means or who is showing them,

but here is a video, in this form, subtype

they showed it, debates took place—I'm not making this up, I

don't know what "show debates" are. Let's just

talk about it normally, and as for whether—I don't know

whether they will be in person, but in any case it is not

necessary, even remotely, because there are different

opinions, first of all, regarding what exactly

needs to be done about this on April 20, and I very

well understand that a huge number

of people are furious, they are outraged, they

are saying: yes, we will come and vote against it, and

it seems everyone around is saying: we will come and

vote against it. It's impossible otherwise, this is

outrageous, just look—they have shoved in

absolute nonsense: God, pensions, whoever

you like, and resetting Putin's terms, of course

we must come and vote. No,

people are saying this, and this approach is supported

package voting is one of the proposed

formulas for opposition action. Let's

look at this carefully, and from my point

of view, Putin understood perfectly well and

anticipated that the public reaction would be

exactly like this

If he had hoped that he would actually

receive the support of the majority of the population,

he would have held

a re-fe-ren-dum, just as

Lukashenko once did, and Nazarbayev as well

Well, everyone who extended their terms

held referendums, and there they

falsified them, yes, falsified those

referendums, but still, a referendum

is at least some kind of mechanism where you can

observe something

He is genuinely afraid, but he understands

that of course, with the help of the North

Caucasus, where there will be total

falsification, and with the help of the Volga region

—Tatarstan and Bashkortostan—

he might perhaps scrape together some kind of

required result, but he understands that in those

cities where it is hard to falsify the vote—

Moscow, likewise Novosibirsk, the whole

north, the northwest—there everything will simply

collapse, and all these cities will overwhelmingly

show that people do not want

Putin's term to be extended. That is precisely why

he reset not only his own terms, but also

effectively reset the entire voting procedure

itself. There will be nothing there for me to

vote for; it will not be possible there

to vote in such a way that

the will of the people could somehow actually be established

This isn't even me saying it; this is what

the Golos movement is saying, which, by the way,

has often sharply disagreed with me on

the question of debates, and regarding

a possible boycott, because I believe

that our opposition must be flexible

if there are real elections, we need

to participate in them; if the elections are fake, not

real elections, they should be boycotted, or we should stage

a voter strike, as we did

during the presidential election. Yet Golos

has always been in favor of participating in elections

I go to their site and I see a huge

headline saying that in this vote

it is impossible to establish the will

of the voters. And do you know what infuriated even

people at Golos? Well, they are, they are

very decent people, honestly, and there are many

people there who initially

supported Ella Pamfilova and believe

that I am being too radical, that one should not

go after the Central Election Commission so aggressively

—but the last straw was this

advertisement with our Sergey Bezrukov

Bezrukov, who is, well, a fine

actor—why is he getting involved in all this filth?

At the Central Election Commission they showed campaign material. What you

are about to see was made with the Commission's money, that is,

with your money—a campaign piece in favor of

the referendum. They claim that this

campaigning is not campaigning for the referendum—

sorry, for the vote—that it is

neutral messaging where they urge people

not to vote for

or against. Let's take a look.

between people. You must agree, it would be difficult

to communicate using only gestures

or sounds. Such metaphors, comparisons,

epithets, images—there are none in any language

in the world, which is why it is so difficult to translate

Pushkin's words into a foreign

language

And we speak this language, feel in it,

declare our love, notice things, tell stories

about the Russian language, and Turgenev (the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev) once

called it, in difficult days,

my support and my pillar:

the great and mighty Russian language. The Russian

language as support and a pillar

That is why I think it is so important

that the amendment to the Constitution of the Russian

Federation on the protection and preservation of the Russian

language be adopted

On April 22, the vote will take place

Don't miss it. It concerns all of us

[music]

So, in your view, was that neutral

messaging simply encouraging people to come to

the vote? Obviously not. It was

specific campaigning, a rather sly kind, in favor of

the Russian language. But what's wrong with that?

The Russian language really is

great; everything he said about Russian

The language issue really is being used to...

to lure people in: "Come on, let's go vote."

For the Russian language. But the Russian language on its own

isn't being offered separately. The Russian language comes

as part of a package deal with everything else: with God, with

same-sex marriage, with the priority of

Russian law

over international law, and with resetting

Putin's term limits. And that's why Sergei Bezrukov may

not be too worried about

having agreed to appear in this

advertisement. But even so,

what he did is absolutely shameful and

shameless, because Sergei Bezrukov

is campaigning this way not for the law, not for

the Russian language, but to get people to come

and vote for resetting Putin's terms,

and that is where the enormous lie lies.

A colossal lie and a colossal deception. I

hope that one day he will feel

very ashamed of it, and that everything there will be arranged

accordingly. And of course this simply

came out after I had already released

today's video, where I talk about that

old strategy of resistance. Because if

I had read Andrei Buzin's post

— one of the key figures

in the election monitoring movement — and everyone who

is involved in election monitoring

of course knows Andrei Buzin — he wrote

a post... Buzin has always been in favor

of clean elections, but here he writes

something that honestly leaves me not even knowing what to say.

Because do you know how they will determine

the number of people who

took part

in this so-called Putin vote?

Well, you might say: by the voter lists

or by the protocols. But usually

the protocol is posted on the wall, observers

fill it out, and based on that protocol

everything is then

recorded and the control ratios are checked.

Not this time. This time, the number

of people who voted will be determined by

the number of ballots lying

inside the ballot box.

Now, maybe if you have never

been involved in election monitoring,

this doesn't sound insane to you. But

guys, it really is insane.

Because the way the election process is currently organized,

and in general the main

barrier standing in the way

of falsifiers — the main barrier —

is that there is a polling station,

and a large copy of the protocol is posted there.

It says that at this

polling station, 1,700 voters are entered in the voter register.

Then they record that

such-and-such number of people came here —

800 people.

We gave them 800 ballots. So many

ballots were taken out later — 20 of them,

because of at-home voting.

There were another four ballots for some kind of

mobile voting, and so many

ballots were spoiled, so many

ballots were canceled, so many votes

were cast — all of it, yes, all these numbers

have to add up.

