United Russia members are being pushed around in the Moscow City Duma, the FBK is suing Putin, and Rogozin’s cosmic riches

[music]

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

That means we are live on air

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

Alexei Navalny.

Or, as the man supposedly hatching plans for bloody

protests—that is what the Kremlin

media called me this week. I really am nurturing

some plans, and if you are nurturing some too,

then nurture them together with me—please send

your questions, comments, and

so on via Twitter with the hashtag #Russia

OfTheFuture. They will be shown to me here, and I will

read them out. I wanted to begin with the topic of

the falsification of history. You know, lately this topic has

also been troubling me lately,

just as it has been troubling Vladimir Putin, because both he and

the entire Russian government—just look at what

Yarovaya is saying—

they are outright obsessed with erecting some kind of

barriers against the falsification of history,

because villains all over the world,

in the West first and foremost, are apparently doing nothing but

thinking about how to falsify history,

especially

the history of our wonderful little Russia,

or of the Soviet Union. Heaven forbid they

do something wrong over there, or cast doubt on our

greatness. Falsifying history—there is

criminal liability for that. Remember, they wanted

to introduce it, and even now there is criminal

liability, or at least it is being planned,

for denying the role of the... and so on. Well then,

they really are so concerned about

the falsification of history. They even started giving

Putin—let's watch for twenty-one seconds

to see how personally concerned he is: "Unfortunately, the most

sacred things sometimes become the object

of speculation. Of course, none of this is new.

This is not the first time we have seen and heard it. We

have repeatedly encountered a selective

approach to history in service of political

expediency.

But now these processes have taken the form

of a truly aggressive campaign."

A selective approach to history in service of

political expediency—an aggressive campaign has now begun,

says Vladimir Putin,

and that is exactly what is happening

right now. This is actually not even

a minor thing, but an important one that shows

quite clearly that the real

falsifiers of history are in the Kremlin.

The point is that a big book was published some time ago,

a large book about the sporting achievements

of the sports society

Spartak, and in general the sporting achievements

of our country. And

the authors of this book included in it, because it was related to

the Spartak sports society,

Spartak,

the triumphant—without any irony—

triumphant victories of the great Soviet

and Russian chess player Garry Kasparov.

And then, just like that—gone. They cut it all out of the book.

So they literally falsified

history. Come on, guys, really—

you cannot erase words from a song; real

history is what it is.

Garry Kasparov now criticizes Putin, and

criticizes him quite harshly, but even so,

he is in fact

—and probably no one would argue with this—

the greatest living chess player,

the greatest chess player on planet Earth

to have lived in our time. And he is real—

he is right here, he speaks Russian,

language,

he has a Russian passport, so you can

touch him, you can talk to him,

he publishes books about chess,

some computer programs, he

—remember—

played against all kinds of supercomputers and

beat one once, then lost the second time. So,

Garry Kasparov is an incredibly great

chess player, truly an outstanding

figure—well, as a chess player, super-mega-extra

great, and part of our history, actually. We are

supposed to be proud of that. But they just walked up and

cut it out. Why? Because right now

Garry Kasparov does not like Putin. And yet

let's look at 1985, at how he was

honored after his victory.

It really was a triumph, and it was our victory.

Why should we cut that out now

simply because Putin does not like it,

because some people do not like it? Here, they love

making films about how, say, in 1962

in a semifinal we almost scored there,

or some marvelous puck

flew into the net in 1983, and in some year

we broke through or won something, and to this day

everyone loves remembering how at the

World Cup we played Yugoslavia, or

in Yugoslavia—well, I am very into

football,

but they chew that over endlessly. And here,

you simply beat everyone outright,

basically. They were competing at the top level:

Karpov and Kasparov, two of our people, one

of them won, and the whole world watched and said,

"Wow, these Russians are amazing." And now

we are supposed to forget it? Falsifiers—

real falsifiers and falsifiers

of history.

Which once again, of course, shows us that

Putin and all this government, in essence, do not care at all about

the country or its heritage.

They could not care less, even though this is part of our

heritage, and we must not hand it over to

these crooks and scoundrels. Let us see

how this whole

book story develops; quite a serious

scandal has flared up. And really,

there is no answer to it. There he is, Kasparov—he

really is a great athlete there,

and it is impossible to cut him out. Let us see what happens.

what they will do and how they will

wriggle out of it. You’ve probably heard that

today we filed a lawsuit against Vladimir

Putin. When I say “we,” I mean

the Anti-Corruption Foundation as an organization,

me, the founder of the Anti-Corruption

Foundation, and more than 10 people,

employees of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. There

is a long video about this on our

channel, Navalny LIVE. Let’s

show a minute of it as a reminder.

Right now, lying on the table in front of me,

is a document. It’s an ordinary lawsuit. You’ve

seen dozens of them. What makes this one unusual is one

name of the defendant.

That defendant is the President of the Russian

Federation, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Our constitutional rights have been violated,

and we intend to defend them. We are filing

a lawsuit against Putin because we believe it is precisely

this offended man with his lips tightly

pressed together

who is guilty of the largest political

repression case of the past decade.

The FBK case is an attempt

to shake a fist and a petty act of revenge

by the president for our anti-corruption

investigations, and an illegal

attempt by the president to hold on to power

in the country by criminal means. The President of Russia

directs and oversees the activities

of the Investigative Committee, so the attack on

FBK

is the president’s direct responsibility.

Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Our rights and freedoms have been violated:

the constitutional right to association,

to form trade unions, and to

disseminate information. We demand

that the FBK case be closed. The Constitution must

be observed. Stop puffing yourselves up and

pursing your lips in offense. Do your

job the way we do ours.

Follow the laws and the Constitution the way

we do. That was recorded in one take back then,

those heartfelt words about

“follow your own Constitution.” Why did we

do this? You can hear the reproach:

“Well, this is just a political gesture, guys. How

can you possibly sue Putin?”

It is, in a sense, a statement, not

just a legal act, of course.

It is a statement, but it is also very definitely

a legal matter. In America, people sue

Trump, and sometimes they win, and

lawsuits are filed against him there.

Legislatures, judges, and

prosecutors themselves initiate certain

cases. In particular, when Trump was in

office, his decision to ban entry

and restrict the admission of Muslim

migrants was overturned

by the Supreme Court because people

sued over that Trump decision, and it

was canceled. In the beautiful Russia of the future,

people will be able to sue the president and

apparently win against him in court. And we, we

act as though we are already in the beautiful

Russia of the future. After all, we

stand for the law, we act according to

the law. And really, who is organizing these

searches? Well, of course they don’t like us.

