“Shake them up and rough them up” — we must hound them, those expensive idiots

Hi everyone. I’m supposedly live right now, but

I can hear my own echo, and while they

turn it off, I’m just—guys, please turn off my

echo. In the beautiful Russia of the future,

people would be shot for this kind of crap—for

live streams like this in general. Ah, sorry,

please—10,000 people. There we go,

finally it’s working. Hooray! 10,000

people live on air were watching us

literally

messing around here. Bonking around,

as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly

Makarov would say. And at one point I even

sat here typing something and realized this was

all going out live. What a relief

that there was no sound and we didn’t hear

everything I was saying here. In any

case, my apologies. Let’s

start from the very beginning. Uh,

“to rock things and telebonk.” That’s how

the speaker of the Legislative Assembly

of St. Petersburg described what we’re

doing. And it’s an absolutely great video,

I think. This meme, generally speaking, as

they also say in St. Petersburg,

we’ll be using for a long time. Last

time you heard the audio, but you didn’t see

the video. And it’s funny. Let’s

watch it. The top boss over the

deputies in the Legislative Assembly is scolding

the chairman of the culture committee,

opposition deputy Maxim

Reznik for attending

rallies. And he says we don’t need all this

“rocking the boat” here.

Here’s what else I’d like to say

completely frankly. Especially since

they keep showing me things that come in. So,

when Maxim Lvovich,

you’re out there partying

at a Moscow rally together with

Navalny.

You know, colleagues, I wanted to tell you, well,

it just can’t be. I’m telling you again, I

understand everything, I know what the authority

of a lawmaker is.

As I said, we cherish this opposition

here in St. Petersburg,

but the chair of the committee on

culture of the cultural capital, of science,

and education cannot be partying at a rally with

Navalny. What, colleagues from the

opposition, are you trying to bring

the protest agenda over here

from Moscow or what?

Why do that?

The city of St. Petersburg lives calmly and

has lived calmly all these years.

Why rock what’s already telebonking, what

shouldn’t be touched?

By the way, just now as I was

re-listening to this video, another

question came up. Not even about the fact that

“rocking” and “telebonking” are wonderful

words, but if the speaker of the Legislative Assembly,

the top United Russia politician, says that

the St. Petersburg culture committee

cannot be headed by someone who parties at

rallies, then I have a question: can

the chairman of the Legislative Assembly

of St. Petersburg say, “The city

of St. Petersburg parties at rallies”?

That sounds kind of

odd, really. But all right, let’s not

nitpick. Let’s think instead about

what exactly these

United Russia people are defending, because

St. Petersburg has just

shown itself in all its glory. So, we’re

the ones rocking, partying, and telebonking, while they have

stability and everything works

perfectly. And one demonstration

of that stability, in particular, is that

the governor, unfortunately elected in

St. Petersburg, opened the metro for the second time.

He opened it the first time before

the elections, and now he opened it a second time

before the elections. And from this second

opening we got an absolutely wonderful

video about St. Petersburg’s high

technology. There you go—Beglov,

just like our livestream today.

They launched it once, launched it a second

time, and, uh, everything there is supposed to

work perfectly. [laughter]

And now you’ll see Beglov, and behind his

back stands that very same Makarov,

the one defending this high

technology from you and me. Let’s

watch. I think this is one minute

that perfectly shows what

the current government is.

When do you want to get to Vosstaniya Square?

No, the microphone up top—dial it. Yes,

that’s the ministerial effect.

Information and reference center

of the metro. Hello.

Good afternoon. Congratulations on the opening of the three stations.

How do I get to Vosstaniya Square?

I’m listening. Hello.

How do I get to Vosstaniya Square?

heard. There, she showed it, she’s on the route

and everything. And then I showed it.

Ah, ah, okay, okay, okay.

Good. Well done.

This endless, non-functioning

Potemkin village (a fake showpiece facade), that’s exactly their

stability—the stability they’re defending from

us, and they don’t want us telebonking and

what was the other one—shaking things up, rocking the boat. But we

need to do it. We did it on

Sunday. And I want to thank everyone who

came to that rally on Sunday,

because we cannot remain

calm and simply stay quiet. Not just

watching the people

who are at the head

of the state, while they are absolutely

They’re incompetent; they can’t do even the most basic

things. And on top of that,

to cover up their incompetence, they jail

people. Tomorrow in Rostov, yes, we have many

political prisoners, but these are the ones

I want to start with. In Rostov, there will be announced

what may be the most monstrous sentence

of all those handed down in recent

times. And it seemed hard to outdo

the sentence

given to Sinitsa, who got 5 years for a tweet.

But there, uh, three

people — Vladislav Mordasov, Yan Sidorov, and

Vyacheslav Shashmin — came out to

the main square in front of the

administration building with placards.

And prosecutors are now seeking 8 years and 3 years for them. It

really just sounds insane. They

came out on that very fifth of

November. Remember, Maltsev was declaring a

revolution. Well, a lot of people somehow

took part. But what these people actually did

was simply come,

stand there with placards in defense of

the Rostov fire victims. They were accused

of participating in some kind of

extremist group that,

supposedly, through this one-person

picketing wanted to overthrow the government

by violent means. And now they are genuinely

trying to slap each of them with 8 years. And

tomorrow this sentence will be announced, and I

urge everyone

to watch and listen. And I urge everyone

to be outraged by this as actively as

possible, because on Sunday

people expressed outrage, and before that

they expressed outrage too,

and some people were released. They’ll release all

the others too if we, uh, do not stop

being outraged. Once again I want to say

a huge word of thanks and express

my respect

to everyone in general, but first and foremost to those

wonderful actors and representatives

of the creative professions who really

truly

have been very persistently carrying out, among other things,

this picket outside the Presidential

Administration, which has now been going on for 15 days

and for 15 days people have been standing there in

line just to stand

for 2 minutes in a picket. I went there myself,

I stood there on Saturday. I went on

Saturday evening thinking, “Well, there won’t be

anyone there.” I had to stand for an hour

just to hold a little sign for 2 minutes afterward.

No one is allowed more than 2 minutes

to show support, because otherwise it would take

too long. And, uh, let’s watch a well-known

actor who is standing there — Sergey

Bubnov; he acted in the TV series *Glukhar* (a Russian police drama),

he’s standing in this picket, and the police are trying

to drive him away, but he’s not

going anywhere. Good for him. 54

seconds.

All right, start. What are you saying?

I’m filming this because my lawyer

advised me to. While carrying out a federal...

...that I’m supposedly required to show my passport. In

what part, exactly? I’ve studied it so much

and there’s nothing like that there at all.

Can you imagine? I’d like you to point me to

Article 54 — there is no law requiring me

to show my passport.

You are not required to carry your passport with you.

No, no, there’s nothing like that in any

federal law. It doesn’t say that

anywhere. No,

it doesn’t.

No, there’s no such thing. Not in any

federal law. Please tell me,

for what reason, under what law,

under which statute — and I’ll show it to you immediately.

The point is that under international law

all foreign citizens have the right

to engage in peaceful picketing just the same.

Can you imagine,

this is the situation in our country.

A sad one.

Well, good for him — he didn’t leave, he just stood there and

said, “I’m not leaving.” You simply do not have

the right. Good for him. And there are a great many

people like him. Let’s watch

a short compilation. I can only show

a short compilation because a large

number of actors recorded various

videos, uh, in support of political

prisoners. Let’s watch — it’s 1

minute, and I think there will be 12 different

people in it. Absolutely tremendous people.

Of course, every person matters,

whether an actor or not. But let’s be honest

and say that when well-known people are not

afraid, it always carries the most weight,

because those well-known people attract

a much broader, well, simply wider

audience. Let’s watch. 1

minute 12 — 1 minute 17 seconds — the best

people in the creative professions.

I am Samaryadin Radzhabov.

They say that I caused pain to

a police officer. Over the past six months,

Konstantin Kotov has been found guilty five times

of administrative

offenses.

Ivan Podkopaev came to the July 27 protest

to express his civic position.

But do you really think it is fair, even for a

stupid, even idiotic comment,

to give someone 5 years in a penal colony?

Sergey Fomin. He is accused of conspiring with

a married couple who handed him

an infant so that Sergey could

safely and painlessly get out of

the police cordon and evade the police. Yevgeny

was accused of injuring

a National Guard officer by hitting him with a trash can and in the area of

the lower back. Although the video clearly shows that

the trash can only touched the detainee.

In 2017, on my YouTube channel *Zhukov's Blog*,

I posted video recordings, and

two years later, in 2019, the Investigative

Committee (Russia's main federal investigative authority) for some reason decided to pay attention to them

.

On July 27, Eduard Monashevsky went to a

peaceful rally, and as a result he

ended up in a police van.

It was a stupid thing to do. He obviously

shouldn't have done it, but damn, not for

three years.

Pertsov came to the peaceful rally on July 27.

Nikita faces up to five years in prison.

Danil Beglets speaking directly: I need

to get back to my family. Two years is just

horrifying.

Absolutely amazing people. And you stand

next to these amazing people.

