Nikita Mikhalkov vs. Bill Gates, poisoning them like ticks, the bizarre “debate” with Zakharova

[music]

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

That means I’m broadcasting from home again, from home, and

apparently for quite a long time yet I

will be talking to you from home.

This is *Russia of the Future*. I am its permanent

host, Alexei Navalny. This week

I am an enemy of the Reich. Literally, an enemy of the Reich.

That is what the editor-in-chief

of *Komsomolskaya Pravda* called me. You know, that is

one of the main

propaganda newspapers, and so

the editor-in-chief of *Komsomolskaya Pravda*,

Vladimir Sungorkin, while discussing with someone—I don’t

remember who—our failed

strange debate with Ms. Zakharova from

the Foreign Ministry—we’ll talk about that later—said that

well, of course Zakharova is fighting Navalny

as if he were an enemy of the Reich. Seriously, they

really do discuss things in exactly those terms, and

they do it completely seriously. Then it

seems to them that this analogy is, basically,

appropriate—that they are the Reich, and people like us are

simply enemies of the Reich. And of course that’s great,

because not everyone has draped themselves in

St. George ribbons (a Russian military remembrance symbol), and now they are simply

turning the dial all the way up,

without knowing any limits to their zeal in commemorating

Victory Day, but at the same time, in some

jokes—or supposedly just joking—when giving

comments to the media, they casually

call each other the Reich, and I, apparently, am an enemy

of the Reich.

Please send your questions with

the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture on Twitter. I

will try to answer them. I can see that

24,000 people are already watching the broadcast

right from the first minutes. Every time I want

to say a few words of thanks to the coronavirus—though I won’t

actually say that. But of course, because

of the virus and the actions

of the authorities, you’ve been driven home, and more of you

are watching the show now. I will miss you very

much when all of you—when all of you

are allowed back outside, allowed to go for walks, and you

stop tuning in to my live stream. I’ll

miss you very much, but still I am waiting for

that moment to come.

Because I want to go for a walk too. And

I want to start by bragging a little: we

published the FBK annual report yesterday.

For us, that is always very important,

because throughout our entire existence, we have always

put out an annual

report every year and very clearly

tell everyone how much money we received,

how much we spent, and what we

worked on, because that matters.

We understand how much we depend on those

who read the report, how much we depend on

you—people who want to understand what

their money was spent on. We do

what we do by asking questions

of officials: how are you spending our money? Well,

in turn, we report back to

you, because in 2019 we had 115,000—I

honestly just love proudly saying this

phrase, and I’m overflowing with pride—115

thousand five hundred ninety-nine monetary

transfers. That is how the Anti-Corruption Foundation works.

No matter what anyone says to us,

telling stories about some kind of large

donors or some foreign

money—we know, you know, and Putin

knows perfectly well that FBK exists

because a huge number of people

send 100, 200, 300, or maybe 400 rubles

in small donations. It is thanks to

that that the Anti-Corruption Foundation

exists. In 115,000 donations, 315

thousand people—but

people, in the hundreds of thousands—115,000

donations came in, and we received

and we

I think we used them quite effectively,

far more effectively than

the Russian state spends money, far

more effectively than any government body. We found assets

belonging to various corrupt officials worth

57 billion rubles alone. We filed

more than 700 lawsuits and complaints in court—sorry, filed them in court—

more than 700 lawsuits and complaints. As you understand,

writing a complaint or a lawsuit is

work.

It is work that a lawyer sits down and does.

More than 700 in a year. On our two YouTube

channels, we cranked out 654 videos. I myself do not

understand how we managed to do that, but

we really got moving with all those videos, and

of course it supports us enormously that you

watch these videos. That is motivating too.

It is rather depressing to put out videos if

no one watches them. But you do watch them, and I

am very happy to tell you now, with pleasure

and pride, about the funny

accusations being made against us right now.

At the moment, an offended and upset

Margarita Simonyan keeps a constant eye on us and

puts out all sorts of

very funny “investigations”—what they

call investigations. And

the traditional pool of Kremlin

propagandists, whose job it is to keep writing

something about us all the time, they too

read this report, and they

came up with two complaints about it. Margarita

Simonyan said that they

took a calculator and looked at our

report and saw that over the whole period we received 82

million rubles, while we spent 63

million rubles. And, my God, shocking

as it is, Margarita Simonyan and a calculator are

a terrifying combination: you put the two together and

a chain reaction begins. She

subtracts 63 from 82 on a calculator,

gets 19 million, and writes an

“investigation” claiming that Navalny

pocketed a considerable sum of money.

which would be really great, but only there

not even 19 million, as was supposedly discovered

by Margarita Simonyan, but much more than that

and it’s very clear where that money is — in our

account, frozen by the Investigative Committee

of Russia, and Al Burov wrote about this too

Volkov, you wrote all of this, saying that you are

shameless scum: first you

freeze donated money, or rather

the money of ordinary people, call it

laundered money, and then on top of that

you shout, “Something doesn’t add up here —

income and expenses don’t match.” Of course they don’t match

because you didn’t exactly steal it — you froze

a considerable sum in our account, which

of course we are fighting to get back, and sooner or later we

will get it. That money is blocked, and

the second very

funny accusation is that they really

consider this a problem

whereas for us it’s actually a huge point of pride

and it shows a major difference in

approach — between normal people

between us, yes, and all that

Kremlin riffraff. They ran the numbers and

announced that for us, apparently, already

for the seventh year in a row

the average donation size has been falling

like, “See? For Navalny, for the seventh year

in a row, people are sending smaller and smaller

individual donations.”

Great — but the number of people is growing

and that’s exactly what we want: for us to have

more donors — 50 rubles, 100 rubles

20 rubles

whatever amount people send us, but

the main thing is that there are lots of people, because

we want to rely on the support of tens of

hundreds of thousands, millions, and that’s why we’re

perfectly fine with the fact that it’s going down —

the average donation size — because

the number of donors is increasing, and

we look at that and think, “Great — more

more people, yes, and money too.” But

the Kremlin looks at it and thinks

that means there are fewer wealthy people and more

paupers coming in, as they see it

This really is, fundamentally,

a worldview-level thing

that sharply distinguishes us all, and

to wrap up the topic of the terrible

“exposés” they made about

us, one of those exposés

was based on the final frames of my

show, because as you know, we

launched sponsorships, and we have 6,500

sponsors of this channel

This channel legally exists

separately from the Anti-Corruption Foundation

because, well, we receive these

through YouTube — you can pay us

sponsorship money, and we don’t know

who exactly is on the other side; we receive these

donations in accordance with YouTube’s rules

Good Lord, they’ve done it again

at the same time

— staged some kind of provocation and then an investigation into it

though I don’t know whether it was a provocation or not

You probably saw that at the end of the show

— the most dedicated viewers are the ones who watch to the very end

the die-hards who make it all the way to the end

— at the end of the show you see names scrolling by

those are specifically the names of third-tier sponsors

the ones who paid more than 1,300 — more than

1,400 rubles

and among those names they found some kind of

“TTR Casino,” and

well, you can sign up there under any name you want

you can call yourself Hitler, you can write

Margarita Simonyan, you can write Igor

Sechin — you can write absolutely anything, and then

they even released an “investigation.” Let me

show you five or six seconds of what it said:

that Navalny LIVE, and therefore the FBK

is funded through online casinos

and also there are people there with foreign

usernames — that is, usernames typed in Latin letters — which

means that most likely these are

foreign citizens. Fifty-six seconds

of shocking revelations

[music]

[music]

It really, genuinely was an “investigation”

they were pushing today; when I saw it, it was sent to me

— haha — I see you

were spreading it through Telegram channels

So if you send us

donations and subscribe

as John Smith, or God forbid as Hitler, or

or whoever, I don’t know

then soon there’ll be another

“investigation” claiming that Navalny is accepting

totalitarian money, or money from

the Chinese government, or of course money from

John Smith — a person with a name like that is

obviously, of course,

a CIA employee. And 52,000 people are already watching us

live right now. This morning

I woke up, like everyone else

picked up my phone, and saw a message there

on a Telegram channel about the “Police Ombudsman” (a Russian police whistleblower project); it was

seven — and I thought maybe it was from some

guy from Novaya Oblast or something

But it really was about the Police Ombudsman

Vladimir Vorontsov. This story

absolutely deserves attention

because it shows, well, it shows

these deep underlying processes

taking place in the police, which unfortunately

are not positive at all. The police

is degrading; right now everyone hates the police

and naturally it is upset by that hatred

it takes offense at that hatred and behaves

in an even stupider, much more

cruel way, and we can see that in the example of

this very Vorontsov, the Police Ombudsman

who, in fact, they say

is a police officer — a former police officer who

He defends other police officers, I mean,

he's a lawyer who defends the labor

rights of cops, and of course he criticizes

their superiors, because the superiors

violate police officers' labor rights, so

they searched his place before; last time, against

him, they opened a criminal case there

and accused him of spreading

"fake news." But this time, he writes, "They're searching my place, and my

door has been smashed in," after which

he disappeared, and some time later, as I understand it,

the Interior Ministry's press service began circulating

footage. It really was something else. First of all,

the door—what his door looked like. I mean,

please show the door. The door was

broken in, sawed through, and it was just lying

on the floor. I've had several searches at my home

and we've had many office

searches in offices too, and yes, they cut through doors, but in his case they even

did more than that—what, tore out some window frames?

They brought in something like a tank. You know how they show it

in movies: an armored vehicle pulls up,

kind of like a tank, and instead of

a gun barrel it has this square thing

that smashes in doors

and window frames in apartment blocks—like in high-rises.

But why? After all, here

it's just an ordinary former police officer living

with his wife and child. They took him away, and now

he's already been arrested and is being held in custody,

as far as I understand.

In any case, they took him away and opened

a criminal case. They're talking about it as if

to say, "Well, there's a child there"—damn it, and now you

don't have a door, because they broke it down, so

it's all just for reports, for show. How are you supposed to

go on living with just an empty doorway?

And most importantly, why is this being done, and why

this whole theatrical display? But the wildest thing

happened outside the apartment, because

you've seen this in movies a million

times—you've seen some kind of assault in a film, and

guys in black come down on ropes,

swinging, and bam—with their feet

they smash the window, burst inside, and grab all the

bad guys. They actually did that here.

It looked nothing like the movies.

It looked exactly like something at the level of the Russian Interior Ministry (MVD),

but done in complete seriousness.

To this man, whom they could simply have

rung the doorbell for and said, "Hello,

search warrant, come out," instead they sent down these

half-baked commandos on ropes.

Let's take a look.

As you can see, it doesn't look in the slightest

like a movie. It doesn't look at all

like some super-special operation. But still,

why? Was he holding a hostage in there or something?

No—the leadership of the Interior Ministry thought it was important

to put on a show, to look cool, like, "We

got him using all available forces and

means." Of course, all those forces and means amounted to

two random guys who, apparently from

fear and terror of falling, were barely

climbing and squeezing through an open

window vent. Well, it's warm now, people had the window open,

and they still sawed through the door. Again, these

helmeted guys had these

GoPros on them—you'll see in the next

video—hanging there, apparently so they could

record it all. American

special forces run around Fallujah (Iraq), shooting

at various people, and they wear GoPros

so their commanders can later

watch how "cool" they were in action. And here it's the same thing.