Bastrykin doesn’t like us, Chaika doesn’t like us,

none of those sitting in the Kremlin likes us,

that’s obvious. But the order to organize

all of this, obviously, came from Putin. Putin

directly, under the law,

organizes it; he is in fact the chief

boss of the Investigative

Committee. So we want to put on record

that we accuse him. And the amount

of lawlessness in this case is simply

enormous—these insane searches,

seizures, they come and take things away from people, from

us too, and

then there is the designation of us as a “foreign agent” (a Russian legal label for organizations deemed under foreign influence). In

court, the Justice Ministry came in and said, yes, foreign

agent. We said, well, show us the document—what

foreign money, exactly, did we

receive? They said, the judge has been shown

a certain memo, here it is.

Please take a look. But no, we won’t

let you photograph it, we won’t give you the memo.

Everything is written there. The judge looked at

this memo, which we were not allowed to see, and said:

yes, yes, yes, I recognize you as foreign agents.

Of course, it’s all part of one package. This

case against FBK, which consists of

all sorts of these fabricated

money-laundering charges that were publicized,

the foreign-agent designation, and so

on—of course it was initiated by Putin.

Putin chaired the meeting

where all these decisions were made.

They were adopted there.

And today there was a funny photo.

Zhanna—well, not funny, really, but striking—

Zhanna, the wife of Ivan Zhdanov, director of FBK, went to

an interrogation. The director’s wife was summoned for

questioning, and she photographed this

remarkable document. It’s called a roadmap,

a roadmap for the investigation in the

criminal case against the director of

FBK, Ivan Zhdanov—a whole roadmap.

All these roadmaps were approved at

a meeting where Putin was present. Putin

is directly involved in this, and we are

directly bringing our claims against him. And

sooner or later, this will be investigated.

This is very important to us. We are doing it,

among other things, so that, of course, people do not

forget. We’re doing it because, well, otherwise

it all starts to feel routine: everyone’s accounts are being drained,

cards are blocked, but somehow we’ve

been living with this for several

months already, God knows how, and it’s like, well, let

people go on thinking—even our supporters,

even you may think, well, it’s all somehow become normal.

Navalny is doing fine there, sounding upbeat.

He’s rattling away on air, so that means everything is fine, but

we’re fine, everything is fine with us, we’ll keep talking,

keep talking, keep releasing investigations,

keep putting out investigations, and of course we

will become even stronger.

And we will, after we get out of

this situation—or even if we don’t and remain

in it, we’ll still grow stronger. But

all the same, we still need your support.

We still want you to keep

talking about all of this. So, well, I have

a question from Alexei: tell us more about

the lawsuit against Putin you mentioned on air—it’s just not very

clear what the mechanism and the goals are. Look,

the mechanism is very simple. Under

the law, we have the right to demand recognition

that actions or inaction are unlawful.

There is a law on the Investigative Committee,

and there are constitutional provisions under which

Putin is the guarantor of the Constitution. If across the whole country

there is a completely unprecedented,

unprecedented in scale number

of searches—hundreds at once—then Putin,

as guarantor of the Constitution, should say:

what is going on here? These searches, this

money-laundering case—

you cannot open a case under such a charge if there was no

underlying crime from which the funds

were supposedly laundered. This whole case is absolutely

fabricated. Besides, why are they taking

phones away from random grandmothers in villages

and so on? That is

completely lawless. So as

guarantor of the Constitution, Putin should say

to the prosecutor, to the head of the Investigative Committee,

to stop it. He does not do that—that’s first. And

second, we can see that the Investigative

Committee is organizing all of this, and Putin, under

Article 2 of the law on the Investigative

Committee,

is effectively its de facto head.

He directs the work of the Investigative Committee,

and in that sense

the mechanism is very clear: we demand

that his inaction be recognized as unlawful,

and we demand that

his actions be recognized as unlawful. We are ready

to present

evidence in an independent court.

Whether they accept the claim or not, we’ll

see. But as I wrote today in my

post,

under him, they just accept

claims from some noodle shop, damn it, some shabby restaurant

in Armenia, where some taxi company shows up and

says, you know, let Navalny

and Sobol both pay compensation there

because people would have eaten more noodles that day

otherwise, but instead, supposedly, people

lost their appetite because of the rallies, and we

have to pay them all. This is

absolutely unlawful nonsense, and yet they accept those claims.

So they ought to accept ours too, at least a little, because

among this whole flood of lawsuits,

ours is actually the most reasonable one. Viktor

Medved asks me: Alexei, can

Putin in any way respond to

your suit? Viktor, well, let me say this:

please understand, over the course of

his whole time in power, has Putin ever

responded in any way to even one of our

complaints? I think, of course—I’m sure

that Putin will pretend that nothing

is happening, and that the court will try to throw out

our lawsuit. Remember, at one point we filed

an exactly similar, very clear and straightforward

lawsuit when Putin, by his personal decision,

allocated a cash subsidy that

benefited his son-in-law Kirill Shamalov.

That is a direct conflict of interest under the law.

We said that Putin cannot do that,

that it is illegal, and in exactly the same way our

lawsuit was not accepted. Putin pretended that

nothing was happening. The entire press wrote about it,

everyone was interested, well, because

it really was illegal: he had effectively

signed over, given, essentially, to his

son-in-law, if I remember correctly, about a billion

dollars. Putin did not respond in any way, and here

he will try not to respond either. But the fact that they do not

respond to our investigations does not

mean that we should stop doing them. All of this

goes into a folder, as they say.

They said I was supposedly nurturing plans for

bloody protests. Sooner or later,

all these files of ours,

they are part of what we are building. And it is

not bloody at all—just absolutely

within the law. But all the same, we are not going to

drop any of this. And I also want to say a few more words about Putin,

because it has become so great and

funny—just hilarious—to watch him.

We are simply going to get

enormous enjoyment over the course of his

remaining

years in power. Quite possibly there are

still quite a lot of them left, unfortunately.

But that depends on you and me. Still,

I guarantee it will only get funnier and

funnier, at the very least because

it’s all just running out: the guy has been in power so long

that he has genuinely forgotten what

happened ten years ago, fifteen years

ago, and the people around him have forgotten too. And

besides, the vocabulary and the number of

political ideas they have are

limited, so now they’re simply starting

to say the same things over and over in circles, hoping

that everyone has forgotten they were saying this

10 years ago or 15 years ago.