Come, for example, to this picket,

there's a one-person protest outside the Presidential

Administration. Wait your turn,

take your place in that one-person protest. And this is

a very useful thing, because, well, you

see just how much so-called

ordinary people passing by actually

support all this. Many of them don't even understand

who exactly it's about, but they see that

people are standing there, some celebrities

are standing there. And that means people

care. And I myself was very

interested to hear what people passing by

were saying. This is

Kitay-Gorod (a central district in Moscow). Naturally, there are lots of

onlookers there,

passersby, tourists, both foreign and local,

and they just walk by and understand, and see,

that yes, some kind of police

lawlessness is happening, and they support the protest against it. People

are speaking out against police

lawlessness, and they support that. And

this is really turning into

the main political issue

in Russia, because, uh, everyone already

understands that this government can rely

only on jailing innocent people. And it asserts

its authority only through

the imprisonment of innocent people. And everyone is pushing back

against that. And in fact this is a very important

thing. Do you know why? Because, well, I

have, of course, many times participated

in various actions, organized protests

in defense of political prisoners. And until

recently they were always

fairly small. It was almost a rule, you could say,

not something we talked about publicly, but among ourselves we

always said that the

smallest political protests were

the ones in defense of political prisoners.

God knows why it used to be that way,

but that really was how it worked. Now it is

not like that at all. And protests in

defense of political prisoners

are finally drawing huge numbers of

people, and they have become the foundation of Russian

opposition politics, and politics in general. The main

issue on the agenda, the one we are

forcing onto the agenda. And what the authorities say in

response,

that too, separately, becomes propaganda

for our side, propaganda showing

just how badly everything is arranged on their end.

Let's listen to a judge, a Consti— a judge of the

Constitutional Court of Dagestan, right? Well,

it's clear what's going on in

Dagestan—it's total lawlessness there,

corruption, a nightmare, rock bottom. But you're a judge

of the Constitutional Court. Good grief, you

should have at least some

idea of how

truth and law are supposed to work. Let's listen. This is

Khasplat Rustamov speaking, one of Dagestan's most prominent legal figures,

What does he say on the subject?

The Moscow city authorities did not authorize

the holding of the rallies. They held

unauthorized rallies.

The Constitution gives the right to hold a

rally,

but federal law limits,

so to speak, the implementation of

this constitutional provision through federal law.

So the state is defending itself.

Do you understand?

So if we

start absolutizing constitutional

provisions, even though they are norms

of direct effect, but we borrowed

this from Europe, because here

demonstrations, peaceful demonstrations, very

easily turn into protests. Right now there are very

many different kinds of technologies,

especially when young people go out into the

streets, to demonstrations—they have no backing of their own,

They are given $100

and then they can attack

police officers, shout anything they want, against

Putin, against parliament, and so on and

so forth. The most uncontrollable force

today is the youth. All these color

revolutions were carried out by young people.

They were directed by certain forces, yes,

special forces. Therefore, when we

talk about the theory of the rule-of-law state,

we need to approach it very cautiously,

especially when it comes to Russia.

He is simply the embodiment

of utter shamelessness. There he is sitting in glasses, and, well,

there are some cadets around him, law students,

probably some kind of

police trainees too, or I don't know who

they are, but in any case these are people

who are studying law, and sitting in front of

them is a man saying, "Well yes, in the

Constitution it is written, but we shouldn't

absolutize it." And then all this

lying garbage about some young people

who were supposedly paid for something, they

they staged color revolutions, as if

nobody knows how all this works in Dagestan

(a republic in Russia’s North Caucasus). Who was paying there,

the truck drivers, when they organized

demonstrations and were arrested? Or during

rallies, including

anti-corruption ones, that’s not how it happened in Dagestan,

or when there were protests in Dagestan

against Kadyrov’s actions,

was someone paying people $100 each or something?

But of course not. Everyone knows that’s

an outright lie. And yet he sits there,

thinking of himself as some outstanding lawyer. Uh,

he claims to be a respected

person, while peddling this brazen,

disgusting lie. And now they’re all

saying that we’re harassing them. You understand? We’ve

unleashed a harassment campaign. And this one will probably also, uh,

this judge from the Constitutional Court, tomorrow

say that I’m being harassed online like this,

that a respected person is being targeted. Right now

it’s just

every bureaucratic [ __ ]. Just

say something about them, and they’ll say:

"Why, you’re persecuting me on the internet."

Vladimir Solovyov

complained today, saying that

a harassment campaign has been launched against him on

the internet. And really, there’s harassment everywhere.

So, Ivan Urgant is being harassed too.

Everyone is being harassed. By the way, let me share with

you a personal sorrow: he finally banned me

on Twitter. He banned

absolutely everyone at the Anti-Corruption Foundation

(FBK). If anyone needed

to find out what Solovyov was writing there, they

came to me and said, "Show us, we’ll

read it." Because I was the only

person — I had this exclusive access — he

hadn’t banned me, and we were always

having these lovely exchanges. I would, in

Google Translate, put together some

phrases in Italian and troll

him, and he’d snap back in response, but he wouldn’t

ban me. But he couldn’t take it anymore. He just couldn’t.

He finally blacklisted me. And

now they’re all, you know, complaining about

harassment. Judge Krivoruchko, the very one

who jailed Pavel Ustinov for absolutely

nothing, said he was being harassed. The Moscow

City Court published an entire

statement saying that unacceptable

criticism, unacceptable criticism directed at

the judicial system, was outright harassment of

Judge Alexei Krivoruchko of the Tverskoy District Court

. And the victim, the supposed

victim in this case, the OMON officer (riot police officer). Well,

that is, the same guy who claimed

that, uh,

who claimed that his shoulder had been

dislocated there, who gave

false testimony — he also said he was facing

harassment. And he said he was being harassed on

social media, and all of them are complaining about

harassment.

Judge Krivoruchko

gave a completely innocent man

4 years in prison. And

then on appeal, they effectively

admitted as much — they reconsidered

the case there. And this OMON officer

was asked: "Why did you decide to arrest

Ustinov?" To which he replied verbatim, I

quote: "He was looking at his phone

— standing there on his phone — who knows what he might have been

coordinating. Also, he was

dressed suspiciously; he was wearing

a leather jacket." So the riot police are walking along and

they see some guy. To be honest,

I used to assume that Ustinov,

well, had taken part in the demonstration, well,

like, you know, got scared and was now

saying something like, "I was just

passing by," but now, uh, after looking into

his political views and everything

else, they figured it all out. In reality, the guy was just

standing there waiting for someone. That’s it. In the city

center. He was wearing a leather jacket, he

was looking at his phone, they saw him, and they

simply had orders to detain

some young men. We can see that they

constantly just grab random people

all the time. They ran up, knocked him

down, dragged him away. In court they say:

"We detained him because he was on

his phone." They gave him 4 years. And this

swine, Judge Krivoruchko, gave

an innocent man 4 years. Now this has, well,

effectively been revised; they changed it to

a suspended sentence. Well, because they can’t exactly

cancel the whole thing outright, because then

it would mean Krivoruchko himself should be jailed. And

he’s complaining about harassment. But when you

[ __ ] sent an innocent man to prison for 4 years,

you knew he was innocent, and that was all

just fine. And all the others too — but now

they’ve been let out under pressure from

the public, though they were planning to hand all of them

several years each. And they still

may yet do it — several people are still

behind bars. When you gave a guy

5 years in prison for a tweet,

what is that? And now they’re complaining about

harassment. Yes, of course, they should be hounded.

Of course, they’re simply scoundrels, villains,

enemies of Russia, and unquestionably criminals.

Well, let’s just look at it, so to speak,

from a legal standpoint.

There’s no doubt at all that Krivoruchko

— we won’t even consider that. It’s obvious,

it was rule-by-phone: he was given instructions. Some

Yegorova probably gave the order,

the chair of the Moscow court, and she

was told to do so by the Presidential Administration.

It’s clear there was a chain of command there, but this

Krivoruchko illegally brought

an innocent person to criminal

liability on the basis of "evidence" like: he was standing there

in a leather jacket. I mean, he committed

a serious crime; he should be imprisoned.

He shouldn’t be hounded online. He

should first be locked up for 10 years, and

then hounded online

so that everyone around knows that there

is a judge named Krivoruchko, that he

has become a symbol of this judicial system,

so that his relatives are ashamed of him. And

all these gatherings of these scumbags, this

OMON officer (a Russian riot police officer),

OMON officer Lyagin, who, you see,

lied that he had been pushed and that he had “been hit in

the shoulder.” And all the rest of these

crooks—well, they give false testimony, and

then, when people write to them online, “You’re

animals and riffraff,” they say, “How can you

hound us? We suffer too, we’re also

human beings.” Sure, you know, we’re forced,

of course, to imprison innocent people for several

years, to lie, to testify against them, or

to beat them with batons or something else. Well,

you should try to understand our situation. It’s not

that we’re like this. Life is like this; our job is

to lie. And if our job is to lie, then

you should forgive us, you should

understand us, and you shouldn’t hound us. But

why shouldn’t we hound you? And then there’s

another thing they often say: “Well, we’re kind of

public servants,” or they often

use the disgusting phrase: “We are

the sovereign’s people.” Those officials

who say, “We are the sovereign’s people,”

should simply be fired immediately, because

we have no such thing as the sovereign’s people. And

we have no sovereign, nor should we. We

are the sovereign; you are public employees, so we have

some especially complicated arrangement here. Don’t you

dare hound us. And what about everyone else?

