Putin Did Worse Than Expected, the Journalists’ Strike, and the Battle for Volokolamsk

[music]

Hello everyone, it's 8:18 p.m. in Moscow, and in the studio

is Alexei Navalny, or, as one opposition

politician called me at today's

meeting of the Central Election

Commission, excuse me please. This

week we didn't come up with a funnier

name, so we'll have to

make do with what we have. It's good that

they're over, though honestly, I was already tired of it.

We liked leading this strike

— it was real political struggle.

But by March 18, we were really waiting for all of this

to end, and it has ended. And today I

am, basically, giving a session — a session

of joy, a psychotherapy session, because

actually it's even a little

strange to watch how much

this has a magical effect on people —

these numbers they showed on

television, they showed them,

and everyone got upset. Everywhere I look,

everyone is upset, worried, and

I said in the previous broadcast that

on March 19 you would feel this,

because the Kremlin wants you

to feel it. They staged the election in such a way

specifically so that on March 19 you

would all read that immediate emigration was needed,

and, my God, nothing

worked out. And they did it. And in

my last video, and now, and apparently for

the next month, I'll be doing these

psychotherapy sessions, explaining whatever

needs explaining, because, guys, overall

everything went according to a normal script, and

our strike was quite successful,

because let's once again reconstruct the whole

chain of events. Look:

a year and a half ago, we said — we said

to this government: despite Crimea (the annexed Ukrainian peninsula), despite

all your wars, despite

the fact that you say you're very tough and

daring, we will challenge you in these

elections, because you can't do anything

because you cannot govern

the country, because the population has been getting poorer

for five years in a row, and I intend to

beat you. I entered the race with those words and

ran an honest campaign. In response,

from the very first months of my

campaign, the Kremlin said: we will not register you,

we will not let you run. And from the very beginning

we said — this was completely our

open position — that if you don't let us in, well,

then you won't get what you

want, because we will

boycott, and we will force you either

to show a very low result,

worse than in the 2012 election,

that is, we will show that since 2012

Putin has lost support and now enjoys

lower backing — which is simply

the truth — or we will force you

to falsify the results. This was a very important,

a very important approach, because since

the street protests

of 2012,

the Kremlin has based much of its domestic

policy on the idea that it can

win without any obvious

falsification, because

falsification agitates people. And that's why

they installed their own Ella Pamfilova (head of Russia's Central Election Commission).

They kept saying endlessly that

they were working on a legitimate system without

and kept saying: why would we need

falsification? We can easily, without

falsification, win everything, and everything will

be just fine. And on this they

spent colossal effort, and they needed

to achieve a very clear result: here

our turnout in 2012 was 65

percent, and Putin then received

63 — 63 percent

of the vote.

They wanted better. Where do you think

this came from? It has been described many times in

newspapers: the goal was 70 percent turnout and 70

percent for Putin. It's very clear where

it came from: it came from the result of

Dmitry Medvedev, because Dmitry

Medvedev in the 2008 election got

70 percent, and turnout there was

also 70 percent. And of course it was important for Putin

to show that he was stronger than Medvedev,

because if you're supposedly so powerful, so

tough, and you're talking about

some fiery missiles in your addresses, or that you

run the whole world and got Trump elected,

then at least in your own country

you should at least be stronger than

Medvedev, right? And so the goal was 70 and

70 percent. So what did they get in the end?

Formally, they achieved it, but to do so

they had to resort to colossal

falsification, colossal deceit, and in

that sense, the strike worked. And they were unable

simply to take, by sheer force

of persuasion on television, by the force

well, of Putin's power alone, just with bare

Putin and propaganda, with his supposed

imaginary successes or real successes,

to show that he enjoys such

support, has such a level of

legitimacy, that he could achieve the

same results Medvedev achieved in

2008. In this election, Putin got

lower turnout than Medvedev, and lower than he himself got

in 2012. In this election, fewer people voted for

Putin than in

2012, and fewer people than voted for

Medvedev.

And this is very simple. Once again, don't let

these numbers hypnotize you — the ones

now in the little box here, here next to

me. Let me list a few of the most important things

again, and you

Please, in your discussions and arguments,

and most importantly, understand them yourselves and

stop worrying about it.

So, what made possible this

massive fraud? Because ten

million votes, at a minimum, we believe

between ten and twelve million, were simply

stuffed in, and there is a huge

amount of mathematical

proof for this.

You have, of course, seen those endless

videos of ballot stuffing, but the three main

things they did not do—first, it was

the number of voters, you understand,

the number of voters.

Because before the election,

literally a week beforehand, nobody knew the

number of voters.

The Central Election Commission did not publish these figures, and five days before, on

the air of Echo of Moscow (a Russian radio station), in response to a direct question,

Ella Pamfilova, when asked, “How many

voters are there in Russia?” by Alexei

Venediktov, said, “Well, I don’t know exactly,

something around 107 million.”

Let’s watch it—just 37 seconds.

Ella Pamfilova on Echo of Moscow.

At a minimum, all together, if you take into account

Look, if we take

duplicates, “dead souls” (a Russian expression for fictitious or deceased people kept on official lists), the poor,

those who are beyond the border, those registered at

various addresses in general, and also including by

various other parameters, yes, right now

I won’t list them all, but it’s already more than two million.

And then another one and a half million voters

in Crimea,

with all the new additions before the presidential election, I’m simply drawing attention to this.

So we are left with 100-something million,

where there is not a single clear answer—right now I

think, right now, moreover, we have now

cross-checked all the data, for example, the tax service

data.

But they were saying, “We have all these technologies, guaranteed,”

and by voting day we would still

significantly refine it—the total database was 109

million, maybe 108, and I think even without rounding.

Even further. So you see, four

days before voting day,

the representative of the Central Election

Commission says, “Well, we have such

secret technologies; we don’t know exactly,”

“give or take a million,”

“we’ll clean it up some more, maybe it will be 107 in the end.”

But in the end, the number of voters was 109 million.

And that raises the question, because

in 2012 there were 110 million, plus

Crimea was added, plus migrants were added,

plus natural population growth was added.

I saw that the Kremlin talking points

were spinning it in such a way that

Putin’s population growth, which he

talked about, could not be included here because

those people had not yet reached

adulthood.