But the internet is the internet—it forgets

nothing. This week, for example,

it was just funny: it’s 2019, and right now there’s the forum

“Russia Calling!” (a Russian investment forum), this regular forum

that Putin always attends, an economic

forum where he talks about his breakthrough

economic ideas—his main thing, so to speak.

a platform where he says something very

important from an economic standpoint. Let’s

watch. 29 seconds. The most important thing

that Russia must do—what

key structural changes I mean. We

talk about this often and at length, but

unfortunately, so far we are moving forward—and this needs

to be said openly—we are moving forward

slowly so far, and this is a serious challenge

that we must respond to.

First and foremost, the Russian government, our

business community, must achieve

radical shifts in increasing

labor productivity on the basis of

modern advanced technologies, simply

qualifications, and new competencies, because

what is the most important key task?

Raising labor productivity, and

he says every phrase very clearly,

you can see he has these cue cards, and on them

the thesis is written in large letters: increasing

labor productivity and machine

time. This takes us six years back

to the same forum, in this very tower,

the Russia Calling! forum, 2013. So what

is Vladimir Putin demanding?

And this is where the good news, so to speak,

as the saying goes, comes to an end. At the same time,

we lag behind developed economies by more than two times in

terms of

labor productivity.

Such a gap between the level of consumption and

efficiency is undoubtedly dangerous.

Living off natural-resource rents at the expense of

future generations—unearned

prosperity. Labor productivity

is everything to us. We instructed the government.

Years passed, six years passed, and nothing

changed. And before that he was demanding

labor productivity, and he’ll demand

higher labor productivity again,

again in another six years,

if he remains in power. That’s all he does—demand it

an endless number of times.

If you just google right now “Putin

demanded an end to rising gasoline prices,”

you’ll just laugh, because once a

year, or once every two years at the very least, he

resolutely demands of himself—Putin

demands an end to the unjustified rise

in housing and utility tariffs. He has been demanding this constantly for 20

years in a row, and it gets funnier and funnier,

because, well, okay, there are things like

that which the public, in principle, wants—

to stop gasoline prices from rising.

But even things like

labor productivity, or whatever

macroeconomic decisions—everything

has already been demanded many, many times, a lot

has been said about it, and now all he has left

is to repeat himself. More than that, the project

and those magnificent projects that

were announced with such enormous fanfare and

started being announced a second time in 2006.

Remember how some time ago literally

every TV channel was broadcasting that

at last, from Krasnoyarsk Krai (a region in Siberia)

to Tuva there would be a railway? In 2011,

Putin hammered in the ceremonial spike and launched the construction.

Vladimir Putin launched the construction

of the Kyzyl-Kuragino railway. It is a

strategically important line. Its

length is 401 kilometers (about 249 miles). It

will connect Krasnoyarsk Krai with Tuva.

The opening ceremony took place

not far from the capital of the republic.

That is exactly where the first station will be.

Kyzyl-Passazhirskaya. The prime minister was handed

a sledgehammer and entrusted with driving in a silver

rail spike for the first section of the railway

track.

By order of the Chairman of the Government

of the Russian Federation, Vladimir

Vladimirovich Putin. What a sight—

a silver spike, a hammer, sweeping

blows. Back then Putin said the railway

would begin operating in four years. 2011.

Year.

What do we have in 2019? In 2019

we are being told that

work on this section will begin in

the following

year, 2020. Well, because basically, yes, yes,

this is how the authorities and officials operate:

they start doing something and say,

“In five years we’ll build it.” But in five

years there’s a new election cycle, and

most likely you won’t be in power anymore.

And in eight years you definitely won’t be in

power. Or, as you may remember, I showed

a lot of funny images from 2005, 2003,

when Roscosmos officials—we’ll talk more about them—

loved to say that

we would already be

landing on the Moon by 2018 and

landing on Mars, and then basically heading off

to another galaxy—everything would be

absolutely amazing. Or those famous videos

where they said that by 2020 there would be

a mainline built from St. Petersburg

to Kamchatka.

You’re just sitting in power, and then the time comes

while you’re still in power. By the way, it’s very

funny: 2020 is about to begin in

a month and a half, and they had that program

for socioeconomic growth through 2020,

and it had many completely specific

targets. It was the most important program

of Putin’s, essentially. Putin’s government

was governing Russia

and making this program. It’ll be hilarious when

now everyone—including me, of course—

starts comparing what exactly they declared, what

they announced, and what they actually did.

Roughly nothing. Roughly nothing.

In Russia there is not a single

kilometer of high-speed railway, not

a single kilometer, because what runs from

From Moscow to St. Petersburg on the Sapsan (high-speed train) is not

high-speed rail at all — there’s nothing of the sort.

Let’s discuss it, it’ll be interesting. So, a question:

Shelest asks me: what do you think

about mandatory pre-installation

of domestic software on smartphones?

Indeed, today they passed, in the third

and final reading, a law under which in

Russia it will be impossible to sell your iPhone

or your Samsung or your Huawei if

they do not have domestic software installed.

Well, everyone got worked up and

started thinking: is this going to be spyware

that will be installed? But in practice, what

this will lead to is that on all phones

that are sold here, there will be

things like Yandex Maps installed,

definitely Yandex something-or-other, some kind of

junk, the Sputnik search engine,

and whatever it is they now have instead of Wikipedia,

that thing they’ve already spent

20 billion rubles on (about $220 million), and people who

buy a phone will spend their time

deleting it all immediately, I have no doubt.

I’m sure that mobile carriers that

sell phones will

immediately start offering services, just like now

they offer services saying, let us sell you

an iPhone for a few thousand rubles (tens of dollars)

2,000 rubles more expensive (about $20).

For the iPhone, we’ll install various

programs on it — there’ll be a similar service:

we can sell you your Samsung, and for another 1,000

rubles (about $10) we’ll remove the domestic software from it.

Besides, obviously this will lead to

people simply buying them abroad.

You understand, even in Belarus

or any other country now, if you just

go there, or if an acquaintance is going, then you’ll

say: buy me an iPhone without

any domestic software on it.

But I think that at the first stage, of course,

they won’t install any kind of spyware,

but overall, of course, they’re

looking at China, right, and they want to make

something similar to what is happening in China,

where — well, not everywhere, but in part of the country, in the

north, where Uyghurs live — you are required

to have spyware on your phone

that monitors your

messages and your movements. It’s not a law,

but you can be jailed

if they discover that your phone does not

have such a program installed. Ideally, that’s how they

see it working, but for now it will be

just this, just plain stupidity. Alexander

asks: Alexei, please comment

on your position regarding

Valery Rashkin’s statement

about impeaching Putin. I didn’t have time and

was preparing for the program. I know that he made

such a statement; I saw it trending on YouTube, and the

statement is up there. In any case,

I support it, because there are many, many

grounds on which Putin should be

impeached. At the very least,

the case we are making against Putin is that he has

committed such a number of absolutely

illegal actions that he most certainly

deserves it. Dima Akhmedzyanov asks

me: Alexei, what do you think about the logo

for St. Petersburg for 7 million rubles (about $77,000)?