What arrangement do they have? What about a taxi driver?

What about a miner? Or anyone at all. And what about

an office manager who comes in to work, or

a designer there doing their job—does he

have some kind of

easier life? Of course not. He has no special benefits,

no early retirement, nothing. We

have none of that. So to say that

because they work for the state, therefore

they deserve exceptional treatment, and

that there can be no

public hounding of them—this is just nonsense. They

all deserve to be hounded, because they are

villains and scoundrels. When they’re merely saying

some nonsense, you can argue with them, but

without making it personal. But when they

lock people up,

what is there to say? This whole

law-enforcement and judicial system, well, it’s

total degradation. Our state as a whole is

basically

degrading in absolutely every area.

But of course, this coercive

apparatus, this judicial apparatus—this is simply

a super-train, the locomotive of degradation; they’ve

already sped far ahead somewhere. For now, we’re still

holding on somehow, but these people have already

become completely hopeless.

Yes, absolutely. We understand why, in

the police, for example, there is enormous turnover,

huge understaffing, and it’s very hard

to work there, with constant overtime, and

so on and so forth. Well,

that’s not our fault. We go out

to rallies in order to change this

government. And the system is now degrading

completely. Now let’s look at

a few news stories. I picked several

major stories about law enforcement

agencies. Over the past week, there was

a hearing in the New Greatness case. And

there they finally, uh, brought out

and questioned the undercover operative. The

New Greatness case—everyone understood that it

was fabricated, and it was built around

claims that there were certain

secret witnesses and undercover

operatives. And everyone—the FSB (Russia’s security service), the Interior Ministry, and

the prosecutor’s office—told us that now these

undercover operatives

would finally tell the truth about

why some people—literally just

teenagers from this New Greatness group—

had been kept in jail for over a year. But

they questioned this undercover

operative, and in court he was asked:

“Please tell us, what exactly—well,

that is,

what was the criminal nature

or terrorist nature of this

group?” And he says: “Well, they

seemed to be, like, pro-Navalny there.”

And, I mean, in any normal

situation,

the judge should have flown into

a rage. And so should the prosecutor and everyone else,

because, I mean, for heaven’s sake, you were

inserted into the group, and all your operative work

amounts to this: there was some

group of people whom you sort of

thought were pro-Navalny, and on

that basis you are keeping them in prison.

That is literally the case. You can

read the transcript; it was published

by Mediazona, and they did nothing

criminal beyond

meeting somewhere and discussing the fact that

they held opposition views. It’s just that

some bastard needed to rack up a so-called

clearance statistic for uncovering a supposedly dangerous

terrorist group.

terrorist group so that

some [ __ ] in the FSB could first hand it over

to someone like Putin, so he could read it.

“Last year, the FSB exposed seven

dangerous, uh, extremist groups.”

Extremism is raising its head: “Let’s

allocate another two brazillion rubles

to fight extremism.” That’s what they do it for.

they fabricated a case, and that’s what they keep

people on staff for. And even in a Putin-era court, all of this

completely falls apart. Let’s take a look. And

let me show you a wonderful image

about the town of Shakhunya. Uh, this post here, and

can we zoom in on it. Well, you

can probably see it, yes, you can

read that this is Irina Slavina. She is

the editor-in-chief of a local website. Uh, and

she posted this because, well, over there

in the town of Shakhunya, someone put up

a memorial plaque

to Stalin. And in the last word of

that post, she slightly, using profanity,

altered the name of that town,

Shakhunya.

That post became the basis for opening a case,

an administrative case; this person was

held administratively

liable. For what? Whom did she insult here?

Stalin. The town? The person simply

wrote it, and has every right to. You can

write, I don’t know, that in the city of Moscow

idiots live, that in New York

jerks live. Or you can take the city of New York,

Los Angeles, Moscow, Saint Petersburg

and twist the names however you like and

write about it on your blog. You have every

right to, you do. But in Nizhny

Novgorod there are these anti-extremism officers. There

it’s a well-known story. There, basically,

these so-called “E Center” and “Center E” officers (anti-extremism police)

in Nizhny Novgorod are these notorious

thugs who are constantly attacking

the headquarters. Uh, and the head of those Center E people

in Nizhny Novgorod, I don’t remember her surname, well,

she’s just a completely rotten [__]

through and through, uh, who is constantly

scoring points for herself by

— you can see this idiot in the

photo — by

fabricating cases and

organizing attacks on the opposition.

Our headquarters there is constantly dealing with petty

acts of sabotage, like filling the doors and

locks with foam. I mean, it’s a gang of bandits and

crooks.

Big, fat, thick-faced men,

whose salaries we pay, are busy doing

this kind of crap, sitting on VKontakte or on

Facebook, searching for posts; they found some

three-line post and opened a case over it.

And then they write, “according to operational data,”

or something like that — that’s how they write it. “During

the monitoring

of the internet, there was discovered

some kind of extremist

statement, therefore I submit this report

to such-and-such superior. And here there are

signs of such-and-such an offense.” Then

it gets sent to experts, to someone else,

a file is compiled. The file

is sent to court. So in all of this, in

all of this, a large number of people are involved,

people whose salaries we pay. What the hell are they,

doing this for? Is there really nothing else

to do in Nizhny Novgorod Region?

There obviously is plenty to do there. There’s

crime there, and corruption there,

and problems there. At the very least, all

these fools from Center E should be handed striped batons

and sent out into the streets so they can

direct traffic, stand by

every pedestrian crossing, or

replace traffic lights and regulate something there.

I mean, if we’re paying these

big loafers, let them

work. But instead they monitor the internet,

and then they say that there’s some kind of campaign

of harassment against them. Well, how else can I

how else can we describe people

who spend our money on

opening some case over a post on

Facebook against, for God’s sake, Stalin?

Of course, this is absolute degradation. And

Trifonov — that’s the surname of this creep who

works in Nizhny Novgorod Region,

in the Investigative Committee. But this is complete

final-stage degradation. What Bastrykin has

reduced the Investigative Committee to,

what he has now turned the

Investigative Committee into — it’s simply

an organized criminal

group, really. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s

just a gathering of bandits, and

that’s what gets promoted. I mean, well, there he is

moving upward, into the Main Investigative

Directorate. The more depraved a person is,

the more willing he is to fabricate

criminal cases and carry out illegal

searches, the better things go for him. Let’s

look at another person. Svetlana Selyutina

was recognized in the Moscow Region as the best

investigator. She literally had that

status; there was some kind of review or evaluation.

They declared this woman major the best

investigator. Do you know what she

was doing?

While serving as an investigator, she searched the database for

people who had recently died, then checked

what cars they owned, and then they

would locate those cars and simply

haul them away on a tow truck — steal them. In other words,

she organized a group — this “best in the profession”

investigator — that stole

cars from dead people. And then,

the relatives, well, you know, when

someone has died, good luck trying to sort it all out. So his

car disappeared. His car disappeared,

and whether a theft report would even be accepted

or not — who knows. She got caught because one

person had sold a car but hadn’t managed to transfer the title

before he died. And they stole that car too.

It was some kind of Nissan Murano he had.

And they stole the car, but the person

who had already paid the now-deceased owner

started looking for it, and that’s how the whole thing came to light. But

otherwise she would have just kept doing it, and this

endlessly. The best investigators there,

are all like that; there are no decent ones there now.

If there are any decent ones, those decent people

are constantly bullied and pushed down. They are at the very

bottom of this whole hierarchy,

the professional hierarchy alongside the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service). The same thing is happening with

us. Exactly the same thing.

Just now they handed down a

verdict in the Tyumen FSB gang case,

which honestly just really

absolutely shocks me. There was not a

single life sentence.

People are given—well, not we, they give people—

five years for writing a tweet,

and Ustinov got four years just for standing in a square,

and those people in Rostov stood there

with a little placard, and the prosecutor is asking for eight years for them.

And these people, meanwhile, committed six murders,

robberies, car thefts.

These were, in fact, just—well—

these FSB officers, all of them,

actual FSB employees, were so—well, as I

often use this word, unfortunately,

but there’s no other way to put it.

For example, in order to test

weapons—some pistols they had prepared

to use later

in crimes, to kill

someone. But in order to use them,

to prepare and test those weapons, they

caught two migrants, tied them to a

tree, and shot both of them in the

head to test the pistols. Just

think about that,

what must be going on in these people’s heads. Here

they are, FSB officers with their IDs,

saying: "Oh look, there goes some Tajik guy,

let’s throw him in the trunk. We’ll

take him somewhere because, well, we need to test

how this works—what, are we going to shoot at cans

or maybe go to a shooting range

to test it? Come on,

let’s just grab that Tajik guy and shoot him in the

head." That is what they actually did. And

not one of them got a life sentence. That is,

even the system understood that they were

criminals. It was impossible to—uh—

impossible. And by the way, also,

my God, what an absolute nightmare.

They tried to extort

$1 million from one local

businessman. The businessman refused and

went for help. So they took another

random migrant, these

FSB officers strangled him, and then planted the body on

that businessman so that

they could keep extorting their

$1 million from him, blackmailing him with threats that

they would open a murder case against him.