But Putin’s demographic “successes” are not

only in the increase of

newborns, but also in longer

life expectancy and lower mortality, so

there should be a larger number of adults.

But fine, let’s just forget about that.

Let’s forget it: there were 110 million before,

then Crimea was added, immigrants were added—112

million. So how did it end up

being 109 million voters in the end?

How? Fine, let’s forget that too.

Let’s just forget the 2012 figure. Take 2016:

in the last State Duma election there were 110

million voters, and now there are

109. Where did that million people go?

Where did they go? And this is actually

an absolutely key figure, and I

am calling on everyone—I called on journalists

to press Pamfilova and the Central

Election Commission on this, because all

the rest—even these astonishing

videos of stacks of ballots being stuffed in—are already

small things compared with the fact that they have

three million voters floating back and forth—three million

voters. You cut the list there, and

your turnout immediately rose by

3 percent. Quite a trick they pulled.

If in 2012 it was 65

and now it is 69, then that is roughly

how it happened.

Despite the fact that they were driving people out to vote, despite

the fact that we were not forcing state employees (public-sector workers) to vote,

nothing actually increased; only because of these

manipulations did they raise turnout. This

means the boycott worked, and this

is visible not only at the federal

level.

Let’s take the city of St. Petersburg.

It is the third-largest federal subject of the Russian

Federation.

Let’s look at the number of voters.

In St. Petersburg, in the election year

of the gubernatorial election in 2014,

there were 3.7 million people; in 2016,

for the State Duma election, 3.8 million

people; and now 3.62 million people. For

St. Petersburg,

that is, excuse me, 5 percent

of voters. Where did they go? And in this

election, if you are from St. Petersburg, you

watching this program, I am more than

sure you know examples of how people

came to polling stations and did not find themselves on

the voter lists, because they

reduced the database so that the

turnout would be higher.

Five percent of voters were simply

thrown off the list. That was method number one

by which they cheated on a massive scale.

And the whole country saw it; you just need to

understand it very clearly. Method number two

was those famous 6 million

absentee certificates—what this time was called

voting at one’s current location

instead of one’s registered address. Six million people is a lot.

or too few? Well, let’s compare it with what

we had in previous elections. There are always some

or a number of people who live somewhere other than

where they are officially registered, and they want

to vote. Sometimes that’s normal—they

come and vote, and there are always

some issues surrounding absentee certificates,

some problems there. But let’s look at

how many there were in the 2016 elections.

Those were federal elections to the State

Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament): 809,000 people, which is seven and a

half times fewer—7.5 times fewer.

All right, this time, taking into account

the administrative pressure of the year, let’s say it was

twice as much, even three times as much as in the

State Duma elections. But when it’s seven and a half times

higher, we understand perfectly well that out of

those six million people,

a significant number were simply

completely fabricated, or it was outright ballot stuffing.

That doesn’t hold up. And the third big figure

you need to understand is voting

outside polling stations,

you know, with those portable ballot boxes, and

people go around carrying portable ballot boxes,

and

then all of that is counted separately.

For example, portable ballot boxes were the main

method of falsification in the elections

in Moscow—in the Moscow mayoral election.

Thanks to them, Sobyanin managed to,

essentially, falsify his first-round

victory. If there had been no

out-of-station voting,

he wouldn’t have been able to steal 2 percent of the vote from us,

and that was enough for his so-called

victory with 51 percent. Let’s also

look at the 2012 presidential

election: outside polling stations,

3.4 million people voted, and in

2018 it was already 5.9 million—that is, 1.7

times more, nearly twice as many, counting people who

suddenly, out of nowhere, decided they were ill and

submitted applications to vote outside

polling stations. That too is an artificial addition of

one and a half million people. That’s it.

And that’s how, little by little, you get 10

million votes that were thrown in—

or rather, not even literally thrown in,

technically speaking, again, it wasn’t necessarily that those

middle-aged women, the teachers at polling stations, were stuffing

all of it into the voting machine or into

the ballot box—no. It’s just that, at the level of

the math, all of this was dumped in,

falsified. And when now

Pamfilova tells us, ‘No, that’s not

how it was. You know, guys, back then

we had a bad voter database, but now

a new life has begun and the database has been cleaned up,

everything is much better’—well then,

excuse me, how were we voting with a bad

database in 2016 and 2012? That means all

those elections were falsified. You were

calculating Putin’s victory in 2012

based on some specific number of

voters. Now you’re saying it was

a bad database, and several million

people were listed twice. So that means

back then, in 2012, we had an absolutely illegitimate

president.

So, guys, I urge you to understand very

clearly that the strike worked.

We reduced so drastically the number

of people willing to go to

polling stations that even despite

the colossal

administrative pressure, they had to resort to

methods like these—

adding millions of votes, millions.

Again, not literally stuffing them in, but simply

drawing them in on paper. That’s very important, and it needs to be

understood. As for the actual

ballot stuffing and falsified additions, again, I’m not going to

show you a huge number of videos.

Instead, let me show you two absolutely

astonishing tally sheets from Kemerovo

Region, my favorite. Please take a look.

This is the tally sheet that the observer at the polling

station received. Look at it and you’ll see—

well, it’s clearly a tally sheet, it looks like an ordinary,

normal tally sheet. There are votes here

for Grudinin, for Zhirinovsky, for

Yavlinsky, for Suraykin,

yes, Putin has the most. This is the

tally sheet our observer received, signed and certified.

Now we open the GAS

Vybory system and see what it shows.

What does the GAS Vybory system show for that same tally sheet?

Something’s off here. It doesn’t really look like

what was written in the tally sheet that

the observer was given. Let me just

show you a simple comparison I prepared specially for you.

The next image shows what exactly

the difference is. You can see it plainly:

on the left is the real tally sheet, on the right

is the table that was entered into the system

GAS Vybory. So you can see: they simply

took votes away from everyone and reassigned them

to Putin. And the funniest part is that one vote

for Baburin—honestly, that was some kind of

joke or irony. I mean,

people just bluntly took the tally sheets and

rewrote all the votes for Putin. And thanks to

the North Caucasus, Kemerovo Region,

and Krasnodar Krai (a federal region in southern Russia), in Krasnodar

Krai,

one of our coordinators there, who

was involved in election monitoring, held

a press conference about the violations. David

Kankiya went outside and was detained.