It’s a pity there’s no picture of this logo. Well, I

am not trying to intrude into the realm

of art,

but in general this strange

obsession of all cities and some state

organizations, first and foremost, with

ordering logos from Artemy

Lebedev (a well-known Russian designer),

cities order them for a ruble, while

state corporations order them for hundreds of

— well, not hundreds, but for many millions

of rubles — or not from Lebedev anymore, the point is

from some other designers, real

or not-so-real designers — this is,

frankly speaking, complete nonsense. All these

logos — they exist, but what are they for?

Why does St. Petersburg need one, where, as

we’ve seen, they can’t even clear the snow?

To urgently change the logo, and especially

to spend 7 million rubles (about $77,000) on it — I

have no doubt that St. Petersburg is the kind of place

where you could announce an international competition

and say: design a logo for

St. Petersburg for one kopeck, and all

the world’s agencies, unknown designers,

whoever — they’d line up, because

it’s St. Petersburg. Of course they’d want

to draw a logo for St. Petersburg.

They’d want to, even if you only know how to draw

a little.

23,500 people are watching us live.

I want to talk about Penza — there

a rather tragic situation happened there.

People were snickering about it online too:

they boiled people alive. But in fact,

those people who were boiled — let’s watch the video — people

were driving in a car and fell in.

Let’s take a look. Here you can see the car

simply fell into a hole. You can see in this

video — this is a pit of boiling water, as

you can see. It was basically a roadway,

a road people drive on. A pipe burst,

boiling water started pouring out, it undermined the ground, well,

it simply turned into a lake of boiling water. Into it

fell a car, and two people died instantly.

As you can see, no one could do

anything. All of this would look like

the usual tragic situation for Russia

caused by the collapse of public utilities, if not for one

particular feature: these utility networks

belong to such a great guy by the name of

Viktor Vekselberg.

And this Viktor Vekselberg — we’ve known him for a long time,

we’ve been dealing with him for a long time. Back in

2011, we published a major

investigation into how he made his money.

simply several hundred million dollars

on flies, on the fly, on the nation, with the creation of

which he sold to the state, but in

reality, to the general public this man

Vekselberg is known for the fact that in 2004

he declared that he was doing a huge

service to all of Russia

by buying back abroad the Fabergé eggs that

had belonged to the imperial family, and with

those Fabergé eggs everyone made a huge fuss

naturally, there were lots of jokes about

the Fabergé eggs, and people joked about Vekselberg

he displayed them in some museums, and apparently

there was even talk that he would donate them

as a gift to a museum, though he never did, or

maybe he gave away a couple, but the point is

that Vekselberg’s business consists, among other things, in

grabbing enormous

chunks of the housing and utilities sector across the country, and from that sector

he extracts money, and with that money he, among other things,

buys those damn Fabergé eggs

buys real estate in Switzerland — all of

them there, well, that kind of oligarch

buy themselves yachts and planes — that’s

an important point, because

but people often tell me: why are you stirring up

hatred toward the rich? Maxim Galkin (a Russian TV host and entertainer)

remember, I argued with him about this

about the rich — why do you deliberately

draw attention to their yachts and

palaces? Because it’s not just officials

or just millionaires — why are you going after

Vekselberg over those Fabergé eggs? I

go after him because 90 percent of what

makes up

Russian billionaires, with rare

exceptions — like the guys behind Yandex or

Magnit, who built something from scratch —

this is simply

money earned from collapse and

poverty. This housing and utilities system in Penza, in

particular, is in such terrible

condition — that damn pipe had never been

repaired

and it burst, and there

two people died

because they spend money on all this

nonsense, because they think differently:

the state allows it, and the idea is that

we can simply keep raising utility rates. Abyzov (a former Russian minister) did

the same in Novosibirsk and across the

country: rates go up, but money for

improving the infrastructure is invested by no one

absolutely no one. We saw in Penza

in a fairly large city

that this does not happen — that money is simply

spent on some luxurious lifestyle, and

when another New Year comes around and

we are told that utility rates will rise

they attach a pile of papers, and on those

papers it says: technical and economic

justification

for raising rates above inflation, blah blah blah

there’s a whole stack of

documents in which, first of all, you

won’t understand anything, and second, they won’t

even show them to you. But the essence of those documents

is that somehow

Vekselberg once again needs a house

or a yacht, or his business is in trouble and

he needs to cover losses, and therefore

the pipe in Penza

no one will ever repair until

as long as we have these

housing and utilities monopolists sitting in Moscow, in monopoly positions

and in all the other cities there exist

in most cities there exists this kind of

monopoly. That is precisely why a major

part of my program has always been

demonopolization. Milov, in his program,

constantly talks about this: until we

smash apart all those people in the housing and utilities sector

— I almost called them fat cats

— just plain crooks who

historically grabbed for themselves

huge chunks of it — this should not

be the case. Housing and utilities is a highly competitive

sector, and we pay quite a lot for these services

people can earn money there under conditions of

a market economy

but if everything is arranged so that you have

monopolists, then in any case you will

have to pay them

we will keep seeing these

monstrous stories: someone

fell into a pit

someone was boiled alive there. I’m being asked:

Alexei, what do you think of the bill

on the prevention of domestic violence? In our country

in general, with these draft laws on

domestic violence, strange

things are happening — outrageous and unacceptable things

at first the state

declared that it would

decriminalize the article on battery because

most cases of battery

are, like, when a husband

beats his wife

90 percent of such cases, they said,

well, you know, a husband beat his wife — that’s

a private family matter. But if in your

apartment someone smashes my face in,

that can somehow be dealt with, but here

it’s all this “if he beats you, he loves you” nonsense

and all the rest of that crap. They said they would

decriminalize it, after which

naturally, a huge scandal broke out

because one woman was killed, then another was killed too

that’s how it used to work before:

the husband got drunk and started fighting with his wife and

the children; she could at least call the local police officer

and he would be locked up for 15 days or taken

to the police station. Now they say, well,

it’s all decriminalized — “if he beats you, he

loves you” — but then he killed one, then another

then a third, and a huge scandal began. There are

women’s organizations, and not only

women’s groups — any normal people are speaking out

for what, of course, should be

criminalized. If a person

beats their relatives at home, they

are committing a crime, and that is in no way

different—quite possibly it's even worse

than when he simply beats up some

passerby on the street, because his

family members are far more defenseless, and

now this whole

mess is starting up—a special law,

they're introducing something like that. None of

that is necessary. Unfortunately, a phenomenon

like domestic violence—a husband beats his wife, a wife

beats the children, the head of the family beats everyone

indiscriminately—has always existed. We must

eradicate it. It existed in the Russian Empire

it existed in the Soviet Union, and

it was regulated—there was, damn it, a normal

criminal code where all of this

was covered. If there's the will, there's an article of law.