And that is the main, fundamental

safeguard. That is why United Russia

has to resort to complicated schemes — this whole

"carousel" operation, when people travel

— you've seen it many times — there is

a bus with 20 people in it, and they

go from one polling station to another.

They show some badge, and they are given ballots.

Then someone simply enters them under other people's names

in the voter lists. In other words,

it's complicated and difficult to carry out —

a kind of falsification that allows them

to add

100 votes for United Russia and Putin at each polling station,

or 50 votes,

which across a region and across the country adds up

to millions of votes. So this is the kind of

thing that happens in almost

all regions of Russia and gives them

a few extra percentage points. But this time they

have scrapped even that. Roughly speaking,

anyone can come in there —

a school principal, the head of the local housing services office,

some local United Russia people — and simply throw in

a whole stack of ballots.

The polling station may have 1,700

registered voters,

but suddenly 5,000 ballots are found there.

That's it — that means that many people voted.

Five thousand voted, and of them 4,500

voted for Putin. That's all.

And there are no observers. The most interesting part is that

observers are effectively banned.

The only observers will be from the Public Chamber

— that is, effectively from the state itself.

On top of that, it will go on for several days,

and Putin has already announced that there will also be

at-home voting. So in reality

it is absolutely impossible to ensure that

your votes are counted. And of course I

also want to go along with everyone else and

simply, as a political statement, vote

against it.

And in fact, you can go

and vote — but at this point it no longer

has any significance. There will be no real battle here

for the result, because everything loses

its meaning.

There is no oversight there. You can go

and vote — just don't be upset

that your vote will not be counted, because

it will not be counted. Therefore, our main

attitude toward this vote

must be one of non-recognition. In the previous

program I said it, in the video I said it, and I will say it

again: we do not recognize this procedure.

This is a real fake. This is no way to do it.

to hold elections, and Putin, having refused

to hold referendums, having started holding

this thing, this whole thing, this vote

he is simply showing in advance that

he is losing the referendum, and so this whole thing began

what is very interesting about this vote is that for the Kremlin

it does not matter how you vote, but what matters is that

they do not understand that not everything can be fixed, but for them

it is very important that you show up, so

right now they are simply sending me from everywhere

the same campaign guide over and over, and it is being handed out

to doctors, and distributed in schools, in the EMERCOM (Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations),

everywhere, to all state employees, sending instructions on how

they are supposed to campaign, and send it to me because

at some point my surname is mentioned there. It is funny, there

is a guide on how to bring people

to this very vote, and in

particular there are different groups there

of people, how to campaign to active people, how

to campaign to patriotically minded

citizens, how to campaign to loyal

and disloyal ones. As for patriotically minded

citizens,

they are to be persuaded as follows

the suggested message is this: right now Ukraine too,

Poland,

Navalny, and anyone else can dictate

to Russia what it may and may not do

and punish it for invented transgressions

by exploiting legal loopholes left behind many years ago

through legal loopholes. It is very

funny that, according to this nonsense, Russia is now being

manipulated by Ukraine, Poland, and Navalny

but a new constitution must be adopted, and then

of course Vladimir Vladimirovich

Putin will receive into his hands a sword

of legend with which he will drive off Navalny,

Poland, and Ukraine

and then Russia will be able

to make decisions independently. And for

active citizens, the following

slogans are proposed

A new constitution without authoritarianism

and permanent rule. Want Putin

to leave?

I am voting for the constitution. So, basically,

United Russia is literally sitting there writing

a guide on how to lure in people like you

to this vote. Want Putin

to leave? Come vote. And there are lots

of different ones there

there they say that Putin has achieved a great deal while in

the office of president for the country, and for

pensioners the proposed message is this: we all

remember how we lived in the 1990s (the turbulent post-Soviet decade): humiliating

poverty, unemployment, hungry elderly people

blah blah blah, come to the vote on April 22

and, by the way, this is being written to us by

a man who in the 1990s worked in

the Saint Petersburg mayor's office, that is, he was one

of those who created those very 1990s with

their humiliating poverty, unemployment, and

hungry elderly people. But now they

with all sorts of slogans want

to drag people in. Why do they want to drag people in?

Because they will not fake the result, but

if everyone around you is saying that

they did not go, and you yourself see where it will be

held, it will be located

in your shopping mall

it will be located in your school, and they can of course

tell you as much as they want

something like 70 percent

of people came and voted, but if you do not

see people actually going, then you will not

believe any of it. That is why they very, very much need

turnout, because, well, on top of that, people's mood

is changing radically. What struck me

this week

was the singer Trofim, that is, the singer Trofim,

Sergei Trofimov, Sergei Trofimov, Sergei

Trofimov gave an interview to the newspaper Sobesednik

and said

the following words

A man who can barely stand on skates and

yet scores ten goals, or who dives

with scuba gear for the first time and finds

Greek amphorae, may think all of that is

real, but reality, sadly, is quite different

It is a pity that the citizens of the country will have to pay

for this illusion, a country that is driving

along a dirt road

while anxiously peering into the rear-view

mirror

Well said by Sergei Trofimov, the singer and

musician. But let us just look at the video

that Sergei Trofimov recorded in 2012

Vladimir Putin is a man who

can correct, while in office, his own

mistakes. We are not choosing a tsar,

we are choosing a manager to whom the reins

of governing the country will be entrusted. I understand that he is

a man of his word, a man whose duty

as a Christian

and as a citizen of Russia is to correct the situation

in the spirit of social justice

I expected decisive steps from Vladimir Vladimirovich

[music]

I really do not want to take a jab at the singer

Sergei Trofimov, and I think that he

said all this absolutely sincerely and, apparently, genuinely

to Sobesednik, but obviously

sincerely, I fully allow for that, that in

2012 that was the case. I just do not really

understand how in 2012 one could

vote for Putin and support

him after the crackdown on Bolotnaya (the Bolotnaya Square protest), after

the falsifications in the 2011 elections, well

and support him while saying, we are not

choosing a tsar, but a manager. And now this

manager is telling all of us, including

the singer Sergei Trofimov: man, after all you

were choosing a tsar, and there will be no more elections, only

a nationwide vote. Come

And even loyalists, you see, people like that

who were official campaign surrogates are already

saying: how much longer can this go on, really, how much longer

can this go on? The man is genuinely just losing his mind

but he is maniacally determined

to remain president, so of course

the Kremlin. Putin may not feel it himself—Putin

is already completely out of touch somewhere up there—but the Kremlin and

everyone else feel it very well,

these moods, and they do not like any of it.

