Why They Lie About the Coronavirus, How an Uzbek Exposed the FSB, and God in the Constitution

[music]

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

which means that your favorite live program is now on the air,

*Russia of the Future*,

and I am its permanent host, Alexei

Navalny — or, as they call me,

a person spreading fake news about the coronavirus,

or rather, even a person who

spreads fake news about the coronavirus together

with Ukrainians — that is what the Kremlin media called me

this week. Today we will talk

about the coronavirus, about fake

stories about the coronavirus — because it is

truly an important global issue. In

Russia, however, it has taken on a rather strange

twist and turned into a stream of

fakes. This issue can, of course,

affect everyone. We should

and apparently will be talking about the coronavirus

constantly — it is an important political and

economic factor.

Please send me your questions with

the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture on Twitter;

they will be put on screen, and I will try to read them.

And do not forget: below there is a link

where you can make a donation to support us.

Just today, if I am not mistaken, the Simonovsky Court

— our beloved court, the same one right here —

fined

the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) 500,000 rubles (about $5,400) because we are

“foreign agents,” and on Instagram, apparently,

on Insta,

we are supposed to write in big letters on Instagram

that we are foreign agents.

They crawled through all our social media, and our

Instagram account was fined 500,000 rubles. You

remember that story: they themselves sent

money to our blocked account during that

whole episode,

some money from some

Spaniard, who later said that he had absolutely no idea

who these people were and did not know to whom

he had sent the money. They declared us

foreign agents despite the fact that

we returned that money ages ago. They

say, no, they will not remove that status from us,

and they keep fining us here and there —

300,000, 500,000 rubles. It is not as if

these are sums that, I do not know,

will destroy us — no sum will destroy us —

but nevertheless,

we constantly need your help, so

please follow that link,

take a look, and if you have the

opportunity, good people,

please support us. And now let us begin with

a big thank-you.

First of all, I want to say

thank you very much to everyone who came to the Nemtsov march

(a memorial march for murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov). It was truly impressive,

and a huge event.

Probably since that very

first tragic march, when

Boris was killed — I was not at it,

because I was under arrest at the time —

this was, as I understand it, the second largest

in terms of attendance. A great many

people came, and many things came together there:

the fifth anniversary of the murder — five years have passed and no one

has been held accountable — and the torture

that has now become almost routine. I

could spend every program, the entire

program, talking about several cases

of torture of people in political cases

that happened just this week.

Until quite recently, this would have been impossible

to imagine. And there was a lot behind it,

including the Network case and the New Greatness case, and apparently

the authorities were, of course, very, very

upset — you could see it clearly —

that so many people came,

and it really was a large march. And

they did not even film it with drones,

you know, the way they usually do — filming before

it starts to make it look like there are few people.

But there were still a great many people, and

Rossiya 1 (state TV channel) aired an absolutely astonishing

fake about the size of the march. They

simply

engaged in something completely ridiculous.

At the march, they asked a person

how many people had been gathered, but

he was actually answering a different question,

namely: “Sorry, how much money did you

raise for political prisoners?” Thanks

to Mikhail Kriger, who at the march was

collecting money for political prisoners.

He said, “Well, about 200,000,” and they showed

those words as if someone at the march

was claiming there were 200,000 people there. So let us

watch this footage.

Can there really be any doubt that there are tens of thousands here?

In fact, through the metal detector gates

that stood before

the starting point of the march, only

a little over 8,000 people passed. But

opposition activists counted

in their own way. I think we will count

from what I saw on Facebook —

it should have been 200,000.

People give different amounts, of course, but I

think today we will count

from what I saw on Facebook — 200,000 should

have been there.

I think maybe even more. So you see,

if you need an illustration

— an ideal illustration — of what fake

news is, this was it. It was not that

people made a mistake or used unverified

information. They literally took and cut out

a fragment where a person simply says “200,000”

about something else,

then inserted it into their own introduction and broadcast it

on federal television. They quite

deliberately, consciously lied. And probably

some of you will now try to write to me in the comments,

“Well then, sue them

under the law...” If only. We will get to that now.

We’ll file a complaint against them, of course,

and obviously it will be rejected, but there will at least be this procedure,

there won’t be any real review of it, actually.

In fact, this morning I called in

our lawyers and said, well, this is such a perfect

moment, such a great issue,

let’s just, under their idiotic

law on “fake news,” the one they

were planning to use to put us on trial, go ahead and

try to hold these crooks accountable.

But no, that’s impossible, because there is

a special clause saying that this

fake news law applies to everyone

except them. It does not apply to

official media, namely state

television. So if you

write something online, some kind of

comment,

you can be held

liable for it, but Rossiya 1 (a Russian state TV channel) cannot be held

liable for it, because

this special Russian

fake news law was created in order to

support lies and fight the truth.

And

this trick is only going to intensify further, because

right now, apparently, there really is

preparation underway for early elections.

Since the start of the year, in every broadcast I’ve been saying

on this subject, in every broadcast, that

I really don’t understand why there is any need right now

to hold early elections. I don’t believe they will

actually hold early elections.

To be honest, even now I’ll confirm that

I do not see the slightest reason for the Kremlin

to hold early elections to the

State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament), and if they

announce them, I’ll probably be glad. It’s

an excellent, really excellent time

for us to compete right now with

United Russia. But by now, so many

media outlets have already written these

reports about early elections to the

State Duma that basically everyone is

getting ready: the Communists and

A Just Russia, and United Russia members are all running around

like scalded cats, trying to secure

the best district for themselves. A huge

number of people are already writing to me saying that

there will definitely be early elections.

Smart Voting, let’s get our candidate lists and districts ready.

In other words, people are in a state of frantic agitation.

Maybe this is, of course, just

disinformation

meant simply to distract

attention from something else, but I think

the likelihood that early elections

will in fact happen is increasing. Maybe

they won’t be in September, but for example in

next March; there’s talk about that too.

The thing is,

they can’t just go ahead and dissolve the Duma, and

the Duma, under the law as it stands now, simply cannot

dissolve itself. So this would be

announced as a change in the election date: they

would simply move them to next March, and

the election campaign would begin

right now. And in any case, as soon as

the elections start, as soon as our deputies—

just imagine it again: the United Russia party, the

Communists, and so on—

the country will be divided into 225

electoral districts, and in each of them

there will be a United Russia candidate; in each of them

that United Russia candidate will lie shamelessly, and

the United Russia candidate will spread all kinds of

fake news. And it will be hilarious, it will be very

cool, and together we will

expose it all. This week I saw

something, and when I saw this story I thought:

people really do feel the approach of

the election campaign. A United Russia politician in

Arkhangelsk Region, a guy by the name of

Dmitry Yurkov,

a textbook United Russia type,

was busy promoting himself and

his party, glorious United

Russia. He wrote a post on VKontakte saying how he

went to the maternity hospital in the town of Kargopol

and visited it, spent time working with

the local people, talked to them, saying, “So how are you doing here,”

“dear women?”

“We’re giving birth,” they supposedly replied, “dear Dmitry,”

“dear Deputy Yurkov,” they answered him.

And he’s like, “Well done, and thank you,”

“dear deputy, for helping us,”

and so on.

“God bless United Russia.” He was very

pleased. But then local

residents started writing in the comments:

“Oleg, that maternity hospital was closed two years ago.”

“It was shut down two years ago, damn it, the whole facility.”

By the way, the whole district was furious about it and still is

furious, because women now have to

travel elsewhere now. And on top of that,

a United Russia politician comes along and writes a post about how wonderfully

he is supposedly working

with the public in this maternity hospital.

After that he was exposed—or rather, the contradiction

became obvious instantly. You can’t

deceive the residents of a town by telling them

there is a maternity hospital when there isn’t one.

So the United Russia politician changed his post and wrote that,

you know, this young journalist, this young

inexperienced journalist—well, it was just

a first attempt, he said. The post had been

written by a young journalist, so to speak,

a trial run, and apparently it didn’t go well.

Apparently he decided to embellish things. But we understand how this

works: it wasn’t some young journalist

who decided to dress things up a little; it’s just that United

Russia lies all the time. And my point is simply that

these may seem like insignificant things,

like, okay, some United Russia politician in Arkhangelsk Region

is lying—but they lie in every region,

endlessly. And our task together is

to drag all of this into the open, because in

Arkhangelsk there will be one district, and elsewhere another.

there will be a different district there, in Moscow there will be

his own constituency, some Andrei

Metelsky, whom you and I threw out

of the Moscow City Duma, will go to the

Duma, won’t he? He’ll want to get back at us,

to take revenge, you could say, to get revenge

I don’t know, he’ll want revenge, let’s put it that way

that’s the right way to say it: he’ll want revenge, and

by the way, Metelsky is now

extremely actively

making the rounds of all the media. I showed you in

the last program how he appeared on a cooking

show. Then he came on the TV channel

Dozhd (TV Rain, an independent Russian TV channel)

and gave a really brilliant performance there too

he called our Ruslan Shaveddinov

Shamsutdinov, apparently in honor of that

[music]

serviceman who recently

shot his fellow soldiers. Let’s

listen to 33 seconds of it, it’s really something. He

was asked a question: so what about

please explain why Shaveddinov

isn’t writing home? The answer was absolutely

brilliant. Let’s listen.

