The Results of the “Vote.” What Should Be Done Next?

This video will come out on the evening of July 1, at the very

moment when half the country will be

sitting there wondering what to do and how to

live with this going forward. Reading the thoughts of

half the country is very easy for me, even

now, on June 30, when I am recording this

video, because I can already tell you

what the results of the nationwide

vote will be: 72 percent in favor of the amendments

because of the resetting of Putin's term limits. I am sure that

if I am wrong, it is only by a couple of

percentage points. And we all need a plan for what

to do and how to save our country.

That plan exists. It is completely concrete,

and each of us can and must find

our place in it. But first, we still need to

understand what has happened and what

the consequences will be. What we saw was a show

with a pre-planned ending. Putin decided

to legalize his lifelong

presidency. United Russia adopted these

amendments, but that was not enough.

It is not very elegant when the tsar is appointed by United

Russia, so Putin said:

we will stage a nationwide performance,

announce that more than half the people

recognize this performance as a real

vote and will come take part in it,

and at the end the curtain will fall and it will say

"Result: 72 percent." And that is not

an exaggeration. After all, we do have

a law. It is not a very good one, and it is often

violated, but it still exists. It is

called the law on guarantees of citizens' electoral

rights, and it is precisely this law that gives

you and me

the guarantees that if an election is taking place

in the country, then there must be

observers, there must be a ballot box of a certain

format, and this is how

a polling station must be

set up. This is how

votes are counted. If you want to file

a complaint, this is how you write it, and under this

procedure you can go to court. But this

time it was officially stated, and look

here, in their responses to complaints they write in black

and white: for this vote, the law on

guarantees of electoral rights

does not

apply. In other words, for the sake of his

enthronement, Putin canceled our guarantees and

rights and held a vote where you could neither

observe nor complain, where you did not even need

to stuff anything into the ballot box.

You simply announce the result. The only

thing he needed

was turnout, because you cannot stage

a performance in a completely empty hall.

I ask you, dear friends,

to have your say. Every one of your votes

is the most important, the most crucial. But a fake is

still a fake. Once again, I urge everyone

to understand very clearly that this vote

is invalid and unlawful. The fundamental

law of our country, a vast country where

150 million people live, cannot be adopted

through voting on tree stumps, out of car trunks,

in cardboard boxes, and in shopping carts from

the supermarket. Putin has simply humiliated everyone. We

look worse than countries in Africa.

Most Third World countries do not have

this kind of disgrace, and we will never recognize

this voting result. It is a fake, but

it has become an open acknowledgment

of what is happening in the country.

Vladimir Putin, together with a group of his

corrupt friends and associates,

has illegally seized power and wants to be

Russia's ruler for life. And we have also

created another weapon, one that no one else in the

world yet has, and this is even more important.

These consequences, too, are very easy for us

to predict, because Putin did not

invent all this. He is simply, step by step,

repeating what was done in those

countries whose political regimes he

wants to establish here in Russia.

Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Peru, Burkina Faso,

Senegal, Burundi, and several other

countries have carried out exactly the same

resetting of term limits, and they all have one

thing in common: they are backward, underdeveloped countries with

very poor populations. These countries

are deteriorating, wages there are tiny,

and people leave them in search of

a better life. And there is not the slightest doubt

that Putin is leading us down that same path. Our

population's incomes have already been falling

for seven years in a row.

And every year, about

150,000 people leave Russia for good. There is not

a single example

of a case where the rule of this kind of lifelong

leader, obsessed with voting rituals and

resetting his terms, has led to

a rise in living standards. As long as Putin is in power,

Russia will grow poorer and deteriorate, and

the life of every person, including you personally,

will become a little

worse each year than the life of someone living in a country

where power changes hands through fair

elections. Putin will not leave on his own. Neither he nor his

cronies will ever give up

the opportunity to rule over millions of people

and appropriate their taxes and natural

resources, their land. I am not ashamed for

my friends. Getting rid of Putin and his

United Russia is a question of the future

of each one of us. You can study,

strive, work hard, but half

the work of your life will simply be devoured and

devalued by this inefficient,

degrading, thieving regime. But there are no

rich countries, no countries with

high wages, where people vote on

a tree stump and in a supermarket cart. That

is the law.

Friends, if you've seen how this goes,

people being carted around to vote,

from Pyaterochka (a major Russian discount supermarket chain), then what needs to be done, and what

the plan is. There is a plan, of course, and it's more complicated

than just, "Let's all go and vote"

against, because this plan takes into account

reality, the strengths and weaknesses

of the regime. The first and main point

where we should focus our efforts is what's left

of Putin's approval rating. After 20 years in power,

he has shown his incompetence.

Everything he has is built on promises and lies.

About half the people in the

country already understand this, and I believe that the minimum benchmark for the

share of the middle class in the structure

of the population by 2020 should be, for

us, no less than 60, and maybe even

70 percent. The result

should be the adoption by the government

of the Russian Federation of a concept

for socioeconomic development through

2020, and a concrete action plan

for all the areas outlined above. And there is not a single

serious—not a single serious

reason that would prevent

us from achieving the goals we have set. Not

one. Another 30 percent are people with

their heads filled with propaganda and lies.