This poor

Vorontsov wasn't even allowed to get properly

dressed. You can see him walking there, just

first, in shock, and second, upset because

they smashed the door in, so you walk out

and—I put myself in his place—my

only thoughts would be, "What on earth am I supposed to do now?

What is my wife going to do about this door?"

I mean, they broke down the door—it's not as simple as

calling a repairman and fixing a window.

Hooray, we smashed it.

They scared the child too. What was all this for?

And of course, right away, of course,

there was REN TV (a Russian tabloid-style TV channel) there, and other

trash TV outlets too, for whom it was very

important to show him walking with

his belt undone while he was being dragged along by

these guys with GoPros, and to ask him

questions. No one stopped them.

Let's watch. "You were detained

—you weren't even given a chance..." "Why is your holster sitting

there?"

"Under the law, and

you're at home with a weapon..."

You see, the key point here is

what kind of

public humiliation this is. Oh, you went after

the police bosses? Well then, this is how the police state responds:

we'll treat you like this. We won't let you get properly

dressed, we won't let you take your things.

They took him to the Investigative Committee,

and after some time it turned out that the criminal

case was for extortion, over some

episodes from ages ago.

So it's completely obvious that Vorontsov

simply enraged the Russian police, including

because he drew a lot of attention to

all those cases where the police were

detaining citizens for no clear reason, arresting them

for no understandable reason—everything absurd and

all those utterly ridiculous ministry orders that

were being issued in connection with the coronavirus

pandemic—he was sharing those too, including

maybe he was even the first. Or whoever

first spread them—our Novosibirsk team was

actively working on that in Novosibirsk,

and Vorontsov was too. I honestly don't remember who

published first this video and audio

that I reposted here, the one

about how in Novosibirsk

the head of the district police service says there,

"You go out there and, to meet the quota, detain these people,

detain them first, and then even..."

was dismissed from his post

It was a huge scandal involving the system.

the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), and here are the police officers

we at the top, yes, and of course it’s obvious what they want

they want to devour him, but it’s very gratifying to watch

how the middle ranks, and even the lower ranks, how

they diligently try to go after him

a person who is basically going against

the system in order to help them. If you

go to his Telegram channel or to the

public page

Batman Police on VKontakte, you’ll see

that it really is very much about police life

the guy, I mean, even in some

cases where it’s not clear who is right

the civilians or—by the way, interestingly—he

deliberately writes there “our cops” and

“civilians,” so basically he is

a real ombudsman for the police, because

he’s a cop to the core himself, but at the same time

he says some normal, decent things

and defends these cops, and

in return, they just

go after him, clearly trying to humiliate him on purpose

It’s very sad to watch, I repeat.

This is the most important thought that is now

constantly in my head, and in the heads of all

other Russian citizens, it seems to me,

right now during the quarantine: that

the law enforcement system

has finally turned into something

separate from society as a whole and

from the state. I mean, these are people who

provide no benefit whatsoever, they

only do harm, they only interfere with our

normal lives, and we all keep waiting for

some kind of movement to arise

against this, but unfortunately it doesn’t happen.

There are many good people, many good cops,

but everyone stays silent, and no one is ready to support Vorontsov

probably, maybe

the public will support him; maybe they

support him somewhere in the smoking rooms

but this whole system in which

they were breaking down his doors and coming down from the roof

well, of course the operatives could have said

to their superiors, let’s not do it

like this; these are not the kind of orders

that would get them fired. They could have

Even if they were ordered to fabricate a case against him

and ordered to storm his apartment, still

they could have done it at least somewhat

in accordance with ordinary

standards—at least detain him

the way ordinary people are detained

when they are actually guilty of something. But

against him they fabricated a case, and on top of that

they climb in through the window and smash down the door—well,

that is, of course, utterly disgraceful.

Once again, I appeal to all employees of the

MVD who are watching the program—we know

there are many of you. Guys, don’t be offended that everyone

hates you. People will keep hating you until

you stop staying silent, because

you really have set yourselves against

society.

Overall, the whole system—Rosgvardiya (Russia’s National Guard), the police—

is setting itself against society, and nothing

good will come of it. Anatoly

asks me on Ring of: tell me,

how do you manage to determine exactly which

brand the clothes worn by this or that official are

or where they were made? Do you have a consultant from a fashion

boutique?

No, so far we don’t have consultants from a fashion

boutique, but we do have an investigations department

where very attentive people work, and

not only are they very attentive,

they are people who are sincerely upset and

outraged by these

wonderful outfits—there, I used a fashionable word—

that

our officials parade around in, and in particular

Anastasia Rakova. Obviously this question

was connected with the investigation that

we released today. When we were

preparing it,

it’s a pity I can’t show you the investigations department chat,

to show how truly

the person who did all this, how

angry he gets, and how angry everyone else gets

about how it really is in fact.

She knows she’s going to be photographed: she goes

to a government meeting, she goes to a

hospital to pose with doctors, and she puts on

a coat costing 500,000 rubles (about $5,500), and that is

basically all we need for

this. We just need principled people

who genuinely want to fight

corruption, and attentiveness. And after that

it’s just a huge and very tedious job

of tracking down all these things. Well,

we simply sat there and compared one item

to another. We did the same with

precious stones and jewelry,

and watches are even more complicated.

One of the things the Anti-Corruption Foundation does

is track watches, and there

just imagine trying to sort through all of that.

It’s a much less distinctive kind of item than

all these

Kiton jackets and coats worn by

Deputy Mayor Rakova.

Let’s watch.

A minute and a half from the investigation

in which Naila Asker-zade appeared. Those

who haven’t seen it yet, please go

and make sure to watch it on the

main channel. For those who have watched it, I have a

request: we’d like to reach a slightly

different audience with it,

first and foremost women, of course,

who are probably the main

audience of all kinds of fashion пабликs about

how much things cost, or generally of places where

the price of clothes is discussed,

and shipping, and so on. Please post

the link there, please—it would really help us a lot.

I wish any ordinary person could, but I don’t know.

There’s my girlfriend and a young man there,

who orders clothes for himself from

AliExpress or somewhere like that and thinks, well,

damn, I’d really like to buy something for

8,000 rubles (about $90), but for 8,000 rubles around here

I’d better buy something for 6,000 rubles (about $70) so they

can look at it and appreciate how much money

can be spent just on clothes. One and a half

minutes into today’s investigation,

which is posted on the main channel, last

week Anastasia Vladimirovna appeared

on another federal TV channel, Russia-1 (a state-owned Russian TV channel).

We’re not even going to listen to what she

is saying — we’re interested in the shirt and the shoes.

Anastasia had already worn this look to

the opening of a coronavirus ward at

one of Moscow’s hospitals.

Jimmy Choo shoes — 45,000 rubles (about $500).

A silk Kiton blouse — 94 and a half

thousand rubles (about $1,050). How can a blouse

cost almost 100,000 rubles? Of course,

there are very expensive things, but this is already

something out of the ordinary. Yes, it’s all about the brand.

Kiton is one of the most expensive brands

in the world. It’s an old Neapolitan workshop

with a family-run Italian tradition,

exclusively handmade work and one-off

items.

We notice a suit from this very brand

on Anastasia Vladimirovna

in this photograph from the Russian

Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

As the website tells us, a cashmere jacket like this for Anastasia took

about a full day

of work

by 25 tailors. The price of the suit

matches the labor costs of Italian

seamstresses — 507,000 rubles (about $5,650). In this

photo we see a bright blue summer

set, again by Kiton: jacket — 300,000 rubles, trousers —

100,000. Here you’ll probably already recognize

the signature check pattern — a suit in gray

coming to 373

thousand rubles altogether. At the start of this video I

showed you just 10 recent appearances,

not private or off-duty ones — only

official events.

No random paparazzi shots, and only in

these 10 photographs alone we found clothing

worth more than 3,074,000 rubles (about $34,000).

People are watching us live right now. If you

want those wonderful little messages to scroll

across the bottom of the screen, there’s a link below.

Click it and send, along with that

message,

a few rubles to support us.

Anastasia Rakova is a very important

official.

Many people, even many Muscovites, don’t

fully understand who this person is. She is

one of the people closest to Sergei

Sobyanin, and she has worked with him her entire career.

Starting from his time in Tyumen, wherever

Sobyanin worked, she always followed him. She

was everywhere with him — first just his secretary,

then his right-hand woman. Many people believe

that her real influence on the life of the city

is no less than Sobyanin’s. Before that, by the way,

Rakova oversaw, for the previous two

years, social policy — and before that

she was, incidentally, responsible for elections.

So when elections were rigged in the

previous cycle, that was exactly

the kind of thing Anastasia Rakova was dealing with —

all sorts of political issues. Then she was removed from

political matters and

they put in our old friend named

Sergunina.

You’ve also seen the investigation

we released about her. And Rakova now has

this whole social-policy bloc.

Believe me, that is an enormous share of power.

I mean, Moscow’s budget is

3 trillion rubles (about $33 billion), and the lion’s share of it

is controlled by Anastasia Rakova.

Education, healthcare,

the social protection department, the

employment department, the civil registry office, and so on and so on.

In other words, it’s just a gigantic area of responsibility. She is

a super-boss. I saw several comments like

that — people saying, who even is this

Rakova, whatever her name is? This is

a person who controls more money

than many federal ministers. This is

someone with enormous powers. Right now she

is on the front line of the fight against the corona

virus, because Moscow has the highest number of

infected people, and Moscow is the only

federal subject with enough money for

any real response. So Rakova, then,

is running this medical

machine. Our investigation, if I remember correctly,

started with

the fact that one of the curious

people who works with us simply

sent us an indignant photo: look,

Rakova is addressing doctors, trying to

encourage them, saying: come on, guys, work

harder, we’ll pay you a little money, and

even if you don’t get paid, you should still work

better — and meanwhile she’s wearing some belt

that costs 52,000 rubles (about $580). I looked at it

and thought, how could this possibly

cost even 2,000 rubles? But then

we looked at one thing, then another, and

saw that, yes, this person really

spends millions of rubles on clothes

that she wears to official events.

It’s not like she, you know, buys herself

diamond-studded outfits and goes to parties

with feathers everywhere, with Sobyanin next to her in

some kind of, I don’t know, super-silky

bright red tuxedo.

No, that’s not what’s going on. This is a person

who goes around hospitals, again, and doesn’t

forget to wear there

items each of which costs

hundreds of thousands of rubles or tens of thousands

of rubles, and that’s why we decided to talk about this

in detail. Our attentive

viewers, and those who have been with us for a long time, will remember this

— we mention it in the video. You remember

of course that back then we did it together with

Meduza (an independent Russian media outlet). That was ages ago, in 2015,

when we did a review

of the jewelry worn by various female officials. Ira, you were there

was absolutely at the top, I think she was even

in first place, because she was

first of all decked out

in very expensive jewelry, really

very expensive jewelry. Ever since

that moment, we have definitely kept an eye on all

these ladies at Moscow City Hall — some of them

you can call “girls,” some you can’t — but still,

you have to keep a close watch, because this is all really

the case with Sergunina, for example, who

was also in that ranking.