Shamsutdinov... and Volkov has some kind of level of

gene pool... What do you think about

that? You know, because you’re just bluntly...

you sent him by force into the army, to Novaya

Zemlya (a remote Arctic archipelago in Russia). Why by force? On Novaya Zemlya, do you

know what the conditions are? Haven’t heard? He’s allowed

to call, no problem. Well, I actually have no connection

I don’t know anything. I know that in the Russian army

everything is according to the law. Well, when his term of service ends, for

him... he stayed to serve... well, that is, he

can’t even call his parents, and

I’m not sure about that, that he can’t

call his parents. Maybe he just doesn’t

want to, simply because right there where

I think, yes, he liked it so much he forgot

to call

and why not? I mean, that’s

a United Russia member exactly as he is. In principle, one could

have said: well, I don’t know, I’m not familiar

with this situation, they brought in the

prosecutor’s office, they’ll sort it out, everything here

is done according to the law. But you see,

he still says: well, he’s not calling his parents

after being taken alive to Novaya Zemlya, right?

No, no, he wasn’t taken away. I know that in the Russian

army everything is fine. He probably just forgot

to call. So they just took him away like that,

kidnapped him from his apartment and you

don’t call anyone? Well, maybe he just forgot

because he got carried away playing around with his comrades, so much so that

he got so fascinated with the rifle that he simply forgot

to call. Then night falls again, and he thinks:

damn, I forgot to call Mom, but it’s too late now

I’ll call in the morning. In the morning he wakes up and they tell him,

hey guys, go shovel snow, and he

is like, whoa

runs off with a shovel and clears snow

all day, and again forgets to call Mom, and

that’s been going on for three months. These people need to be

crushed, these United Russia people, because

a new Metelsky will come along

and they’ll drag him through again with the help of

electronic voting, because they

need to show

the opposition people on the internet

saying: sit there, you managed to sink the leader of United Russia, but

we won’t let you sink him any further, we’ll

send him around by the big route

push him into the State Duma, and he will

still be representing your interests

he’ll still have that hotel in Austria

he will still, de facto, be

a person who is essentially

a foreign agent, and he’ll still

have everything actively registered in his mother’s name

he won’t give a damn about you and will be your deputy

this cannot be allowed. Today I wrote

a post on the occasion of the third anniversary of the release of

the investigation *He Is Not Dimon to You*

There is polling that was conducted

immediately after *He Is Not Dimon to You* came out, and

now recently, three years later,

please show this slide

about how attitudes toward

Medvedev have changed. It’s very important to understand that we, in terms of

informing people and in terms of

changing their attitudes, are a huge force

look here at attitudes toward Medvedev

positive and negative, before the release

the blue line is immediately

right after the investigation was released, and

the red line is now. You see how

negative attitudes rose from 8 to

31, and how positive attitudes fell

who did that? We did — the people

who simply clicked a button

and shared the investigation, who

just said to someone in conversation,

listen, did you go and watch

the investigation about Medvedev? No? Go

take a look at the dachas he has. It seems like

nonsense, just a simple conversation, but that is exactly what

was killing Medvedev and United Russia. Now

it’s not just that his political

career and political future have been destroyed, but in

fact — show the next slide — we

see that citizens, our fellow citizens,

the citizens of Russia, have a clear understanding

that Medvedev should end up on the

defendants’ bench, and now, three

years after the release of *He Is Not Dimon to You*, we

see absolutely clearly that this needs to happen, and

the sooner the better, but here

50 percent of people want to see

an investigation into Medvedev, they want to see him

on the defendants’ bench. This is very important. We

must do the same with United Russia. It will

be harder to do because they are

cunning too. Right now they’re doing this

rebranding, once again putting forward various

charity people, these wonderful

people — or not so wonderful, well, or at least

people who seem not to be guilty of anything — and putting them forward

the composer, and he’ll say, well, why bother

when Navalny is criticizing me online?

I’m a composer, I play the violin, I

earn my money legally, everything is fine for me.

Call me when it comes to the crooks and thieves (a well-known opposition label for the ruling party United Russia),

that is, of course, they definitely will

and right now they’re sitting there working out, at this very

moment, they’re sitting and figuring out

their tactics against us. Our task here

is also to believe in ourselves. Yesterday’s broad-

yesterday’s broadcast, by the way, the previous stream,

also got a million views. The viewers of this

program — look how many of you have watched since

the start of the year: already four programs with a million

views.

That’s enough to simply crush

United Russia. Everyone just needs to

invest

effort. I’ll talk later about how,

when they start talking against the Constitution and all that.

Moscow City Hall is now forcing doctors,

police officers, everyone under the sun, not just

to register on Gosuslugi (Russia’s state services portal), but also

to bring in six other people so that they

vote electronically for Putin’s

amendments.

So, well, we simply can’t force people,

we just have to act on our own ideas.

In fact, it looks like each of us

has to go after United Russia and get five

people

involved in this work. Then we

really won’t leave anything — we won’t leave

one stone standing of their

ratings. That’s very important. So, now,

Victor Medved asks me,

a regular viewer of our program:

“Alexei, please comment on the lawsuit

by Deripaska for 1 ruble.”

I only know one thing: on the day when

my accounts were frozen,

at the same time, information appeared on the website

of the arbitration court

saying that Oleg Deripaska,

the oligarch, had sued me and was demanding something there.

As the media wrote, apparently he

was unhappy with my words that his

entire business consists of

receiving state aid.

That’s rather strange, because the fact that

Deripaska and his structures endlessly, like

a black hole, receive state

support

is absolutely common knowledge. I don’t know on what

grounds he plans to sue, but so far we still

haven’t received the claim and haven’t read it.

So it’s hard to say, but I don’t have the slightest

doubt that, of course, this is somehow

the Kremlin using Deripaska — that’s how it always

happens. That is, they don’t invent

some strategy against us, and within

that strategy there is always, inevitably,

someone filing a lawsuit in order to

demand that something be blocked. There have been court

rulings, new fines — this is what they do

constantly.

Igor Kochetkov asks me,

“Please comment on the story with

the deaths involving dry ice...”

I’m not even going to comment on that story.

There’s nothing to comment on there — it’s a monstrous tragedy, and

and what I find rather strange here is that

around this tragic story, the idea that

all of it was somehow almost live, online,

broadcast in Instagram Stories,

looks, frankly speaking, bizarre.

But all of this, again, just points to the same thing:

guys, you need to be more careful.

I mean, dry ice is giving off some kind of vapor, but you should at least

have read online what it actually is,

why it does that, and whether you can breathe

what it gives off. It’s a terrible, horrific

tragedy. Everyone needs to be careful; you shouldn’t

treat such things

lightly. But as for broadcasting

all these horrible events live and

then later on television — today I was told

that on Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel), on

Sobchak’s program, they showed a reconstruction

of these events, dwelling on them in a sensational way.

They showed, “Here are people lying there with their

tongues hanging out, this is how it all happened.” It’s like

some kind of grotesque spectacle. It’s really bizarre, but

everyone decides that for themselves, I suppose.

Danil asks me about Putin’s lie

about the poor — because it says here

“poverty line.” I’ll talk about that because

it’s actually a super, super important issue. As for

these strange amendments, here’s another question:

“Alexei, information has appeared that Putin

will sign the amendments on March 18, a month

before the vote.

Will he do it on camera and

then talk about the people’s will?

Will he wait for the vote? As far as I

understand, the plan is exactly this: that on the day of

the annexation of Crimea (March 18) — is it March 18 or not?

I don’t remember, but I think so — Putin

will sign it ceremonially, and then

there will be a nationwide vote which

means nothing. That is, he will already have

signed everything, and they’ll simply be

deceiving the people in this way. It’s a very strange and

very incomprehensible setup. It looks like

Putin himself really came up with it,

who is, after all, in a kind of semi-

senile state, and this setup looks

genuinely senile — it was invented by

a senile person: first they’ll sign it

ceremonially on the day of the annexation of Crimea,

and then there will be a vote. It’s completely absurd — that is,

he is really fixated on the

annexation of Crimea, because, as I was just saying,

when I spoke about early elections, it was also

being discussed that they might schedule them for March 17,

also around the day of the annexation of Crimea. Well,

they want to do everything on the day of the annexation

of Crimea. This whole vote is complete nonsense.

a fake, but they’ll sign it and

with electronic voting too. Don’t

worry, all of this will definitely

be passed. Alexei, why are there

almost no coronavirus cases in Russia?

I’ll definitely talk about that. It

seems to me that this is super, super, mega important.

So, about the poverty line — this is

an important thing, and Putin just spent a long time

rambling on and talking about, about, and

about how brilliantly he developed Russia’s economy.

His main argument is

that before — look — the number of poor people

was enormous, and now the number of poor people

is much smaller, therefore

despite the fact that these people are doing badly now,

you may complain, but it was still

a great breakthrough — I did a very good job,

he said in that interview, the one

I showed clips from, where everything is kind of

black-and-white, the camera rushes in on everyone,

shot in this supposedly stylish way, with lots of close-ups,

and the host asks, with this very

tricky expression, a tricky question: and what

would you say to that? Like, a tough

question. And Putin answers in that kind of

style. Obama once gave an interview

like that; they copied the whole thing. But in

reality,

for all that TASS is a

state news agency, I actually liked this interview

a lot. They recorded it for something like

two long hours, and then

they chopped it up and are releasing it like a series.