These are people who really—I

am opposed to the death penalty, I am

a principled opponent of the death penalty.

But of course, there can be no other punishment

for people like this except life imprisonment.

Not only did they kill six

people, they did it with the utmost

cynicism, showing that they

completely deny the value of human life. In

principle, then yes—send them away for life

to Black Dolphin (a notorious Russian maximum-security prison) or wherever else.

Where they send terrorists. These people are, in effect,

terrorists. They simply destroy

people like us, fellow human beings,

just like that, in order to test weapons.

But even toward people like this, our judicial

system somehow, you see, manages to find

some kind of sympathy. Twenty-four

years is, of course, a long sentence, but

it is not life. And all the others

got long sentences too, but those are

not life terms. But it seems to me that

society’s position ought to be this:

if—especially when people acting in an

official capacity, FSB officers, the Federal Security

Service, commit things like this—then that’s it,

unambiguously: life imprisonment, full stop.

No, these are the ones they like; they still

somehow give them a little

hope. You’ll serve your time and maybe,

somehow later, with good behavior or something, you’ll

get out. But for someone like Sinitsa

or those bloggers from Rostov, they have no

compassion, no kind of

normal attitude at all. No. The police

literally just this week

in the town of Volsk in the Saratov region

two police officers picked up on the street

a detainee. A drunk man—they

detained him, they had some kind of argument. And

well,

you’d think, this is the police, right, maybe they beat him up. No,

they took him to the local cemetery

and killed him there.

They just beat the guy to death,

who was, well, drunk,

let’s say he probably

said something rude to them. Good God, these people

might have killed him just for fun, but

if we’re going to make excuses for them, we

can suppose that he somehow

insulted them—but they took him to a cemetery

and killed him. Police officers in uniform, do you understand?

They took him there, and then after that they came out and

said: "There’s been too much harassment of police lately.

Stop

this unrestrained campaign against us. And stop

talking about the bad things we do." But what

are we supposed to talk about? If things like this

are happening—well, of course,

a crime can happen. And of course,

there are more than a million people working in the police,

and not all of them, obviously,

are out there strangling and killing people in cemeteries, but, excuse me,

we would like, for example, in

the Saratov region, at the very least, for there to be

some kind of suspension of all

Interior Ministry leadership. The minister

at the federal level should resign in that case.

resignation in a situation like the same one involving

Ustinov. If you drag some innocent

person off somewhere, as in the case of

Ivan Golunov, who had drugs planted on him,

and everyone has already admitted that, yet

the leadership of the Interior Ministry should resign.

The minister, or at least a deputy minister, and so

on, right? But not a damn thing

happens. And then they say:

"Stop the harassment. Stop the harassment."

No, we will not stop. It needs to

continue, because this is not harassment.

It is simply telling the truth about what

is happening. And we need to tell the truth about

what is happening. And we need to voice our, uh, own

opinion regarding these current

judicial structures, including

in order to improve

these structures a little. By the way, besides

that, uh, let's take a look: our

Belgorod штаб (regional campaign office) has a video

that it released just today, also a kind of

embodiment of what is going on.

The fat, thick-faced colonel you are about to

see first gives an interview

where he spouts all this nonsense just like

a Constitutional Court judge. And then

we will look at his mansion. How did he

build it? A great mystery.

The former head of the city police

said that only

paid kids with backpacks go to rallies. Don't you

think that the authorities, by their own

unwillingness to listen to people, are driving them into

the streets to protest?

I do not think so. These people will come out

whenever you give them money.

Yury Khludeyev is a liar and a hypocrite, and I will

prove it to you. When Khludeyev says that

someone is paying us extra to go out

into the streets, when he says that we are

stirring up unrest for some personal

gain, he knows perfectly well why he needs to say

exactly that, and what exactly he stands to

lose. Here is his house on the shore of the

Belgorod Reservoir. The area

of the house is about 700 sq m. The former police officer was

simply allowed to clear a strip of forest

and take a valuable plot of

Belgorod land for his own use. Who

authorized it? Without the personal involvement of

Governor Savchenko, things like this in our

region are impossible. By the most conservative

estimates, the house alone is worth more than 40 million

rubles (about several hundred thousand U.S. dollars). More precisely, it is hard to estimate, because the land

here is priceless. It is simply impossible to

buy land here, let alone clear forest

to build a house.

And he too will be outraged,

saying that he is being harassed on the internet, that

he is being insulted, that he does not

deserve this. After all, he served in the

force for so many years. But I say

quite plainly: he is a crook and a thief. How

could a police officer possibly earn enough for such a

house? He is a crook, a thief, a traitor. As

they themselves say in movies,

if some person there

takes bribes, then he has betrayed all

of us. He is a traitor. This is a traitor, and

this is a criminal. Should he be hounded?

Of course he should. I would like everyone in

the Belgorod Region to know this. He should be

hounded, and so should the governor,

who understands how all this

works, and the new police chief,

this former one already, who knows that his

predecessor is corrupt, but

for some reason does not send any

centers, uh, or whatever other agencies with

all sorts of other abbreviations that would

check where this money came from. And the FSB (Federal Security Service),

which knows that their top

police officials are crooks and thieves, but has done

absolutely nothing. And the prosecutor's office, and the courts,

yes, all of them. How are we supposed to

treat them? Of course, we should hound them.

The entire top echelon

of the heads of the security and law enforcement agencies

in the Belgorod Region are criminals, crooks,

and thieves. It is impossible to regard them

in any other way. That does not mean

that we consider everyone to be like that. But

the top brass, yes, absolutely. And, by the way,

again, despite the fact that

we fiercely attack that part of the

law enforcement system that we

hate for its crimes, we are

the only ones who are ready, including among

the major media and information

platforms, to stand up for the interests of

ordinary police officers, who also

have a pretty hard time. And perhaps

those of you who follow things

closely saw the post on

the VKontakte channel Ombudsman for Police.

It is the main public page, one that I

talk about here fairly often,

the main public page, which

is run by a man named Vladimir

Vorontsov; he defends the interests of

police officers, advocates for them, goes to court for them, and so

on. I offered him, and here I am

publicly offering once again, to host

a program on our channel, and I am publicly

saying that I do not care at all what he

says there. He can

come here and argue with me here

about what I have said here,

right? And there are absolutely no conditions. We cannot

pay him money, because we

are, so to speak, launching a program,

putting it on air, because we do not have

much money at all. But, of course,

I would like to see a program here

that would defend police officers' rights.

Interestingly, when this was

offered to him, he ran a poll in his public page.

Let’s look at the results. Here we can

see that it has several categories there

for employees, former employees, and

what they call civilians. And both

employees and civilians reading the

public page, as you can see, want this kind of

program. I hope Vorontsov will come and

host it for us. We’ll help make that

happen. A program like this is needed,

police officers need defending. When you’re there,

reading that public page—let me give it a plug—

you realize what a trash fire and what a

brutal atmosphere exists in the

Ministry of Internal Affairs,

which ultimately leads to the fact that

decent people leave, and only those remain

who beat detainees to death.

Just a couple of examples—well, they may

be a little comical, but they’re very

good ones. From his public page recently.

You know that on the fifth, the fifth day of the month,

which is basically right now—tomorrow, I think—

we have Criminal Investigation Officer’s Day

here. Well, we understand that criminal investigation officers

mark their

own

professional holiday, but the very

idea their superiors have of

how they celebrate leads to this:

this was somewhere in Bashkiria (Bashkortostan, a republic in Russia), right? And across the

entire republic of Bashkiria, they issued

an order saying that on the eve of Criminal

Investigation Day—please show the order,

if you can—on the eve of that day they

ban or restrict the issuance of

service weapons and official

vehicles. So if you read

this order literally, what it

says here—well, between the lines—

it says this: we’re about to have

Criminal Investigation Officer’s Day, and all

criminal investigation officers are going to get wasted,

start firing into the air, or

they might shoot someone who just happens to be

walking by, or get into a fight and start shooting at

each other. And of course, drunk as they’ll be,

they’ll go tearing around in official cars.

So, to keep them from

going on a rampage, let’s just not issue them

either service weapons or cars.

How are police officers supposed to feel

when they receive an order like that? I mean,

sure, incidents like that do happen, and management

would like to limit them,

but surely this should be handled

differently, and discussed

differently too. Here’s another great

photo he posted today, also a great

one. We think that only we are treated

like cattle, but as for

police officers—well, maybe

the authorities simply don’t care about them at all.

They did a great job installing this ATM. Look,

please—this is, uh, a law-enforcement

college, I think, somewhere in the Urals

at the school. This person here is

two meters tall (about 6 ft 7 in). And to withdraw

money from the ATM, he has to do it like this.

It’s a small thing, sure. But it’s a

perfect illustration of how they generally

treat the lower

ranks of police officers. When it comes to

conflicts between civilians and

police, they of course always side

with the police, but inside this

system, ordinary cops are for them

just dust. These are people they

simply do not care about at all. That’s why they

are constantly stuck on one duty shift after another.

They handle an enormous amount of

pointless paperwork, so

they become enraged, they grow numb, and in

the end they stop caring about what

happens to people. And that leads them

to the point where the decent ones leave,

and only the not-so-decent ones remain.