So if he's getting violent,

then let's lock him up for 15 days or for a year, but

instead they first come up with a bunch of bullshit because

they're fighting against this so-called juvenile

justice system.

They say the state must not interfere in

family matters, so *Domostroi* (a traditional patriarchal Russian code of household rules)

is supposedly fine: a bearded man in a *kosovorotka* (traditional Russian shirt)

comes in and smacks everyone around,

and that's apparently how they imagine

people ought to live. That's the kind of idea

they have in their heads. So there is constant

pressure, including from the church, under

the influence of strange people who

call themselves conservatives, but in fact

they are just some kind of

crazy, dangerous lunatics. We constantly

see a push in favor of

not prosecuting anyone

for domestic violence. That is, of course, complete

nonsense. Alexei will talk about what's happening in

Shiyes (a protest site in northern Russia)—well, to give you an idea of what's going on there,

there is a genuinely heroic

resistance by local residents. I saw

people forming chains, linking up like that,

trying to encircle the area, and

that's why people from the city council went there to defend

the camp from being stormed. In other words, there is

a truly desperate civic

standoff there. I may talk about it

in more detail in future broadcasts, but for now

I wanted to say something about Rogozin. In

the last program—I’ll brag a little—

in the previous episode I showed you this

video of Putin sighing

and worrying about how

everything had been stolen at the

Vostochny Cosmodrome. A hundred times, he said, everything had to be transparent,

you must work transparently,

the funding is transparent, huge sums are being allocated,

the project practically has

national significance—yet no, they steal

hundreds of millions, hundreds of millions.

There is still no order there; they still haven't

managed to put things properly in order.

I showed that, and then we thought: listen,

the man really has the nerve

to say that he was demanding

transparency. So let's try

to quickly, maybe within

a week, find something interesting and

tell the public what Putin

is being told about this so-called transparency. But

it's obviously nonsense, because corruption at

the top level is rampant, and we simply took a list of

the leadership of Roscosmos, the leadership

of Vostochny, and thought: now we'll

check them against the databases, take a look, and then

sort of let the machine help us with Rogozin

and just have a look. It seemed like—well, what is there

to look at? He's been checked a hundred times, a hundred times

people wrote about his apartments.

We won't find anything on Rogozin. The thing is,

he used to publish his asset declarations

on the government website, but now on the

government side no one publishes declarations

anymore, and no one looks at what

he has hidden who-knows-where

on the Roscosmos website. So we did a simple

thing: we went onto the Roscosmos website,

looked at it, and were honestly stunned by

his official salary: 23

million rubles a year (about 230,000 euros / 250,000 US dollars), one and a half times more

than ours—2 million rubles a month instead of thousands

of rubles a day. The guy is an employee

of a state corporation. So we started

looking further into his declaration and simply

found things for ourselves that we decided to

show you—and Putin, naturally,

who knows all of this already—but just to rub

his face in it once again: don't tell us

anything about transparency when

right next to you everything is happening openly.

Our investigation

consisted of the following: we

took the declaration, and then simply

looked at how this dacha (country house) is laid out and

showed you an aerial flyover of it. Let's watch

the 13-minute video posted on Mail.ru—on the

main Alexei Navalny channel. One

moment, I'll show you. We are in the north of Moscow,

just beyond the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road), in the Khimki area, and here is

Rogozin's brand-new country house, almost 800 square meters

in size. It stands on a pleasant wooded

plot of 25 sotkas (0.25 hectares / 2,500 square meters), which we also see in

Dmitry Olegovich's latest declaration.

Rogozin expanded his holdings by exactly

two times, and now it is a plot of

half a hectare, and as you can see, work is boiling away here

full steam.

Just like at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, we notice

a path

that at first seems to lead nowhere.

Let's look closer, and we can clearly see

a gate to the neighboring plot, and quite a substantial house there

—larger even than Rogozin's: 808

square meters. The answer to this question

can usually be found in extracts from

Rosreestr (Russia’s state real estate registry)

but not this time, because according to

the official documents, all of this is owned by

a private individual. The neighboring 800-square-meter

house was, in 2017,

purchased by Rogozin’s aide from

the government, Valentin Vasilkov

Semyonovich. Rogozin’s plot—half a hectare (5,000 square meters)

of land and an 800-square-meter house—is worth 200

million rubles. The plot belonging to Rogozin’s elderly father-in-law

and Rogozin’s—we estimate at 150 million rubles. 35,700 are watching

live right now, and just as I was

speaking, Igor Drozdov—37—was correcting me

already. Igor Drozdov asks: what do you

think about the fact that they’ve allowed

drones to be shot down with military weapons?

Indeed, today really was such a

productive day for our State Duma (Russia’s lower house of parliament). They

passed, in the third reading, a law under which

they allowed basically everyone there to

—the National Guard, the police, well, just about everyone—

to shoot down drones. Why? Well,

for exactly that reason. They’re not concerned about

any other use of drones. There’s only one thing

that bothers them, one thing that infuriates them: all these

drones, in their minds, are associated exclusively with

the activities of the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) and other organizations

that simply fly these drones around and

show people the dachas (country houses).

Well, that’s exactly the point.

You see, we thought, let’s

see how quickly we can find

some obvious corruption at the highest

level, connected with the space sector, and we didn’t even

need to search for anything. I mean, it’s just

there in plain sight: he registers a 150-million-ruble house,

an 800-square-meter property worth 150 million

rubles, in the name of his father-in-law or grandfather or whoever.

He bought one car for 12

million rubles, a second car for 8

million rubles—20 million rubles

spent on cars in a single year.

He’s the head of a state corporation, but how

does this even work for them? What

especially got to me, by the way, while we were preparing this

and digging through everything, was this situation. We, we

naturally wanted to compare his salary.

When we saw 23 million rubles there for

a deputy, 20 million rubles—is that a lot

or a little? It’s useful to look at NASA’s website; there

on many of their pages it’s written

about transparency, and all the figures are there.