That is why there is no referendum, and that is why—

Daniels asks: “Alexei, what do you

think? Is this the same Daniil

or are there really that many people named Daniil?”

People keep asking me whether there will be large-scale

ballot stuffing like there was in 2017.

You cannot even say there “will be,” Daniil, because

everything that happens on April 22

will be one continuous fraud, as I already

said. There is no oversight mechanism there

whatsoever. They will simply pull out a stack

of ballots. Well, it is just hard

to explain this to people who have never

worked as election observers at a polling station. If

you have been an observer at a polling station, you

know what a complicated system there is

for counting votes, which does not always

work if people are trying

to falsify the results. But in principle it

is designed fairly well if everything is

done honestly, and now they are simply

abolishing it completely. So it is not a question of

there being many votes and how many of them

will be stuffed in; it will be a huge pile of fake votes

with just a few real ones mixed in. That is exactly

what it will be. Viktor Medved asks: “Alexei,”

“How, in practice, will your refusal to recognize

the vote on April 22 be expressed?”

That is exactly how it will be expressed: I

do not recognize this vote. I do not recognize it.

I think you, Viktor, should say

exactly the same thing. And when, sooner

or later—after all, it cannot go on forever,

Putin will not rule indefinitely—there is

a normal parliament in Russia, and this will be

the main thing that not only

the

opposition, but any politicians at all, will say in

their platforms.

They will have to say: of course, we

will repeal this, because all of it was

a sham. And as soon as a new parliament

is elected, you do not even need

to go through any procedure or hold any

popular vote at all.

We simply say: all of this is null and void,

none of it exists—neither these new

powers for Putin, nor

any resetting of term limits. Besides,

of course, we already consider Putin’s

power illegitimate,

but after all this, his bid for yet

another term is simply absolutely

illegal, absolutely illegitimate. It is

essentially a coup d’état, a seizure

of power. 363,000 people on the live stream

—I am being told that we already have 3,100

sponsors, those wonderful people who

click the button below, right

under the little screen you are watching me on.

By the way, one of the

very noteworthy things, I think, which the

Kremlin is also watching, is the reaction

from the North Caucasus. You know how the North

Caucasus works: whenever you

talk to people from the North

Caucasus—really, with anyone

from the North Caucasus—they all, you know,

curse the authorities in the strongest terms, but when it comes to any

initiatives from the authorities,

the local bosses vote as instructed. Look at what

is happening in Ingushetia.

It is very much a typical North

Caucasus system—the North Caucasus is the North Caucasus.

And now, there, the council of teips

(Ingush clans) has issued an official statement saying:

“We are not going to vote for your damn

Constitution.” It literally says there,

“Why should the people vote for

constitutional amendments that are not

being implemented? We are tired of the authorities’ hypocrisy.”

That is being said by the head of the council of teips,

that is, by the very people who have always

supported the authorities—these are the kind of

people who, in effect, are not usually against

them. And after this statement, an administrative case was immediately

opened against him. By the way,

for what? Does he no longer even have the right to say

that he will not vote? They opened

administrative cases there against many

people, and criminal cases were initiated against some. But

officially, the elders gather

and say: “We will not vote for this.”

This shows that grassroots

discontent is building very strongly.

It is breaking through where no one expected it. I

think that Putin and the presidential

administration, not least of all,

did not expect that in Ingushetia anyone would

say anything on this issue.

But it is happening, and that is why

they are not holding a referendum. That is why

there will be this absolutely total

falsification. I saw many questions:

“Alexei, was it really the case that…” Right now, I

cannot see it on the screen anymore, but the question was

something like: “Do you think Putin

deliberately timed this

nationwide vote to coincide with the coronavirus

epidemic?” I do not think so.

But it seems to me that now, after an hour on air, I

want, toward the end of the broadcast, when more

people are watching, to say something that

I think is very important: what they

are doing now with this announcement of

the vote on April 22

is a real crime against everyone, and

against pensioners in particular. This

really hits me hard.

I urge all of you to think about this too

and to make them—really, we

must make them.

Of course, it would be better to postpone this altogether.

Or cancel it and not hold any vote at all.

But at the very least, it should not be on the 22nd

of April, because what will be done

would be a genuine crime.

It really looks like an attempt—

as cynical as this may sound, like some kind of dark

joke,

but nevertheless it is as if they want

to vote for Putin and at the same time

save on Pension Fund spending,

because many elderly people will simply

die after this. What is happening now

with the coronavirus—let's look at

the chart. We are told that there is very little coronavirus

in Russia right now. Looking at

the chart, it is indeed low, but we can see

that in those countries—please show

the chart Alexashenko is referring to—

there, you see?

The bars at the bottom are Russia, while these

curves that have shot

way upward are France and the U.S., where the situation

is much worse, especially in France. But

the gap is only 4 to 15 days. Our

bars are moving in exactly the same way as

those graphs, and in that sense we are being told

that the situation in France is terrible,

that the situation in the U.S. is alarming, while for us, so far, in terms of

the trend, unfortunately, the situation is exactly

the same—just 14 days later.

If the same pace continues, then we

will have as many infected people, as many dead, and as many

dying as Italy has,

as France has, and as the U.S. has. And how,

against that backdrop, can anyone hold

a nationwide vote, the whole point of which

is that many people gather in one room,

including elderly people?

You've seen how this works: there is a person sitting there with

the coronavirus, God forbid, and they hand this

grandfather or grandmother a ballot, and there they are

peering at it with their weak eyesight,

saying, 'Sonny, give me the pen.' That whole

pen has been licked, touched a hundred times,

they chat, take that grandmother by the arm, and

lead her over to the voting booth,

and of course infect her. The number

of infections will be simply enormous. One

member of an election commission will infect

hundreds of people that day.