He was jailed for five days—the second time that month—

just so you understand the nature

of these violations. And in that sense, these three

regions at least—Kemerovo Region,

the North Caucasus as a region, and

Krasnodar Krai—were already the

cherry on top: an additional

million or couple of million votes.

not hundreds of thousands of votes for him to

just to polish it off, so to speak. But these

basic things — ballot stuffing, basically,

manipulation of the voter rolls — that

was already enough to make all of this

happen. And you know, we had

an absolutely astonishing story, of course,

with the North Caucasus. We sent

observers. We created what we called

the “Wild Division” — that was our internal

name for it — and sent observers to

the North Caucasus. We sent

observers to Mordovia as well, and called it the Wild

Division, and also to some other problematic

regions. We sent a few to other

areas too — Tambov, the same

Kuzbass — but our main problem

was specifically with Mordovia and the North

Caucasus, where we sent observers.

Thanks to everyone who, during the previous similar

broadcast, helped fund this entire trip.

And some absolutely incredible things

came to light, to put it plainly.

The “voters’ strike” won in

the North Caucasus.

Let’s just look at the picture.

The difference between places where there were observers

at our polling stations — this is Chechnya —

and places without observers: we can see

that it’s 55 percent, and at some polling stations, well,

there’s already quite a lot about this on the internet,

and we’ll be talking much more about it,

you’ll see that 30 percent

of the vote was there, but often

it was 40 percent of the vote. In other words, people did not

go to the polls; it was only through methods of

massive falsification that this was

made to happen. I’ve already met

with observers who returned from there,

and they told us a whole lot of completely

absurdly funny stories. We’ll try

to make several videos,

and we’ll even specifically target them

at the Caucasus republics, because we’re

actually very grateful to the local

residents — they helped our observers, and

the stories go something like this: people would simply

come up to our people and say,

“Listen, you’re standing here observing,

this is some kind of Grudinin hell, we need

to add 500 votes for Putin — that’s what the bosses told us.

“Come on, so you won’t feel bad,

we’ll throw Grudinin a hundred too,”

“we’ll add them in right now, just don’t

make a fuss that we’re about to

credit Putin with 500 more votes.” And this was everywhere,

literally everywhere. Everywhere there were

observers, the level of

voting for Putin was much lower,

turnout was much lower — there was no triumphant

victory at all. We made one mistake,

a serious mistake,

we focused so heavily on Chechnya.

That was the right thing to do there, but we were so

concerned with ensuring the safety

of our observers that we sent two

people to each polling station on purpose.

We coordinated with the Central Election Commission a bit and

somewhat ignored other, in this respect

seemingly less problematic republics

of the North Caucasus. In fact, the most problematic

turned out to be North Ossetia — there

they simply threw everyone out of the polling stations,

detained them, took them to the police,

brought in the Investigative Committee, threatened them with criminal

charges. Karachay-Cherkessia also turned out to be

quite problematic, and I’m just

thinking of our absolutely remarkable

observer, Yekaterina, who went there for the first time.

She went to a polling station, and I think we have three

minutes — we have two videos, or actually

something like a three-part sequence. I think it’s worth

watching — you can even see this kind of evolution

of an observer. First, a minute and 40 seconds of what

Yekaterina said immediately after

returning from her trip. Let’s watch. Hi everyone,

I need to tell you, while it’s still fresh,

about how today’s

election went in the city of Cherkessk. I went there

as an observer for candidate Grudinin.

Please forgive how I look, and

the fact that I’ve been crying out of sheer helplessness.

Then there was another one. I said,

“Fine, let’s assume that.” Then they themselves

just started

They simply took all those ballots,

which had just been laid out, and started putting everything together.

First of all, all of this was recorded

on video, and then they just started writing this down

and stuffing it into bags. I asked, “Why are you doing this?”

I still didn’t know the turnout — you hadn’t announced

anything. They said nothing, they did not

say

how many votes they had counted, they did not say

how many votes had been cast for this or that

candidate. I went to the chair of the commission

to demand a copy of the official protocol, and she

said she would give me that copy only, well,

once we drove to city hall. That too is

illegal, because they are supposed to issue

the protocol after everything is counted right there at the

polling station itself.

Miss, please give me a copy

of the election protocol.

Where are you taking the ballots? Why did you

put them in the car when I still haven’t

received a copy? Please give me

a copy of the election protocol. No, I

must receive it before you leave. I

must get a copy before you drive off

to city hall, Svetlana.

Then I’m going with you. I need a copy

of the protocol. I need a copy of the protocol.

84 Krupskaya Street.

I’ve decided to leave Russia

because this is total lawlessness. Well,

you can imagine it, right — you can see the despair

of a person. She came to the polling station, she

He understands that the strike worked.

He came to monitor turnout, and he sees that

there is no 90 percent or 70 percent turnout at all.

No such percentages. Instead, there are ballots laid out on a tray,

simply dumped out and stuffed into bags.

They take them away somewhere, and they pay no attention at all to the shouting and

the commotion—just real thugs, actual bandits.

Bandits. Katya then said rather dramatically

at the end that

she was leaving the country, that it was useless

to keep fighting. But then we saw another of her

videos, and we literally have just 1 minute here.

Let's watch: a person pulled herself together and

decided to do the right thing. And what is interesting

is the evolution of this observer, and also the answer

the crooks gave her when she decided not

to go along with the rest and instead to fight. 1 minute 2

seconds.

Ekaterina: Hi everyone, guys, it's me again, and

I’m not going to cry, because I’m

actually in fighting spirits, ready

to fight all the injustices

that came my way during this trip. So,

basically, I wanted to talk about a few things

that I didn’t mention in the last video. I

went there on behalf of Navalny. I traveled to the city of

Cherkessk, even though I’m from Moscow. I went

specifically to a difficult region there, because

Moscow is boring in comparison; in the regions, even

more observers are needed there—people are needed there.

So I decided to go, and in three days I managed to

get in touch with lawyers,

file a complaint with the prosecutor’s office, file

a complaint with the Central Election Commission, file a complaint on the violations map,

file a complaint with the election

commission of the city of Cherkessk. So far, only the latter

has replied to me. And do you know what

they told me? I wanted to make some kind of

interesting video with a catchy

headline, but actually I don’t even

need to come up with anything, because they have opened

an investigation against me. I believe that everything there

was done honestly, and if something there

was dishonest, then the commission probably

also acted dishonestly by not telling me

about it. So the possible developments now are

threefold: either I emigrate and seek

political asylum, or I end up in

prison, or I win.