We called it something like an informal

royal ranking — she too was covered in expensive

jewelry. Sergunina is definitely

a dollar millionaire for sure. And then there was some

Gulnara Penkova, good Lord,

the Moscow mayor’s press secretary, also

decked out in super-expensive jewelry. Together with

Meduza, we published that ranking.

As mentioned in the video, one great

consequence was that starting the very next

day, not a single piece of jewelry — nothing at all,

just gone. Apparently there was a scandal, and it

struck a nerve with a lot of people, because

a lot of attention was paid to it specifically by

a female audience. And our authorities

generally believe that women are the backbone

of the regime, because women are considered

on average to be less interested in

politics,

but they still more or less go to elections, especially

women aged 50 and older, and they go vote

and keep voting for the authorities. So

for the authorities, women are the main

important, most basic electorate, and we really

landed a blow there. So they took off

all those trinkets of theirs — very expensive ones — but

what we’re really interested in is

what will happen next with Anastasia Rakova.

Will she keep wearing her coats

that cost half a million rubles (about several thousand U.S. dollars)? Well, we don’t think

that, you know, this is going to turn into one of those things you see in

cartoons — or remember there was

that parody by Svetlakov (Russian comedian Sergei Svetlakov) about an honest

policeman, where he dressed his child

in a McDonald’s outfit, cutting

holes for the arms and legs.

It was a McDonald’s bag, and in that McDonald’s bag

his child wore it. But we don’t expect Rakova to

show up tomorrow

in a McDonald’s bag — that would probably be too small for her,

so she’d have to take a sack, cut

holes in it, and come wearing that sack. But

we’ll see how she changes her wardrobe

along with all the rest of these ladies.

But jokes aside,

this is a genuinely painful subject, because

after all, she is in charge of social policy — she really

deals with social issues. This is someone who spends 90

percent of her working time

sitting there discussing, well, how

to hand out benefits: who gets them, who gets

2,000 rubles, what about people with disabilities,

which ones,

who should get apartments, how many square meters of living space,

who gets admitted to a nursing home, who

doesn’t, and whether we build a hospice rink —

or don’t build it. You really are dealing

every day with hundreds of thousands of

literally impoverished people, or

people of modest means, or very sick people

— all kinds of people. And yet, I just don’t know,

she goes out herself and buys these

all these things, or maybe, I don’t know,

some oligarch owners

of these clothing stores just bring them in,

like a KamAZ truck unloads somewhere, and she’s standing there in this

huge pile, you know how there are those

second-hand sales with a heap of

rags lying around,

except for her it’s the opposite: they bring in stuff from the best boutiques,

a whole load of it, and she just dives in

and digs out a few things. But

I doubt that’s how it works. Still, the psychology

of a person like that, someone who is not at all

ashamed, not in the slightest, is impossible

to imagine in Western society.

It’s impossible to imagine that some

government official in

the United Kingdom would wear something

that costs half a million rubles. There

have been plenty of such cases — the entire press

would go absolutely wild,

and they’d be all over it for three months, because even

if you do have that kind of money, you still can’t

go around wearing a coat that costs half a million

rubles.

You can’t keep changing that coat all the time.

Maybe you have just one — okay. But when

they have lots of them, it no longer looks just

strange; it’s plainly inconsistent with your

position as a public official. So

this investigation seems important to me, and

so please help us. There are 80

thousand people watching us live right now,

so please spread this around to various

thematic forums, public pages, and so on,

so that people watch it again

and are struck by it — especially now, when they’re

sitting in quarantine waiting for their benefits.

Even in Moscow, they’re not paying them, and

they’re not paying pregnant women what was promised either,

and they keep delaying and delaying payments to those

they promised to pay.

They say salaries will be paid after May 18.

Everything is being done as if

there’s no money at all — I mean, simply no

money. And Sobyanin, Rakova, and all the

others are trying to cut corners on everything.

There’s no shortage of money, and these people are super rich.

But they don’t set aside anything, so it’s very

important. Let me look at the questions. Eighty-four thousand

people are watching us live.

Northwind asks me:

They’ll answer you: what salary should

officials have? What should

their salary be? It should be

a normal, market-level salary. Rogova

earns an average of 7 million rubles a

year. That’s a big salary.

Even now, that’s, well, a little less

than $100,000 a year. Yes, before

the latest sharp drop in oil prices,

it was more than $100,000

a year. That is a high salary. I

really do believe that

officials should be paid a good

salary that corresponds

to market benchmarks, that is,

so that a person values their

job. If you hire someone

as an official, and we say: you’ll

be earning 600,000 rubles per

month. For 600,000 rubles a

month, there’ll be a line tomorrow

of very decent, qualified people

with excellent education. That’s the whole

point.

Big money, a big salary,

for a proper job, but

while earning 7,000 rubles—or rather, 7

million rubles a year, 600,000 rubles

a month.

It’s impossible to compare. You simply can’t spend that much

on clothes—5 million rubles. It’s impossible

to buy jewelry worth 8

million rubles. And if someone

gives it to you, or, I don’t know, some admirer gives you

a piece of jewelry worth 8 million rubles,

well, sorry, but if you’re an official, you have to

declare it, you have to report such

gifts. Officials are not allowed to receive them, and

that is simply a fact. So in

some sense,

maybe this is even more important than

all those dachas (country houses), palaces, and everything else,

because we may not find the dachas, and

we definitely won’t find the Swiss bank accounts.

Those can only be found by

the Investigative Committee (Russia’s main federal investigative authority), which does not want

to look for any of it. But the fact that they completely

without any embarrassment, and understanding that this is

easy to uncover—well, easy to uncover, but

they just go and get photographed in it

endlessly—they don’t even think

they need to hide it at all.

It seems to show a super-

condescending attitude toward everyone, and they

will keep demonstrating it until

they are afraid of us during

the time of

elections, rallies, and any political

events. That is, when people like Rogov and

Sobyanin are afraid they wore the wrong thing,

said the wrong thing, lost an election, and got thrown out—

only then will they listen, just like

everyone else.

Because an official should be under

pressure—not necessarily crushed by it, but

in a normal way. Take Angela Merkel, for example—right now

everyone in Germany loves her, she is acting correctly,

and her approval rating is simply rising

at cosmic speed. An official simply

has to pick up some reaction from

society. They should want to receive

support, and they should be afraid of losing

that support. But what we see from Moscow City Hall

is: they just don’t give a damn about any of it.

They don’t care at all, and they need to be brought to their senses.

And the first step, of course,

is spreading these investigations. So,

Dmitry asks: Hello,

should we be worried about our accounts being blocked

if we send you

money? You don’t need to send money to me personally.

For now, there’s no need to be afraid of that. Send it

without hesitation—no one will block anything of yours. As

I said at the beginning of the broadcast, this

year we had 115,5

99 money transfers. That is

tens of thousands of people, and it is absolutely

legal. Everything is transferred legally, OK.

Send it. Anatoly Bykov—many people

have been asking about Anatoly Bykov. He is a

well-known businessman from Krasnoyarsk.

It is customary to say

an “authoritative businessman,” because

well, he is a typical figure from

the “wild ’90s” (the turbulent post-Soviet 1990s in Russia), probably.

People under 30 may not know him

that well, but in the 1990s he was unquestionably

a huge name. He was on the board of directors

of the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Plant

when all these sectors were being carved up—

oil plants, metal and

metallurgical plants, aluminum

enterprises—in Krasnoyarsk and across

Siberia. There were shootings, killings,

all sorts of things were happening, and

as a result of those events,

Bykov became one of the owners

of the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Plant. Later

he was forced,

if I remember correctly, to sell it all

to Deripaska. Well, he ended up with quite a

large amount of money, and he stayed

living in Krasnoyarsk. Not exactly a small amount of money, and

he lives in Krasnoyarsk, and

the thing is that now he has been

arrested, and today this was being talked about

all over the media.

I received a lot of

questions about how I feel about it.

I mean, on the one hand, obviously

the man came through those wild ’90s,

but on the other hand, it may be a political case, and

my position here is completely unambiguous.

My answer is: I’m not personally acquainted with Anatoly

Bykov, but I have no doubt whatsoever that this case is political

— I have absolutely no doubts,

not the slightest. He may well have had

some kind of biography

of varying degrees of complexity, or, I don’t know,

illegality, and all the rest. But what

is happening now obviously has nothing

to do with, not the slightest connection to,

any real accusation. He is being accused

of having allegedly

organized contract killings in

1994. That is,

strictly speaking, the statute of limitations has already

expired. And he was accused

by a man who himself has served 13

years; he only had a little time left before

being released, and suddenly he gets out and gives

testimony against Bykov, saying that Bykov

ordered contract killings. Why is this

happening now? The whole point is that

Bykov,

for all his peculiarities,

first, in recent years has been quite

sharp in speaking out against the authorities; second,

he takes part in local

political life. He somehow

controls the local franchise of the Patriots

of Russia party. In

Krasnoyarsk and the Krasnoyarsk region,

that party gets very high results, and even in

some cities it beats United

Russia, simply because he — because

Bykov is one of their own, he’s local, he had some

money, and apparently he spends it,

sure, he lives well, but he didn’t leave

for somewhere abroad. He’s, well, a kind of

people’s oligarch, someone familiar,

a fairly understandable figure. And he was beating

United Russia, and now he speaks out

against the authorities. And when, at one point,

they passed

what political analysts call yet another

“law named after Navalny” (a law informally associated with opposition politician Alexei Navalny), when they passed

the law under which, if you are convicted,

even given a suspended sentence, you cannot

take part in elections — Bykov also fell under

that law. He had helped get several

deputies elected to the Krasnoyarsk city council and to

the regional assembly, and for him

when this law was passed in the 2010s

— to be precise, not in 2012, in 2013 —

he had been planning to run, but then he couldn’t.

In that same 2013,

he too was barred from taking part in elections, and he

couldn’t run. And now, supposedly, in

some time — in about six months —

the period expires

during which he is not allowed to participate in elections.

And elections are happening all the time, and for the authorities — both

local and federal — it is very undesirable

for him to run, because

of course

he would beat United Russia. And that is the main

reason. But the second thing is this:

again, I’m not going to discuss

Bykov’s biography, but if we look

objectively at all this, let’s

watch a clip from a report

on Rossiya 24 (Russian state TV channel Rossiya 24).

Here is the report itself, from the moment of

the detention. Just imagine:

they are detaining a very wealthy man

who is accused of contract

killings. How does it happen that

a camera crew runs together with the special forces

and storms his house, filming all of it?

A federal TV channel’s camera crew films

all this, and at the same time, immediately after he is

detained, the editorial office instantly has at its disposal

—

video of this man,

someone named Tatarinov, who gave

testimony about Bykov, saying that he

was involved in contract killings. That’s not how it

works.