And it really is a series of lies, just

a series of endless lies, and it’s very

useful to watch. I strongly advise everyone

to watch all the parts, because in each one

you can see, first of all, how absurdly

Putin lies, and how they try to help him

with infographics, because over all this

Putin-style lying

they put all sorts of charts, and those charts are absolutely

astonishing — very interesting. Look at how

they help him. And this week they released

a segment about, well, just

the top lie — the number one hit of lying —

which is, of course, the poverty line: how many

poor people there are in Russia, what “poor” even means, and

what the line is.

The poverty line: the poor are those who live on

an income below the subsistence minimum,

and the subsistence minimum in Russia right now

nationwide is 11,185 rubles (about 11.2 thousand rubles), and

obviously, if in some family the amount per

family member is less than 11,000 rubles,

that’s not even just poor — that’s extreme destitution.

This is the key thing to understand: the main

deception is that official

statistics, and Putin, classify as poor

only those who receive less than 11,000 rubles,

because that’s not even poverty anymore —

it’s truly extreme poverty. These are people

who can’t afford to buy themselves anything,

because what is called the subsistence

minimum in Russia is simply a fake,

not a real living minimum at all. But

attentive viewers who watch

the program

regularly probably remember that last

year, in July, I talked a lot about the

figure —

the number of people who are below

the poverty line — and here in the main

video I’m giving a completely different number,

because eight months ago, according to

official government statistics,

there were 21 million poor people. Now

the government, just recently,

Golokova said — the relevant minister came out again and

said: 18.5

million people.

Where did the other 2.5 million

people go? Did they die? Did they disappear?

What happened to them? The answer

is that they simply —

well, it’s just statistical manipulation. They

simply changed the counting method. There were

destitute people — really, objectively destitute

people, getting nothing — and they

fiddled around with wages and with

the calculation methodology, and simply removed some of these

destitute people from the count. So instead of

21 million, it came out to 18.5 million, and now

they can say, you know, we’re defeating

poverty — look, there are far fewer poor people.

But in his interview, Putin — let’s

listen —

he simply gives a figure that even

the government never gave you. He just

says there are 13 million poor people, and

pay attention when you watch the clip:

that statement about 13 million

poor people is complete nonsense that

contradicts the government’s own statements. And what does

the state agency TASS do

to help him?

They draw a chart and write those 13 as percentages,

so it’s no longer millions of people but percentages

of the population. Let’s take a look.

Because back then, below the poverty line,

if we start with the key question, there were

42 million people — that was a third of the country’s population.

Today it’s also a lot — around 13.5 —

but still, that’s still not one-third.

Forty-two million.

That’s it, you see? And all, all, all

those things he was building his story around there,

about the economy and everything else — they simply

don’t matter, because his key

figure, 13 million, which he compares

to those 40 million — 13

million? No, that’s a lie. According to

official statistics from July of last

year, it was 21 million, and by the real numbers —

let’s be honest, the position of my program

has always clearly been that the minimum wage

in Russia should be 25,000 rubles.

If I believe that a person who lives

on 25,000 rubles a month (about $250–$300) is definitely not

rich, but anything below

25,000 rubles a month is obviously

plain, outright poverty, and there’s no

other word for it.

If tomorrow we recalculate Russia’s citizens

so that everyone whose per-family-member income is less

than 25,000 rubles, we’ll find that below

the poverty line there are more than 90—well,

half the country would end up there, that’s all. And

all this Putin talk is also just

manipulation of statistics. They tell us

that, well, guys, for you—

there’s nothing to wish for, but you know, your salary

is falling—this is “negative growth.”

You have nothing to eat? Well, fine, if you

can’t buy yourselves

vegetables, we won’t call you poor, we’ll call you

“moderately well-off Russians.” And

if you can’t afford potatoes, we’ll

call you not destitute, but rather

“citizens approaching a critical

threshold,” and we’ll remove you from all the statistics, and that’s it. And there’s

really nothing behind it—no

economic policy, no economic

strategy, nothing at all. They just bluntly

take the poor and move them out of the category

into what in Germany would be called the middle class.

Back then, maybe some of you remember,

there were these funny little

guys from the SPS party (Union of Right Forces, a liberal Russian political party)

who ran in elections in the 1990s. They had

this concept that the middle

class would include everyone who had

a mobile phone. Back then, of course,

a mobile phone actually cost real money, and

now they’re doing the same thing. Tomorrow they’ll say:

we’ll classify as middle class

people who use

the latest cutting-edge technologies—4G,

touchscreen, 3G phone—went and made a call? We’ll

move you into the middle class, and that’s it, and the poor

won’t exist in Russia at all. That’s one way

to defeat poverty. Another astonishing, of course,

lie—and here it’s not even just

a lie anymore, but some kind of, well, strange

amazing lexicon has appeared. I, honestly,

myself,

quite often use, let’s say,

plain everyday speech, yes, including on

this program—but, let’s be honest, in

some public speeches Vladimir

Vladimirovich (Putin) simply amazed us

with expressions like “please step up and get shaved” (a colloquial threat meaning: break the rules and you’ll be dealt with),

as if to say, don’t obey the law

and please, step up and get shaved. Meaning what exactly?

That they’ll just grab you and throw you in

jail? A “two-year term,” a “three-year term,”

a “five-year term”? And of course there was also the astonishing

lie that, supposedly, here you can

hold rallies, but in Sweden people are jailed for rallies. Let’s

listen: if you want

to express your point of view, your opinion,

and you want to do it through public

actions, then fine—the law allows it.

Get permission and do it. But in

some countries—practically all

countries, including European ones—for

unauthorized demonstrations

the law provides for imprisonment.

It starts with short terms there, from 6 months

to a year.

And in some countries, simply for

unauthorized demonstrations—about, say,

if there are 12 people somewhere, I think,

in Sweden, it’s considered mass

rioting.

[music]

A “five-year term” if they force their way in, or a “ten-year term”—we don’t

have that here, you understand. A “three-year term,”

a “three-year term” is less than ten, sure, but

it’s still not small, still a lot. Don’t break

the law. It’s the same there too, there, there

people also go out and also get permission

without incidents. If they didn’t get permission,

they don’t go out. If they got it, they go out.

Please step up and get shaved—and so two

activists are sitting there: please step up and get shaved.

A “ten-year term,” or maybe a “three-year term,” and then

a “five-year term.” And in some places, if they force their way in—

what are you even talking about, by the way?

You’re talking about people who simply came out and demanded

their right to peaceful assembly, and all of this

was in the context of discussing

the Moscow protests, and the Moscow protests

happened because first they didn’t allow

the candidates to run, and then those candidates were not

allowed to hold a lawful rally saying

that they were demanding access to the elections. That’s what

was happening there. People filed applications and said:

we want to hold a rally about the fact

that lawlessness is happening, we were not allowed

onto the ballot, we have supporters, we want

to meet them in the street. This is

fully permitted by law, and

yet for some reason it’s all: yes, you must obtain

permission, he says. Obtain it from whom?

Why should they have to seek approval when in the

Constitution itself it plainly says they have

the right to assemble peacefully and without weapons?

And then it’s all: please step up and get shaved, a “five-year term,”

a “three-year term”—and what an astonishing

lie this is about Sweden, absolutely astonishing.

In Sweden, as in many

other countries, there are criminal penalties

for mass rioting. By mass

rioting in Sweden they mean

actual pogroms/violent riots—actual

mass unrest like what happened in Sweden. Let’s

take a look.

[music]

You can see—it really is a riot: cars

are burning, violence is on the streets. In any country,

of course, such actions

are prosecuted under criminal law; they

deserve a trial and legal review.

Why did this happen, and who is to blame?

How can this be compared with our rallies?

A young woman walks around there reading aloud.

She reads the Constitution to the cops, and they grab her and drag her away.

Zhdanov or Sobol are standing on the boulevard.

They say, "We want to take part in the elections."

They seize them, drag them away, and lock them up for 15 days.

Fifteen days, a million-ruble fine, and so on.

And so on and so forth. Nothing even remotely like this is possible there.

It's impossible to compare; you simply can't imagine

this happening in any European country.

First of all, these people were not allowed to hold

these rallies.

But even if they had simply, without

any kind of permit, just gone ahead and

come out onto a boulevard or a street and started

protesting, no one would have

arrested them. Not even close. It's impossible.

Simply impossible. They don't beat people up there.

If they're in the way, if they're blocking passage,

they'll just say, "Please move over there, cross here,

go to the other side."

It's impossible even to imagine.

And in that sense, of course, Putin is brazenly

lying. And his lies, incidentally, do have an effect.

I've said this before,

and I'll repeat it: when the police detain me and

drag me off somewhere,

they first start complaining about their

hard lives, and then, of course, they

start up with this whole line:

they keep repeating, "Well, in Europe too,

of course, if you so much as raised

a hand against a police officer, they'd shoot you immediately."