That last one is the least likely, but it’s the one I like most, and

it’s the option we like best too.

Of course, we understand what this

system is. But here is a person who saw it all with her own

eyes, who felt all of it firsthand, and

she decided to keep fighting. The system

responds by saying:

we’ll open a criminal case against you personally.

But she understands—and you should understand too—

what a sham all this is. Reuters journalists

also conducted an experiment, a rather

interesting one. They took under their

control 12 polling stations, and at those

12 polling stations they sat down and

carefully counted the entire voter turnout.

Let’s look at

the table they compiled based on

all of this. So, there’s no table—no,

they say there’s no table, we forgot to

show you the table. But this simply

shows that at some polling stations,

for example in Simferopol, 60

percent of the votes were stuffed in—that is, the ballot stuffing there

was enormous. In all the regions they observed—

in Crimea, in the North

Caucasus, in the Urals, in various places—

the result of those observations was the same:

colossal, massive ballot stuffing

measured in the tens of percentage points. Therefore,

I ask you once again: stop looking at

these election commission figures and believing them.

Why did you suddenly decide to worry about

something that is completely fake? In fact, the very fact that

it is fake shows how successfully

we acted, because

without fraud they simply could not have achieved this,

and

we will continue exposing them. And right now it is very

important—I was just asked

by our headquarters in Novokuznetsk, in this most

problematic region,

to state clearly that we are officially

appealing to the candidates—to all presidential candidates,

except Putin, who is not interested in this—

especially to those candidates

for president who at least occasionally

say something about election fraud:

Grudinin, Yavlinsky, and Sobchak,

asking them to officially demand

the video recordings from all polling stations

located in southern

Kuzbass and in the Kemerovo region as a whole.

We will prove it documentarily. Why am I

forced to appeal to them? Because we have

no rights at all. People very often ask:

will you go to court? How can I go to court?

I’m not a candidate. Right now the system is set up so

that Yavlinsky has to go to court,

Sobchak has to go to court, Grudinin has to

go to court. Even though we

deployed more observers than anyone else

and in fact were practically the only ones

who were dealing with these

observers, we have no rights at all.

We can’t even obtain the video recordings. So I

hope the candidates will help make that happen.

Once again, using these video recordings we will prove

it. Our lawyers are even promising to shave off my beard

—that will probably be a more

careful promise than

Grudinin’s—if he doesn’t follow through, if he cannot

document exactly how massive the

ballot stuffing was on the territory of

the Kemerovo region. Why do I talk about it so

often? Because these are precisely the

votes that made all of this happen.

And we achieved this: now half the country,

including people who do not use the internet, knows

that everyone was being pressured to go to the polling stations and vote.

to vote, because they are exactly the people

who were coerced — they are exactly the ones

state employees who were forced at 9 a.m.

to come and vote for someone, while half the

country saw it — those who use the

internet saw all these

falsifications. Everyone knows perfectly well that there is no

colossal level of support there

for Putin, at least not on the scale

they talk about, on the scale they claim

and all this, I don’t know — around the world, these

elections

have simply turned into a comedy, which

to be honest, isn’t even funny anymore — it’s unpleasant

when they discuss all this, it’s unpleasant

that feeling — after all, this is Putin, this is

Putin’s fault, and the whole world and the whole country

saw that once again, just like in 2011

as always, everything rests on

falsification, everything rests on

rigging.

This is a direct consequence of our strike.

We carried out our threat, and we forced

them to falsify. For now, we cannot

make them give up

falsification; we are not yet in a position

to force them not to rig things.

But at the very least, we dragged all of this

out into the open, and Ella Pamfilova and Putin

and all the others will say that

the elections were fair, but even their supporters

will be smirking as they say it.

So let me answer some Twitter

questions — people are writing something to me here.

Someone asks Navalny: the election is over,

what comes next? Will there be rallies, other actions?

So the fight for the presidency

is over. We’d like more information

about your plans for the future... I don’t

know what exactly that ellipsis is supposed to imply,

I don’t know how that word fits into this

context. Look,

our plans — we’ve come out of this whole

very exhausting 15-month campaign

that was difficult, expensive, and hard, with

arrests, searches, and so on. We are much

stronger now — in fact, much stronger. What

our organization represents now,

our structure, your structure, is night and day compared

with what it was 15 months

ago.

It is a huge, real political network, and

our task now, our plan for the future,

is this: we continue our struggle.

It consists in making this regional

network create politics; it will

engage in political struggle. I

of course understand that maybe this

sounds a bit grandiose, or maybe not

very clear, but in fact, someone

somewhere — I saw it on Facebook —

wrote a very smart thing:

a politician is a person who creates politics

around themselves, and a political

party, even if it is not officially registered, is

the party that creates

politics around itself. Unfortunately, all attempts over

the many, many recent years by all parties,

both systemic and non-systemic, to create

a regional network that creates

politics around itself have failed. Any

political party is basically just

some nomenklatura in Moscow and people in

the regions who, by and large, don’t really

understand what to do and simply wait until

once every four years a budget falls

into their laps, and they carve that budget up

or spend it — usually carve it up — but for the

most part they do nothing, and no one

understands why they exist. Now, together with you, we

are going to invent

we are going to create new methods

of political struggle, new methods

of political pressure in order to

fight, including through elections. Will we

take part in regional elections? Yes, we

will take part in regional elections.

Will we organize protest

actions, including nationwide protest

actions? We will, and we can. Fifteen

months ago, they said to me, “Alexei,

what about organizing a nationwide Russian

protest action?” I said, “Well, of course

we’ll be able to do it, but it’s not clear how.”

Now we understand how to do it. We have

a genuinely alive, powerful network: 700,000

supporters, 200,000 volunteers,

observers — they tried to shut us down, they stole,

30,000 to 35,000 people across 84 regions — and it still

exists to this day.