We can see that the head of NASA earns

one and a half times less than Rogozin. Then

we start googling how much

an engineer at NASA earns, and how much an engineer at

a Roscosmos enterprise earns, and the engineer

here earns several times less.

Meanwhile, the bosses here earn

several times more than in America,

while the engineer here earns several times

less. Does it still surprise you, then, why

Russia, for example in the number of

launches, has already fallen behind not only the United States, but also

the European Union, and even China has left us

far, far behind? Because, well,

all the drive,

all the ambition, the entire intellectual

resource of these people—where did it go? That’s right,

it went into securing their own

schemes—one relative here, another relative there,

this got re-registered here, that got shifted there.

As we say in the video: classified, removed from the registries,

transferred here, siphoned off there, and boom—everyone’s

rich, everyone has some kind of Mercedes, and it all seems

to be legal. And Putin goes around

ranting about some kind of

transparency, some kind of—well,

we would very much like

Putin—though of course he himself won’t say anything,

he’s forbidden from speaking about it, from mentioning us—

but maybe Peskov can always tell us:

what do you have to say about transparency? Just

explain to us: where

did the money for all this come from?

What’s especially outrageous, of course, is that all this

is happening with Dmitry Rogozin. The most

glorious of his actions, of course, in

recent times is this legendary

tweet.

Let’s take a look at it. Guys,

“I would trade, without a second’s hesitation,

all my thoughts, all my

positions, for the chance to be in the same trench

with the defenders of Sloviansk.” Do you understand what a

spectacle of hypocrisy this is? These guys, damn it,

set themselves official salaries of 20

million rubles and sit there typing, pretending they’d give it all up

and go straight to the trenches.

“An automatic rifle here, a mess tin nearby—or better yet,

not even a mess tin, better an upturned helmet,

with some buckwheat porridge in it, and I’d pull a spoon

out of my boot, eat, and then go off

to shoot at Ukrainians”—that’s what he’d supposedly give everything for.

But in reality, these people really are

just going mad from excess, spoiled by luxury, and

it’s our duty to fight them however

we can. There are a lot of questions about what

I think about how great it is that they launched

the MCD—the Moscow Central Diameters

commuter rail lines. I wasn’t following it

very closely today, but I know that

they effectively launched these suburban trains. The topic

is pretty close to me because

from age 16 to my early twenties, every

single day I rode the commuter train from

Golitsyno to Belorussky Station

and I’ve hated all those trains ever since

because I spent so much time on them.

And I just saw that today

Putin came to Belorussky Station

specifically

to open and launch these trains, and it

apparently caused some kind of collapse up and down the line.

People were stuck in those trains for hours,

and at the same time the trains arrived shortened, all

packed to the brim, with people cramming into the cars. It was this kind of

small-scale but very real breakdown.

A transportation disaster, fortunately without

any casualties. The idiots responsible for it

were people who decided to use it for publicity and

shoot some kind of reports, and they blocked off

all the railway tracks there.

Besides, it seems pretty obvious to me that

they simply miscalculated everything there.

And the trains started running more slowly.

These commuter trains are operating oddly somehow, they

have been shortened. I’m not going to

go into detail right now because I haven’t

looked into it fully, though I’ll try to. But

the fact is that today the entire internet

and Twitter were flooded with photos

and videos of people packed in like sardines

trying to escape from these shortened

cars.

They were forcing open the doors of these commuter trains and

jumping out to freedom because they were sick of

standing there for hours and hours because

Putin was at Belorussky Station in Moscow.

That kind of thing. Natalia asks me, “Alexei,”

“do you know any details about the ties between

Abyzov, Svyaz Bank, and the withdrawal of

800 million rubles (about $12.5 million)? I only know

that an investigation was published by

the journalistic organization OCCRP.

You can easily find it online. I think

they did it jointly with *Novaya Gazeta*.

There’s quite a long article there about how

Mikhail Abyzov, who, by the way, was also

in the housing and utilities business—I already told you

about Penza and Vekselberg—the same kind of

thing. This was in Novosibirsk Region.

Well, now he’s already in jail, so he’s not

doing it anymore. But an investigation about Abyzov

came out while he was still a minister, and it’s

no secret to anyone that we consider him

a crook and a villain. I have no doubt that everything

written in that article is true. On my

paper cup it says, “Watch your back.”

For those words, “Watch your back,” a man

named Yevgeny Yurzinnov has already been

held for several days

behind bars, in jail, because

he wrote those words: “Watch your back.”

Judge Krivoruchko—the very judge to whom I myself would gladly

say, “Watch your back,”

because this is Judge Krivoruchko, and he has

tried me more than once. A more disgusting,

lying, vile swindler, who isn’t even

really a judge but a parody of one, is hard

to imagine. He’s a kind of special judge

at the Tverskoy District Court (in Moscow).

He’ll rubber-stamp any nonsense there.

It was this very Judge Krivoruchko who handed down four years

in prison to Ustinov—you

remember him, the one who was later released.

They said, “Good Lord, of course he was

jailed by mistake, the whole thing was completely wrong.”

They didn’t acquit him, but they gave him a one-year

suspended sentence. But the fact is that

everyone acknowledged that Judge Krivoruchko had issued

an insane,

absolutely unlawful decision. And when

he issued that unlawful ruling,

many people, including Yevgeny Yurzinnov,

wrote unflattering things

on Twitter and elsewhere about this judge,

Krivoruchko. And, broadly speaking, I can

sign my name under those words: Judge

Krivoruchko is simply a scoundrel. He himself

should be put in prison; he should be driven

the hell out. But against

Yurzinnov they opened a case for making a threat

to kill. For example, if I say

that Judge

Krivoruchko should be sent to the glue factory,

is that a death threat? I mean,

the authorities were stung at first, bitterly

and painfully, because they were reproached for having

handed down absolutely unlawful

verdicts. Everyone was outraged by it. But then

they decided to take revenge on some people and

literally started running through

comments and jailing those who wrote

something. His wife is now recording

a very sorrowful appeal

to tell you that he was beaten in the pretrial detention center (SIZO).

All right, two seconds, let’s take a look at the clip.

My name is Karina Amirzanova.

Alexandrovna.

I am the wife of the accused, Yevgeny Arzu-

nov, who was detained on November 12,

2019. He was detained in my

presence, in a hotel room. We were there

not by accident: on the 13th, on November 13,

we were supposed to fly out of

Vnukovo Airport for a trip to Italy.