One person from the election system—after all,

Putin said they would go door to door.

Great idea, right? Of course, not everyone who

goes door to door will be infected with this

virus, but if 500 people are going

door to door in your federal subject (region),

and 3 of them are sick, then they

will infect hundreds of people—and they will infect

whom? The elderly, those who have

an enormous risk of death, real

death. We are constantly told 3

percent, 2 percent, 0.7 percent, but

no one disputes that for elderly

people this is truly—imagine it like this:

four people are standing there, and one will be shot—that is about the same

probability. Let's listen to what Channel One (Russia's main state TV channel)

has to say about it. I'll stay in the

corner so you don't get banned. 'The population-level rate

is around 3 percent. However,

for a 30-year-old, the estimated fatality rate

would be 0.2 percent, while for a patient over

80 years old, it reaches 22 percent.

That is what our Chinese

colleagues are telling us.'

Today, you understand, today they are introducing

some new heightened-readiness

measures, and in every—I don't know, right now

every ten minutes we hear that this has been closed,

that has been closed, quarantine here, quarantine there,

and more quarantine measures need to be announced. I

know a lot of people—what should we call them,

corona-skeptics, perhaps?

People who think all this

is not such a dangerous disease, or those

who believe that these

restrictive economic measures

will do even more harm than the

coronavirus epidemic itself. Maybe that is true.

Maybe in a year we will realize that all of this

was too much commotion,

and that it was not actually that страшно. Maybe

that will be the case, or maybe not. But is it worth

taking the risk and testing that now, if we

really are seeing mortality among

elderly people at the level of 15 to 20

percent? That, that tells us

that we should not take risks, we should not

test it—we would be better off taking more

measures rather than fewer. And Putin—

look, at the beginning of the program I

said that he is acting almost like

a maniac over these amendments. That is why everything

is moving so fast, why the Federation Council (upper house of Russia's parliament)

and the regional legislatures immediately

and the Constitutional Court shamefully decide everything—he simply

runs and signs it all at once, even though he had promised not to.

They need this vote by

April 22. They tell him: coronavirus.

Then: we'll do it door to door. Whatever it is

that is driving him, whatever is tearing him apart to get this

done so urgently—we do not know. Maybe we will find out.

But the task now for everyone, regardless

of their political views,

simply because we are normal people and

we do not want to put at risk

our parents, our grandparents, and so

on, is simply to demand that they at

least postpone their idiotic vote.

Come on, they can wait. Good Lord, he has been in power for 20

years—he can wait a little longer before this

gets voted on. There really needs to be

some kind of major lobbying

campaign, and I think that of course— but

returning to the question of whether Putin deliberately timed

all this to coincide with his own—

with the coronavirus epidemic: of course not.

It is impossible to time something like that. But the fact is that

Now, speaking of conspiracy theories,

this is not a conspiracy theory at all. It is an absolute

fact that the authorities are now simply

lying on a massive, colossal scale about

what is happening, and of course we must talk about it.

This is not panic at all; it is

simply the reasonable thing to do. But let us

look at the simplest question: how many

people are being tested? If you try

to get tested for coronavirus, you will

never manage it. But when we look

at the data, we see that Russia is in one

of the top positions. In Russia,

there have supposedly already been

122,000 coronavirus tests. That is more than in the United Kingdom,

in France, in Australia, more than in the United States,

more than in many developed

countries combined. And yet no one

can actually get this test.

But that is simply a colossal lie.

An even more dangerous offshoot of that lie,

apparently, is that they are not detecting cases. But

look, literally just 10

minutes before going on air I saw this figure, so

I cannot show you the slide. In New York

today they carried out 11,000 tests and

identified

I think around a thousand infected people there. In

Russia, over the course of today, according

to the official figures, they supposedly carried out 9,000

tests and identified 50 people.

That looks unrealistic. But even if

we assume that is what happened,

that coronavirus somehow passed Russia by—no,

there is no such possibility.

But of course we do not believe that we

really conducted that many tests, because

you can ask any doctor, especially

a doctor who works in an

infectious diseases hospital: there are no tests, no reliable

tests. There is only this Novosibirsk

institute where these tests are sent,

half of them do not come back, and no one

understands how many false results they are producing.

There are no proper procedures. Now, when

we are told about South Korea,

that they tested a million people, and by the way

it was a very effective

method: it was absolutely comprehensive

testing there. People were tested by the thousands, by tens of

thousands. But this is what

it looked like. Let us see how

all of this looked in

Korea.

[music]

Kantora gave me people where she is, POV case

let the words, chapter 3, of a special system

except ramen, dictation, tip-top, Kuptsova

Olga Belova

giant usually use brain rent by

we will have mushrooms, integration of butterflies

region

at the entrance, trampling of the upper, in general

little sheep, onigiri, photo, fio6 of the market on

yoga, orderly, here

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[music]

The people who understood that clip best were those who

speak Korean. But even in English

everything was clear enough anyway. There,

right on the streets, they set up these

transparent booths on a mass scale. Inside each booth,

fully equipped, as you can see, in full protective gear,

there is a doctor. A person goes in there, and

without any direct contact, they are given

tests. Tens of thousands of people went through these tests,

and millions of people

saw that this was mass testing.

They did the same thing in Singapore, and now

Singapore, which quite effectively

resisted it and, as far as I

understand, remains one of the most successful

examples of combating

coronavirus. In Singapore, which is exactly

the kind of country that is highly vulnerable, with endless travel by

Chinese visitors,

a huge airport, traffic from all over

Asia, people constantly moving and interacting—

it should have been devastated.

Singapore should simply have been overwhelmed there

by coronavirus, but they have almost none of it there

because what did they do?

Mass, universal testing. Anyone

who wanted to could go and get tested.

For some reason, our doctors are now saying—

they often show this doctor who

heads the hospital in Kommunarka (a Moscow settlement known for its COVID hospital),

he seems like a normal enough guy, but

he has been told to keep repeating this to everyone:

why do you need to get tested? And he

tells every reporter: why on earth would you

go get tested for no reason? In other words,

mass testing is harmful, because

you do not have a fever, you do not have

symptoms, so why do you need it? It only

stirs up panic, according to them. But that

is complete falsehood and hypocrisy. What causes panic

is exactly the opposite, because

people do not understand.