We can do all sorts of things. We will

create information channels, a YouTube

channel, and regional ones. All of this will have to

be invented anew; we’ll have to learn how to do it,

because no one in Russia has ever

done this before, and there has never been an independent

political organization that, even under

intense pressure, continues to exist and is capable

of doing this. But we will do it. We will

fight with all our strength, and we know for certain

that support exists. If people from

Chechnya come — observers say that

everyone came up to us there, Chechens and

others, saying, “Well done, you came here

to stand up to our bosses somehow,”

and in Dagestan it was the same. Everywhere,

absolutely everywhere, people want some kind of struggle,

some kind of resistance, and they see nothing — nothing

is happening, there is no opposition, no politics.

So of course a person shrugs and votes for

Putin — who else are they supposed to vote for?

They’re told they need to vote, so they vote

for Putin. So that is the system we will use.

Naturally, we are now thinking

about how to scale this down properly. We

cannot maintain all 84 regional

branches, and in such a huge, fully expanded

form, we simply cannot exist.

We can't keep raising money for all of this.

We've basically decided not to live all the time in this kind of

hysterical fundraising mode — it's

simply impossible. So right now we're thinking

about how to scale it back properly, competently, intelligently,

how to reduce all of this.

Without falling out with anyone,

to part on good terms with everyone, and

to continue our political

cooperation. After all, people didn't come for

money. They didn't come so that you could

sit in an office — they came to fight

for their country. And that's what we're doing now.

But again, we're reinventing things from scratch. If

someone asks, "Do you know how to do this?"

I'd say: my answer is, I understand in general how

to do it. But exactly how we'll organize it —

we're going to figure that out now: sit down, think it through, and decide.

Right now, together with our

regional

coordinators, we're sitting down and thinking

about how to wind this structure down so that it

becomes a bit cheaper in terms of

maintenance, while citizens can continue

to send in messages — "Good will prevail," Sergey writes.

Although it seems we shouldn't, on this broadcast, be

collecting data — good job, you're thinking ahead.

So we'll do everything. We will organize protest actions

directly based on the results

of the election — well, on the voting results.

But it's impossible to organize a protest action

just on that basis, because, well, nobody is interested

in all that. I've predicted these voting results to you

on this broadcast a million times, and

they don't bring anyone out into the streets. We're not

going to hold, you know, a rally just for the sake of

a rally. But clearly, there have emerged

two political Russias. One is ideologically in favor of

— there are these stubborn people

who believe that we must

give up everything, that we must give up

development and simply keep supporting this

colossus with feet of clay — Putin's system —

which supposedly threatens the whole world with

who-knows-what. And then there are millions of normal

people who, for the first time,

and perhaps this was the main thing about this

strike: for the first time, millions of people

took part in a collective political

action, a unified one. And these people — 35

million people — did not take part in

the election. We can't — well, I can't say

that all 35 million

took part in the strike, but obviously

many, many millions did participate

in the strike consciously. And relying on these

people, we will fight against Putin's

Russia. We will fight for people, for

influence — organizationally, politically,

in the media, informationally, however necessary. We

will do it, and that is our

plan. So my appeal to you is: don't

go anywhere.

Stay with us. We have nowhere else to go —

we only have one country. Like Katya,

who appeared a moment ago — she decided that I

am not going anywhere.

You are not going anywhere either; you'll stay here, and

the only question is whether we are ready to let these

people devour us, or whether, as we said,

we will fight for our interests.

Let me take a couple more questions.

What are you asking me? Okay, I see one from

Kolomna: "They want to turn it into a second Volokolamsk.

We started protesting earlier. Please talk about

it on air." I will talk about

Volokolamsk a bit later. What should be done about

Slutsky? All right, then let's

indeed say that right now there are two main

topics, the two main political topics in

Russia, and it seems to me — though I may

be mistaken — that they will have

long-term political consequences.

They are

Volokolamsk and Slutsky. What happened

in Volokolamsk — or really, not only

in Volokolamsk, but in the Moscow Region

as a whole — is the so-called garbage

crisis, when the regional authorities around Moscow

together with the Moscow city authorities, together with

— they've effectively created a kind of

mafia group there.

There are ties to Prosecutor General Chaika (Yury Chaika, Russia's former prosecutor general), that whole

Moscow Region mafia that's connected to

Shoigu (Sergei Shoigu, Russia's longtime defense minister) — they're making colossal

amounts of money from landfills, and

they're making it in a pretty barbaric

way, because they simply create

giant dump sites, just open-air ones, and all

this garbage is dumped there so that it can

just sit there. People are writing: do an investigation

into the landfill sites. Please look at

Lyubov Sobol's investigation

from 2015 — the investigation

"Who Makes Billions from Landfills?"

It describes exactly all these people, all

Putin's friends, the friends of the Prosecutor General's Office, and

the Sobyanin mafia (allies of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin) — they make billions from this.

But all these profits

have run up against a finite resource — simply

plots of land located near populated

areas. And sooner or later, the people living

in those towns — in Klin,

Volokolamsk, in Kolomna —

they understood, they felt it, they

smelled that they were simply being

poisoned. You have to understand:

the Moscow Region is the second most populous

federal subject of the Russian Federation,

it's an enormous

number of people. Naturally, they are in

a completely justified fury when

people — when people simply can no longer

breathe.

They start relating completely differently to

everything. In Volokolamsk,

it exploded the fastest. They held

huge rallies, and at those rallies...

them, just like in the pictures, because they were walking around in

gas masks, and overall even

people who sympathized with them were saying, well, somehow

it all seemed more like some kind of metaphor.

A gas mask is a metaphor, because it can’t

really be that bad. They just don’t

like the landfill. Of course they don’t like the landfill.

Obviously, no one would like it, but a bad

smell when the wind occasionally blows from there

— a bad smell, and before that they tried

to convince everyone that that was all it was, and that’s what they said.

They even said that the organizers of the rally

in Volokolamsk — and many of them, well,

some of them we know quite well

for many years — were somehow State Department agents.

TV host

Karaulov, a well-known crook, came there specially and showed footage of tanks.

He said: these are my photos with the organizers of these

rallies — look, look, here they are with

Navalny, the well-known extremist. Then

it turned out, literally just a couple of days ago,

we all found out, we found out that the residents of

Volokolamsk were not exaggerating when

they were walking around in their

gas masks: 100 children were affected, and 60

were hospitalized because of a release of this

so-called landfill gas.

You can google it, look it up on

Wikipedia — it really is a poisonous

gas. And if children there were fainting, if they

were dizzy, nauseous — you can

judge the scale of the problem. How can people live like that?