It’s impossible that journalists would be brought into such a super-

secret operation,

that journalists would be supplied with all

the documents. So let’s watch

five seconds of it —

what remarkable journalists there are,

good for them, and what reports they make from

the scene of the detention. “The detention of Bykov

was the result of a joint operation by the Interior Ministry, the FSB (Federal Security Service), and the

Investigative Committee. At the same time, at the

detainee’s place of residence,

searches begin. About one hundred

security personnel are taking part. The cottage settlement of Udachny,

near the well-known residence of the governor,

is an environmentally clean and beautiful district

of Krasnoyarsk.

It is here that the estate of

the influential businessman

Anatoly Bykov is located, near the Yenisei River.”

[music]

“SOBR officers (a Russian special rapid-response unit), who arrived at Anatoly

Bykov’s residence, are now storming the mansion. A

helicopter is also being

used.

This is Bykov’s house: a three-story mansion with

an attic, luxurious inside and out.

Expensive furniture, a large

billiards table, a private movie theater.

Investigators are inspecting the study and living

quarters, examining all kinds of materials

related to the case. As you can see,

for all Anatoly Bykov’s wealth, the house

looks like Elena Malysheva’s (a well-known Russian TV host) house

in terms of the color palette, let’s say.”

So, I mean, guys, that just doesn’t happen.

Special forces are running in, and right behind them a TV camera

is filming everything — that simply does not happen.

It’s not even that someone handed journalists

operational footage — no, the journalists are literally

running there themselves, and there it is, just like

that. A case from 1994, and now, right before

the elections, a man suddenly appears who gives testimony.

The testimony is being weaponized—it's perfectly clear what this is about.

All of this has been set up so that you would

be kept off the ballot—that is, this case

is clearly a commissioned hit job. If there are grounds

and evidence to believe that he was somehow

involved in something, then please

investigate it. But the way all this is happening

is simply an obvious attempt

to make it look, in the eyes of Krasnoyarsk residents,

as though when he, his party, his

colleagues, and supporters are barred from

the election, then that must mean it's right, that's how it

should be—because, look, there's this estate,

and now we're storming it there in Krasnoyarsk

Everyone knows about this estate, everyone knows everything,

and they vote for him, among other reasons,

because he built that estate outside

Krasnoyarsk.

not outside New York—that's how it all works.

So let me just repeat once again:

otherwise they'll later run around

shouting about some amazing alliance between

Bykov and Navalny. If you want to

investigate him, then investigate him. But

when you try to sell us some obviously

fabricated case based on charges from 1994

for which the statute of limitations expired long ago,

that's clearly complete nonsense. I

hope that the residents of Krasnoyarsk, whoever

they vote for—whether Bykov or

someone else—the main thing is that they

do not vote for United Russia because of the people

who staged this

utterly disgraceful spectacle. There are a huge

number of questions about, well, the virus.

Masks—someone with the username "Around the World in Nine" asks:

Alexei, some stores in Moscow have posted notices

saying that people without masks

will not be allowed inside.

Masks are expensive—where is Putin's

anti-price-gouging policy on

masks? How are people supposed to enter a store?

A doctor from Kyiv asks:

well, some doctor anyway—

how appropriate do you think it is

to start coming out of

self-isolation after the holidays, given

that over the past week we've had

more than 10,000 cases a day?

Savinofigor asks about the strange statistics:

300,000 COVID cases in Moscow according to

Sobyanin's figures versus 84,000 according to the federal штаб (operational task force). What

is that about? That's a great question, thank you

very much. We really don't understand

what exactly is going on, because what is

happening now from the standpoint of

the strategy for fighting the coronavirus

and the strategy of this whole isolation

and the exit from it is genuinely unclear. But

the thing is, nobody understands what's

happening, yet the authorities have already begun this

narrative, this storyline,

that benefits them, and we are absolutely guaranteed

to hear, day after day, around the clock, for weeks and

months, for at least the next year, that

everything was done brilliantly, that Russia did better

than anyone else in the world.

Since you're watching this program,

it may just seem ridiculous to you, like, how

can anyone say that—but they have in fact already

started saying it. And Putin kicked off

that campaign: yesterday he spoke at

yet another one of his meetings with

ministers. Everyone has practically stopped paying

much attention to all these meetings.

It's obvious that Sobyanin, for example,

from the standpoint of practical, real-world

matters connected with the coronavirus, is

a much more significant figure than Putin,

because at least he is actually making some

decisions already.

Whether they're right or wrong, he makes them,

whereas Putin makes no decisions at all.

But he has already declared that you all

did an amazingly great job. What's more,

he said, you know, we did everything so

well that many other

countries are following our path—and at that point you just

want your jaw to drop to the floor

and hit the table. But what he actually said was:

"Look, practice has shown that we

acted absolutely correctly. Moreover,

many foreign countries have followed

our path.

We can see that, and it's good if things work out for them too.

This is classic Goebbels-style

propaganda: the more outrageous and brazen

the lie, the faster people start believing it.

Now they are absolutely certain to

flood television with stories

and just hammer it into everyone's ears

that we did better than anyone else,

and that other countries are following us. And our

task—the task of normal, decent people—is

to expose this propaganda with very

simple questions: namely,

what exactly was Russia's strategy, and what did we

actually do very well? If right now, well,

you were asking whether

quarantine should be lifted now, as is being done

across the country—today Sobyanin said that

in Moscow the current, somewhat eased

quarantine will remain in place until the end of the month, until

May 31. But overall, across the country, it is one way or

another beginning to be lifted; in Moscow

it is being partially lifted.

And Putin is instructing that

governors should now work not on

campaigns to fight the coronavirus, but on

campaigns for

lifting restrictions. Let's try

to look at this soberly and

without, setting aside perhaps some

dislike of our authorities: when can

quarantine be lifted, and when can

restrictions be lifted, when your graph was

first like this, and then it became like

this?

wait, we’ve reached that very notorious plateau

and then, when it started to go down a little,

that’s when you can start thinking about

lifting restrictions, gradually

lifting them. And Russia is the only country in the

world where, even according to the official

charts, everything is still shooting upward like a rocket, damn it.

What’s more, we now have fairly

clear evidence that because of

Sobyanin (the Mayor of Moscow), because of the traffic jams he created

the crowding in the metro, last week there was

a spike

in these newly identified cases

of infection all at once. Everything is going up, and we

were absolutely right to ask

the question: here we have official data

from the оперативный штаб (government coronavirus task force), saying that we

currently have, what, how many cases

— around 100,000 infected. Then Sobyanin

comes out today and says

"Well, you know, actually

in Moscow there are about 300,000

infected." Excuse me, but is Moscow no longer

part of Russia? Then what exactly is

the federal task force counting? And most

importantly, what is this supposed to mean? So here’s what we’ve got:

it would be great if other countries were following

our lead, but if in reality the mayor

of the city — the mayor of the biggest city —

says that of course there are 300,000 infected,

and that is three times higher than the official

figures, then how many infected people are there

overall, guys? And what exactly is our

official formula? I mean, we can

say these are the infected people in hospitals,

we can count those, or we can count

asymptomatic cases, or we can say that we

are extrapolating from tests, or something else — there

has to be some formula by which

we count the infected, and that formula has to be uniform.

And the Health Ministry, Ros... this

Rospotrebnadzor (Russia’s consumer safety watchdog), and all the other

scientists said, you know, in order

to understand when

to lift the quarantine, how the chart is built, where

on that chart, damn it, that very

notorious plateau is, we need

a single formula. And if there is no single formula,

then how are we counting any of this at all?

And in general, let’s look at

what normal charts are supposed to look like.

Here are charts for those who are more or less

handling the quarantine reasonably well, those who

still need to improve, and those who are doing very

badly. Show me that nice

image I prepared, with lots and lots of

different countries. Here, look — let’s

take a longer look at this image.

You see, on the left-hand side, if you’re looking

at the screen, there are the green countries — like

Estonia, Norway, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

I can’t quite see — Austria, not Australia,

up there in green. That means the rate

of infection growth shot up, it was high, and then

in Austria, seriously, it

started going down. Next we have the yellow

countries, where

the situation is good — restrictions can be lifted there

and they are gradually lifting

restrictions. It had all been going

up, and then it started going down, and now people there

are slowly lifting restrictions, but

they are watching carefully so that

the trend doesn’t start rising again. And then we have

the red countries, which include

Russia as well. Russia isn’t to say that

it’s the absolute worst — the U.S., as you can see,

is not doing very well either, but right now it seems

that their growth rate is no longer

rising. And only Russia is still rapidly

— like a damn rocket flying to the moon, in

accordance with Rogozin’s (head of Russia’s space agency) dreams of opening

a new base there — with the growth rate of new

cases increasing wildly. And in

this situation, with a chart like this,

it’s impossible even to talk about

lifting restrictions — it’s simply

impossible to discuss. If we are talking about it,

then what the hell did we comply with all this for

all this time? What were all these

sacrifices for, exactly?

A huge number of people became poorer,

businesses were shut down — what was it all for, in

the end? Any one of us — I spent all this

time going to the store in a mask and gloves and

so on. If they are now bluntly

lifting all this by region, if they are

lifting it now in Moscow — if you want to lift it, then

let’s talk internationally, let’s look

at Germany. We have a separate chart for

Germany — show it. This is what it should

look like. Look, look — Germany.

The upper chart shows the number of

cases.

And then the number of new cases, and

bring back the lower chart — that is the number of new

cases. You see, it is going down, and

when it goes down like this, those

orange bars indicate that

restrictions can be lifted. And Angela

Merkel

is lifting those restrictions, and she says

that people can walk freely in

parks, but they still have to follow certain

specific restrictions. They must

wear masks, maintain social

distancing, and so on — and of course no

concerts, of course.

Some venues

— restaurants, I think, still aren’t open yet,

or they are opening only in the form of

some kind of cafés, that is — but these

restrictions can be lifted because

the chart has gone down. But here our chart

goes up — it just keeps going up and up,

up and up. And the only thing we

should be seriously discussing right now

is whether this corresponds to when it actually becomes easier.

Even these statistics, which

look absolutely hellish—do they correspond

to any kind of truth? Clearly, they do not

reflect the truth, and first and foremost

that applies to the mortality statistics, because

they simply do not look anything at all like

the truth. And we can see that first of all

by comparing, for example, the data on the number of

doctors who died in Russia. The percentage of dead

medical workers among those infected was very, very

high, and it is quite consistent with what we see

if we compare it with European

countries and countries where there was

a very bad situation. In other words,

in terms of the number of dead doctors, it is just as bad.

But if we look at people in absolute

numbers, then for some reason in Russia there is no

mortality. So where does the mortality go?

Literally in 10 minutes—I understand that they managed

to prepare this image for me—

I saw a great post

by someone who works with statistics.

He writes: look—could you move that for me,

the text on the screen, so I can read it?

Something is written there—here, in large type.

The person writes about how, in reality, in Russia

the statistics are manipulated. In the recommendations

of the Health Ministry dated April 8, it was simply

explicitly recommended that if an elderly person

caught the coronavirus and died because

their heart gave out, then it should be recorded as

heart failure. Later, however, people noticed this,

there was a scandal, and in the

next version that specific

wording was removed. But overall there remained

this kind of ambiguity,

this uncertainty: you can record

it as death from circulatory insufficiency

or similar causes.