So once again, I’m in favor of

having a program on our channel

in defense of police officers, and I hope it

will happen. For those who have just

joined us,

and those wondering why I’ve

been on air for more than an hour and am still

going strong and haven’t stopped talking yet: our

broadcast unfortunately started 20 to 25

minutes late, so I’ll keep the program going

a little longer. Once again, I apologize

for that.

If someone had told me that

I would be ordered to pay several million

rubles because someone didn’t eat kebab,

it would have sounded like a bizarre joke, but

that is exactly what happened. Things are happening—

events, really—that are simply

going to become

classic legal absurdities,

but they are not very funny for those

inside the system. As you know,

after the recent rallies in Moscow,

the Moscow city government, and obviously

the presidential administration, decided not

just to jail all the organizers first

for 30 days, 50 days,

as in the case of Yashin (Ilya Yashin, Russian opposition politician), and so

on; they also decided that all

the organizers—me, Sobol, Alburov,

I think Yashin, Gudkov, and others—

should have to pay, should pay

a huge amount of money, so they’d think twice next time.

So all sorts of people sued us:

Mosgortrans (Moscow public transit), some taxi services. And

the most comical and hellish lawsuit against us

was filed by the Armenia restaurant. Literally the Armenia restaurant.

And you’ll laugh. They were, in all

seriousness—at first they

demanded 500,000 from us, but in the end they won

250,000, literally with the following

argument. That is, in court it went like this:

That happened yesterday.

They came and said, "You know, because of the protests we had to close our

restaurant."

When the lawyer asked, "And why did you close it?

The other restaurants didn’t close, did they?"

They said, "Well, that’s

not important, we had to close." And the whole

point is that our average guest

eats 4 kilograms of meat (about 8.8 pounds).

4 kilograms of meat? Everyone in the courtroom was shocked, right? 4

kilograms of meat per year. So we

take the average attendance and multiply it by

4 kilograms of meat. And so we calculated that

in one day we suffered damages of 250,000

rubles. The judge said, "Excellent, sounds

great, we believe everything: that you were

forced to close, that each of your customers

eats 4 kilograms of meat, damages, boom,

Navalny, Sobol, and Yashin will pay you back

250,000 rubles for 4 kilograms of meat." It sounds insane, but

that is literally how it happens.

So, well, what can I say? In the

beautiful Russia of the future,

of course, we’ll have to imprison not only

the judge, uh—

who made this decision, and

the prosecutor’s office, which backed all the rest,

but I don’t even know—let’s

talk it over, what are we

going to do with these people from the Armenia

restaurant? I mean, who dragged you by the

hand into this court? It’s obvious you want

to lick Moscow City Hall’s boots, and you’re some kind of

disgusting lackeys and a disgrace to the Armenian

nation. I hope—I call on all Armenians

not to go to the Armenia restaurant, not

to mention everyone else. But why,

as they said in that famous film, was everyone

taught? But why did you, you sons of bitches, decide

to be the star pupils? What for? What are we

supposed to do with you in the beautiful Russia

of the future? I think we’ll start with this:

we’ll lock all these people up and, uh, keep them

for 10 days somewhere and feed them three

times a day. And at every meal they

will have to eat, just as they

wrote, 4.3

kilograms of meat (about 9.5 pounds). The best shashlik and lyulya kebab

—we’ll bring in the best chef from the Armenia restaurant.

He’ll grill meat for them, and they’ll

eat it and reflect on their

behavior. There’s no other way.

[snorts] Same thing with the 3.5 million rubles. Now we’re

all supposed to pay for trampled lawns.

I just want to remind you how

the lawn got trampled during the protests.

Let’s take a look. Thirty seconds.

Take each other by the hands.

Hold hands

and move forward.

Move along, please.

Guys, line up, holding hands.

Take hold.

So people were just standing there peacefully on

the boulevard, on some kind of

pedestrian area. But no, they had to

send out these hellish space marines,

these imperial stormtroopers from Star

Wars. For some reason they lined up like [__]

in formation and marched off, trampling the flowers and

lawns. And now someone has to pay for that.

Why 3.5 million rubles? That’s a separate and very

funny story. Apparently they couldn’t find

any organizations anywhere near Moscow

that would, well, agree

to disgrace themselves so badly as to provide

an expert opinion saying that this lawn

was worth 3.5 million rubles. Let me even

show you the photo. They sent it for expert review to

the Center for Biodiversity in

East Asia, the Komarov Mountain-Taiga Station

named after Komarov. A mountain-taiga

station, for God’s sake. In other words, nobody else wanted to

humiliate themselves that much, excuse me,

but they found some crook at this

mountain-taiga station. He took a look,

they sent him a photo of

some trampled, I don’t know, leaf or whatever,

and he said, "Well yes, of course, this

is worth 3.5 million rubles. I’m signing it, excellent,

decision made," and the judge said so. How

are we supposed to regard this judge? Who

is he, really? I mean, not that we should

harass them—of course not. They all need to be imprisoned.

We’ll have to lock them up, of course. They

will cry, they will be upset, they

will talk about how they were tormented and

forced. But of course, of course,

there is absolutely no other way

for us to build a normal judicial system

in this country. And this isn’t even

lustration. People are always shouting, "Lustration,

illustration." What lustration? Under the

current criminal code, we

understand that the mountain-taiga station

fabricated an expert report, that the prosecutor’s office

supported a false accusation, and that the court

handed down a knowingly unjust ruling.

All of them should be in prison, and for long

terms of imprisonment. So I,

of course, understand that for the guys from the

mountain-taiga station, it probably

already isn’t that different—they’re sitting out there in some hut at the

mountain-taiga station, and that probably doesn’t

differ much from a place of

detention. But okay, in that same

hut we’ll just put bars on the

windows, board up the door, do something like

that. And this won’t be vengeance, not

revenge—it will, in fact,

be justice. That is how justice should

be carried out: an honest, fair,

adversarial trial with a jury

in court. But obviously, any

jury—come on, let’s seat a

jury, an independent judge, a prosecutor,

lawyers for all these people—they’ll watch

this video. And the question is: so who trampled

The flowers? For Navalny, or what, with Yashin?

Question: so how, in what way, and why did you

send the trampled flowers from Moscow to a

remote station in the mountain taiga? Well, I mean,

it is obvious that all of these are unlawful

sentences, right? Now all of us are apparently supposed to

pay 5 million rubles already (about 50,000 USD). Apparently this is not

going to stop; it will turn into some kind of

absolutely colossal sum, and

the next stage will be that they start

taking away some of our, I don’t know,

things, uh, seizing our international passports,

well, and doing everything else they do

to bankrupt people, because obviously

none of these

opposition figures named in these lawsuits simply

will not be able to pay such sums and do not

have that kind of money in order to

pay them. So that is what they will

busy themselves with and keep practicing on, all of

that. And journalist [clears throat]

Prokopyeva. Svetlana Prokopyeva—I very much

want to speak up for her, because

this too, uh—sorry that our whole

program is about these kinds of people

who are, well, super

super unfairly, really for no reason at all,

simply being targeted for imprisonment. Prokopyeva—

a journalist from Pskov. One day she simply

wrote a short column about how

the beastly and disgusting

behavior of the FSB and the Interior Ministry, and our state in general,

drives people to the point of

desperation. And so they go and

commit unlawful acts.

That is, essentially, exactly what I

have been talking about. On every program now, for

40 minutes already. And now they have opened

a criminal case against her. Now they

want to put her in prison. And soon there will

also be a final decision. Let’s listen to 1 minute

12 seconds of Prokopyeva, in which she

is essentially reading out her post.

Listen to it and just think for yourselves,

decide for yourselves, even if you

feel negatively toward me or

are somehow skeptical. Just listen:

is what she says really worth all these

expenses of a criminal case, and is there

even the slightest reason here

to, uh—not even to imprison her,

but to open a criminal case and generally

go after her with any kind of accusations?

I am Svetlana Prokopyeva. I am a journalist, and

I could be sentenced to 7 years in prison for

justifying terrorism. Seventeen-year-old

Mikhail Zhlobitsky blew himself up at the entrance

to the FSB building in Arkhangelsk. That explosion in

Arkhangelsk became the subject of my latest

author’s program on the radio station

Echo of Moscow in Pskov. At the beginning of December,

administrative charges were filed, and

at the same time the Investigative Committee began

a review under Criminal Code Article 205.2

against me personally. On February 6, I

opened the door when the bell rang, and a dozen

armed men in helmets shoved me

back with shields against the wall in the far room.

That is how I learned that a criminal case had

indeed been opened. On September 20, my

procedural status changed. Now

I am officially a defendant. The penalty is a fine of up to

1 million rubles (about 10,000 USD) or imprisonment for

up to 7 years. I do not admit guilt and

consider my criminal case a banal

act of revenge by offended security officials. In that text

I placed responsibility on them for

the explosion in Arkhangelsk. My criminal case

is the murder of freedom of speech. With my example

before their eyes, dozens and hundreds of

other journalists will not dare to speak

the truth in time.

Dozens of armed men, shoving their way in

with shields, broke into her apartment.

“Justified terrorism.” But any

normal person places responsibility on them,

and I place

responsibility for the Arkhangelsk explosion on

the security services. They were committing lawless abuses, they

were torturing people, and then some

madman went and set off a grenade.