How can anyone live in conditions

where things like this are happening? And here

of course we just need to draw a simple

parallel.

A lot of people say that Volokolamsk is just

some small episode, some kind of local story,

a small town outside Moscow (in the Moscow region),

and in the entire Volokolamsk district

50,000 people live there; in the town of

Volokolamsk itself, 20,000. But not long

ago there was an American city,

Flint, where the water was contaminated with lead.

And that small city,

that small city became the center of

American politics during the election,

by the way. It became

a dedicated topic in the debates between

Clinton and Sanders back when the

primaries were still going on. In other words, it was a huge,

major political event. So

Volokolamsk too,

just like Kolomna and Klin, by the way,

should likewise be at the center of

nationwide debate, because this is

not really about Klin and Volokolamsk and all

the rest of them specifically — it’s about all of this, it’s about

Chelyabinsk,

it’s about Krasnoyarsk, where the situation is even worse.

In Krasnoyarsk, by the way, there’s that

famous cloud that covers the city, and in

Chelyabinsk the environmental situation is monstrous,

with horrific rates of cancer

and respiratory disease.

Look at what’s happening in Norilsk — we have

a whole lot of cities where people are simply being poisoned. But

in Volokolamsk, because children were involved, this

is what made everything explode. And it’s very interesting that

Volokolamsk approached this politically.

Volokolamsk really did take part in

the “voters’ strike” (an opposition boycott campaign), and it had one of the

lowest turnout rates in the country. In the

district it was only 44 percent. At those

rallies that took place before the election, those

rallies featured perfectly explicit,

openly opposition slogans.

Let’s watch 36 seconds from a pre-

election

rally in Volokolamsk.

[music]

[music]

As you can tell from the rhetoric, this

was very much an opposition rally, because

anyone who has been to rallies about development

or environmental issues knows that very often

there’s this line: we’re outside politics, we

just want to speak up here for clean water,

but we won’t allow

politicians to speak, and we will

avoid topics that criticize the authorities. In

Volokolamsk, everything was completely different. These are

quite brave people, and all of them

speak bluntly, telling the plain truth. They directly

connect all of this with politics, and that

is absolutely right. And, by the way, it

shows that when protests take on

a political form, they look completely

different and work much more effectively. But

probably it couldn’t have happened any

other way, because when it comes

to children’s health,

you want to say everything directly

to the head of the district. I think you’ve already seen this footage,

but it seems to me so instructive

that it’s worth watching it

again. This is a one-minute, thirty-second meeting

between the head of the Volokolamsk district and residents

who, until very recently, were his

constituents. He is a member of United Russia (the ruling party), he is

part of the authorities, and

on television they tell us how

this party and these officials enjoy excellent public support.

1 minute 30 seconds.

I’m going to ask you one question: why did you

even come here?

Ah.

[applause]

Ah.

[applause]

So you can see, it was only this little bit short of

turning into a lynching.

This is in the era of “stability,” in the era of

everything else they talk about. And, overall, you can

understand these people, because the problem had been there

for years, for years. In recent months these

rallies had been going on for a long time. They kept coming, kept saying:

you can’t live like this. But there was money in it for them there.

Vorobyov makes money from this, after all.

the whole Vorobyov mafia

the Moscow Region crowd—they make money from it

they make very real money,

billions of rubles, and in that sense, when

Governor Vorobyov finally arrived there,

the governor of the Moscow Region, a very

firmly entrenched governor, a powerful

man, and it would seem that by coming

there he should have gotten the classic

situation where a governor shows up at a

protest rally, people listen to him, and he

nods and says, “We’ll sort it out,” and they’re

told, “All right then, wait a bit,”

and they say, “Fine, we’ll wait.” And 31

seconds later, this is how Governor Vorobyov

felt at that rally. Let’s

take a look. He got 88 percent in

the last election—that is, supposedly

beloved by the whole people, even more than Putin, by the way.

[applause]

uh,

uh,

[applause]

I

with all their percentages, with all their

National Guard, with television, with the armored vehicles

they buy, with all the

billions they’ve spent on PR

and keep spending on federal television,

this little guy comes running, hanging his head in shame,

just like when I used to go to some

regions and people there would throw eggs at me,

people like the ones who were hired

by governors like Vorobyov. Only here

no one hired anybody—they’re just actually

throwing things at you because you

instantly went from this huge,

bloated toad into a small,

pathetic man, a crook and a thief,

whom the people living in your own

territory are driving away in disgrace. It’s very important

what happens next in Volokolamsk

and in all the other

and, secondly, in other regions they will of course

lie and try to drive a wedge between people,

because that’s their main

tactic in the authorities right now—they’ll

say, “Well, if we close the landfill in

Volokolamsk,”

we’ll have to haul the garbage to Kolomna, and the residents

of Kolomna will say, “No, let it stay in Volokolamsk,”

and they’ll tell the residents of Klin that we’re

probably going to bring it to Klin, to your

landfill.” I’ve already seen comments like that online,

I’ve read similar comments. Right now they’re

simply going to try to exploit

these contradictions and prove to us that, guys,

nothing can be done. Yes, everything can be done.

Why the hell is the Moscow Region,

which is larger than Belgium in area,

unable to solve the issue in some way?

European countries somehow manage waste processing,

and only in Russia do we have these gigantic

landfills—like in Volokolamsk, where they’re

literally taller than nine-story

apartment buildings, these mountains of trash. There’s nothing like that anywhere else.

This is the 21st century. Waste processing is

a major problem, a very serious problem

for humanity, but children being poisoned

by an open landfill—

that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world, and it shouldn’t

be happening in Russia either. And there is enough money

for this. So of course they will

lie, they’ll say that nothing

can be done, they’ll try

to discredit people, they’ll

try somehow to gradually split

the initiative groups and try to

prosecute someone, intimidate them—

it’s the standard tactic. But I simply

care about this, and I call on residents of all

towns around Moscow who are concerned

about this issue—and it is concerning, because I

myself am a former resident of the Moscow Region, and my

parents live in the Moscow Region—not

to give in to this. We need to show

solidarity and not give them a moment’s peace.

We need to keep this going. As I understand it, in

Volokolamsk this weekend as well

there are officially approved rallies,

near the administration building and over the landfill, so

people need to keep taking part in this,

because they’ll take away the water, they’ll take away the air.