Or: "In Europe, of course, they also jail people for

rioting. In Europe they jail people for rioting."

Or: "If you run at a police officer with a gun,

they may shoot you." Yes—but

to imagine that in Europe or in the United States people

are denied permission for a rally or jailed

just for standing in the street—that

is impossible. Be sure to watch that

Putin interview. First of all, and secondly,

in exactly the same spirit, under the banner of fighting fake

news, people who keep repeating

that garbage

need to be given some explanatory work—about

the poverty line, and about this lie that

in developed countries and in Russia

these practices are supposedly borrowed from developed countries. That is

absolutely not true, and we need to make a video

on this topic because

it really does matter—especially for

the security and law-enforcement people who, I don't know, are too lazy to

look up any information online.

It really works on them. There are 40,000

people watching the livestream. Nikol

asks me: "Alexei, please comment

on the freezing of the bank accounts. What's going on there?"

Dasha, Timofey, Platonov are asking.

How are you coping financially in the face of

this disgusting account freeze? Ivan

Shishkin is also asking about the frozen accounts. I

also saw a question here: "As a feminist, I am

outraged by the freezing of the accounts.

What's going on there?

The feminist is outraged by the freeze—well,

I'm outraged too, though feminism has nothing to do with it.

Like her father, she is simply a citizen.

For example, the freezing of Zakhar's account

should concern more than just feminists. Really, this

is some very strange thing that happened.

It clearly happened as part of some kind of

Kremlin super-plan, because

some completely illegal things

were done there. And when things reach that degree of

illegality, it's obvious, of course, that this

was decided at the level of the Presidential Administration.

Show the screenshot.

From the pension account.

My mother's, that is. There it is.

Blocked. Look, you see—the pension

account. The pension came in, and by order

of a judicial authority, 18,000 rubles

were frozen.

And this pension—there's an absurd story behind it.

For 45 years of work, she was awarded the title of

Veteran of Labor (an official Russian honorary status), just so you know, for that

title.

Officially, a Veteran of Labor receives

a small social bonus of 66 rubles

a month. Those 66 rubles were also included

in the pension—and they froze those too, which

is unbelievable. When my mother went

to Sberbank, they told her, "Ma'am, have you lost

your mind? That doesn't happen. It's forbidden

to freeze pension accounts." Nevertheless,

they froze it, and now they can't unfreeze it.

And as for the children—well, yes, I

absolutely hate this entire regime.

I fight this regime, and I call on all of you

to fight it and remove it

from power.

But I do not expect this regime to

love me in return. It has fabricated criminal cases

against me many times and continues

to do so. But my daughter Dasha—why

was her account frozen, the one that had

some laughably small amount of money on it?

Or my Zakhar's account, or my parents' accounts, or

my wife's? In other words, all the accounts were frozen.

This is a pretty unpleasant thing. I am very

grateful

to the huge number of—really—good people.

An enormous number of genuinely good people

have reached out.

People are offering help; I don't know, someone even

offered a full backup source of money.

Someone said, "I want to give money to Navalny," but we

said that of course there was no need to do that.

I personally do not need help. This is something

we will manage. It is fairly

unpleasant—what is happening is unpleasant.

What is especially unpleasant is the situation with my parents,

because they are elderly people, and now they have to go

somewhere, you know,

and re-register the pension so that it

gets delivered through the post office, and again they have to go somewhere

and fill out paperwork. It's a massive headache.

Our misfortune is that we got hit hard by this.

It’s far away.

to live using cash, but I’ve already gotten out of the habit.

For quite a long time now, I’ve tried to make sure that

my bookkeeping, for me personally, is very

clear and understandable. And all these FSB (Russia’s security service) claims—they’ve spent many

years knowing exactly how much money I spent and where

down to the last kopek, how much I received, and

how much I spent. That’s exactly why everything

you see—these stories about, say,

Navalny’s shady business—are just

some made-up story that they

show you with random numbers. Today I

saw a video that

these Kremlin guys are spreading

about how Navalny supposedly should have had

his accounts blocked earlier because

let us tell you how much he has

stolen lately. Let’s

watch the video—it’s very funny.

[music]

[music]

[music]

It’s basically just like, let’s write:

Navalny

spent 10 million rubles on vacation

10 million—is that a lot? Not enough. Let’s

write 27. Let’s write 27, and [__] he

earned, let’s say, some number of bitcoins, and

even if you take these fabricated

criminal cases

which I proved in the European Court

were fabricated, and the Russian

Federation paid me compensation in

all of those cases, like Kirovles and

Yves Rocher, the sums there are nothing like that

—they’re much smaller. In other words, even within

the criminal cases you yourselves published

So, basically, you never

see any specific information. If

I really had a lot of money in my accounts,

make no mistake—you would instantly

see a screenshot: Navalny had

such-and-such millions seized; Navalny’s wife had

70 million seized there, 80 million there

80 million [__]; here it shows I

earned money from commissioned investigations, or whatever.

But you don’t see anything even remotely like that.

Everything that actually exists, they

really don’t want to show, because

they seized 30,000 rubles from Zakhar’s account

and 18,000 rubles from my mother’s account, and

so on and so forth. But you can’t really show

that, because it’s not interesting, and

it’s easier to just make something up. I see

some very funny comments.

Vitaly writes: “Hello, Alexei. In February

I was in Dubai on a package tour, and from

the company Addon Tours, when meeting all

the tourists, they apparently for some reason

were trying to prove that you have

a luxury villa in Jumeirah

and that your neighbors are Kirkorov and Pugacheva (major Russian pop stars), and

they were saying it very insistently.” Well, I don’t

know why a travel company would

be telling people that my neighbors are Kirkorov

and Pugacheva, that I have a luxury villa—and if I do

have one, wonderful.

Show it to us, film it—I would be very

glad. But I’ve only ever seen, in person,

Filipp Kirkorov

and I’ve never seen Pugacheva even once, honestly

speaking.

To wrap up this whole topic of, uh, uh, uh,

the account blocking—it’s an unpleasant thing

because I’ll have to, well, I have to

get used to living differently, returning from

the rather pleasant world of cashless

money to the world of cash.

It’s not at all clear how all this is going to

work now, because apparently they’ll be

blocking all incoming payments to me from

my sole proprietorship, where money is transferred to me

for the legal services

that I provide.

But kind people are helping a lot.

They’re even writing that all of Instagram is flooded

with messages like, “We’ll send money right now,”

“Tell us in the video where to send it.” That’s very

pleasant, but we’re managing. I’m not the first—

in fact, a huge number of people are

actually in a much worse

situation than I am. They live

somewhere in the regions, and their accounts have been blocked

for several months already, but they

are somehow coping, and I’ll cope too. But

I just want to say once again

a huge thank you to everyone who wrote

messages offering help.

I see a question here asking me to

comment on Panfilova’s comparison

of the constitutional amendments to borscht

Indeed, Ella Panfilova

compared the constitutional amendments to borscht and

cutlets. At this point, that doesn’t even

look like any special kind of absurdity anymore

because the constitutional amendments themselves

really do resemble borscht and cutlets. I mean,

the comparison is now, in principle,

fitting: borscht, cutlets, compote—nonsense, murk,

it’s all something strange. And unfortunately, not only was I wrong,

it seems I also

gave bad advice to all these guys

who are dealing with the amendments

to the Constitution, because I said

that no one was interested in this. For them,

it’s very important to give Putin more

powers, and they want it to happen

solemnly, with everyone discussing it

and then voting for it all. They already

understand that no one is going to vote for it,

so now this whole thing from the Moscow City Duma

has been published, and on

Instagram a lot of people have already

written to me. Right before coming on here, a doctor

wrote that Alexei is making everyone

go through electronic registration, and another wrote

that public utilities employees and

are being forced to go through this electronic

registration. Show us a screenshot from

a screenshot from Instagram

No, probably not, but you can go in and

look — it’s on Facebook too, literally

messages saying that they are forcing people

to register in the electronic, uh, in the

electronic system.

All public utilities workers, everyone who works for

the Moscow government, and we already know that

doctors, police officers — everyone under the sun —

are being forced to register, even under

threats like: we have your SNILS (Russian pension insurance number), we

have your passport details, we’ll

register you ourselves and vote

for you ourselves. So for the Kremlin there is no

problem with the voting results, and

they are probably even falsifying turnout.

They are very worried that no one is

discussing this, that everyone is just laughing at the amendments

and absolutely no one is saying that

these are momentous,

great amendments. Well, because Putin

decided to completely rewrite the Constitution and

create some kind of, well, something

new — but basically nobody cares.

The Constitution was already bad, Putin already

controls everything, he has seized power,

so what difference will changing three

words make now? None of this is

interesting to us. Of course, they want

people to discuss it, because otherwise no one will

believe it is something important. But in fact they

are not holding a referendum. It’s not as if we have

one part of society and another part of society

fighting each

other, and we say: let’s vote on who is right. No,

they are simply holding this

kind of vote which in fact

is, as political scientists say,

a plebiscite. And in a plebiscite, what matters greatly is

mass participation, turnout, and public discussion, and they

will of course fabricate a high turnout. But people

will talk among themselves, they will

understand that yes, nobody talked about this

Constitution, nobody cared,

nobody cared, and then they showed a figure saying

70 percent turned out and 90

percent voted in favor. Hardly anyone will

really believe that. So in order for people

to discuss at least something, they really decided

— and I kind of carelessly said on the program

let’s hear what —

I don’t want to give advice on their strategy,

of course, but nevertheless

if I were Putin, I really would have included

an amendment to the Constitution saying that the family

is a union between a man and a woman, and nobody would

be discussing anything else at all.