Sorry—you can also record it as COVID,

and in this way the mortality

somehow evaporated. And the best

proof that in Russia right now

there is colossal falsification of mortality

data

is this: right now, if any of you

use Twitter, go and read

Maxim Mironov and Alexei Venediktov (editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, a Russian radio station).

Venediktov, who in such cases always tries

to work in the mayor's favor, started publishing

mortality data, saying that he had been informed by

city hall—the editor-in-chief of the radio station

Echo of Moscow.

"I was told by city hall that the death figures are such-and-such," and

"look, they haven't increased." And immediately

people come in and say: let's

look at the Moscow registry website

and we will see there that the statistics on

mortality stopped being published in February.

Previously,

there was always monthly statistics on

the number of deaths from the Moscow civil registry offices

—the offices that register births,

marriages, and deaths—and they used to report monthly

figures all the time, for years. The latest

figures there are dated January 1, 2020.

How many died in Moscow in February and in March

we do not know. And then into this

discussion comes Sergei Aleksashenko, who says:

pay attention—Rosstat has also stopped

publishing mortality statistics.

We do not have any mortality statistics

that can be verified, and in that

sense, everything Sobyanin (Moscow mayor) says,

everything Putin says, and all this lying about

low mortality

—I believe this can and should now

be considered a lie, because we know—and

this is ironclad—they are hiding

the statistics. But if they are hiding them, that

means they can simply distribute the deaths under other

categories however they like; they can

write that people died of all sorts of other things.

At least at this stage, though, they

cannot simply make the bodies

disappear, haul them away, and bury them in the forest.

They cannot do that, among other things, because

there are relatives, and they need death certificates.

They cannot do that. They are not hiding all the

statistics,

they are simply hiding them from us. So sooner or

later this will come out, because there are

a lot of other indicators, and people who

work with data will uncover this

fraud.

And so that you discover it as late as possible,

they have basically hidden everything. Notice:

even regarding doctors, in terms of measures and

doctor deaths, there are statistics showing that

the number is very high, as I already said—at the level of

Europe. Many doctors are dying, which is exactly why

we were running around supporting

the Doctors' Alliance trade union, which was shouting:

give us protective equipment.

Doctors are a vulnerable group, doctors

become carriers of the disease, doctors

are dying in large numbers. But

even for them the statistics are being hidden. Today

a pro-Kremlin channel called Mysh

incidentally,

published an appeal from a young woman. It is

a terrible situation: she was somewhere in

Thailand, got stuck there, and cannot return.

Her mother was a doctor, and she died.

She died, and she had been diagnosed several times

with a positive COVID diagnosis.

She died, but now the certificate says

pneumonia, and that is all. In part this is because

Putin has now promised insurance payments

for doctors—20 million rubles (about 200,000 USD) —and

you see, here there is this

remarkable convergence of interests.

Some people do not want to pay 2.5

million rubles (about 25,000 USD) in insurance to the family of a deceased doctor,

while others, on the whole,

are interested in people dying of

pneumonia, but absolutely not dying of COVID,

because that badly damages

the statistics and shows that Russia

has completely failed in its fight against

the coronavirus, and Putin personally

has completely failed at it. And now they are hiding it.

Let’s look at this young woman.

It’s unfair. My mother worked under terrible conditions and

caught it there while on duty.

She was saying quietly that there was coronavirus outside.

They said that she died, and everywhere they were

saying that Lyuba from Armavir had been admitted somehow.

She had been a very healthy person, and now

for some reason, the report from the morgue

by the pathologist says that she had

just—there’s no need to write the word “corona”

virus, and you can do that so that

I won’t be able to demand any

compensation. It’s strange. I want to watch and

see it with my own eyes.

The situation is terribly upsetting, and it feels as though

they thought they could get away with anything.

You see, if they really have enough nerve

to cover up doctors’ deaths,

to falsify the statistics,

the mortality statistics of doctors who have

relatives, who have colleagues

who run a special website

in memory of the doctors who died, where it is being updated,

then, basically, we know more or less

the real statistics on doctors’ deaths

because there is simply a website online

where people from hospitals are writing a kind of book

of remembrance for their colleagues, and there is a huge

number of dead. I follow

several Dagestani Instagram

public pages, and there it’s just—

you just count them: photos of people,

funerals, crying colleagues, an enormous

number of medical workers are dying, but by

the real statistics

or rather, in the official statistics, this

is not visible. By the way, I think that it is precisely

in the North Caucasus that they will

simply hide a great deal, because in

the North Caucasus there are many elderly people

who are therefore in the high-risk group,

and the healthcare system there is absolutely, completely broken

and the authorities are constantly

inclined to falsification.

And so my assumption is

that it is specifically from the North

Caucasus that we will see several

scandals over the fact that

the data were falsified,

and the mortality figures were manipulated very seriously. But overall,

you understand, to answer the question again:

can the quarantine be lifted? Well, Russia

has now already entered the top five in terms of

the number of cases. The number

of cases in Moscow

even by official data is higher than

in Wuhan. Remember the city of Wuhan, where

it all began—whether people were eating bats there

or there was a laboratory—and people often

say, “Come on, that’s nonsense, Wuhan

is tiny compared with Moscow,”

like it’s some Chinese village compared with Moscow.

It only seems that way to us, as if it were a village,

because we had never heard

the name of that city, because we

only know places like Shanghai and

Beijing.

Wuhan is about the size of Moscow, and right now in

Moscow there are more cases than in Wuhan. And what is

Sergei Semyonovich Sobyanin doing?

He is still keeping a significant part of the city under

under

the regime they call

“self-isolation.” It absolutely infuriates me

that they call it self-isolation.

Sobyanin said that he was extending the

self-isolation regime. If I can be fined

and taken to the police station for stepping

out of my home, then that is not self-isolation. It’s not me

who decided that. It’s called quarantine, as we

have already said here many times. They

will never call it quarantine or

a state of emergency, because then

there would be no way around it—they would have to pay up.

So, Sobyanin stated that

first of all, he confirmed these

figures—300,000 people. First, let’s

so that it doesn’t look like I’m

telling some horror story here—these horror stories

are being told by Sobyanin. Let’s watch 17 seconds

of him telling us about roughly 100

thousand infected people. It is obvious that the real

number of sick people in the city is even higher. According to

screening studies, they are at around

two to two and a half percent

of Moscow’s entire population; converted into

numbers, that comes to about 300,000. There, you see,

that’s exactly what I was talking about. So let’s

simply take some figure as a baseline,

and then at the state level we

will proceed from whether we can

lift the restrictions or whether we cannot lift

the restrictions. Sobyanin tells us that

he is allowing construction workers and

industrial enterprises to work, but at the same time

it is still forbidden to go for a walk with your family,

it is still forbidden to do any

jogging. So basically, in Russia

in terms of the number of restrictions

imposed on citizens, we have one of the—well, in

Moscow, one of the harshest

regimes. In most countries, in one form or another,

walks and jogging

were allowed. Here, everything is banned. And then

suddenly—bang—we allow all

construction workers back, because, supposedly, construction workers

are not in the service sector, and they have

non-closed work teams. Let’s look at

what Sobyanin himself says on this subject:

We believe there is an opportunity to give

people the chance to come to work. This is

the manufacturing sector, the industrial

sector,

the construction sector. Why exactly these ones?

sectors, because we're talking about closed-off

workforces—industrial ones—that

can ensure monitoring of the condition

of their employees and maintain sanitary

standards, and

we're talking about a closed workforce that

does not interact with an undefined circle

of people, as can happen in the service sector.

Then control over

the rate of infection in the service sector

is very, very difficult.

99,000 people are watching the live broadcast.

Yaga, I have a question for you. So, you

heard what he said—does it seem

to you that this is a normal explanation for

ordinary people? No, once again they

simply take everyone for idiots.

"These are closed workforces"—but we've seen

construction sites, we've seen them. A construction site is

a place where, most often, migrants work,

for the most part, right? And they go to

the nearby shop for milk,

bread, kefir.

They live in dormitories or hostels, or in

trailers—well, living in trailers is now

officially prohibited, but they live in very cramped conditions

because, as immigrants, they earn

little money, and on top of that, in Russia

construction is most often organized

in terribly unsanitary conditions. They eat from

one common pot, and yes, they interact with a large

number of people—probably fewer than

the number

probably an even greater number of people

served by, say, a barista in a café, I'm not sure,

but a construction worker also interacts with people.

I'm not saying, let's tomorrow

just open all cafés and all restaurants.

No, what we're saying is: I don't really understand—

if I, or other people in Moscow,

and there are huge numbers of people who run

in the mornings—say I go out for a run,

I run along the boulevard,

and I don't go near anyone, I don't

talk to anyone, I run for 40 minutes and come back

home—how is that more dangerous than

construction workers who, in any

case, do interact—

building materials are constantly being delivered to them and taken away.

A construction site is an anthill; things are constantly

happening there. We've all seen

construction sites, and you understand that this strict

industrial enterprise he talks about—he says, look,

we'll allow industrial enterprises too,

also a closed workforce—but

excuse me, [__], have we not seen

how industry works? An industrial

enterprise is a place where people are constantly

coming, where materials are constantly being delivered,

where people come to buy things,

there's a supply department, a sales department—

that is, basically any production facility

involves far more interaction than any office. The office

of the Anti-Corruption Foundation is forbidden

to work because of restrictions

on contacts that are in force—what it, what he

thinks our office is, and any other office,

I don't know.

In 99 percent of offices, people just sit at

computers with their heads down. That's exactly what a

workforce is. An industrial enterprise

interacts with a much larger

number of people—vehicles constantly coming in

and going out. That's precisely why those

industrial enterprises that are not

absolutely necessary, that don't have, so to speak,

a process that cannot be interrupted—this is

not a nuclear power plant—

that's exactly why all over the world they

are not operating, and only here do we apparently need

industrial enterprises, and of course

construction, construction, construction, because

it's about money. And in that sense, what we're seeing is

a classic situation where people—and

the Moscow authorities, really, essentially—

don't give a damn about this coronavirus.

They don't care about the coronavirus. It doesn't matter what

happens there, the main thing is that right now

the curbs—and this Sobyanin (the Moscow mayor) whom

people are now quite rightly calling

Sergei Bordyurovich (a mocking nickname based on *bordyur*, "curb")—I can already see on

internet forums that people call him nothing else.

For him, the ideal city has now

come into being: curbs are being laid,

all construction sites are operating, commercial buildings

are going up, money is being brought in so that

construction keeps going—but the residents are not, and they aren't wandering

the streets, they aren't running around, they never get in

my way, there's no need to pay them money,

no need to help them, but they

keep paying taxes, and from those taxes you

keep doing more and more

construction and beautification projects, and

making more and more

money from them. It's a perfectly ideal situation.

And it's happening right before our eyes.

Right now, there is probably not a single Muscovite

who isn't outraged by this. How could they

allow construction and ban everything

else? Even now, a mother with a child

cannot legally go out for a walk. Here I am—

right now, my wife and I live

with our family in this apartment—we're all

already in contact with each other. Why can't we go out as a family

and take a walk somewhere separately? No, because

they'll detain us, arrest us, because apparently

we're not allowed, it's dangerous. But meanwhile, right nearby

there will again be some

of our wonderful migrant workers

redoing the curbs and all that.