Well, that is because you behave like

complete scoundrels, villains. You yourselves behave

like terrorists. If in our country people

who possess

the state’s license, so to speak, to

detain someone and conduct

an investigation, use that right in order

to torture someone with electric shocks,

then they are criminals and

terrorists. What do you expect? That someone will

love you for it,

because all these fairy tales about some kind of

terrorist threats—well, they no longer work.

That stopped working a long time ago. Where? In

Arkhangelsk, or what? Are you fighting ISIS

or some other kind of

crime? In Arkhangelsk Region

you should be fighting poverty, corruption,

the governor and deputy governor, and

everyone else who has

stolen everything. Go investigate the Vostochny Cosmodrome

and check that. That is where you should be breaking in—

to everyone there; someone siphoned off tens of

billions of rubles (hundreds of millions of USD). Well, of course, uh,

sorry, not Arkhangelsk Region but

Pskov Region. In Pskov Region,

go fight alcoholism, go

fight, really, just the sheer hopelessness

there. Pskov Region—well, it is

just, uh, uh, [sighs]

one of the main historic Russian

regions, and it is in such a

situation. I mean, there is just, uh, well,

hardly anywhere else—maybe somewhere in

Altai—you would find such

terrible hopelessness as in Pskov Region. And yet

right next to it is wealthy Estonia,

wonderful. Everyone there lives very well.

In the Pskov region, things are truly rock bottom,

alcoholism, no jobs, a nightmare. But the FSB (Russia’s security service),

of course, wants to go after Svetlana

Prokopyeva. And they are absolutely to blame

for the fact that some people, looking at what

the FSB and the state and everyone else are doing,

just lose their minds, and

run around throwing

grenades at people. They are to blame. And it is certainly not

Prokopyeva doing that.

And last time I rather chaotically

told you about the conflict at the Blokhin Oncology Center

named after Blokhin. Well, I just said—I

didn’t know much myself—I just said that

the doctors there were in conflict, submitting

resignations, some people were being brought in, others

were leaving. And, uh, this week, over the course of

this week, including somewhat, perhaps

even unexpectedly for me, this

became the main event in the media overall.

the main media story.

Peskov commented on it, the Health Ministry

made statements about it. TV shows covered it,

all the newspapers wrote about it. And in fact,

this really is an extremely important

situation that needs to be watched. The

outcome of this conflict needs close attention.

Right now, things are actually going quite

badly there, because, well, it

shows the direction of the decline—or at least

the direction in which the state, well,

slightly acknowledges the problems and

claims it wants to solve them. What is

the essence of it? There is a department, and there is

the giant, enormous oncology

Blokhin Institute. If you live in

Moscow, you drive along Kashirskoye Highway and

see a colossal gray

building—this gigantic institution,

receiving billions of rubles, is the

oncology center. Inside it there is a department of

pediatric oncology. I mean, it is a

terrible and tragic place where

people end up when their children fall ill,

where those children end up. And there are

doctors there who perform

I got sidetracked—anyway, they perform transplants

for those children who have found themselves in

this situation. Most often, when you see

fundraisers through text messages

or something else, these are the children who

need bone marrow

transplants or other kinds of

transplants. And these are the doctors who do them. That

is, they are unique specialists, and they

all simultaneously announced that they

were leaving and released a video appeal.

Let’s—many people have already seen it,

but still, just to remind

you, here are 50 seconds of it.

We are pediatric oncologists who have devoted our

lives to saving children. We, as well as those

who could not be here with us today,

announce our decision

to resign, because the new management of the

oncology center does not allow us to honestly fulfill

our duty as doctors. Resignation

letters have already been submitted.

There is no basic ventilation, the walls

are being eaten away by mold, the wards are overcrowded

with patients. Meanwhile, construction of new buildings has been dragging on for 20 years,

but

their opening keeps being postponed

year after year.

Instead of solving these problems, the new

management has launched into bureaucratic infighting

and, in order to promote its own people,

is terrorizing the established staff.

The calculation of employees’ wages

has turned into a closed,

unfair process that

is aimed at pushing out unwanted staff.

Now we appeal to all citizens of

Russia,

our colleagues, patients, and their parents

to support us,

because if not you, then no one

else will stand up for us.

30,000 people are watching us live.

Why? Well, among other things, I got so

furious about this situation that I wrote

several posts. And now all this

Kremlin riffraff is accusing me of

saying, “Look who was the first to post

the doctors’ appeal. It was Navalny.

It’s all a staged campaign.” I really

was one of the first to post all of this, including

because we provide

informational support to the Doctors’ Alliance union,

which I have always said openly, and I

urge everyone else to give them

informational support as well. Why was I so

angry? Because, well, let’s imagine

a kind of healthcare pyramid.

In it, you can, well,

ideally, you shouldn’t ignore anything,

because this is healthcare. But when

you have no money—or, as in

Russia’s case, you steal a great deal of

healthcare money—there are still

some things that should be untouchable. For example,

rural feldsher stations (small primary care clinics) in

villages. You can sort of not care

about them. To hell with those villages,

no one knows about them. Let’s steal all the money.

Then there are regional district

hospitals. Then large provincial

hospitals in major cities. People may

make noise, but you can still take

something away from them. But at the top of this whole

structure there is a kind of sacred cow.

That is oncology, and especially pediatric

oncology, because that is what all the

charitable foundations work on. Everywhere you look,

good Lord, Instagram, all social media, all of

Facebook is just packed

with endless fundraising for sick people.

children. All our celebrities are involved in one

charity foundation or another. And everyone

talks about it endlessly. Good for them,

they're right to raise money and discuss it.

But the question arises: why do we have to

raise money when there seems to be

enough of it in the budget, and yet

this pediatric oncology sector

and, Lord, this small department of

superstar doctors there at the center

named after Blokhin, doctors who performed more than

half of all these transplants. I mean,

it's not thousands of operations a year,

it's dozens or hundreds of very

complex operations. They were doing them. And

it seemed that here, at least, you could

create a magic bubble, and inside that

magic bubble solve all the problems

of these medical workers, pay them huge

salaries, create wonderful

working conditions for them, make the best

hospital rooms for those poor children

who have to undergo transplants.

Ah, well, we expected this. Honestly,

this is more or less how I

imagined it. And when I saw this

appeal, then spoke with the doctors, I

saw these pay slips with salaries of 13,000

and 27,000 rubles.

You remember that under the May decrees (a set of presidential social policy directives),

a doctor in Moscow cannot be paid less

than 160,000 rubles, and a nurse cannot

be paid less than 80,000 rubles. And

Sobyanin, and Skvortsova at the federal

level, say that's exactly how much

they earn. But it turned out that in the most mega-

super-rich part of Russian

healthcare, what is happening is

a complete disaster. Oncology means big

money. And now a team of crooks is simply moving in there.

And, of course, I openly

accuse those who have now effectively taken over

this Blokhin Center and, in particular,

are firing people there. I say they are

crooks because there are already facts, and we

can see that they are stealing through drug procurement.

And in general, there is also

suspicious and clearly illegal enrichment by this

chief doctor and his whole team. They

are simply pushing out the entire existing team so they can

sit on top of some large

financial stream. But again,

the assumption was that even if that were the case, you

could somehow move in there, but at least

pay people off, shut everyone up

with money, for example, pay them

huge salaries or something. But not a

chance. They care so little about it

that they are simply firing them. And these doctors

submitted resignation letters. What

did they do? They immediately fired

Professor Minkevich, whom they

considered the instigator of this conflict,

even though he had worked there for 40 years and was in fact

the founder, the first person who began

performing transplants there. And

then they started putting out some kind of nonsense. Good Lord,

they dragged out Dr. Roshal, who

started shouting: "Why are the doctors

resigning? Let's take a look." Thirty-two

seconds—32 shameful seconds in the history of

Dr. Roshal.

Even if you are 100% right

and everything really is exactly as you say, I still

will not support you.

I will not support you,

because putting any ambitions on the scales against

children's health is unacceptable. What

does that mean? What is this, all of you

deciding to leave? Who is going to treat them? You wrote

your resignation letters, and in two weeks you'll be gone. Then

what? Since when is this some kind of trend?"

He understands perfectly well that this is all lies

and hypocrisy, because there is a resignation schedule there.

Naturally, they are finishing treatment for the

children. No one is abandoning sick children

halfway through treatment. And these people

have said exactly that they cannot

work like this. There is mold on the walls, there are

horrific conditions in these children's rooms.

There is no ventilation. You've seen

the terrible images of sick children,

the photographs of children with cancer.

They are all wearing respirators. Under no

circumstances can they get sick with anything. They, they cannot

be lying in rooms where there is mold on

the walls. They cannot be there without

ventilation. These doctors are saying, "Well,

why aren't you solving these problems? We

are going to leave now in protest." What else

are they supposed to do? And Dr. Roshal

says, "Well, even if you are

100% right, I won't support you." Why not

support them? If you're such a

famous doctor, then let's drag this

Skvortsova of yours into it. Demand that they

allocate a billion or so. Our channel

Rusha Today—I'll talk about this at the end of the program—

gets 20 billion rubles a year.