There are many people among us

who are worried about vulnerable people. Even I,

for example,

I do not have a fever or anything, but I

for example cannot go visit my

parents, because they are

elderly.

Like many elderly people, they have health conditions, and I

am afraid to go. But probably if I

got tested and saw that I did not have

coronavirus—well, because after all

it can be present even without a fever—then maybe I

could go to my parents and

bring them groceries or something else, just

talk to them. But I am not going, because I do not

know. The same goes for this: say tomorrow you

have a fever, a runny nose, and then you are sitting there

not understanding anything. Of course you are immediately

in a state of alarm.

...like any normal citizen, all of you...

...have hidden away somewhere quite well, but you would still...

...prefer to know whether you do, in fact, have...

...the coronavirus right now or not, because...

...a lot depends on that: whether you should simply sit...

...quietly at your computer, or somehow...

...get treatment, stock up on things. But if you have...

...a chronic illness, maybe you would be...

...even more worried about it. In Singapore...

...they acted very clearly: they carried out mass testing, and...

...everyone they found was isolated, and they immediately rushed...

...to find out who had been in contact with whom. In...

...South Korea, what did they do? In South Korea as well...

...there are cameras everywhere, video cameras all over...

...everywhere, across all the cities, just like in Moscow. And in...

...Moscow, Sobyanin (the mayor of Moscow) is very proud that...

...they can identify all protest participants using these...

...cameras. In South Korea, they...

...used the cameras in order to...

...trace the contact circle of those who...

...had contracted the coronavirus. So, for example...

...a person got sick, and then they simply looked...

...using these AI-powered camera systems...

...which were configured to determine whom...

...this person had come into contact with somewhere, and then...

...they rushed to test those people. But overall...

...they carried out mass testing. In Russia...

...there is no mass testing at all. I’m sure...

...that you hardly know even a single...

...person who has taken a test and...

...actually received the test results.

Maybe you do know some, but they’re just...

...writing on Facebook.

They all write the same thing: “They took us away, we...

...don’t know anything, some kind of tests for...

...Selikha (?) will be ready in a week because...

...we sent them to Novosibirsk,” and at the same time they...

...are lying that they supposedly...

...conducted 122,000 tests. But that is simply a lie.

And it is precisely this lie that causes panic...

...because if they are lying about the number...

...about the number of tests, why are they lying?

It means they are hiding something.

It means they understand that the number of infected people is...

...much higher, and they do not want to...

...say it. That is the logical conclusion, and I am sure...

...absolutely sure that this conclusion is correct. They were told...

...because the vote on April 22...

...Putin wants to hold this...

...vote, and he will keep suppressing things and...

...lying about these statistics until...

...he gets it done. But after that...

...there will be an absolutely enormous...

...outbreak. Therefore...

...lying about this is simply criminal, and...

...keeping silent about it is criminal as well. In fact, there will be no...

...panic at all. But in all these...

...countries—in Singapore, in South Korea...

...and now in the United States—mass...

...testing is underway, and there is no panic. Sure...

...people go to stores and buy up toilet...

...paper and food products, but that is not...

...panic.

No one is running through the streets in terror, no one...

...is attacking people or snatching from some grandmother...

...I don’t know, a turnip or potatoes. It is normal...

...for people to go to stores and stock up...

...on food, because people were told: “Stay...

...home and don’t go out.” So people said, fine, they...

...are following that instruction in a disciplined way.

“All right, we’ll go to the store now...

...buy food, and then we’ll stay home.” But how else...

...are people supposed to act? So these...

...truly degenerate statements on...

...television, where they ostentatiously say...

...“Look how stupid these people are, they’re buying up all the...

...food.” No, they are not stupid people, they are...

...normal people. They were told, “Folks, stay...

...home, especially if you’re feeling unwell, stay...

...home.” Fine—but they still need to eat.

They went to the store, bought food, and went...

...back to their apartment. And our authorities—they...

...really are lying, they are stirring up panic, they...

...for some reason start fighting those who...

...buy food in stores. Let them...

...buy it—what’s the problem? If they say...

...that we have everything...

...fully supplied with food, then...

...there should be enough food. But this is just...

...endless, endless lying. They sent me...

...you know that we work a lot...

...with the Doctors’ Alliance trade union...

...and they sent this into the chat...

...a photograph showing how...

...coronavirus testing is being done in Perm.

Let’s take a look. And everyone there...

...is laughing, ha-ha.

Please show that picture. I’m reading it...

...and it says there that they are going to conduct...

...a bacterial culture. So I’m asking, basically, what...

...is wrong with this picture? Probably those of you...

...who studied biology better than I did...

...or know medicine better than I do, you...

...have probably started laughing too. And then...

...the doctors accordingly tell me: “Alexei...

...you should be ashamed of yourself, because...

...they teach this in the sixth grade at school: what the difference is...

...between a bacterium and a virus. Because...

...the coronavirus is a virus, and there really...

...the hospital’s chief doctor...

...not only that—this wasn’t in Perm, it was in Kurgan.

In Kurgan.

Please show it again. She really...

...writes: “Let’s carry out testing...

...for the coronavirus, and to do that we’ll perform...

...a bacterial culture.” In other words, with that...

...it is impossible to detect the coronavirus. But...

...it probably made its way into the statistics: they...

...said, “You know, we conducted...

...100 tests, we carried out 100 tests...”

...a bacterial culture. But with that it is impossible...

...to detect the coronavirus. And for...

...a person who works in medicine...

...this is, first, hilariously funny; second...

...it shows complete...

...incompetence on the part of the doctor; and third...

...it shows a gigantic system of lies...

...all across the country.