But that's absurd. And now they're also saying

that this is very important because reopening

construction sites will reduce crime. That's

just, fundamentally, an absolutely

brilliant idea in terms of sheer brazenness

and cynicism. Let's listen to 23 seconds of it.

Won't the coronavirus simply lead

to crime? What measures are being taken...

additional security measures and peace

this is, of course, about reopening jobs so that

people could work instead of just sitting idle, especially

at construction sites there are quite a lot of

migrants who have not left Moscow

they are still here; they are not being allowed back to their home countries

there is no work here, so reopening

industrial enterprises and

construction sites partly addresses this problem

one hundred thousand people are watching us live

on air; I’m always very glad when during a

live broadcast that number appears for me

here on the monitor, in the corner, it shows 100

thousand people. That’s cool. So anyway,

they don’t say it outright, but basically they say that,

like, we brought migrants here, and there’s no work

when there is no work, they will be

drawn into criminal activity

they’ll be snatching bags, breaking into apartments

and then the question to the authorities is: why the hell did you bring them here in the first place?

and of course the question arises. I myself

have spoken about this: we are not interested in

having people go hungry right now

if you have already brought them here anyway

brought them here

there are either one million or one and a half million

migrants, and no one knows the exact number

of course, we are interested in making sure

that they have housing and, yes, because

if a person lacks any of that, they

will of course be drawn into criminal

activity simply in order to

survive, and therefore

they need to be given some small amount of

money to cover their basic

needs. But all of this is presented in such a

way, you know: at construction sites, migrants

will supposedly start stealing if we don’t

reopen jobs. And what are Russians supposed to do then?

And as for everyone else—well, the people who

came to Moscow to earn money—we have

a huge number of people in Russia’s regions

Russia

just like before the Revolution, as with seasonal labor migration

they would come from their own

Vologda

or the Yaroslavl region and work here in

Moscow; people came to construction sites from Mordovia

and what about them? Is everyone else fine? And the people who

worked as security guards here, or in

restaurants, and elsewhere—there is, in fact, a huge

number of people

who worked in different sectors, and now

before them all, before millions of them,

stands exactly this question: there’s no money—should they go

and steal a little, or not steal, or

borrow while they still can borrow from

friends and acquaintances and avoid stealing for now? This

really is a question facing a huge

number of people. But they are reopening only construction sites

Why? Because construction

is not getting funded—this is no exaggeration

the Moscow mayor’s office allocates

tens of billions of rubles

it allocates money much faster than it can be

spent, which is why it is so important for them to

reopen everything as quickly as possible, because you can’t

you can’t

sign new contracts or allocate another 50

billion rubles until you have closed out the old one

you have to lay these paving tiles

so that later, on top of these tiles,

you can lay different tiles. And so their

contracts have stalled, and the whole chain

of kickbacks has stalled too

because they need to order new

curbstones

and so on and so forth. So

that is why they cannot stop for even

a second; they need to announce more and more

new contracts. This is primarily

connected with urban beautification projects

and with commercial construction. What

is the urgent need right now to build

luxury housing or office space, and what for?

What is so absolutely necessary for our city about that?

It’s not food, it’s not the metro, it’s not healthcare

all of this can definitely be stopped while providing

help to people, but they do not do that

because of money. And as for our money, they

absolutely, completely do not care

and of course, already trying to get in on it

again, Vladimir Resin has popped up

the former deputy mayor of Moscow who was in charge of

construction, and who now sits in the State Duma for United

Russia

in the State Duma. His son, the well-known

deputy Slutsky, about whom we have done

many investigations, who is at the same time

both corrupt and a monstrous pervert, has already

come out and told us the wonderful news

it turns out that immediately, very soon,

on May 12, work will resume on

church construction. Many thanks—that is

just exactly

God must have been sitting there like,

well, when will work on

church construction begin? That is what

Moscow is desperately in need of right now, and

Muscovites, everyone else, the whole universe

all creation, and the higher being that created

the world are all clearly in need of us

urgently starting to restore in

Moscow these churches. Well, we understand why this

works, because a church is

a state construction project, and state

construction means enormous kickbacks all around

and besides, when you are building a church, then

you can basically ignore any

documentation and say, well, for such a

cause, let’s process everything urgently, and

they process it and make money and make money

and this is just some completely

astonishing thing in its cynicism, and we

must not stay silent about this; this

should be met with the strongest possible outrage, and

you know that I have always been a supporter of

a fairly strict quarantine; I am a supporter of

that we should declare a state of emergency

situation

I’m generally in favor of a mask

mandate and everything else, but right now we

of course need to demand that the system

be functioning properly. I mean, either they

shut things down for everyone

or they allow everyone to work

or they introduce some normal

reasonable measures. For example, in Spain they

introduced a system where people of certain

ages—I don’t know, people over 70

years old—could go out at certain times

for one hour a day, while younger people from 40 to

60 had a different time slot, from 6 to 7 p.m.

People with children could go out

at all other times. Something like that

needs to be introduced. It’s absolutely impossible

to keep everyone at home while not having

any overall basic strategy

at all. But why

isn’t it doing that? Volkov (Leonid Volkov, Russian opposition politician)

My colleague wrote

a great post and caused, just with that post,

an absolutely enormous scandal

because he pointed out very precisely why

all this happened, why in Russia

the growth curve in cases looks like this, why in

Russia the authorities are now forced to hide

the death toll, why all this is happening, and

there are a lot of jokes on the subject that

Putin is personally to blame for everything—in China, apparently,

the bat was to blame, and in Russia it’s Putin—but

this is an absolutely ironclad fact that

everyone should know, and I think everyone

should be telling others about it:

Putin is personally to blame because

throughout March

what did we do? We did nothing. Why?

Because for April 20, as you may remember,

Putin had scheduled his

vote on extending his terms in office, and

because he hoped, believed—he so badly wanted

to hold that vote

that when borders had already been closed

and quarantines introduced in all other countries,

nothing whatsoever was happening in Russia. People

kept infecting one another

kept on

traveling because Putin wanted to hold

his vote, and he dragged it out until

the very last moment. We lost a month, a whole month. And if

you look at the latest infection-rate graph

that Mediazona (independent Russian media outlet) showed in comparison

with other countries, let’s take a look—here,

you see, this lower part is just because the

starting point is different, but if we

look at the comparison graphs, by the way,

this graph is useful too

you can see that we’ve caught up with Italy in terms of

the number of infections. By these days, we

had already caught up with Italy, and our curve looks

much steeper than the Italian one

steeper than the American one, which

also looks pretty bad. In the U.S.

the situation is difficult, but if we look at

the larger growth charts

of infection rates, right from the very beginning,

from the first days—we can put that graph aside

then we’ll see that we had a big lag

that is, when everywhere else things were already going like this,

our curve was still small because

Russia really is located quite

far away, and Leonid Volkov

in his post gives a great example:

if we look at it, it seems to us that

we’re close to Europe and everyone flies there, but in fact

hardly anyone does. In terms of the number

of arrivals to Europe, we’re roughly in the same category

as Australia, which is God knows

how far away

and in that sense we are very far away. We have

low population mobility, low

population density. We had a lag, we had

a month’s head start, a whole month when it was possible

to fight actively, take preventive

measures, buy masks, introduce some

restrictions, cut social contacts so that

people wouldn’t be running back and forth. We

did nothing because for Putin

the vote was what mattered. And exactly the same thing

is happening now: they’re starting

to gradually lift these restrictions, and Putin

is instructing the government: let’s

come up with ways to get rid of these

restrictions. Why? Because this summer they

want to hold their idiotic

vote, and they don’t give a damn how many

people die. If they die, they die—they’ll hide it

somewhere. The main thing is to stay alive themselves and

above all to hold that vote. So

without any doubt, without any exaggeration, without

the slightest exaggeration, the fact that in Russia

things look very bad

compared with other countries, and the fact

that the entire Russian system

of state administration has completely

failed in the fight against the coronavirus—this is

directly and entirely the doing of

Vladimir Putin personally, because he needs this

vote. He needs it, and he will

keep dragging things along, keep dragging them along

As Volkov rightly says, in order

for him to announce this vote, he

has to be able to hold it in time this summer

he has to announce it around May 20. He

can’t announce any kind of

nationwide vote while

there is still quarantine across the country

you simply can’t do that. So they

are now going to start easing things. I read

an excellent post on Facebook

saying that new

guidelines have already come out for hospitals, and we

can see—what’s it called—the medicine

let’s see—Arbidol in

my script there’s something about Arbidol, and in my opinion

Mikha’s case it’s the same Arbidol too, and we

right now

we are allocating state funds so that

quite literally

we can buy what doctors themselves call bogus

ineffective drugs; there has already

been a major story about this. At first, we were told

that the Chinese had supposedly discovered that

this Arbidol works, but then it turned out that

it does not work at all. The scientific

community wrote a letter about this

Arbidol, and the Chinese themselves said that

it is completely ineffective.

Russia’s anti-monopoly service launched

a full investigation because it was

false advertising, because

Arbidol is generally presented as some kind of

medicine, and yet they still include it

because, well, because the well-known

“Madam Arbidol,” Tatyana Golikova, is still now

still effectively in charge of Russian

healthcare. When this all started, it

was all about Arbidol; everyone was shouting and screaming

what kind of nonsense is this, who came up with Arbidol

and drugs like this? And Golikova personally

went around pharmacies checking whether

they had Arbidol in stock, because she

has an interest in it.

There are business interests there, including for her family,

and the press wrote about it many times, and

even now they keep trying to force

this Arbidol on us. And then Putin comes out and

says, you know, that Russia

has handled this better than anyone. And the symbol, perhaps,

of how Russia is handling it is

this very striking photo of Alexander

Beglov. There he is — why on earth did you even show up

at the maternity hospital dressed like that? It is pretty absurd, yes.

You have probably already seen lots of memes on this

topic. This is

the embodiment of Russia’s success in

the fight against coronavirus, especially considering

that, of course, afterward

the next day it turned out that in

that maternity hospital there was a coronavirus outbreak.

Beglov, by the way, said that he would not

observe any quarantine, would not

self-isolate, and would not go

into voluntary isolation for two weeks because

he had very powerful means of

protection. As you can see, his extremely powerful

protective equipment — so apparently

quarantine is for everyone else, not for him. And this

is all just some kind of

endless continuation of a police

operation.

But one of the symbols of this police

operation was an astonishing incident in Moscow,

in Golyanovo.

There, these idiots from the police literally

chased in a car

a person who was walking in the park. They were so

determined to detain this especially

dangerous criminal that they actually drove

across the lawn in a car to catch him.

To detain him — look, Vanya, they are just brutally driving over

the lawns, look, they broke all the bushes

while driving. And what is interesting is

that in this detention, in the detention of

this especially dangerous criminal, taking part was

a certain major nicknamed “Indus”

— Shans Shangareyev — whom

our штаб (campaign headquarters) knows very well because he

constantly organizes the detention of

our activists. And this

pointless scumbag is dragging some

elderly pensioner into a booth, an older woman

they are shoving in there, because this is how they

carry out orders on self-isolation.