The investigators claim that we wanted

to flee the country. There was nowhere for us to flee to.

I have the impression that he

was beaten there, and that’s why all this time it feels

as if they’ve been hiding him from us. And

he’s not the only one—there are two others, Sergey Polovets

and Alexei Meresov. These are people who,

when Krivoruchko handed down

an unlawful ruling—which has already been recognized as such—

they wrote to him online,

something like, “I hope you

drop dead, you bastard.” Any normal

person said those completely

justified words about

that lawless thug of a judge,

Krivoruchko. They’ve now been jailed, and they are being tried.

Krivoruchko himself is not on trial—Krivoruchko

continues to receive a salary of about

500,000 rubles a month (about $7,800),

rides around in an official car, and in his

black robe

and little glasses keeps on handing down

unlawful sentences. People are being tried

for what they wrote on the internet. And separately, you understand,

there’s clearly a whole gang of idlers

whose job is to run through

comments and read what exactly

people wrote about Judge Krivoruchko, and then

open criminal cases over it. That’s right.

There is, of course, a criminal statute covering threats

of murder. And if it were actually being applied

to protect me, then all of Prigozhin’s people

would have to be thrown in jail, because

comments like “watch your back”

or “death is coming for you” — I get a hundred

thousand of those a day, and no one

in the Interior Ministry cares.

But when it comes to Judge Krivoruchko,

they run around opening all these criminal cases.

Then they’ll go on about how

their clearance rate has improved. So yes,

that offense certainly does exist. Fine.

Even if Judge Krivoruchko is trying

a gangster or a criminal, and he fears that

someone might crack him over the head with a stick, he files

a complaint saying he received death threats.

But then the police should go out and find

this Ryzhy, or Plovets, or Veresov,

and see that the guy was just flying with his wife

to Italy on vacation.

They come up to him and ask,

“Excuse me, why exactly did you write this?”

“Do you want to kill Judge Krivoruchko?” Well,

he says, “No, no, come on, I wrote it

because I think Vova is a scumbag, you know,”

you know.

“Drop dead,” “I’ll kill you” — that’s the sort of thing

people say to each other

all the time. In that sense, the offense of

making a death threat should include

some actual reality to the threat. When people

write something online, that doesn’t

necessarily mean anything. But here they immediately

throw people into pretrial detention (SIZO, a Russian remand prison) because the state

the state really wants to lock up

someone it is very fond of — Judge Krivoruchko,

who, in turn, is ready to

put absolutely anyone away for any

nonexistent crime,

shoot them, crush them,

and burn them. In other words, he does exactly the same thing

only

as gangsters do, except

in a judge’s robe. So I just want

to express my support for all three of these people,

who are completely innocent and are sitting in jail

not only despite being innocent, but also because of

a complete bastard and thug,

which is what Judge Krivoruchko is. So, Vitaliy

WSOF asks me: “Alexei, will there be

something today about ‘snatch-and-grab’? That really

was hilarious — whether it was about oil or processors.”

You wrote that, and I think we should have

shown that video where Putin says

something like, well, we’ll just

snatch-and-grab, steal American

technologies. By the way, that perfectly

captured something about him — that smug,

self-satisfied attitude, like the Americans will create the technology, and then

we’ll just snatch it. And in that whole

‘snatch-and-grab,’ ‘swipe it,’ ‘make off with it’ business, you can clearly see

his very essence. He lights up at the thought

that something can be pinched, swiped,

stolen. But it never even occurs to him

to say, “You know, we also have

science, we also have technology, and we don’t

necessarily have to steal anything. We

can invent something ourselves, create something.” But no —

it’s all ‘snatch-and-grab,’ we’ll just haul it away.”

And there are people just like that sitting in the hall, you know, at

that same “Russia Calling!” forum,

and it’s kind of awkward — everyone understands what nonsense this is,

but those bankers are such cowards

that they giggle, “Ha-ha-ha, snatch-and-grab, what a

great line.” Right, another question — something

about Yakutia (Sakha Republic). Is it true that in Yakutia, on November 21,

all schoolchildren will be required

to perform

the national anthem in order to foster

social responsibility, writes

Presidentushka to me. Well, this little president

of Yakutia came up with this nonsense. It’s like

that saying about what a cat does when it has

nothing better to do. These people are busy with

absolute crap. They’re sitting there in Yakutia —

good Lord, there are so many problems in Yakutia,

a huge number of real problems —

and this bunch of idiots calling themselves

United Russia, the party in power,

sit around thinking up things like,

“Hey, let’s make the children sing the anthem before

every lesson.”

That’ll teach them social

responsibility. Even in the Soviet Union

that didn’t exist. I was a child

of the Soviet Union, and even then there was nothing like that.

There was plenty of idiocy there, and yes, we sang

all sorts of Pioneer songs and had all kinds of

events, and they raised the flag,

and there were ceremonial assemblies — all of that existed, but

not every day. But in Yakutia, apparently,

the current bosses think

it should be every single day. Let the kids do it.

Let all the children in

Yakutia understand from an early age

that the people running our country are idiots, and

that will be enough — no one will need

to prove or explain anything to them. They’ll just, after the first time,

and painfully, hear: “Kids, let’s

stand up, now we’re going to sing the Russian anthem.” They’ll

sing it, and the next day she’ll say,

“Kids, stand up. Lenochka, Valechka, let’s sing

the Russian anthem.”

And so on every day. And by the 10th, the 20th,

the 100th day, the children will simply — well, first of all, they’ll

hate that anthem

and hate this government.

Then they’ll come to rallies with us.

That’s how, as they wrote there, church protests

and all those protests grow out of this sort of thing.

That’s exactly how church protests arise, and sooner or later,

anyway, the last thing I want

to end this program with: I love, absolutely love,

watching broadcasts from the current Moscow City Duma,

because, unlike the empty show it used to be,

thanks to you and me, we elected

great deputies — genuinely great deputies — and

There are 45 people there now.

You know, out of 45 people they managed to gather 20

opposition deputies through a lot of

voting. Well, about three of them kind of

keep disappearing all the time, but 17 are actually there,

pretty desperate, hardcore guys.

And in the Moscow City Duma, well, first of all, at last

these United Russia members really

got pushback.

People openly argue with them, and the sessions

go on for hours because

the opposition members are no longer just sitting quietly and not standing up for their rights.

What's more, we were just talking

about Judge Krivoruchko, and finally

— thank God, hallelujah — in the Moscow City Duma there was finally

a proper assessment of what

the judicial system actually is. And by the way, because

of that,

it also includes justices of the peace, and before them

the chair of the Moscow City Court reports back —

Yegorova.