They carried out a bacteriological

bacteriological test, which

cannot detect a virus—that’s just

how it works, so it’s simply

endless. Plus there’s this endless

lying. It also feeds on

well, sort of thrives on just

the colossal, of course, incompetence

of chief physicians. They vary—there are some very

good chief physicians, and many

different good doctors—but in principle

a chief physician in Russia is

an administrative position where, more often

than not, the person in charge is someone who is very

interested in arranging

various deals

with drug procurement, and who always

salutes the head of the health department,

who in turn reports

to the deputy governor for

healthcare and social policy, and so

on. The system in the country is like the army.

They all steal a great deal; they’ve turned

healthcare into that, and they are ready to falsify

any statistics. Plus, I mean, if your main

thing—the thing you have to be

competent at—is stealing, then very many

of them are genuinely stupid. I was simply struck by

a speech in the Moscow

this speech, a public speech in the

Moscow City Duma by a deputy,

Sharapova, the head of an enormous

hospital. Remember when I was being held in a

special detention center and they poisoned me with something there?

I was hospitalized in that hospital, and

then they urgently discharged me on orders from the Interior Ministry

even though the doctors said I should not

be discharged, and they said it was

nonsense, that no one had poisoned him, he just had

an allergy. So, she is the chief physician

of that hospital and, at the same time,

a United Russia deputy in the Moscow City Duma.

It really is one of the hospitals—namely, Nina

Vinogradova.

A gigantic one. Here is what the chief physician says:

They’re sitting at a Moscow City Duma session. Let’s listen.

Three weeks ago I was at the Lavra (a major Orthodox monastery), and I

met with an elder and asked, Father,

what awaits us, what awaits our Russia? He

said: prosperity. And here I hear from this

podium what our Communists are saying about

the fact that

how, like astrologers, they are already claiming, they already

know what awaits us in 2024.

So listen to the elders, to what the elder

says.

At least do that. What are you, what are you,

some astrologers now? They know everything, apparently.

Thank you. Listen to the elders, to what the elder

says—he wants to save us here. Excuse me, but are you

really the chief physician of a huge hospital?

I mean, this is just some crazy woman

who is absolutely incompetent. She cannot

run an institution like that

in healthcare. But they are all like that there.

And so, of course, they will lie about

anything at all. And quite rightly, today

there was an address recorded to doctors—maybe by that

same medical trade union that

told doctors: don’t stay silent, guys, you

know that across the country people do not have

even basic protective equipment. Yet they

keep lying that we are fully prepared for

the fight against coronavirus. Go into any hospital

and ask: do you even have enough medical

masks? No, we don’t.

Especially in the regions, they fold gauze four

times and attach it with some kind of strings

or clips to their ears, because

maybe surgeons have some for going into

the operating room, but the rest of the staff

do not. And in any hospital it is obvious that in

a hospital, first and foremost, everything

must be arranged in such a way that none of the

staff gets infected

with coronavirus, because one infected

orderly or nurse can cause terrible

damage, and there must be guarantees that none of the

doctors will become infected. But they have no

protective materials at all. A short

excerpt from Vasilyeva’s address: All over the world

the new coronavirus is raging, while here in

Russia what is raging is “community-acquired pneumonia,”

and as usual, what is also raging here is the lies

of the authorities and the intimidation of medical

workers. Colleagues, you have been mobilized to

fight supposedly against community-acquired pneumonia,

and at the same time you are being forced

to conceal the real situation, to stay silent about

the lack of protective equipment.

You are being forced to wear, sew, and wash

gauze masks; you are not being supplied with protective

suits, putting both you and

our entire country at risk. I urge you to stop

going along with the authorities and their ambitions,

to refuse to work without

personal protective equipment and demand that it

be properly provided to you. It’s 2020.

People and doctors are being told: come on, there’s an epidemic

all around, coronavirus, my God, we’re all going to die,

so please take your gauze mask

and wash it.

And besides, this costs next to nothing compared

with the gigantic spending

of the state—if only on

propaganda campaigns, on

maintaining some, I don’t know,

your whoever, or Vladimir Solovyov—it’s

just pennies to buy this

protective equipment. But they don’t buy it, they won’t buy it.

Meanwhile, this whole propaganda gang

just squeals when they come across

doctors who do not want to stay silent and

who do not want to cover up all these

falsifications and manipulations of the statistics

on coronavirus. Solovyov here was simply

screeching, and by the way he released his latest

program on YouTube, apparently intending to...

The show is called Solovyov Live, and he

has a much more flamboyant, vaudeville-like style there,

a much more theatrical kind of program. What I mean is,

he of course shows

all sorts of clips there and discusses things in that format.

He was literally squealing when he mentioned

the Doctors’ Alliance union and called it now

— you’ll hear it yourselves in a moment — very close to

leading into yet another point.

At the same time, in the clip you’re about to hear

the voice of one young woman, and let me remind you that

she has protection — not just anyone, but a general.

A very intimidating structure from foreign intelligence

is covering for her — it’s simply that her husband’s father is one, so she can do anything.

And they call themselves

the leaders of the so-called Doctors’ Alliance.

They’re provocateurs too,

scoundrels, alarmists, liars, as Arturas Krivonos correctly writes.

Arturas Krivonos says, of course, they shouldn’t be

strangled, but brought to heel under the law, as

Artur Krivonos writes. Again, the Doctors’ Alliance

cannot be interrupted.

He isn’t outraged that some

doctors are being told to wash and reuse gauze masks.

He isn’t outraged by that — he’s outraged at people

who say, ‘Just buy proper

masks already,’ because yes, they don’t care

that people will die. Just imagine: a doctor,

an orderly, a nurse who, wearing this

gauze mask, gets infected accidentally

from an incoming patient and then goes on

to infect others.

She’ll spread the coronavirus through a hospital where

there are elderly people with chronic

illnesses — the very group with that

20 percent mortality rate. But this is just

catastrophic madness, and still

the day before yesterday

Danilkina from a municipality

in St. Petersburg simply posts

a photo. I look at it and you realize

that people should simply be jailed for this. Right now

the coronavirus epidemic has been officially recognized, and there is quarantine everywhere,

yet United Russia is holding a

concert for the 70th anniversary of Victory in the municipal district

Kommendantsky Aerodrom (a district in St. Petersburg).