Let's take some from them—you could take,

of course, all 20. Best of all, take all

20. Let's at least take three and

give it to pediatric oncology. But no,

not a damn thing. Not a damn thing. They're firing these people.

Some of them have already been fired. The Alliance

of Doctors was accused of being connected

to me. And in general, they are being called agitators,

terrible people. And meanwhile there is this whole

discussion going on: "Why are these

doctors so bad? They need to be fired. They're stirring up

trouble, saying things within the workforce,

you can't do that." And somehow

the question gets avoided: "But why is there mold in

the rooms? Why are the medicines paid for? And

why are they bringing in a new team and firing these people?

No one has any doubts. Everyone

is saying that those who are

resigning are doctors of the highest

the most competent. They’re the best, the most

capable, but since they’re making a fuss, we

fire them. But they’re not even protesting

because they’re demanding

gold Mercedeses or anything like

the cars the director

of this center has. They’re not asking for that. They’re

saying, "Just get rid of the mold in

the wards and pay our salaries

somewhat transparently." Those are

their demands.

The substance of the issue is not being discussed. How

dare they leave like that? And, uh,

right now we’re seeing a rather interesting

attack on doctors who are trying

to secure the pay they’re owed. Why

do I talk about this so much? Because

I think, in general,

healthcare is an indicator

of everything that’s going on. And, uh,

Putin’s complete failure

when it comes to

ensuring that doctors receive even a basic salary

shows that nothing good

is going to come of this for anyone. But let’s also

be honest: Putin himself is hardly

interested in paying

doctors low wages. He has no interest in that.

He’s simply realized by now

that his policies have led, among other things,

to economic collapse,

to the absence of economic growth. So

he lies, claiming that he pays them high

salaries, but in reality he simply cannot

pay them. They shifted all of this

onto the regions, and the regions have no money.

That’s why he engages in endless

lying and rather ridiculous PR.

Let’s, uh, take a look right

now. Apparently, after, among other things,

the oncologists spoke out, Putin held a

special meeting. At that meeting

the same old picture started again, with indignation: "

Why aren’t you paying doctors? Let’s

pretend Putin has suddenly come out in support of doctors."

As part of improving the sector-wide

pay system for medical

workers, we consider it necessary to establish

by government act the share of guaranteed

base-salary payments in the wage

structure at no less than 55%

while ensuring that average wages

are not below the level set out in

the presidential decrees. The list of

incentive payments and their share in

the wage structure, as well as

the list of compensation payments and

the conditions for granting them.

It is important that when, uh, increasing the share

of the base salary, compensation payments are not reduced, reduced

and neither are other

supplements. So that this little trick

doesn’t happen.

And they show us all this. And they’re

probably once again expecting

a replay of the 2012 discussion. Putin

said doctors’ salaries should be raised, they

said it, and then didn’t raise them, and

repeated it in 2013 and still didn’t

raise them. Maybe they increased them slightly

in 2014, in 2015,

2016, 2017,

2018, for heaven’s sake, and in 2019

they’re now holding a meeting and

saying literally the same thing. We need

to make sure that, you know, over there

it doesn’t turn out that the base rate is 13,000 rubles

and you’re supposedly entitled to some bonuses, but

in practice you receive 13,000 rubles.

You’ve been discussing all this for five years. Five years.

It feels as if they’re all suffering from

some kind of illness. You know how in movies

they show people with a rare

condition: you remember everything, but then

you fall asleep, wake up, and remember absolutely

nothing. They’re the same: they woke up and

don’t remember at all that the May decrees

were adopted in 2012. Then

during the election campaign he said all

of this again. Then they repeatedly

reported that all doctors were receiving

decent wages. And now

once again wise Vladimir Putin, after 20

years, says: "Oh, you know, doctors

aren’t actually getting paid; none of this led anywhere." And

now, well, I saw this great headline:

"Putin Must Take Charge of Healthcare."

Putin himself has finally decided

to deal with all of this. And we understand

that this is just another chimera. And from

the example of healthcare we can see that even

when they don’t really want to—well, for

Putin, the 3.5 million medical workers in

the country are very important. He doesn’t want

them to go on strike, but they can’t do anything

because they’ve stolen everything. And this is

the clearest indicator that if nothing can be done

about this, then we should simply look

at what is happening to doctors.

If they’re getting next to nothing, then neither

teachers, nor cops, nor, I don’t know, nor

designers, nor anyone else are going to get

a damn thing, you understand? Public-sector workers

won’t be paid more, their wages won’t be raised, and they’ll

cut public-sector pay, while for everyone

else inflation and the lack of

economic growth will eat up their wages.

That’s exactly how it all works. More than

that, we can see that in response to

people’s demands to be paid their wages,

they started behaving quite aggressively

within the healthcare system.

There’s a really striking story that

I wrote about today and want to

tell you about. Uh, here’s more on how

female corrupt officials declared

a union representative in Perm (a city in Russia).

There is a woman named Anastasia Tarabarina, and she

helped, as a member of the Doctors’ Alliance trade union,

the local neonatologists, who work with

newborn babies, draft

a demand:

"We want to be paid for night shifts and

overtime at 600 rubles an hour.

And if we work during the day, we want

to be paid 300 rubles an hour for overtime."

So, in other words, people simply demanded

that if they are being forced

to work overtime, they should be paid. They asked for nothing else

and were threatened

with dismissal. And in response,

the chief physician found a photo of this doctor on Instagram

— one where she is sitting with

some bananas, grapes, a pear,

and flowers, with the caption "To the best doctor."

And he sent her an official notice saying this was

corruption. "On your official Instagram

account, corruption has been discovered,

therefore I request a written

explanation as to why you were given a pear and

a banana." Well, obviously, all this is leading toward

dismissal. Then they’ll issue a reprimand

and say, "We are firing you for violating

anti-corruption rules."

Well, good for her, really. Anastasia

recorded a great video in response. Let’s

watch it — 1 minute 24 seconds of exactly what

any decent person should say to this crook of a

chief physician, who simply decided to

intimidate her.

Hello, I’m Anastasia Tarabrina, and I am

the biggest corrupter in the field of

medicine. The thing is, I work

as an obstetrician-gynecologist at Perm

City Hospital No. 6. And

at the same time, I work with the Doctors’ Alliance

trade union. When we helped our colleagues,

the neonatologists, draw up demands regarding

overtime pay, the hospital administration

got so angry with me that they

dug through my Instagram — what they called my

official one — found this

photo and declared that I was

corrupt. And they demanded

a written explanation. I

want to say to all of you, dear

officials, that when you buy

medicines and hospital supplies at

twice the price, no inspections

take place. When you buy

CT scanners at ten times the price,

no inspections take place. When

patients have to buy medicines that are supposed to be free

with their own money, everyone stays silent. But

the moment our union started

defending the rights of medical workers,

I was immediately accused of corruption. So

now let’s declare all doctors like me,

who work for 20,000 rubles per

full-time position, to be bribe-takers and

corrupt officials because one day their

grateful patients gave them flowers.

And then we’ll see who wins. And

I am telling all of you right now that we will

continue helping

medical workers. And we will not stop

our work. In fact,

on the contrary, our union will defend

the rights of medical workers with even greater force

and confidence.

Well done, Tarabrina. Well done. I applaud her.

That’s exactly how it should be. I think that, in reality, it’s

not easy to work somewhere in Perm

as an obstetrician-gynecologist. And when

the chief physician starts coming after you, well,

obviously the hospital management — well, you

feel that it’s hard. I think she’s

going through a lot right now. But at this moment, 31,000

people are watching us live alone,

so she needs support, and let

the chief physician be the one who’s afraid — he’s the one who should be

subjected to what, as I said at the beginning,

real pressure for things like this.

Let him first stop purchasing

medicines the way he does, and

that is exactly how he buys them. And

let them stop buying medical equipment

above market price, and only then

start making accusations against doctors

for being given a flower, a pear,

or a banana. Yes, of course. Listen,

we know that we have this habit,

this tradition of giving chocolates, sweets, and

so on. In the beautiful Russia of the future,

we will probably get rid of that habit. Well,

it’s not even about the habit — there simply won’t be

such a need. Seriously, are you really

now actually going to

go after doctors when you don’t pay them

a damn thing? You’re going to dig through their

Instagram accounts, looking for baskets with

flowers and saying they failed to declare them

in an anti-corruption disclosure. The people

who steal tens of millions of rubles,

yes, of course, they should be hounded; of course, they

should be crushed, while the union should be

supported. People are asking me — I can see

there are lots of questions about Yuri Dud’s interview with Sergei

Guriev. Well, what are you asking?

Look, it’s a great interview. Guriev is

the most famous Russian economist.

A very smart man, one of the smartest

people I know. And

he really is a genuine economist. These days,

it’s like everyone

labels themselves an economist. You

see endless appearances by all sorts of

people who call themselves

economists. In reality, they are not

economists at all in 99% of cases.

Guriev really is a world-famous

guy, an economist. So definitely watch this

interview. It’s very good.

Here’s a question from Erwin Veikov.

Guriev said that the regime will not be able

to survive another 10 years without change.

He’s right. Without changing, the regime won’t be able

to last even a minute—or even a day.