Then this police officer

— let us find him a medal; there is a special one, like

“for courage.” I hope that medal

was given to him specifically for handling this kind of thing,

as you are about to see. Let’s watch.

[music]

He is dragging this woman somewhere, for some reason.

Are they ensuring the safety of this

woman, or themselves, or the people around them?

Not the people around them, obviously, and not this woman either.

They are obviously not helping her, and they are not helping themselves. I cannot

understand what for — but they drag her away because they are idiots,

because their superiors are just as

idiotic, and because overall

the system has no logic at all, no

coherent reasoning, nothing understandable. Today I saw some

kind of funny video, almost like something from TikTok,

about how, in Russia, the authorities in general

make decisions that

concern coronavirus. In the video there was

a list of possible decisions:

arrest, raise taxes, release,

lift isolation, impose isolation — and then

someone rolls a die. That is exactly how

it happens: just random

strange actions. Putin has his own logic,

he wants to hold his nationwide

vote. Sobyanin has his own logic,

he wants to steal as much money as possible.

Some minor

governors also have some sort of their own

logic, but overall there is no common picture

at all, and there are no real efforts to

overcome the problems. Well, I have probably

really worn you out already

with these stories about protective equipment for doctors,

because how much longer can this even be discussed?

We already started helping, we helped

raise money for the Doctors’ Alliance, then

everyone started fundraising, telethons

were being organized,

various people were donating money for

doctor protection campaigns, but the state

had plenty of time and plenty of money

to buy this equipment — and there is still no protective gear. And again

we see videos of people — this is some kind of

hospital in Vladimir Oblast (a region east of Moscow),

not far from Moscow — where a doctor

publishes photos showing that he is completely covered

in burns, because

She is forced to wash the suit in bleach. It

is a disposable suit, but there are none, and she

has to wash it in bleach and then walk around with

burns on her face. I mean, what kind of insane trash is this? NTV (a pro-Kremlin TV channel)

You understand, pro-Kremlin television

is doing a report on this topic. This is

not just something we, or even the Doctors' Alliance, or I

am telling you here on YouTube.

State television

— pro-Kremlin television — and absolutely nothing is being done.

Nothing is moving. Let's watch: they film how the suits

are treated, washed, and dried on radiators,

then handed to someone else and sent around for a second round.

And the fact that she developed such

burns — I'm not the only one like this. Just think about the conditions

we are working in. Fifty thousand people

and only three meters... What do they do? They lock in

all the medical staff, all the patients who

are there. The nurses have only masks and

gowns.

What did this lead to? It led to infection spreading

not only to those who were lying nearby, but also when

the doctors got infected too. Worst of all, in the end the entire

medical staff of the internal medicine department

ended up in quarantine. Some already have COVID-19

confirmed. Several medical workers are in

serious condition and have been sent to the capital

because there is no one to save them in Vladimir Region.

No one... When you went in there, everyone was still

more or less healthy. We were given these suits,

and they told us, 'So what? What are you so horrified about?'

The most astonishing phrase in this

report is: 'The medics were sent to Moscow'

because there was no one to save them in Vladimir

Region.' It gives the impression that

they were talking about Novaya Zemlya (a remote Russian Arctic archipelago) or some

Franz Josef Land archipelago. This is Vladimir

Region — you get in a car, and in two

hours you're in Vladimir Region.

If there are no people there to save medics,

then obviously there are no people there

to save anyone else either, not just medics.

So this is, basically, a complete

failure. And by the way, did you see this

week there was a funny story involving the newspaper

Vedomosti, my favorite, where three times

the newly appointed editor-in-chief showed up and then

that venal crook

removed a piece about Putin's ratings — about

the latest Putin approval ratings, which

the Levada Center (an independent Russian pollster) published this week.

They showed the biggest drop

in the entire period of observation. People

see this, people see it, and people are

very unhappy about it. But the astonishing

thing is that even despite the fact that the authorities

... and I like looking at

these ratings, and I like looking at

these record-breaking levels of decline

in the ratings.

They do nothing. Well, first of all,

they can't do anything. If they

spent 20 years dismantling healthcare, then it's no surprise

they can't fix it in Vladimir Region.

But they are not even trying

to do some simple things. There are many

questions about the mask mandate.

Indeed, a mask mandate already exists in many

regions, and in Moscow it starts on May 12.

From May 12, on the Moscow metro you must be

wearing a mask and gloves. It's unclear how this

will be enforced, but apparently they simply will not

let you go any farther, past the

entrance, if you don't have a mask.

And the question is: who is supposed to pay for this

mask? And we won't even talk about the fact that

even now, not all pharmacies

have masks, gloves, and all these supplies.

And this is actually a fairly substantial

expense. Basically, you wear a mask for three

hours, and then, as all doctors say,

the mask stops being a barrier against infection

and becomes a source of infection,

because a lot of things collect on it

and remain on it. You have to change

your mask every three hours, or four hours at most.

At the very least, you need to change your mask once a day, and

by some simple estimates,

for a person to make it to the end

of the announced quarantine in Moscow, in order

to more or less change this

mask and disposable gloves from time to time — and they

do tear, after all — you would have to

spend around 3,000 to 5,000

rubles (roughly $30–$55). And who is going to pay that money? Let me

remind you that back when all this was just

beginning, one of the last

videos I recorded in the studio was

a video about how the Moscow government

had definitely spent 400 million rubles on masks

at an inflated price. In any case,

there were tens of millions of masks there, that is,

it was certainly not just a tiny amount — not 50 masks or anything like that.

They bought a lot — tens of

millions of masks — and it was stated

that yes, we bought them in order

to avoid high prices and in order

to distribute them to people. Have you seen

even one person receive a free mask

from the state? I have seen free masks

being given out by the Doctors' Alliance; I have seen free

masks distributed by volunteers. But has the state

given this free mask to anyone at all?

Has the state done anything so that it would

really cost 4 or 5 rubles?

No, absolutely not — there are no masks. Right before

the program, I saw a video of how

in America, in the States, a person was walking without a mask.

A New York police officer saw him. What

happened? Look: the guy was walking without

a mask, and the police car pulled up to him.

The cop says, 'You need a mask,'

and gives him one. The police gave him a mask. Can you imagine that in Moscow?

Amazing.

If a police officer sees you without a mask, he does not

try to fine you 4,000 rubles

as has been announced in the Moscow Region,

you will be fined 4,000 rubles for it.

for not having a mask. And what if he has children and no money?

He has no job, all right, so he should be

fined.

But what will that solve? If you take

another 4,000 rubles (about $45) from him, does that mean

he’ll go out and buy a mask? No, it doesn’t.

It doesn’t, because he has no money for anything.

Or maybe—who knows—he’s just not

a conscientious person. Then the obvious solution

for a normal state

would be to approach this person, give him a mask, and

the police’s job right now should be to go around saying,

“You’re in a hurry and you’re without a mask—here, please take one,”

“put it on here in front of us, and then keep going wearing it.” But

that’s not what happens here. No one

will ever do that, and instead they’ll keep chasing after us

now, and we’ll keep seeing videos like this.

I’m sure I’ll be showing you more of these videos

on the next program or the one after that,

of yet another scandal breaking out in the metro

because they won’t let some elderly woman in

without a mask.

She needs to travel, and she’s crying and shouting.

It doesn’t even occur to these people

to give her a mask. They wanted 400 million rubles (about $4.5 million);

even before the active phase of the epidemic,

money was spent on masks, and now billions have been spent

on protective equipment, yet no one is given anything.

They simply give no one anything. Not only

do they not give anything out—they punish those who still

speak up about it. I showed you something on this topic

about three weeks ago:

a video of the head of the Doctors’ Alliance (a Russian medical workers’ union) branch

of the Doctors’ Alliance trade union in Krasnodar Krai

recording an appeal saying that

in our hospital

there are no masks, no protective equipment. I appeal to

everyone: we cannot properly treat people

Now, looking back at that, we ought to

say to that woman: how right you were to sound

the alarm, because the death rate among doctors

is enormous, and the death toll overall is enormous. If

every hospital had had a doctor like that,

who publicly raised the alarm,

there would probably be far fewer

infected people now. But let’s just recall this

video.

Sochi, Krasnodar Krai. We demand

that we be provided with modern protective

equipment. We are in contact with patients,

with sick people and healthy people alike. We

can unwittingly become a source of infection

if we work without protective equipment.

If we doctors and nurses fall ill ourselves,

along with paramedics and medical assistants, then stopping the epidemic

and saving the entire population will be impossible.

Now let me ask you a question, without looking at

Google, so to speak—tell me,

please, how was this woman rewarded?

Was she given a certificate of honor, a badge,

awarded a St. George ribbon (a Russian military remembrance symbol), and given

a cash bonus, promoted?

In what form did the state say thank you?

What did the state say to this wonderful

woman who sounded the alarm when

it was necessary to sound the alarm? They

opened an administrative case against

her—an administrative case was brought against her.

The police came to her, and they are punishing her, they are

fining her for the fact that, being a doctor,

she recorded a video saying, “Guys, I can’t

treat people without a mask, because I’ll

infect people if I work without one.” And they found

some bought-off strikebreakers in

her hospital who then wrote

a statement saying everything was fine with us,

when of course there was nothing there at all.

To this day they still don’t have a damn thing.

And now she is being brought to administrative

liability.

That’s what our wonderful

state is busy doing. Today I saw an amazing

photo from Sakhalin—there’s this thing there

called

an observation facility, so to speak.

That is, when people arrive from somewhere,

or when there’s a large number of people,

and it is decided they need to be placed in

quarantine, they’re herded into some kind of

place where they are then supposed to stay

and recover or whatever. What does this

observation facility look like

in Sakhalin? It’s the Olimpia sports complex.

As you can see, it’s just a hellish

dump.

It’s like some kind of flophouse out of

a horror movie. In Sakhalin, where, by the way,

there are major gas projects—yet if there is

even one person there sick with corona-

virus, then the question is: when people leave this observation facility,

how many of them will have coronavirus?

The answer is obvious: one hundred

percent of them. I’m talking about this

at such length because it is very important for me

to prove my point that the authorities

have absolutely no clear

strategy at all. They are doing basically

nothing. There is only one thing they do

nonstop: they lie endlessly. We saw a great example

of that lying over this

Chayandinskoye field—I told you

about it here last time. I said

that at this Gazprom

field there are about three

thousand people working there, and two thousand of them

had contracted coronavirus. And as for

the question of industrial enterprises—

you see, Sobyanin (the mayor of Moscow) says

industrial enterprises are one thing—well, here you go,

here’s your industrial enterprise, and a construction site is

basically the same thing. At a field site,

obviously, workers are going around building things.

Out of three thousand people, 2,000 were infected.

Officials confirmed that.

The next day I showed you here

screenshots.

And what was the official number of cases there?

Just 348 people.

At your site, there are two and a half

thousand infected, but the statistics

show 348. I mean, it's just

some endless, endless lying.

And of course, the ultimate example came in

Lipetsk Oblast (a region in Russia).

There, there's Governor Artamonov,

who is just pretty disgusting,

really a vile, utterly nasty guy. His whole

life he worked at Sberbank (Russia's state-controlled bank).