They gathered a bunch of elderly people into one

room, put on a concert for them, gave them new

— apparently they were handing out some kind of

packages there, I don’t know, sausage or sprats — well,

give them that sausage or those sprats,

just send it to them in some way

so that these people, during quarantine

and during an epidemic — elderly people,

veterans — aren’t exposed to this. It’s genuinely disgusting. Are they

not afraid that one person there

who is infected will infect them all and that

half of them will simply die after that?

United Russia doesn’t give a damn. United Russia and

Putin want to hold their vote

before April 2, so this is not

alarmism at all.

It is absolutely right that every

one of us should specifically tell our own

elderly relatives, among others,

‘Don’t go, and be outraged

if this vote is held.’ It seems to me that

even the political aspect

is less important than the

medical one, because this is a crime.

They’ll also be driving people there; they’ll

be bribing and manipulating these

pensioners, luring them with food. They’ll

say, ‘Come, we’ll give you food,’ and

these unfortunate people will go there, to those

polling stations during an epidemic in order to

vote for Putin simply for

some can of green peas or something,

because they are poor, and this is simply

the most real, genuine

crime. 21:25 — our program has been on for almost an hour and a half.

Our program is on the air; 67 people are watching

live.

Well, speaking of poor people and a can

of green peas, I still can’t help but

say something about the many people in

Russia’s so-called middle class, because this

statement by Putin impressed

the entire country this week.

I was even just monitoring

the social media of various pro-Putin

oddballs — I’m curious what talking points

are being handed down to them and what they’re saying there — and even I

saw a certain amount of shock there because

Putin actually stated that in Russia, 70

percent are middle class, and that the middle

class includes those who earn 17,000

rubles a month (about 17,000 rubles, roughly equivalent to a very low monthly income by international standards). In other words, grandpa has completely drifted off

into outer space. Let’s listen to what he said about the middle

class — where they said it would be more than

half. Listen, so this is what ‘middle

class’ means.

If you think that the middle class means

living the way people do in France, Germany, or

the United States, then that does not correspond

to reality. The middle class is different in every

country. There is a corresponding

methodology.

The World Bank’s methodology is that

the middle class is calculated by the number of

households

or people whose incomes are one and a half times

higher than the minimum wage.

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We have a lot of people like that.

Our minimum wage is 11,280 rubles,

I think, this year, and average

salaries are much higher, so we have quite a lot of such people.

You hear how confidently he says

‘70 percent’ and ‘middle’

— mediocre class, really. But you know,

we have to proceed from reality

— or rather, not from reality, but from the World Bank’s methodology.

And the man understands perfectly well that this

will be seen by millions of people. How can you

tell millions of people, among whom there are millions

who are destitute — that is, people who are genuinely poor?

earning 17,000 rubles

someone who earns 17,000 rubles pays

then 6,000 rubles for utilities and housing services and

and then they’re not just counting every kopeck of

wages by Western standards, and they can’t buy

themselves anything — for them, if you earn 17,000

rubles and live in Moscow — or even in the regions — you

can’t afford to buy yourself a coffee and a bun for

lunch, and they understand perfectly well that they are

not middle class at all — they are very

poor people; they are already in the

lower end of poverty. He understands that

all this talk about the middle class — you

know, the World Bank has a methodology, and according

to the World Bank’s methodology, if we’re not lying

and just look at the reality, here in Russia

the middle class is not 70 percent — take away the zero,

it’s 7 percent. You can

just google it right now and see, but

7 percent is the real

share of the middle class in Russia. But

I mean, people are just juggling

numbers, and still have the nerve

to say — what is Putin’s logic here? We have

a minimum wage of 11,000 rubles

and the World Bank says that if you earn

70 percent more than the minimum

amount,

then you’re middle class. Well then just lower

the minimum wage to one ruble

and then, it turns out, 1.70 rubles

would count as middle class, and someone earning 5

rubles a month would be

insanely rich. I mean, this is

just absolutely, brazenly false and

hypocritical, based on first-grade

math. Any first-grader

understands that 17,000 rubles is not

middle class. Middle class is a person

who

can afford to buy things. Middle class means

a person who can save money. Middle

class is a person who says,

“I need boots,” and goes out and buys

boots. A person earning 17,000 rubles

cannot do that. Middle class is

a person who wanted to buy a TV

and bought one two months later, not on credit;

someone who wanted to buy a car and

bought one a year or two later.

That is not the majority of people in Russia, unfortunately.

That’s exactly why I saw that

one of the most popular tweets — I

even asked, if it’s available, please show it —

it said that if the price of

oil drops by another $10 per barrel,

then in Russia, middle class will include

literally anyone wearing pants.

That’s exactly how it will be. By

Putin’s logic, that’s exactly how it is. And

the question is: why is he saying this? When I

heard all this, I thought, well,

it’s obvious that he is interested in being

more popular, not less

popular, and clearly Putin is not interested

in having the whole country, including all

Putin supporters, discussing and getting outraged over this

statement about 17,000 rubles

being middle class. It’s just — excuse me — the man has

drifted off into parallel worlds, and

that’s not an exaggeration. Since what year has he

been a big boss?

Since the early-to-mid 1990s. This man

was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg

then moved on from there and joined

the Kremlin’s Control Directorate, then

went on to become head of the FSB (Russia’s security service)

and before that, by the way, he lived in

Germany, when the entire Soviet Union

was in utter poverty, while this guy was living in

Germany, where everything was much, much

better. I lived in a military town myself, somewhere

and there were some kids there whose

parents had not served abroad, and there were

a small number of kids whose fathers

came back from Germany, from Hungary, having

served in the Western Group of Forces, and of course

those were super-rich people. They had

Salamander shoes, they had a Madonna dinner set,

they had colorful wrappers

from chewing gum — other kids didn’t have any of that. And

Putin, in fact, has been living for 30 years

the life of

a high-ranking nomenklatura official (Soviet-style ruling elite), and in that

sense, the gap

between him and any ordinary

person is simply astonishing

and colossal. Still,

even a deputy mayor in the mid-1990s

of the country’s second-largest city after Moscow — this

was a man sitting in an office with

a line of petitioners outside it,

in St. Petersburg’s city hall, where they stole

on a huge scale. Even back then they were

Putin, I think, was already

a millionaire by then, because that whole

gang under Sobchak (Anatoly Sobchak, St. Petersburg’s mayor at the time), of course,

were super-corrupt people. And

basically, all of them — Sechin,

Miller, and Dima Medvedev — they all

remained. So ever since those times they have

simply been living in some other universe. This

is, by the way, perfectly illustrated by

the current head of St. Petersburg, Beglov

I mean, who is he, really? Just

some kind of minor

ridiculous mustached man, pretty insignificant,

but even for him

they stage an entire little performance. Look, even

for some basically insignificant

governor, whose political weight is far less

than governors had in the 1990s,

when governors had real powers — he goes into a

store

and talks to a woman. Let’s watch.