But there are also about 20 percent who are

firm supporters of Putin, who

of course does have them, but they have long since

ceased to be the majority in the country. So all

the chances for change are above all connected

with the campaigning work of each of us. Twenty

percent—the most active and sensible—

must persuade 20 percent of those

who sit in front of the TV. That will be followed by

such a drop in Putin's approval rating that

his regime will not withstand it. This is something we need to understand

very clearly. The foundations of the regime are,

of course, corrupt courts and police,

propagandists, election fraud. But first and foremost,

real, actual

living people with brainwashed minds. They give

Putin his approval rating, support, votes, and, as he sees it, the right

to take away

our votes. And it is on that rating that Putin

rules. This is not abstract reasoning;

it is a point in the plan: every day, do

something to campaign against this government.

Share a video, hand out a leaflet,

talk in the smoking area.

This is the most important work. No one is going to

do it for you. Second, Putin has

a formal mechanism with which

he governs and rewrites

the laws to suit himself. It's called United Russia.

It controls the federal parliament,

it controls all regional

parliaments and city councils, and yet

it has long been unpopular, and everyone

hates it. But it wins, and not even

so much because of falsification as because

you and I vote in a scattered way, while

Putin's people, the United Russia crowd, always vote the same way, and their

can-

didate always gets more votes. Our answer

is Smart Voting. For now, it's the best

tool we have to beat a United Russia

candidate.

Of course, none of this is easy or simple,

but Smart Voting works, and the

last elections in Moscow

proved it. In two months, there will be

real elections in as many as 31 regions,

with 66 different election

campaigns where Smart Voting

will be used. Either you and I ourselves

will get our friends, acquaintances,

relatives, and neighbors out to vote just as effectively

as Putin rounds up state employees, or

United Russia will win again. And here someone might

object and say, "Alexei, well, you

ignored and refused to recognize

the nationwide vote on resetting the presidential term limits,

and now you're trying to convince us that elections

in Novosibirsk, Cheboksary, and Tomsk

matter more, and that we should work ourselves to the bone for them." Yes,

these elections are much more important, because

there is at least some procedure there, there

are observers, candidates. Out of these 31

regions, there are about ten where United Russia

can actually be defeated—that is,

polling shows that if all

Putin's opponents vote strategically

using Smart Voting, then that's it: there will be no

ruling pro-Putin party there, and not a single

Putin-backed law will get pushed through there anymore.

It's clear that in order to preserve

its majority, the authorities will unleash

lawlessness everywhere, even worse than what happened in Moscow

last summer.

But this is a real struggle in which there can

be a real victory. So

register,

get everyone to register, and

get ready to become an election observer this

fall. We will need thousands

of observers across the country. And finally,

the last thing—the most obvious, the simplest,

the most effective—is what Putin fears

most of all:

the street.

Neither he, nor Mishustin, nor Medvedev, nor

Chubais, the Rotenbergs, Serdyukov, or Usmanov

will leave until we start taking to the

streets

by the hundreds of thousands and millions. Yes, they have

the police and the National Guard there, I know, but

hear me out. For me, for a long time now,

for several years, calling for a rally has meant

that I'll be at that rally for 10 minutes, and

then spend a month in a cell. Some people

get locked up not for a month, but for years. But this

is something we simply need to understand soberly and accept:

its inevitability. Putin's strategy is this: he

arrests 100 people for a month, imprisons

five people, and by doing so intimidates

Millions upon millions are being deprived of their own

future because they keep thinking, “What if?”

What if they haul me off to the police? Better that

they take me away than live like this for another twenty

years. And besides, they can’t arrest everyone. Well, they may

detain a few people, but if 500,000 people come out

what can they do about it? That is truly

the worst nightmare of Putin’s ministers:

that one day the people will finally understand that all this

Rosgvardiya (Russia’s National Guard), arrests, and intimidation are

just a soap bubble, until the first time

when a truly large number of people come out.

But in 2012, a lot of people did come out

and Putin got scared, and for a while

the elections became somewhat better.

They installed video cameras and so on. I

propose, I ask the Central

Election Commission to install web

cameras at all polling stations

across the country. We have more than 90,000 of them.

At every single one, and let them operate there

around the clock, day and night,

so that the country can see. Put everything on

the internet so that the country can see what

is happening around each specific ballot box,

and eliminate any possibility of fraud

on that front. But that fear passed long ago,

and they’ve grown brazen again. Just look—they’re already

proposing that elections be held like this,

over the course of a week and even on tree stumps

for all elections in Russia.

So in September, we need to go to

the polls and bring everyone out for Smart Voting

but if they steal the votes again, then we must go

into the streets and stand there for as long as we can. There is

no doubt that under the pretext of

the coronavirus, Putin banned any

mass gatherings all the way through the end of the year.

We need to act sensibly here.

The real peak of the epidemic is now, in July;

there may be a second wave, but by

September everything should ease

and normalize, and our right to gather

peacefully to express our views

must be restored

without any conditions or restrictions.

Of course, we all want change without

upheaval. We have supporters, they have

supporters; we compete for

votes. Some get a majority, some

a minority. Then in parliament everyone

argues and passes laws. That’s how it works in

normal, prosperous countries. But here,

it’s different.

Putin relies on a minority and says

to the majority:

“You are nobody. You have no voice. Your

candidates—I will never allow them onto the ballot. I

will stay in power for life because I have

Rosgvardiya (Russia’s National Guard), Solovyov (state TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov), and Ella Pamfilova (head of Russia’s Central Election Commission).”

And there is only one answer to that:

You know, we have neither

Solovyov nor Pamfilova, but we do have

ourselves—several million people.

That is all we have: ourselves. And ourselves we will

present in the streets of our cities. Then

we’ll see what matters more. There is no other way.

We campaign, we defeat them at the polls;

if they do not let us participate in elections or

they falsify the results,

then we go out into the streets and achieve

our goal there. That is the plan to save Russia.