Right now, unfortunately, it is changing for the

worse, in order to solve

its own problems. For now, they’re imprisoning

people, firing this Tarabrina, uh,

and somehow covering up for all sorts of their crooks

who work in the security services and so

on. In other words, it is still

changing form. They understand that they are not

capable of delivering rising

wages or ensuring economic

growth. So they are moving down the path of a

kind of

more and more police-style

state. So they are changing. Our

task is to put pressure on them so that they

ultimately change in the right direction,

because right now this regime is increasingly

becoming a regime of

expensive fools. Really. They, well,

they like to say that they’re

somehow very cunning, but when you

look at these people,

who receive

billions, who live lives of

fantastic wealth, and you see just how,

even by the regime’s own standards, how

ineffective, stupid, and pointless they are,

it’s horrifying. A perfect,

absolutely marvelous example. And it was

shown to us

by Dmitry Kiselyov. You

know, this man heads, uh,

a state news

agency. He is one of the richest—I won’t

call him a journalist—one of the richest

liars. He lives in a huge

apartment in the ultra-elite

residential complex Legends of Tsvetnoy on

Tsvetnoy Boulevard. And while trying to cover for

his boss Putin, he decided to air a report claiming

that in the Central African

Republic there are no so-called

Wagner fighters—that is, people who

work for Putin’s chef, Prigozhin.

And to do that, they showed us some kind of

instructor who explained that no,

no, no, there are no Wagner fighters here

at all. And it came off as very comical. Let’s

watch a clip from the

agency SIT, which does

open-source investigations.

Just the other day, the Central African Republic, where disappearances

and the deaths of journalists are not uncommon,

was visited by VGTRK special correspondent

Alexander Rogatkin.

The senior instructor at the training

camp immediately clears everything

up.

We have absolutely nothing to do with the PMC

Wagner from our Russia.

The honor of the Russian soldier must not be

stained anywhere.

We have absolutely nothing to do with the PMC

Wagner.

So they show a guy who

is supposed to explain that he has nothing

to do with PMC Wagner. And as

proof of that, while he says that we

have nothing to do with it, they show a sheet of paper: here are our

principles. And on that sheet there’s a watermark of

PMC Wagner. And they show it on screen.

Well, what you need here is some kind of, you know,

music like comedians use, with that

ba-dum-tss,

to signal a total fail,

because Kiselyov and all the rest get billions

from the budget. And these Wagner PMC people

get billions from the shadow military

budget. It’s unclear why on earth our

money should be spent in this

Central African

Republic at all. And why it should go

through Putin’s chef, Prigozhin, a

crook and a thug. Good Lord, can’t you

just—I don’t know—not, well,

fail so badly that you actually show

the Wagner PMC emblem live

on air while denying that Wagner PMC is

there. But they did. They showed it because

they are super-mega expensive [__]. Kira

Yarmysh released a whole video today about

another super-mega expensive

fool who gets 20

billion rubles a year from us. Just imagine that—an astronomical

amount of money, simply

enormous. With that money, we could not only pay for every

sick child’s

operation, but for every sick child we

could pay for the operation and buy

them an apartment. But all of that

is handed over to Margarita Simonyan, who

simply wastes it on absolutely nothing. Let’s

watch a few seconds—55 seconds—from Kira’s video

about RT (formerly Russia Today).

Margarita Simonyan. We all just

adore her. She is the best example of theft,

pointlessness, and incompetence in what

is happening in Russia. This channel

is specifically designed for propaganda

aimed at foreign audiences. And they are very proud

of its successes. In every interview,

Margarita Simonyan says that her

channel is watched by a record number of

people. Here is the rating of all channels

broadcasting in Britain for the week of September 16 to 22.

RT is on the list. Number of viewers:

469,000,

audience share 0.2%.

Judging by the channel header, they’re very proud

of YouTube. It literally says: the most

watched news network, with over 9

billion views. Well then, let’s look at

the most popular videos. Here’s one about

a homeless man who found a job. Here’s one about

an escaped chimpanzee, and here’s one about a tsunami.

They simply take other people’s videos, filmed on

phones, slap their own logo on them, and

make money off those views.

I mean, we assume that Putin

is this kind of villain and that he does

villainous things. In particular, he created this

machine. We pour 20

billion rubles into one end, and out the other end we get

propaganda—effective propaganda.

Putin tells his lies to a large

number of people in the West. But in

practice, he’s not even telling

those lies to anyone. 429,000

reach, or 0.02% of the UK. They have

a UK bureau there,

some huge operation, a large

number of people on enormous salaries,

with rented apartments, who

fly back and forth and, I have no doubt,

do it business class to London and back.

429,000 people—that’s fewer than watch

this broadcast. And if this—if this broadcast

gets fewer than 400,000 viewers, I

consider it a failure. And they do this

for a billion rubles, stealing

funny little videos, reposting them to

their own channel, and telling us about their

billions in reach. It’s a complete

and total failure. So this

regime is changing form, but more and

more it is becoming a regime of expensive

idiots. Nothing else. All right, I

see a lot of questions coming in about

where to donate if all the accounts

are block—blocked. We

really do have our accounts constantly

blocked. Still, we somehow

keep scrambling to collect money through PayPal and

so on, just so we can

keep going somehow. Things are very hard for us

right now. But there’s a link in the description,

and it works—or if it isn’t there yet,

it will appear. Go to it

and, uh, if you’d like

to support us, please do.

In any case, we spend your money

far, far more effectively than

Rush Today. And I want to end my

program with an absolutely astonishing

video featuring the son—despite the fact that this

grown-up, overweight man is the son

of the head of Beloglinsky District

in Krasnodar Krai,

Alexander Koklin. Krasnodar Krai,

the Kuban region, is something I discuss constantly

on this program. And I have repeat

edly said that Krasnodar Krai

really needs an operation called

"Clean Hands." The entire leadership there simply needs to be jailed:

the executive branch,

the judiciary, the FSB (Federal Security Service), the MVD (Interior Ministry),

the prosecutor’s office, the leadership of all these bodies in

Krasnodar Krai—they’re gangsters. A gathering

of gangsters not figuratively, but in the

most literal sense. They all should be

removed, and there should absolutely be consequences,

and then they should be imprisoned. And here’s just one more

great illustration of how all this

works there—this lawlessness

of the people in power in

Krasnodar Krai—in these 32

seconds.

Come on, yeah,

send me the photo later.

Uh-huh. [laughter]

This video,

film this instead. Come on, come on, a little bit

more—it’s time

for video.

This is how they shoot in Karabakh (the South Caucasus conflict region),

I already got it on camera.

So what, a bit drunk? They came out of a café,

pulled an assault rifle out of a Mercedes, and

fired a few shots into the air. Because

the video made it online, well, obviously,

once it hit the internet, the situation

started to smell a bit like trouble. But this is

Krasnodar Krai, and they resolved everything

in a truly magnificent way. This

guy went to the police himself the next day

and said, "You know, I have a

rifle, I brought it to you, and it’s a

deactivated rifle, it can’t be

used, so there’s no

problem." And the police looked at it

and said, "Oh, right, a deactivated

rifle." It’s just a fantastic story,

isn’t it? You get caught, say, I don’t

know, shooting heroin into your vein, and then you

come in the next day and say, "Oh,

you know, I brought you a little bag of

this white powder." The police

look at it: it’s flour, case closed. You

can have any kind of weapon you like, but if

you get caught with it, you just go in and say:

"You know, you buy a

deactivated rifle, bring it in,

and say, "That’s what it all was—this was a

deactivated pistol, this was a deactivated

rifle." And the police say, "Well,

yes." And the Interior Ministry had already stated there that

well, experts will of course examine it,

but we can already see now that, of course,

there is no crime here.

Magnificent—no searches at all. Now, when it came to

that journalist from Pskov who

wrote an article—and I showed it—they

sent in FSB special forces, pinning her

to the wall with rifles. But no one burst in on this fat guy with

an assault rifle in the trunk.

They believed him. Why bother

with a search? He’s a respected man,

the son of the district head, probably a member of

United Russia. We believe you. You brought us

the right thing—yes, of course, the secretary

of the local branch of the United Russia party.

Well, of course, if he fired an

assault rifle and then the next day went and bought

a deactivated one and brought it in and handed it over—well,

Of course that’s exactly how it was. Why conduct

any kind of check? We take this

assault rifle, uh, send it for examination, and on top of that

we’ll even pay a bonus for turning in

this weapon to us. Let’s give him some kind of distinction

award and all that. Then it’ll turn out

that, well, with this

deactivated assault rifle he protected the country from

terrorism. We’ll reward him and so on. That’s

Russia for you. You understand? People stand there with one-person protest pickets

(a common form of solo protest in Russia). One gets 4 years, another gets 8.

A female journalist wrote an article, a little opinion column

of five, five paragraphs. Special forces

break into her home.

But this guy with the assault rifle, yes, he’s one of ours,

one of our own, so everything is just fine. So we

have to hate them, we have to hound them.

And we have to hound them not because

we enjoy hounding people, but because

that’s what we do. Including in order

to create public pressure, in order

to rally the whole country and

to turn the whole country against these brazen

disgusting swine. Once again, I apologize to you

for the fact that we started

late; we had various

technical issues. We’ll get everything fixed by

next week, and everything will be fine. But

see you next Thursday. Bye.

[music]

[music]