From

so that

no

Tell me.

Well, there doesn't seem to be anything interesting so far.

Some pathetic Beglov came into a

store and chatted with this woman.

The woman was planted; she was immediately

exposed. She turned out to be an actress

from some TV series, and it turned out she was the mother of

Beglov's security guard. Good Lord, even for him

they managed to arrange some lousy staged footage in a

store, showing them buying something there,

some pasta, with a planted person. And for Putin,

these planted people have been around for 20 years already.

He doesn't see anyone except

planted people. Every time he—well, you've

seen plenty of those ridiculous photos

where he's meeting with some fishermen or

ordinary lumberjacks or just regular people

who, supposedly, surround the church—it's all

some kind of extras. All these people are, well,

I mean, it's just absolutely, absolutely

all staged. And because of that, he—well, he

has completely lost touch and is somewhere totally

detached from reality. That's exactly why, in that same

interview, the guy first

said that in Russia

70 percent of the middle class lives on 18,000 rubles (about US$200)

a month, and then he starts talking about how in

France—well, in France, basically, in

France things are supposedly very bad. Let's listen to a clip

about how things are in France.

He didn't want to increase incomes—like in

France. Well, look at what's happening there.

All right, and then there are these constant

protests—entire sectors

of the economy stop functioning during these

riots. One person was killed, many

were injured, eyes were shot out

by rubber bullets. Nonsense. Is that what you

want? I don't think so. But the point is,

in France, people came out into the streets.

Macron made a move, then backed off,

he reversed course. Well, all right,

I don't know—was that good for the French people? I think yes.

Though I don't mean to advocate

it. First of all, nothing substantial

changed. They were discussing pension

reform—France was also carrying out

a pension reform, and Macron backed down.

There's nothing good about that either.

No, but in France the average salary is 251,000 rubles (about US$2,800)

and this guy, completely seriously,

says there's nothing

good about France, because he thinks

a good country and a bad country are not defined by

the fact that here people get 17,000 and there it's 251,000.

So, well,

both of us still think it's better

to live in a country where the average is 251,000 rubles (about US$2,800),

rather than one where the 'middle class' lives on 17,000. But Putin

seems to think a good country is one where

the people stay quiet, where if anyone goes out

into the streets, no decisions

get reversed. In France, the authorities are forced

to yield.

Of course, in his view, there's nothing good about that. Fine, and

here it doesn't matter that it's 17,000, and he

really does think that. And he thinks that

we think so too—that a good country is one

where the master and the tsar order everyone around.

Because, again, because

with the ice-cream seller, it was the same story, because

back in 2017 he came

to the MAKS air show (a major Russian aviation exhibition) and saw

that same ice-cream vendor.

There were lots of people around.

He went to buy something for himself.

And then two years pass, and Putin again

goes out among the people. He wants to talk

to ordinary people, and there's that same simple

woman again. Two years later, he

walks up to her, and the team sees that

it's the very same person, the very same

ice-cream seller. It's all just so absurd.

It has turned into a clown show. But when

this goes on for one year, two years, three

years—when it goes on for 20 years straight, and before

that you were still some kind of

untouchable big shot, a deputy governor,

director of the FSB (Russia's security service),

some very rich man who

moves around with security, with an official car,

and an official apartment,

you really do simply lose touch with

reality. I'm just saying this outright: the 70

thousand people watching this live

can see that he has, of course, completely lost touch with

reality. And, by the way, you can see it very

clearly in those moments when he

can't always be

surrounded only by accomplices, and when he finds himself

somewhere there are actual

real people. He starts, rather comically,

discussing salaries with these people and

trying to prove that their salaries are actually

a little higher than they really are.

Let's look at his meeting at a

factory. 'On average?' 'About...'

'At the enterprise, the average is around 90,000.'

'Well, not exactly.'

'Our average is a bit higher.'

'HR says 70,000.'

'HR would know.'

You see? That's how it all works.

So he says, 'Well then, comrade, tell us

the average.' And apparently at that very moment the man got flustered,

the performer who was supposed to

play the role of a worker, and he says, '30–40, you understand?'

How do you get from 30–40 to 90? Exactly. And he probably

walked away from there thinking, 'What a

stupid woman—she doesn't know that actually

the average salary at the

enterprise is, of course, 90,000 rubles (about US$1,000). She simply

doesn't understand how it all works.' Even though

30–40 thousand is actually fairly good

30–40 thousand is twice as much as

what a person who is supposed to belong

to the middle class gets.

Smart Voting—none of these people, they don't...

They will never step aside on their own; they can only be pushed aside.

They can be removed in different ways—through rallies and so on.

There is a wide range of things that need to be done.

People need to campaign, but they have become so detached from reality

that they seriously

believe this internal idea that

that

17,000 rubles a month is the middle class, and that at any factory

people earn 90,000 rubles, and that the ice cream maker should always

be the same one—that this is normal, that

you can simply walk into a store and

run into your security guard’s mother by chance, and that

a photo with you has already

become the very essence of this government. They will never leave on their own.

So they must be fought.

Let’s

do it with all our strength. Thank you

very much to everyone who watched my

rather long livestream. See you

next Thursday. Don’t call Nenasheva by that name.

And don’t forget to click the button

to sponsor the channel. Thank you very much. Bye.

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