What happens around this

confrontation, where on one side are

the interests of the residents and on the other side

enormous money,

is whether the residents will be able to force these

even

people to give up some of their money

in order to reduce social tension.

That is an extremely important and extremely interesting

question. Danil Logachev asks me

what time my Instagram live streams happen.

On naval 2017, I really do hold those

Instagram live streams, usually on Wednesdays, and

I bring people on—Instagram gives you the option

to simply connect some

random person and chat with them—but

I don’t do it at any specific

time. It’s more of a

fun thing. I try to do it all

on Wednesdays. If there are any other

questions on Twitter, I’ll answer them.

It seems to me people are asking:

why did pro-Putin journalists stage

this kind of boycott of the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament)? Well,

it all came down to Slutsky.

Slutsky—and what happened with Slutsky is

the second very important political

story that will have major

consequences depending on how it

develops. You know the whole

story, and deputy Slutsky is not just

a deputy, not an ordinary deputy—he

heads the committee on foreign

policy, so in that sense he is quite a

a trusted person in this system

an important person for this system because

he is someone whose role carries real weight

as head of the Committee on International

Affairs

he travels all over the place and officially

acts on behalf of the state

speaks on behalf of the state, and he is a

powerful deputy, so the system does not

give him up. And now it turns out he was simply

sexually harassing female journalists

quite openly and quite aggressively

several journalists accused him of this

of sexual harassment, but by now

the story has become much bigger than that

because the question was precisely why

even such pro-Putin media outlets declared a

boycott of the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament). This is already a situation in which

the discussion was taking place around it

The journalists did everything by the book and took the legal

route when they said they would not

publicly disclose information about the harassment

They went to the Duma leadership and were told, well, write a

letter and we’ll consider it all. They wrote the letter

and, generally speaking, you have to understand that for

them this was also a fairly

humiliating situation. One of the

journalists,

BBC journalist Frida Rustamova,

even recorded clear evidence

of this harassment on a voice recorder and

provided the recording. Which, frankly,

is not the most comfortable thing for a person

to do. Nevertheless, they

did it. And what did they

run into when they got there? Let’s

just look at 21 seconds of how

this meeting went, with

State Duma deputies sitting there on one side—people

who work on our money, receiving

their salaries from us, who are supposed to protect

these very journalists, who are supposed to be

an example of morality—well, supposedly

these are the best citizens sitting in the Duma, right? So how

did it all happen? Twenty-one seconds, I said.

That this kind of

documents and audio recordings

which were made without permission

—you journalists know that when you

come in to conduct an interview, you ask

for permission: excuse me, may I record you

or not? Can one touch, God forbid—I don’t

know.

You understand, there he is sitting in front of you,

this man this wide,

the man whose salary you pay, and you

bring him an audio recording

where a State Duma deputy is harassing a

female journalist. Well, it is obvious, at the very

least it is an ethical violation, and presumably we

understand that they are all one mafia there, but they are not going to

shoot him over it. But they could at least

have produced some vague wording

to show they would not cover for

their own man. But looking everyone in the eye,

when asked, here is the audio recording, he is

harassing her—they said: the recording

is illegal. What are you doing? You recorded him

without a deputy’s permission on an

audio device.

What outrageous conduct, dear journalist

Frida Rustamova. We are not interested in what

was done to you there—you turned on a recorder and

recorded a public official

while being a journalist. Outrageous. When

they are asked, is it not allowed, is it allowed to grab

someone—God knows, I don’t know. This is just, if

you made a Wikipedia article called “boorishness,” this

would be the illustration. That is why even

pro-Putin journalists declared a boycott, and

they were right to do so

And this is a very important story because

as you can see now, information has appeared

before the start of the broadcast about which

media outlets have

joined this boycott. Some

are boycotting the Duma as a whole,

some are boycotting only the Committee on

International Affairs and Slutsky himself, but

this is an extremely important thing that in Russia

basically never happens

In recent years, we have simply had a peak

of a classic situation, a classic

situation of two sides:

the side of good and the side of evil. There it is,

playing out according to all the rules of a trade-union

—not revolutionary, probably, but

more like this kind of labor-union struggle

Here is a professional community; it has been insulted

and they want to get their way, and they have every

right to do so. They declared a

boycott. There will be

strikebreakers, and for example deputy and

editor

in-chief of the newspaper *Moskovsky Komsomolets*

has already said that he

will send even more journalists

to the State Duma

to the State Duma, and in general, while being

the head of the Union of Journalists, he is making

some completely

I don’t know, utterly vile

statements to the effect that the

female journalists brought it on themselves, that they are to blame for everything

I mean, this is the very definition of a

true strikebreaker in the midst of a

strike, someone working for such an

unjust employer

There is also a lockout, just as in labor

struggles: people came out and declared a

strike, and the employer said: all of you are

fired. And here Volodin said that

everyone who boycotts will be stripped of

their accreditation, and we are going to see a very

quite

dramatic story. I do not know

how exactly it will develop, but to me

it seems this will be very interesting

to see which of those who announced the boycott will also

turn into a strikebreaker and betray

their own, and who else will join in

whether these efforts will continue, these

wonderful people who go to

single-person pickets outside the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament), and how

people react to them

other journalists who are watching—well, is there

mostly support, or more of a “ho-ho,”

“look at these idiots standing there with their

pathetic, miserable one-person pickets”