Alexei, why did you have to say that?

That was said

two weeks ago, and now we have

an amendment that says that under the joint jurisdiction

of the Russian Federation and its constituent entities

there are

the protection of the family, motherhood, fatherhood, and

childhood, and the protection of the institution of marriage as a union

between a man and a woman. Why was this done?

I mean, it has no practical meaning

whatsoever. Russia already does not

recognize same-sex marriages. But the expectation is

that now, of course,

the progressive liberal public

will start squealing, shouting, biting, and

scratching, while against them there will be

conservatives saying, yes,

we are for family values.

And it perfectly shows that in Russia

most people are against same-sex marriage, and

Putin’s side is, as it were, defeating these

nasty, malicious liberal perverts.

That is exactly what this was invented for. But honestly,

in my own flight of

fancy, I did not imagine they would go

further than that,

further than the part about the family being a union

between a man and a woman.

But they have now, in complete seriousness, actually

included the state-forming

role of the Russian people, God — which is just

a separate

source of amazement. What really gets me is that they

put God into the Constitution, and for me this

as a believer is simply

ten times more offensive, probably, than

for those who, that is, just to put it bluntly, what the hell

— you put God in there? I don’t believe in

God; I don’t want Him to be in the

Constitution.

Well, in the constitutions of a huge number of

countries there is God, and there are many nuances there, but

God is there.

But as a believer, and it seems to me

like all other believers, we ask

the question: excuse me, but which God exactly have you

put into our Constitution? Because it sounds

directly strange. So,

where is it — there was a direct quote like this:

a wonderful one, that Russia preserves — the Russian

Federation, united by

a thousand-year history, preserves the memory

of the ancestors who passed down to us

the ideals and faith in God. The memory of ancestors — and

which ancestors would those be, exactly?

Because my own ancestors specifically, and I myself,

lived in an atheist state and denied

God. And I have said here many times

that every summer I went to the library and took

from the library a book from the library’s

atheist section, and went to my grandmother’s in the summer so that

I could, basically, stay there and

read that there is no God — and that was encouraged. And

that was considered proper behavior. And I was baptized

in secret — my grandmother had me baptized — because my father

was a Party member. He was in the military, and military personnel

were supposed to be Party members, and all of this

was forbidden. So, in other words, my ancestors

did not pass down any sort of faith, sorry.

The generations before them lived not just in

an atheist state—they lived in

a state where churches were blown up. Let's

look at this footage of what

our ancestors did in relation to God.

[music]

This wasn't done by some distant

ancestors—this was done by our grandmothers and

great-grandmothers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers.

And most importantly, right up until the very

end—until 1986—people were being imprisoned

for religion, for faith—they jailed people for believing.

I remember perfectly well how it was just absolutely

heavily condemned—any, any

support for religion. And now we're being

told that this is somehow the memory

of our ancestors passing down to us ideals and faith in

God. It's amazing. Right now, working in

the courts, working in

law enforcement, are the very people

who made films like these.

Right before the program, I just went onto

YouTube and typed in "Soviet Union" and

"Orthodoxy," and there it was—a wonderful minute and a half.

It's from 1961—not that long ago.

That means the people who were already then

working somewhere in the propaganda apparatus—they

are still working somewhere now.

where members gathered for their secret meetings,

members of the underground sect of so-called

Evangelical Christians.

With the doors locked tight and the windows covered,

the sect leaders, for several hours

at a time—sometimes from evening until dawn—

tormented the minds and souls of these deceived people,

driving them into frenzy and fits.

And now this has been put to an end.

[music]

The trial lasted six days

against the leaders of the sect.

There are 45 people watching live, and

I hope you liked that music.

Tan-ta-tan—"scoundrels burying all that is living in a ravine".

[__] this has been put to an end. This faith

and these ideals were passed down to us by our

immediate ancestors, who are still

alive right now and walking alongside us

on the very same streets, and right now

they are being asked to vote for amendments

that mention ideals and faith in God. Well,

fine, let's set that aside and not

look at the Soviet Union.

Let's go further in trying to understand

which God our ancestors supposedly bequeathed to us. Did they

mean some ancient god, or after all

some other god? Actually, not just

the Orthodox God—or maybe

there are so many Muslims

here, so many Buddhists here.

The officially recognized religions in Russia—well, which

ones are recognized? Orthodoxy, Islam,

Buddhism, Judaism. So which God

did our ancestors pass down to us? There isn't just one.

Probably somewhere out in the forests there are

Rodnovers (modern Slavic neopagans),

pagans—a huge number of people, well, not

huge, but some number of people. In the

north too, there are people with animistic

religions—Mari traditional beliefs, for example.

So were it the ideals of Mari traditional religion that our ancestors passed down to us?

Ancestors?

What exactly did they pass down to us, and why are you even

bringing all this up? Why are you, members of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union),

straight out of 1977, barging in and teaching

us not just to love the motherland, but now

also to love God? It really

looks like complete trash, but in

a way they are achieving their

goal, because here I am discussing it and

shouting about it in an agitated voice, passionately

acting outraged—and 45,500 people are watching me,

because they want

this to be discussed, because

there's absolutely nothing else there worth discussing.

It's completely uninteresting, but all of it

has definitely been turned into such trash that

Ella Pamfilova really did call it all

cutlets.

And she had just a super-great

metaphor today. The person helping me

put this program together—he

spent six hours, on weird fast-forward,

watching the court session so that it wouldn't just be

a written quote,

but an actual video quote from Ella Pamfilova

for you. Let's listen to how she

—this old fraud—doesn't even really

understand. I mean, basically, you see,

she understands that everything happening is some kind of borscht

and cutlets, but she doesn't understand how much her

metaphor actually works in our favor.

Let's listen: "The amendments are a set lunch."

She's answering the question that

that

everyone is baffled by: how can you

simply, in a yes-or-no format,

vote on a thousand amendments

when in those thousand amendments all sorts of things are mixed together?

She says: you should treat it like

a set lunch. There's borscht there, there's

soup there—well, borscht is soup, it's the same thing—

there's borscht, there are cutlets, there

is compote. I may not like the compote, but I'll

eat this, not eat that, and still I'll be

satisfied. But, dear Ella Pamfilova,

that's not how it works, because in your

set lunch we're being asked to decide about God,

and about the minimum wage,

and about pension indexation, and about Putin's

powers, and about the State Council, and about reducing

the role of the courts, and about the State Duma, and

about same-sex marriage, and about the idea that children

are now the property of the state. Even

the Russian Orthodox Church has already objected—have you lost your minds? Children

the property of the state? They probably meant

to say

that children are so important, but honestly it sounds

rather strange, to be honest. Children are not

are in no way the property of the state

and we are being told that this is your one

set meal, but to continue that

metaphor of Ella Pamfilova (head of Russia’s Central Election Commission), it should

not sound like that, it should not sound

like that. It sounds as if they bring us food

and say: guys, you either eat

or you go hungry. You have to

decide right now whether you will or won’t, but

if you say you will, then you must

eat everything. We have borscht (beet soup), we have

cutlets, we have compote (fruit drink), we have

a dead cat, we have a kilogram

of nails, we have, I don’t know, fried

Pamfilova—what, what else might someone have

something even more disgusting, a toad, some of the most

nightmarish things that don’t even

occur to me—but you simply have to

tick the box and eat all of it: a bat

like in China

that gave us the coronavirus, I don’t know, a boiled

beaver, Margarita Simonyan (Russian state media editor)

—all of that is on the menu. If you tick

the box, you have to eat all of it, because

that’s your set lunch, and we say

that—and here a lot of people are asking me, I

see a ton of questions being asked: what is our

tactic regarding the Constitution?

What is our voting tactic? Well, guys,

what tactic can there be here when we are

simply being asked, all at once, to

vote for God and eat boiled beaver?

I still think that the exact

tactic—I’ll formulate it clearly in the form of

slogans and specific actions

—can be announced when they

finally explain to us what kind of

vote this is going to be. But already now it is clear that

it cannot be recognized as legitimate.

I’m being asked whether it is possible to

campaign at polling stations. By the way,

it’s interesting—my mind is joking around—but which

God are they talking about? He seems kind of vague, and yet

which God exactly are they proposing here?

As for whether campaigning is allowed at polling stations before

April 2, if all this falls under

electoral law,

as I understand it, they have effectively abolished the so-

called day of silence. But

indeed, they are basically

taking this outside the scope of

normal procedure. This is not a vote,

formally speaking, and it is not a referendum.

This is some kind of nonsense where

thousands of amendments are bundled into one question, so

the only possible attitude toward this now

is non-recognition. This is

legal nonsense, absurdity. There is

not a single conservative, liberal,

or any other normal lawyer who would not

say that this is insane. Any person

with even minimal legal

education—common sense tells you that

everything they are doing now will be

repealed not on the first day, but in the

first second after this government

is gone. More than that, it is in principle already

legally null and void, because

you simply cannot do this; it is forbidden to do so.