A state bank. And now he, well,

tries to present himself as some great economist and

technocrat and so on. Just a man

who spent his whole life in a state bank, living off the public.

And in Lipetsk Oblast, he's "restoring order."

And

the local media published a completely

astonishing

conversation between the governor of Lipetsk

Oblast and the mayor of Lipetsk,

where they discuss how they could make it so

that in certain parts of the city

people—various gopniks (thugs), all sorts of [__], basically—

wouldn't gather, because they're infecting

each other. They seriously

say: let's use

tick-control chemicals. It creates this kind of

fog, you know. Basically,

you know, like in films about the First World

War—we'll do something like a gas attack, and

they're like ticks.

We'll poison them like ticks in the grass. They're infecting each other anyway.

They'll get scared and scatter.

When they published this video—well, this

recording—and all the local residents started

discussing it, naturally, I expected—I thought,

I'll show this on my program, and probably

by then they'll say it's all

fake, all fabricated, and they'll start

threatening everyone with criminal charges for

spreading it. But no—they flat-out admitted it.

They just admitted it. That's how much they

consider it normal

to sit there discussing among themselves: let's poison them

like ticks.

What did they say? Well, yes, we discussed it.

It's a little out of context, but

let's listen to this wonderful

discussion—what they

really think about people who are always hanging around.

Disturbing, isn't it.

Gopniks, cars,

standing around.

[music]

[music]

We heard the discussion: let's gas them there,

poison them—those, as he put it, brainless people. And

what if they drop dead?

Yeah, what if they do? Well, it would be good to

try it there in Nizhny Park, on that 100-meter stretch,

test it a little—on, say, three people first,

poison them and then see. That's how they were, like,

literally discussing it, as if they were exterminating cockroaches.

But these are residents of your region. You can

call them gopniks or whatever you want, but they

are sitting there because you haven't

explained things to them. You have a huge number of

police officers—let them come, and let the police

use loudspeakers to tell people

to disperse. But the main thing you

should do is give these people money,

say: here, you've received your 20,000 rubles

in aid (about 220 USD), so now go

home and stay there. But they don't want to give

people anything. Instead, they're talking about

poisoning them.

Actually spraying some visible chemical there—and what if

they drop dead? Let's poison them there like

ticks.

That is genuinely how they treat people.

Because this damn governor,

Artamonov, from his Sberbank days—you know what, let's

take a look at his financial disclosure.

In 2018, the man's income was 195

million rubles (about 2.1 million USD); in 2017, 131

million rubles (about 1.4 million USD). He really thinks

he's the master of life, the coolest

guy around, because he sat there in his

Sberbank and in that state

bank they gave him bonuses and a salary

that were so amazing.

He's a rich man, so he thinks he can treat everyone

like complete [__] and cattle, and

seriously sit there with officials

discussing how to poison some

people with tick poison. That's how they think,

because in reality they

are convinced that if someone doesn't have

an annual income of 10 million rubles (about 110,000 USD), or

better yet 100 million rubles (about 1.1 million USD), then he's just

an idiot.

If they don't have income, if they aren't

rich, it's because they're stupid and

worthless, so there's no need to give them

anything at all—it's a waste anyway.

That's their real attitude. And as always in

cases like this, of course I say:

guys,

dear residents of Lipetsk Oblast,

destroy this governor politically,

this mayor and all the rest of them.

Just put up notices on

every fence—every resident of the region

should know how the governor, with his

multi-million-ruble income,

who lived off the state in

the state-controlled Sberbank

for many years, now treats people like this. And

he and United Russia (the ruling political party)—all of them, in political

terms, must be destroyed and must

receive zero votes.

And this must be constantly thrown in the face of

the entire government. Under no circumstances should

this be forgiven, because they will never

change their attitude toward people if we

keep forgiving it. He doesn't want to hand out masks,

but he does have money for tick poison, and

come on—93,000 people watching live...

On air, I’ll take a few questions and then move on

to the next topic. Alex Gear asks:

about discussing the prosecution

and accountability of officials.

They want to avoid responsibility for this

very isolation itself. You see, the thing is

that, of course, all of this isolation, everything that

is being done, is absolutely, wildly illegal.

That is, all the regulations, everything that

is being adopted, is completely unlawful.

Because there is no state of emergency,

none. I repeat: it is impossible, on the basis of

the law, to detain people, to drag them away like

that woman in Ufa, as I showed. It is impossible

to hound someone like a tick if there is no

— you can’t poison a tick under any

circumstances if a state of emergency has not been introduced.

It is impossible to restrict our

rights and freedoms the way they are restricting them

now. So all of this is absolutely ille-

gal. But the entire political elite is involved

in this, and in that sense they will

either face collective punishment

or none at all. And collective punishment,

realistically, in this situation can mean

striking at their vulnerable spots — that is,

elections, Smart Voting, and this

Putin vote — not recognizing it,

not going there, and if

someone does go, or if you are forced to go, then

vote against. That is the only kind of

accountability Putin fears.

A drop in his ratings — that’s what’s needed.

He needs to prop up those ratings, to keep convincing

the people around him every day that they

need him.

Well, they just want to crush them. Anton asks me

about these fitness clubs, about

the chemicals, so I already explained that. Elena

Shcherbakova asks: why is the question of lifting or

easing the self-isolation regime

being voiced by a mayor who understands nothing about

medicine, and specifically about epidemics? He’s not a

doctor, virologist,

or epidemiologist. Exactly for the reason I just mentioned:

because the opinion of an epidemiologist and

anyone else is of absolutely no

interest to them. No one cares, simply no one.

Putin is thinking about something else. He is thinking about

the fact that he has

a nationwide vote, and you see,

there is no line of thinking like, well, we could

hold it in July, or we could hold it in

October. If we hold it

in July, a few hundred more

elderly people will die, some number of people

will fall seriously ill — but never mind, keep it moving.

Whether they die or not, Putin says

to Kiriyenko and everyone else, and they are preparing

this whole thing. So the virologists and everyone

else are all crowding somewhere behind

the door, and no one is interested in them at all.

Absolutely no one cares about their opinions, and the opinion

of doctors interests no one. That is exactly

why the statistics are being falsified, and

the opinion of doctors matters only insofar as

they are told: all right, guys,

let’s hide the mortality figures and spread them

across other categories somehow. That is the

kind of interaction they have with

medical professionals. But the political system of our

country is interested in none of this; otherwise

Sobyanin would not have reopened construction sites right now,

when our numbers are simply going straight

up and forward — the number of infections is surging.

I really like that right now there is a very active

discussion going on. At the start of the

broadcast — I’ve been live for 1 hour and 45 minutes already —

I have not once urged you

to sign on the Five Steps website. You

need to sign it. We all need

to sign it and urge everyone else to do the same.

But at the very least, we got a reaction: Shalimov

went on Instagram and simply called

all those people whining freeloaders — the people

who are asking the state for financial support.

After that he deleted it,

and then he said he was joking. Then, as I understand it,

Instagram removed it altogether,

because people came and

explained to Mr. Shalimov that they are not

in fact

[music]

freeloaders at all. And there was already

an appeal to Kadyrov (the head of Chechnya) demanding that

he fire your man. Well, let’s

watch these wonderful 55 seconds

that this man posted, then got scared

and took down. But of course he expressed the view

of this entire ruling elite. So this week, of course,

the head coach

of Akhmat, Shalimov, was the chief

press secretary for the whole Russian government.

Let’s watch the clip.

The stores are open, trolleybuses are running,

factories are operating, people are actually doing

important things for us — they will all

get money. But if you’re a freeloader who

wants handouts just because of all this,

then let’s start by taking a look at

your profession, your background,

your story. Have you noticed that

everyone who is whining today is somehow

visible?

So my question is: why should anyone

help you?

So that what happens, exactly?

So, what an incredible way to frame the question.

Just amazing — here sits this great man, and he… I

don’t know much about football, and Shalimov is

just some name I remember from my childhood.

As I understand it, he is now the head coach of a

team that is currently sitting

near the bottom of the league table.

But that’s not even what I want to talk about. What I

want to ask Mr. Shalimov is this:

what benefit do you actually bring

to anyone at all, and why should anyone pay you?

Money, obviously—you really have some nerve.

A loss-making team that gets

money from the budget. But maybe in Chechnya and

in Grozny there are lots of fans of this

team who, well, think that Shalimov

should be paid. But the way he himself

talks—sitting there, looking down on everyone—and

in such a calm, measured tone

he says, “Well then, let me ask you a question:”

“Why should you be given money? For what?”

That really is the best way to frame the question:

so that people can eat,

so that we can remain

citizens of Russia, so that we can continue

paying taxes, on which, later, unfortunately,

damn it, Igor

Shalimov will go on existing. He sits there and says, “Well, everyone who

is useful gets paid.”

“Look, trolleybuses are running, buses

are running, and I, Igor Shalimov, keep getting

a salary because I’m a useful person.

“But all of you are out there begging in some kind of

informal sector, doing some kind of work,

making something—why should I give you anything?”

Shalimov very keenly senses

that he loves this regime; he’s latched onto

this power, and in a certain sense

there are some big shots, and he stands guard

over them.

Over these state

billions—there’s this big door behind which

the reserves are kept, all the people’s money

that was accumulated over many years, oil money, and

standing there are Putin, Rotenberg, Kadyrov himself, and

so on—and tiny little Shalimov

is standing there too. He’s guarding it as well, and he too

gets a little share from it. And to everyone

else he says, “No, you explain

why money should be given to you—for what?” This question

really has left many people

completely stumped: “For what?” Well, basically,

for everything—because, well, because

it’s my money, and I’d like to get

a little bit of it back. But that kind of arrogance

certainly makes an impression.

Russia’s finance minister today was

—Shalimov was the most brazen person discussing this topic, but

Anton Siluanov was the loudest.

It seemed to him that he was being very

measured and careful when he answered

this question in an interview with the newspaper *Vedomosti*.

There he said, answering the question

of whether money should be handed out to the public, that

people need to live within their means, and spending reserves

and increasing the national debt may be necessary now, but

we must be careful—we cannot scatter helicopter money

from a helicopter. Well, first of all,

there is, of course, an obvious substitution

of concepts here. This is a Kremlin talking point.

Right now they call direct aid to the population

“helicopter money,” which

even in terms of economic terminology

is completely wrong. But they do it because

they say it so that people

will naturally immediately picture in their heads

a helicopter flying overhead and money being thrown

out of it—and that really does look like

something absurd. But our proposal is not like that:

no one is giving anything to anyone from a helicopter.

We would send it to each person, and we

are demanding that 20,000 rubles be sent out, and that is

not helicopter money. It is money that a person

receives as compensation

for the economic crisis that has affected

him and his family, as compensation for lost

income, as compensation for the loss of a job

or as compensation for future

inflation. In other words, it has nothing

to do with income. But this whole

thing is that they are now going to repeat

endlessly: “People need to live within their means.”

“Stop this populism, nothing needs to be done,”

“people need to live within their means.” I recorded

a video on this topic for Instagram, but I’ll repeat it here.

What immediately came to mind here was this

dacha (country house).

Just to save time, I’m not going to

show you the video right now that we