meaning, you can’t beat a whip through a butt end—nothing

can be done, it’s all impossible, this is

really a very interesting case

the journalistic community

which, as you know, is very much

concerned with itself—but that’s normal; in

any country, that’s how the media work: they

push for what they want, and they have every right to do so

they

are personally offended there, they are offended in

these kinds of matters where, so to speak,

they are entitled to feel offended, and they are

filled with righteous, visible anger at

Popova, in a situation where they ought to be

filled with righteous anger, and it is very

important what is happening, and

of course, absolutely, I wanted to support

all these journalists, but we—perhaps you

saw our March 8 issue that we

put out as a sign of solidarity with these

with these people—we carried out our

investigation, a package that

concerns Slutsky’s property, and we found

information that is sufficient

to, as it says here, drive

Slutsky

out of the State Duma even without any

harassment allegations, although first and foremost he

should be expelled for harassment

let’s watch a few seconds from

our investigation—about a minute and 30 seconds

about who deputy Slutsky is and why

he has no place in the State Duma

another of Slutsky’s cars: a Mercedes

S-Class

and here it’s not even about the price, although

of course it is also very expensive, but rather

the fact that we managed to find the specific

Mercedes belonging to the specific Slutsky, and

thereby crack open a portal into the life of

the people’s elected representative. This car

is unquestionably his, since there is

a photograph of Slutsky personally getting out of it

and now watch this trick: you can

scroll through the list, to cheerful music,

of fines issued to the car

of the deputy, just since June 2017

in a little over half a year: 59 pages

59 pages of fines, the total number of

violations

drumroll: 825. And now we move

to Rublyovka (an elite suburban area west of Moscow), let’s

take a look at the deputy’s 800-square-meter house

he has owned it since 1999, so I’m not even going to

raise the question of where the money came from—the prices

were different back then, so let’s

assume he had the money. But the issue

here is not the cost, but the size of the plot

Slutsky declares a plot of 1,200

square meters

but if we carefully examine the boundaries

of the actual plot

we will see that they differ greatly

from what is on paper

which suggests the thought: did

Slutsky illegally grab himself some extra land? But

no—Slutsky did not illegally seize extra land

in 2008 he leased

the neighboring forest plot with an area of 1

hectare

and never once declared it. I’ve already

run a little over time—there are 32

thousand people watching, so for another five minutes

with your permission, I’ll keep talking

it’s just [__] with Slutsky—this is a very important

situation, and it seems to me very important

to support the path of the media outlets that declared

a boycott of the Duma; there are media outlets there

it’s just disgusting—Lenta.ru in

its current state is simply

utterly nauseating—but the fact

that they joined in is an excellent

move, good for them. I know

some people criticize this and say, well,

why did you only start declaring a boycott now, while

before you didn’t declare this boycott

in all those earlier cases

and of course there is a certain logic to those words, but

nevertheless this should be supported, because

this is a genuinely righteous story, and in it

there will be deceit, there will be cowardice, there will be

courage, and of course one must

support the side of good. By the way, they say

the story is starting to bring out some

very unexpected things—for example,

today one of the journalists

accused Vladimir Zhirinovsky of no less

than sexual harassment, and

indeed quite severe sexual harassment

I can’t read the whole text aloud

it would be too awkward to read some things

out loud, but nevertheless this journalist

writes that

Zhirinovsky, in the company of his entourage,

while I’m speaking now—you can manage to

read it all on the screen—dragged him to a sauna

and grabbed him and groped him, that is,

this is really

important testimony, especially in

light of the fact that these are the people—you read

this text and understand that it is written

about the very person who keeps telling us about

“traditional values” (a common Russian political slogan about moral and social cohesion), who sits in

the State Duma and presents himself as a model of morality and

virtue

teaching us

how to live, telling us what is good and what is bad

what we’re allowed to watch on the internet and what

we’re not. First they pass laws

about banned websites, and then they grab someone there on

a male journalist and drag him off with them to a bathhouse

trying to take him away by force. This, this is

what is happening right now.

With journalists, the story with Slutsky, and now in this

expanding story, this is a story

of decent people against thieves,

debauchees, crooks, and perverts

who are trying to teach us how to live.

So this is a very big story. Two

very short things at the end. You keep asking me,

Sergey Kalinov asks: tell us

the story about saying goodbye to the grandmother, or—

about Yashin. LifeNews has hit a new low, but

really,

it’s a disgusting story. I mean, we’ve seen

all kinds of vile things, but Yashin has

an elderly grandmother, a very old grandmother. She fell ill.

She doesn’t have dementia—well, in any case it’s quite difficult

in an apartment setting when everyone is working

to provide proper care for her, so they placed her in

a special facility where people are cared for,

a special boarding home, a care home where they look after

her. And of course they decided to turn this into

a big scandal right away, claiming that Yashin

dumped his grandmother in a nursing home while he himself

took her apartment. The usual kind of

filth. And what really, really made an

impression was this: LifeNews was pounding on the door of

the apartment where Yashin lives, filming his parents there,

then they tried to force their way into this care home

where his grandmother is staying. Naturally, they were not

let in. Then a local police officer went in there,

this policeman secretly

filmed the grandmother on his phone and took that

recording out and handed it over to LifeNews. What

is going on, damn it? I mean,

they really have hit rock bottom, you understand? Some kind of

tenfold, triple, absolute swinishness, and

I’ve probably said “swinishness” on this broadcast

a million times, but what else can you call it?

A policeman goes in and secretly films an old woman,

sorry, Yashin’s grandmother,

a pensioner, you understand, as she says something,

records it on his phone so he can give it to those

disgusting people at LifeNews so they can

put out their latest piece of trash. And look:

when Putin is asked something

about his personal life, he practically

shudders all over. They’ve sealed off his personal life

completely, but engaging in

this kind of filth—they can do that, no problem. It’s just

awful. Best wishes and support to Ilya Yashin and his entire

family. The last thing I want

to say, because you remember I started

by saying that my program is a program of joy,

a program about what is good, and I

talk about it through what is bad.

It is very bad that in the last major

city in Russia, Yekaterinburg,

they abolished the mayoral election, and now it will no longer be possible

to elect Yevgeny Roizman again, because

there are no more elections. But what is good is that

once again we saw that they can do nothing. Here

they are again telling us that they have everything:

they have television, they have swagger,

the Sarmat missile, and some kind of

huge approval ratings, support, and so on.

And there sits Roizman, and all he has is that

red T-shirt, his famous museum

of Nevyansk icons, and a video blog

that he records.

And they can do nothing to Roizman. And

this is just a man in a red

T-shirt—here in the photo it looks blue,

but he does have that famous red one—who spends all his time

kicking United Russia (the ruling political party) all over

Yekaterinburg, and they can do nothing

to him, in one of Russia’s biggest cities. That

is the most significant

political fact of what is happening: that

they rigged these elections—well, abolished them—because they could not

cope with the strike that was being

coordinated, damn it, from this very broadcast

where there is nothing except a camera, a white

table, and a red cup with an inscription on it.

In Yekaterinburg, they had to

cancel the mayoral election because they could do nothing

about one private

individual who relies on other

honest people. Therefore, honest people

will always win.

Thank you very much to everyone who watched.

See you next Thursday.

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