It’s just unclear. I’m being asked by

Illusionist why they still aren’t

talking about the constitutional amendment concerning

Putin and his terms.

That is an excellent question, and it answers for us

what, in essence,

why there is suddenly so much about God,

same-sex marriage, and so on. No one is

discussing what all of this was actually done for, all this

nonsense. It’s like in the well-known saying:

if you want to hide a leaf, where should you

hide it? In a tree. So they introduce a thousand

amendments, and it seems to me the most important one there

is the amendment about the State Council, because Putin

wants to effectively control the country

without being president, by heading some

body endowed with extraordinary powers.

Most likely that is it, but we do not know

for sure right now, because somewhere there, on

this huge, ugly, strange

tree with thousands of little leaves,

there is one leaf that Putin needs

people to vote for, and so that it would not

be discussed. That is exactly what is happening now with

all this stuff about God and everything else.

Alyosha Stupin asks me: Alexei, if

there is any technical possibility of defeating

Putin’s amendments? Absolutely, definitely not.

Absolutely, certainly not. When

they tell us there will be a vote on April 22,

on April 23 they will announce to you that

it has all been adopted.

There will be no way to monitor it. There will be

electronic voting, which, as we

remember from the elections to the

Moscow City Duma, was completely falsified. There

it is impossible to control anything, even

if we wanted to, even if we got involved and

said: guys, let’s vote

against.

It’s not even clear what exactly you would be voting

against. They’ll tell you: well, vote

against the amendment about God, about same-sex

marriage, or maybe you are voting

against the idea that

pensions should be indexed for retirees, and maybe

you are voting against the fact that

we are removing the word “consecutive,” which you

didn’t like because it said you couldn’t be

president for two consecutive terms. Now

we’ll remove that word and it will supposedly become

better. All of this is legally null and void,

and that is exactly how it should

be treated. It does not have the slightest

significance. The story about which I am not

being asked questions—but should be—is super

important, super interesting, and very important precisely

in terms of these endless

foxnews

stories about how the FSB caught someone

exposed them, and we will be hearing more and more

of these kinds of stories.

Putin has just made a statement about the coronavirus,

and we will still have time to discuss what it means.

Some foreign wrongdoers,

they tell us. But this story about an Uzbek man

and the FSB is involved in it, is the story of how

one unfortunate Uzbek man, though paying a very high price

for it,

exposed a colossal lie, a colossal

nationwide lie by the Federal Security Service

and the country’s top political

leadership. For this lie and for

these machinations, sooner or later they will be

held accountable. And besides that,

historical responsibility will catch up with them,

because one day

history textbooks will say how

the service that was supposed to be responsible for

the security of the state lied brazenly,

and not only lied, but also left

the security of those very Russians under threat.

That is, they have completely

degenerated and decayed, and this

is expressed precisely in this story.

So, this unfortunate man,

ethnically,

is Uzbek. His name is Khusniddin Zaina Benzinov.

He is an ethnic Uzbek who had a hard life in

Kyrgyzstan, left Kyrgyzstan, and now works

in the Moscow region, repairing things.

He fixes things, paints, in general does the kind of work

done by someone who has worked as a cook and then as some kind of

repairman or construction worker — in other words,

a migrant who came

to earn a living and get by.

And one day he came to the city of

Magnitogorsk to visit

his sister, and it so unfortunately happened that

some time after he arrived,

that very apartment building in the city

of Magnitogorsk was blown up, and a terrorist attack occurred

that to this day has not been officially acknowledged, and to this day we are

still being lied to, brazenly told that no

terrorist attack took place, that nothing happened,

even though it was not just an explosion — there was

a chase and a shootout. There is video where we

hear gunshots and see an assault on a GAZelle van.

It was burned. Let me remind you once again,

for just a few seconds, of that shootout

that the whole country saw, while we are

being told that none of it happened.

[music]

[music]

Some people were shot up in a GAZelle van,

it was set on fire, and everything around was strewn with shell casings.

There were three bodies in the vehicle, and we are told that

none of this happened, that some people accidentally

burned to death. Before that, there had been the apartment building explosion,

and we are told none of that happened either — it was

just a household gas explosion.

In fact, a pro-Kremlin outlet,

Baza, a Life News affiliate,

even made a film about it. That is,

Kremlin-aligned guys

made a film. You can find it

online. I’ll show you just

half a minute from that film, and they clearly

state that it was a terrorist attack, and they

spoke there with many people,

witnesses. And in Magnitogorsk,

basically everyone knows it was a terrorist attack.

Let’s listen. Officially, the authorities

named as the preliminary cause

a gas explosion in one of the apartments.

However, no one ever gave us a final account

of the causes of the tragedy. We conducted

our own investigation, and now

we know exactly what happened on Karl Marx

Avenue.

On December 31, 2018, it was a terrorist attack, and it was

covered up. While we were in

Magnitogorsk, we asked everyone one

main question: what happened?

No one said “gas,” “accident,” or anything like that.

The answer I remember most was from one

taxi driver. I asked him the same ordinary

question, and he was silent for a long time.

Then he said: “Everyone knows what happened, and everyone

keeps quiet.”

I need to buy a coat like that,

like the one that guy is wearing, so I can

appear in investigations.

If you want to help fund it, go

to the link below in the description of this video.

It’s there.

And send a little duck that

will float across this screen. Anyway,

this pro-Kremlin outlet

proves it was a terrorist attack. We all

understand that it was a terrorist attack, but the authorities

deny it. So where does the Uzbek man come into this?

This unfortunate man,

who was in Magnitogorsk that day, was walking somewhere

down the street when some men jumped him,

shouting “FSB! FSB!” and dragged him away somewhere.

They brought him to some room, stripped him, and laid him

on bricks. The outlet Mediazona has published

his monologue — definitely go to Mediazona

and read it, because it is truly

important. So,

they grabbed him, dragged him away, stripped him, laid him on

bricks, and started shocking him with electricity — simply

some random Uzbek man who had come

to visit his sister and knew nothing about anything.

They tortured him with electric shocks and said: “Confess, you

organized the terrorist attack.” He had sent money

to an acquaintance shortly before that to buy

that GAZelle van. And apparently there was some GAZelle van

that the terrorists used.

They probably assumed that he had also

helped finance that van, which they wanted

to use for something. They saw:

“Okay, an Uzbek man bought a GAZelle, and here we have

an apartment building explosion, so probably we need to

check whether he was involved.” And how

do they check? Two wires, two leads — and off they go.

another one to his leg, in short, man, and

they tortured him for several days, trying to beat out of

him a confession about who blew up that building, well

what could he possibly say? Of course he could

confess to them and say, "I blew it up,"

and that aliens were blowing things up in general,

larvae or whatever — under torture, he would say anything, but

in essence, he still couldn't really

say anything; he couldn't identify their

accomplices, couldn't turn anyone in, because he

didn't have any of their accomplices — they were holding him

and the official, official

reason they gave for holding him was a

statement saying that he was allegedly on

an international wanted list, and besides that there was

just some scribble on paper saying that he was

on an international wanted list.

They tortured him and tortured him, and then apparently they couldn't just

let him go like that.

They released him, and as he was leaving the pretrial detention center (SIZO), he

was arrested again, this time for illegal

presence on Russian territory, and they put

him in a deportation detention center, and in

that deportation center they also

held him for half a year, and then they wanted to simply

send him back to Kyrgyzstan.

Well, just so there wouldn't be a guy like that

who could confirm what he

did confirm: that I was seized in the basement

and tortured, and asked who blew up the building, thereby

thereby confirming that the building was blown up. Fortunately,

fortunately, he was smart enough and

was able to get a lawyer.

They filed a complaint with the ECHR, the European Court of Human Rights,

which prohibited his extradition because

they said that if you

extradite him to Kyrgyzstan,

it's completely unclear what will happen to him, so this cannot

be done. He stayed here, and apparently

even now he is, in a way, still suffering there

because he is in a strange situation

and he really is the most important

witness to a major crime by the FSB (Russia's security service),

moreover, one committed at a personal level

you understand perfectly well, at the

highest level, you understand perfectly well that

information that a building had been blown up in

a major city, and that it needed to be covered up,

that this should not be talked about — such a decision

could only have been made by Putin personally, that is,

without question, Putin personally together with

the FSB leadership

decided — I don't know, maybe in order

not to spoil the statistics, or for some

other reason — to lie to us that there had not been

a terrorist attack in the country. There was a terrorist attack, and

several dozen people were killed, and now we

now have a witness to this.

That witness was tortured, and this is an extremely important story.

People very often say: what exactly should they be

jailed for, like, there are all these examples, examples, and

will we actually have grounds to imprison those

criminals? Of course we will need to

put them in prison — these are outright monsters, and it is proven,

and this crime leads all the way to the very, very

top. This is absolutely real. Also,

read about it in Mediazona.

It's horrific, but

but an extremely important story. A huge number of

people are just watching about the coronavirus — 47,000

people are watching live.