The main gangster of the entire judicial system.

Deputy Oleg Sheremetyev from

the Communist Party (KPRF) — let's listen to what he said

about the Moscow case and the judicial system.

They're just showing him, but you can

imagine the looks on

the United Russia members' faces. First of all, of course,

absolutely everyone who was detained and

convicted this summer must not simply

be released — they must be recognized

as victims of political repression, with

appropriate compensation paid to them,

benefits provided, and so on. But that's not

all. The point is that there are people

responsible for all of this

happening and for innocent people ending up in prison.

First, of course, there are the officials who

restrict the right to hold

rallies, meetings, marches, and so on.

That means employees of the mayor's office and

the Presidential Administration — their

involvement in everything that happened over the summer

must not be overlooked either. In other words,

these people must not simply be fired;

there must be an investigation, because

this was provoked and

organized. Second — or maybe

this should even be called the first thing — there is one

very specific, very big problem

that has

a specific name: Olga Alexandrovna

Yegorova. As long as this person heads

the Moscow City Court, you can forget about justice

in Moscow.

That is why I believe we must make

every effort to ensure that the leadership of

the Moscow City Court

is finally replaced, and I think

that we too can make

our contribution to that — and should.

Here you need to understand who this Olga

Yegorova is — that same gangster. She is the most

powerful person in the judicial

system in Russia, absolutely — far

more powerful than the chairman of the Supreme

Court, who is basically just small fry

compared with this old, vicious witch

who controls all the judges manually,

and they are simply slaves — all of them.

All the judges in Moscow's courts are simply

Olga Yegorova's slaves. She has built the system perfectly:

it hands down any kind of

illegal ruling just like that, at the snap

of a finger. This whole system of 'telephone justice'

is organized perfectly.

That's why everyone is afraid. And these debates

in the Moscow City Duma before, in previous convocations — well,

whether it was the opposition or, naturally, the authorities,

they all just tiptoed around her.

And now, finally, guys have appeared who

actually say it. What's more, this was Sheremetyev —

because it's one thing to say it behind someone's back,

but she came into the chamber and he said roughly

the same thing to her right there in the hall, directly.

Let's take a look. Olga

Alexandrovna,

does the concept of judicial honor exist —

something like an officer's honor, for example?

And if it does, then why did you and your subordinates

not resign after everything

that happened this summer? I have worked my whole

life honestly, in accordance

with the law. I believe I can continue working.

She's worked honestly her whole life, sure.

Dmitry Rogozin says he earned everything honestly,

Moscow prosecutor Popov says everything is very honest too,

but in any case,

it's great that this has finally started

to happen. But there in the Moscow City Duma,

besides all that,

the United Russia members are genuinely

in a daze because, well, basically,

people have finally appeared who

not only argue with them, but also

speak back. Today there was an incredibly funny exchange

between the crazy deputy

Stepanova-Belkova, whom we did an investigation on,

who back in the

1990s literally worked

for the U.S. State Department, as a staff member

of the National Democratic Institute's office

— an organization funded there by the State Department

and American foundations. She worked for them in the

1990s; now, of course, she's in United Russia.

Now she's a super-conservative, and here is what —

let's watch, it's very funny — how she

complains that a Communist is threatening her

and says he'll have her shot. I would like to

ask you, first of all,

to reprimand the deputy who just spoke,

and second, what I would like

to inform everyone present is that

literally a few minutes ago, that same

deputy told me that for all

of us, if the Communists come to power,

being shot would be considered a blessing,

whereas the rope and the gallows...

This is Lyudmila... This is not relevant to the proceedings.

I ask everyone to observe the rules of the session.

Colleagues, please stick to the agenda. But the funniest

story, unfortunately, was not caught on

video, but deputy Tarasov, with whom she was

arguing, described it on Facebook.

Well, they naturally started

trading insults, and in her usual manner she

— that crazy woman Stebenkova — said, "Go on

United Russia" (the ruling political party in Russia).

So she stood up and asked them,

"Why do you include prostitutes

on your Communist Party lists?"

Tarasov, completely unfazed,

said, "Come on, Lyudmila Vasilievna, we never even

considered putting you on our

lists." So there are some really funny

and great things happening there. But United Russia's

response is quite traditional. They don't like it

that FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) staff go there

and work with Moscow City Duma deputies, so

today I once again went there with

a larger video crew in order to... well, I don't know,

to discuss a bill, they were doing something,

it was interaction with deputies, which is what they

are supposed to do.

That is the deputies' duty, and our

duty is to work with these deputies.

And we work with them perfectly well. What happened was

that they simply didn't let us in. They said,

you know, you're on some kind of blacklist. One

moment.

Like Sobol

and Shirinov and other people are stuck in the reception area

— they are simply not being let in. What a mess.

A deputy is standing there with them, the one they

came to see. I am standing at the

entrance to the Moscow City Duma

together with Ruslan Shaveddinov

of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and

Moscow City Duma deputy from the

Communist Party, Yelena Shuvalova.

We came to discuss work-related matters, and

a pass had been ordered for Ruslan and me,

but for some reason we were not on the list.

Right now the security staff

are not letting us through and are saying that

we are barred from entering the building. There is no request for

you, none of your names are in the pass

system, so you cannot enter the

Moscow City Duma premises.

Certain individuals have effectively been put under

quarantine, and now they will not be allowed into the Moscow

City Duma, despite the fact that

I have specific work to do with

these people. You know, of course,

they say that when things are very bad, people

cry, but when

things are very, very bad, they start laughing.

And really, this situation has already become

so tragic that it simply

makes you laugh. We are following the development of the

situation. But this is yet another act of cowardice, another fear

on the part of United Russia members, afraid even to let you

step onto the grounds of the Moscow City Duma.

What do they have to hide? Apparently their own

corrupt little schemes. That's how it is.

Sobol ended up under quarantine. Yes, the situation

developed in such a way that the

deputy went to the head of security

and said, "Have you lost your minds? How can you

possibly have the right not to let people come to

see me? I am a deputy."

She insisted there are no blacklists.

Blacklists cannot exist under any

circumstances. Nevertheless, for

FBK staff, an exception has apparently been made.

We'll see how the

situation develops further, but in any case I am very

happy and want to once again say thank you

to everyone who voted strategically ("Smart Voting," an opposition-backed tactical voting campaign)

so that we elected such great deputies

who are now giving United Russia a hard time

even while being in the minority.

Thank you very much to everyone who watched

the program. See you next Thursday.

Bye.

[music]