All right, Praktika asks me:

Sapsanov asks: "Alexei, what do you

think about the situation around Tinkov

and his bank?"

I don't like Oleg Tinkov; he is

a rather nasty character,

a disgusting, groveling suck-up to the authorities [__],

but I don't feel any particular

schadenfreude over the fact that he has now been

arrested in Britain

because the United States is seeking his extradition, and

because he apparently did some kind of shady dealing with

taxes, and he was a U.S. citizen. He

renounced it in some year — what amused me in

this whole story is that this

Oleg Tinkov cult figure is just a man

who fawns all over Putin,

who fawns all over this regime, this sort of

genuinely rich man, but at the same time

repulsive,

so nauseating [__]. And yet, when

he was arrested in England, they put

an ankle bracelet on him and banned him from visiting

Anapa.

They banned him from leaving England; he lives

and walks around his apartment. He's not in jail, he's

not even really under house

arrest — it's some kind of restriction on his freedom.

So, they confiscated — he says that

he does not have a British or American passport,

but they confiscated his Italian residence

permit and his Cypriot passport, and also

some other document. So it turns out he had three

citizenships. That, too, is the whole essence

of these Putin lackeys:

they go on about what a wonderful man

we have leading the country, how marvelous everything is,

"I love him" — and then they run off to get passports here,

passports there, residence permits here,

all so that if anything happens

they can say, "Goodbye, Russians, and while I was here

I made money off you, but you can stay

with that man whom I

supported, the one who fed you all those

lovely stories — while I secured myself

a safe harbor over here." But he schemed

and schemed and outsmarted himself, arranging

foreign citizenship,

and now, naturally, those foreign

states are saying, "Hey, man, you were

our citizen — now pay us taxes," and

now Tinkov has found himself in exactly this kind of

situation. Robert Petrosyan asks: "Are the authorities concealing the real statistics

about the real statistics

of the coronavirus?"

And Meduza writes only that in order not to

overload things, Sergei Sobyanin introduced in Moscow

a state of heightened readiness in connection with

the coronavirus. So, let’s begin

by simply taking a look and trying

to answer the question objectively: are

the Russian authorities concealing the situation with

the coronavirus? Because right now

there seem to be two positions emerging. Some

say it’s a total nightmare, horror everywhere,

an epidemic, while others say we should trust

the Russian authorities. And the Russian authorities

are also saying that

all sorts of panic-inducing rumors are being spread,

by foreign states and so on. But

first, let’s listen to what was said at the

government meeting, where it was stated that

foreigners

are planting fake news about the coronavirus, that

as for these provocative information dumps, the FSB (Russia’s security service)

reports that they are mainly organized from abroad,

from outside the country. But unfortunately, this

always accompanies us. The purpose of such leaks

is clear: to sow panic, panic among

the population.

There is only one thing that can be set against this:

timely, comprehensive, and

reliable information for the country’s citizens.

Thank God, nothing critical is happening,

but people

must know the real situation. I ask that

this information

work be properly organized. People must know

the real situation. But at the same time, some

mysterious foreigners are supposedly

planting something. Interestingly, I also received

an audio file by email.

“Alexei, listen, this is the real truth

about the coronavirus.” As I understand it, this is exactly

the file the authorities were referring to.

Let’s listen to it. It’s an obvious

fake—you can tell right away. More than that,

I have a somewhat

conspiratorial theory that

they actually made it themselves.

That is, Prigozhin’s factory (a reference to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troll factory) did it,

because they were hoping that

maybe I would post this recording somewhere

or write something about it, because

prepared materials immediately appeared

across that whole Prigozhin

factory, saying that Navalny

was spreading it, using bots to

distribute information about the coronavirus. I

hadn’t written anything on the subject, so

they were clearly expecting something like this

to happen.

Let’s listen to this file, which is

of course an obvious fake.

Good evening. I don’t have very good

news, but I really want to protect everyone,

all, all, all my dear people. I’m

also going to send this out to

clients, but I wanted to say it personally somehow.

I’m asking you very much to spread

this information as widely as possible. Since our

government does not want to inform us

about this, then we will inform each other

using the information that has leaked out.

There are twenty thousand people infected with

coronavirus in Moscow. Wear masks, don’t go to

crowded places, don’t go anywhere

—we protect one another, we protect our

loved ones.

And stock up on food. Unfortunately,

they’re saying stores will be empty.

The information is more than reliable. In

Italy they are reporting what is happening here,

but here they are not reporting the infected in order

to make sure we pass this damn Constitution

and in two months, do you understand, in

two months after adopting this Constitution,

what will happen is that a great many

people will simply die.

This is another fake. I repeat, I

am sure they made it themselves. Why?

Just like in the case of Zimnyaya Vishnya (the Winter Cherry mall fire in Kemerovo) and

all the others—we’ve discussed this

many times. This is their constant

reaction to any problem: some

problem happens, and instead of discussing it,

they start fighting fakes, and then everyone

starts discussing some prankster or

phone calls or something else.

They start holding

foreign intelligence services responsible, and then, in a way,

the question is discussed less and less: what

is the real situation here with

the coronavirus? I can see people writing to me here:

‘Dig and find out.’ Well, at least ‘dig’

and ‘find out’ usually rhyme differently,

but never mind.

On TV they say there is no coronavirus in the Russian Federation,

but in one of Moscow’s prefectures

the prefect is making everyone wear

masks, and they’ve put disinfectant at the entrance.

And Putin is being protected too—Peskov confirmed it.

Let’s look at this map that is often

posted online. According to this map, we

can see that indeed—show us

the map—there, you see, right now where

huge, huge Russia is, there is no longer

the number 1 there, but the number 7 as of today,

because today, according to official

information, 7 people are infected. Go back.

Back to the map of confirmed coronavirus cases.

Confirmed coronavirus cases—and it looks

rather strange. Either it looks as if

the coronavirus is afraid of Putin, and as soon as

it flies up to Russia’s state

border and sees a border guard, it

turns around and flies away, and only the

very bravest

little coronaviruses managed to infect

a small number of people. In China there are very

many cases, and we have a long border with China. We

still have planes flying here from

China.

I read in the news today that Aeroflot

is only today banning flights from Hong Kong.

And in general, people are flying in from Italy and from China.

And it seems rather strange that we supposedly don't have it.

Let's take a look at a big,

map,

an updated one—I took a screenshot

from a website with the latest information about

the coronavirus, and we can see it is simply

everywhere, everywhere—widespread across Russia.

It's almost absent here, but it's present in the U.S., in countries with the most

advanced healthcare systems—it is there, while here it is supposedly

almost nonexistent. And it very, very much looks like here

we don't have it—for example, in Brazil

there is almost none, and in all the other countries of Latin

America there is almost none; in Africa there is very

little. And it seems to me that this is exactly

where the main answer lies: we don't have

coronavirus

not because it isn't there, but because it

is, first of all, deliberately not being detected, and

second, being concealed.

And today our channel released, on this subject,

on this issue,

a remarkable investigation. Many

journalists, by the way, have done this in written

form—they simply tried to find out

whether in Russia

it is possible to get tested for coronavirus. Well,

look, this really is

a very important question, because if you

do a simple exercise right now,

for example, search

whether the number of quarantines

introduced across the country has increased, you will see

for example, in Altai, in kindergartens in Altai Krai (a region in Russia),

in Ufa, Perm, and Troitsk,

quarantine has been declared; in Tomsk they have banned

mass events, and so on and so

forth. So, we can see that there are

certain developments taking place that

go beyond

the usual seasonal flu epidemic that comes

every year. There is no new coronavirus

officially, because even if it seems to you that

you have coronavirus, it will never

be confirmed, because you will not be able

to get tested for it. So, Nizovtsev

conducted an experiment today: he went to the

airport and pretended he was a tourist from

Italy who had arrived and wanted to get

tested. He was unable to do it. Let's

look at the information about what one should do

in order to undergo testing for

the presence of coronavirus—that is,

exactly that.

Well, no problem, no problem—there is a hotline

for the Health Ministry, and he called there, and now

we'll find everything out. We're calling the Health Ministry hotline.

Health Ministry, hello. Please tell me,

I have just returned from

Italy.

As far as I know, there is coronavirus there, and I

also suspect that I may have it after my trip.

Is there somewhere I can go, wearing a mask,

for diagnostics and get checked on site?

If they won't help me there, then I suppose I need

to go to a clinic, or simply return home and

wait if I do have the disease?

[music]

Basically, everything is proceeding somehow

quite calmly.

We are sick, and now all doctors have simply been given

an obvious instruction that no one

has coronavirus—just as no one had

respiratory illnesses either.

Remember in 2010, when everything

was burning around Moscow, and they simply

forbade doctors from recording

an increase in respiratory illnesses, and no one

was dying from that. People started

dying of strokes or heart attacks, but

not from that. This is how they do it

all the time: as soon as the Health Ministry

says, 'We are beginning a fight against,' say,

cardiovascular disease, then suddenly

the numbers start going down, down,

down. Ask any doctor

how that happens—they'll tell you: they simply

reclassify deaths under all sorts of other causes.

That's all.

Every year, a huge number of people, unfortunately,

die from the flu and from pneumonia.

And now this coronavirus is simply being

reclassified entirely as pneumonia, and that's it.

Besides that, one of the most important things is

test reagents.

Our dear state, while concealing

even the coronavirus statistics, does not

want to show the failure of the healthcare system, because

healthcare is at the level of Africa—we are not

capable of doing anything. They say—

officially, they say—that the

Vector enterprise in Novosibirsk (a Russian state virology center) produces

equipment that detects coronavirus.

Go online and look:

there will be a proud article saying that

this equipment has been supplied to 15 institutions.

Fifteen institutions for the entire country.

Well, of course, that is simply nowhere near enough.

Not even close. They are afraid

of panic, and indeed, one should not speak about this

in some super, super

militarized tones, because panic will begin.

We have many people in an unstable

state who are constantly afraid that they

will get sick and keep imagining they have coronavirus.

Tomorrow, if everyone suddenly rushes

to get checked for coronavirus, there will not

be enough reagents for that. But

if a person has arrived from Italy, from a risk

zone, and says, 'I want to be tested,' then he

should probably be tested, especially since

the incubation period is two weeks, and he

may not have—or rather, may well not have—

any fever at all.

He needs to be tested. They simply are not

testing him, simply not testing him, because

well, what could happen to a young man? And

if he is an elderly person, well, let's...

Let's look at the mortality chart for

COVID-19 mortality by age.

In fact, we need to look at this soberly,

not panic, and not

work ourselves into hysterics. At the same time,

coronavirus is not

some kind of joke of an illness. This

comparison you see: on the left is

ordinary flu, and on the right is

coronavirus. You can see that for older

people, the mortality rate is quite high. Overall,

the mortality rate from coronavirus is currently

around 3.4 percent. For elderly people,

it's quite dangerous. Well, in Russia,

the way things work is this: if someone tells you

a person died at the age of 75, you won't

be surprised. In our country, where supposedly no one

even lives to retirement, reaching 75 years old

already seems like a full life. He lived long enough, died, and

died at 75—in Russia, that's considered the proper age to die.

If you've lived past 75 in Russia,

it's like you've already gone beyond your limit, so

basically, that doesn't bother anyone. Well,

that's because this is the attitude toward

human life, and right now they are simply

not

registering anyone, not testing anyone, and when

Nizovtsev was sent from the local clinic (state outpatient clinic)

to the place where they actually have the equipment, there they

told him, 'Man, we're not admitting you, and we won't'

admit you, because we do not admit

people. Let's watch this clip.

So, we've come to Grafsky Lane, here—we were

sent here from the clinic. This is where

the epidemiology center is located.

Hello, epidemiology center. I

have returned from Italy and want to get tested

to see whether I have coronavirus or not. Can I

come to your epidemiology center? I was

told that I should come here.

And now we'll go in and

find out what is actually going on here in the end.

Where can someone go

to get tested here for coronavirus?

No, there is no such thing.

So apparently, in Moscow—the only rich

city in Russia, where in theory it would actually be possible

to test people—they are not testing them.

Why? The answer is in the

Moscow government plan that was approved

for combating coronavirus. There

is Plan A, which is prevention before

the first infected person is identified, and there is Plan B,

which has obviously already been activated now,

because it explicitly says

that Plan B comes into force after

the first infected person is identified. Let's take a look

at this plan. It was published; people sent it to me too.

They sent it to me as well.

It says some very interesting things there, very plainly.

The plan is presented as something really impressive. It says there

that if a person is found

to have coronavirus, then his—look here—

see, point 32: guarding the entrance to his building.

His building entrance is supposed to be guarded; they are supposed to

disinfect his workplace; they are supposed to

forbid his coworkers from

leaving their apartments, and disinfect

the work premises. In other words, for

every single person, on paper, they drew up a plan.

So they are very pleased with themselves;

they said, 'We've made a great plan.'

They obviously leaked it on purpose to all the media;

now it's published everywhere so that

they can say what a great coronavirus plan this is:

'the virus won't get through; every infected person'

will be guarded like this.

But that's impossible to do. Besides,

our state is, in principle, incapable

of doing much of anything except, of course,

the things our

state always does. We have a person who

has coronavirus; he was told to stay

at home, and they brought criminal and

administrative charges against him because

he took out the trash. Show the photo.

Seriously, the guy had either flown with

someone or sat in the next seat to someone

who got sick. They told him to stay home, but he

went out, and they said, 'Look, the cameras caught you'

when you left

your building and walked to the trash bin,

took out the garbage, so we are holding you

administratively liable.' The guy

says, 'But how

am I supposed to throw out the trash? I mean,

I have to do something.' And that is exactly

where the problem lies: our state

will not build any kind of system

for these people—either keep them somewhere or not

keep them, do something with them. But if you

are taking them under control, if you wrote in your

idiotic plan that building entrances must be guarded, then

first, someone has to guard them, and second,

there should be special people in all those

protective suits taking out the trash and bringing supplies. But

it's impossible to do that. Besides, this

coronavirus cannot

be identified just by looking at someone; it

really does look very similar to other illnesses. You actually need to take

tests, but there is no equipment.

Russian medicine (healthcare) has been gutted and

run into the ground; they cannot detect it.

Notice that very often when people

write, 'We were sick, we had

a high fever, we went in and they

took our blood for coronavirus'—it is not

detected through blood.

There is only a minimal amount there. To

actually detect coronavirus,

you need to take

mucosal swabs from the nose and throat. They

take blood—for what? Because a blood test

for coronavirus does not exist, at least for now.

So it's not exactly some sinister conspiracy

by the authorities so that everyone is

sick

but no one knows about it—well, of course.

There is no kind of super-sinister conspiracy.

There is simply a general strategy on the part of our authorities:

always lie, say nothing, and

claim that everything here is just fine, and

so, wrapped up in their own armor,

they say things are better here than in any

European country. But of course, the number

of people actually infected with coronavirus is fairly

large, and a normal government should do

the sensible thing—namely, on the one

hand,

try not to create panic and explain

to people that yes, there is a fatality rate, but at 3.4

percent, that does not mean you are definitely going to

die, and therefore there is no need to recoil from

people who have coronavirus or burn down

hospitals where people with coronavirus are being treated.

But at the same time, for elderly people this is

quite dangerous, so contact needs to be minimized,

and

we need to—let's touch things less,

touch each other less. There was a great video from

Germany where Angela Merkel tried

to shake a minister's hand at a government meeting

and reminded everyone that now, under our

new policy, we do not touch one

another. Let's take a look

at it.

Savelyev.

That is what needs to be done. We need

to promote

preventive measures, we need to explain

to people what to do, and we need to stop lying.

Because when any normal

person looks at the map and sees that we have

seven cases while elsewhere there are 20 or 30, and

across the world overall, it is obvious that this is

a lie, and they think: aha, they're lying, so why should I

believe them? Maybe we really have 100,000

or maybe 200,000; maybe tomorrow everything

will be piled up with bodies.

Maybe I really do need to run out and buy

some supplies. There is simply no need

to lie. Like every other country, we need

to provide normal, honest

information, because then there will not be a sudden jump

from this into panic.

If people were told that we have

some hundreds or a couple thousand sick people,

there would be no leap from that into panic. But

when we are told that we have 7

people,

and then it turns out that actually it is not 7 at all

and there is not enough room in hospitals

to accommodate everyone,

that is exactly how a jump into panic can happen.

And it is very important for us not

to give in to that panic. It is important for us

to understand that coronavirus is a serious

thing, and it will seriously affect

the economy—it is already affecting the global

economy. Indeed, a great many

people may get sick, and that does not

necessarily mean some kind of terrible

consequences. Elderly people need to be

more careful, and for the rest of us, the first

thing we need to do is wash our hands properly—

wash our hands a lot,

lather them well with soap and wash

both sides of the hands for at least 30 seconds.

And it is very important not to touch

your face constantly, because people

get sick like this: you ride the subway,

touch everything, scratch yourself, hold

your phone, and then press that phone

to your mouth. That is exactly how people

get sick—not simply because someone somewhere

walks by or sneezes nearby. We

just need to observe basic,

normal, reasonable

precautions.

If we do get sick and we understand that

it is most likely coronavirus, there is still no need

to faint with fear. We need to

take the medicines that are currently

being used. I think that in the

next few months humanity will

develop an effective medicine against

this coronavirus.

But from our state we must

demand that it stop lying,

because this lying has become extremely

tiring. When they lie about a genuinely

possible real epidemic, or the threat of

an epidemic, that is very, very bad. And

separately, of course, I want to say something about this

vote.

Right now, all over the world, mass

events are being canceled. Our authorities, however,

in order, as I already said,

not to show what a complete failure we have

in medicine, but also in order

to make sure people come to this

vote—above all, as you

know, the people who turn out for all votes here are

elderly people, who are the most

vulnerable to coronavirus. For them,

the real fatality rate is 14 percent, 15

percent—more than 10 percent, as you

have seen. And when the authorities lie on the one

hand, and on the other hand

want to herd everyone into some kind of

vote, where elderly people will go,

that is already truly a crime against

their own people. So let us demand

that they tell us the truth.

Thank you very much to everyone who watched this

program. See you next

Thursday. Bye for now.

[music]