The Kremlin takes revenge for May 5, Gabrelyanov resorts to name-calling, Roskomnadzor humiliates itself

[music]

Hello everyone, and today is Thursday.

It's 8:18 p.m., and we're live on the TV channel—

the YouTube channel—

I'm getting carried away there—on the YouTube channel

Navalny Live. Before we begin: Navalny 2018.

As you can see, Alexei Navalny

is unfortunately not in the frame today because

he is serving an administrative arrest.

But in the studio, you have me, Georgy Alburov, and Lyubov

Sobol. The day before yesterday, a court sentenced

Alexei Navalny to

30 days of administrative arrest for organizing

the rally on May 5. He is expected to be released

around June 15.

Yes, exactly on the 15th, in fact.

There is even an exact time when we'll all see him.

Of course, we're really looking forward to it and hope he'll get out

maybe even a little earlier.

Well then, let's move on to the first update

about how Alexei Navalny's administrative

arrest is going. It turns out that

he isn't just sitting there doing nothing, but

is studying Python—

for those who don't know, that's a programming language.

So I think that when he gets out, he'll be able to write

some neural networks that will

expose corrupt officials and

make our work a little easier.

Great idea. Tell me, you spoke

today with Ivan Zhdanov, who

was there, right? Yes, I saw a person who

saw Alexei, yes.

I asked him to tell me how Alexei is doing there.

Alexei is doing well, except that

they won't let him eat Doshirak (instant noodles) with a fork,

which, in my view, is a violation of human rights,

and they confiscate his e-reader, which

is also quite inconvenient, because in the

special detention center there are fairly strict

limits on the number—on the number

of packages and the number of kilograms that

can be brought to you there, to that detention center.

So you can't exactly bring a whole library in there.

That is, books are most efficiently brought in

in electronic form.

I mean, if you bring several

paper books, then that's exactly that many

kilograms of food, fruit, and water that you

won't be getting when they bring things to you,

because it's either books or food.

Yes, that's how it's set up.

So e-books are quite a

good and convenient way out of the situation

so that you can bring more things in there.

But as we can see,

the authorities really don't like the fact that

Alexei has something to read, and they

confiscate it. Well, let's assume we can guess

why a fork isn't allowed, but

why an electronic device isn't allowed—I have no idea.

Well, you know how our bureaucracy works.

You yourself ran into it very closely today.

A very close encounter, so to speak.

We'll tell you about it a little later—a small spoiler:

my co-host barely

made it to the broadcast because today she was

stopped by the police as she was leaving her house. But we'll tell you

more about that a bit later. What else

can we say about Alexei? For now,

there isn't any more news, only this:

—

Will there be a congress—a founding congress?

A party congress? A party congress, under the working

title—yes, the working title, definitely—

will take place in Moscow on May 19.

It will be a fairly technical

event, because right now, as you

may have noticed, we are not conducting any

active campaign to recruit

party members, because now is not the time

for that. What we need now is a structure that

would be as compact as possible,

as mobile as possible, so that all the people

who signed up for the party—and only the minimum

number required, the minimally

necessary number under the law—could all

quickly come to Moscow, quickly

organize meetings, quickly

sign documents, run to the Ministry of Justice,

and so on. That requires there to be

not too many people involved, and right now we are going through all

these technical procedures. On the 19th, in

Moscow, the congress will take place, and we have already

done this some 135 times, by various estimates—

well, in the latest news they said, by various

estimates, 7 to 8 times—7 or 8, yes, but you

didn't count the number of documents

that were submitted in the regions, because in

the regions, when you hold

a founding meeting of a local

branch, they reject those too.

If you add everything up,

the number runs into the hundreds—

hundreds of applications to the Ministry of Justice. That's the story.

Oh, and I completely forgot to say: please

ask your questions in the comments on

YouTube, on Twitter,

wherever you're watching us.

We'll definitely try to read all

your questions—at the very least read them, and at best

also answer them when

there's time for that. So, what's next?

And click—go ahead and click,

right here Valery

Pankrukhin is greeting us. Thank you, Valery, we greet you too,

and he's asking about—well, about me.

Yes, some of you probably already know

that this situation came up when

I was detained

on January 28, live on air—you all saw it.

So, they had to let me go home both

at the stage of administrative detention

and later at the court stage as well—whether it was

a fine or not—because

there is a certain ruling

by a cassation court stating that the mother

of a young child, and even of a minor child,

a child cannot be detained for more than

three hours — that’s the correct legal wording.

So today I finally memorized it for good, and

administrative

administrative arrest

Consequently, neither does

administrative detention, since for a person

to whom administrative arrest does not apply,

administrative arrest

In plain Russian, that means

they can hold me for three hours and then they have to let me go.

So today, with a perfectly clear conscience,

everything all nice and proper, nothing to worry about,

having been thoroughly briefed on all this today,

I was riding around with my clear conscience,

through Moscow, thinking that now I’d arrive,

they’d say something to me there, I’d refuse

to sign it,

and leave — let them choke on it. It all started with

what? Just tell me, how does your day usually go?

Usually? And how did this one go?

A highly unusual day, to put it mildly.

I knew that this evening I’d be on air with you,

Georgy, and it’s a great honor to host

the show I started back in 2017, so by a certain time I had to

go get makeup done, yes.

So I tried to head out at that time, and

after that — we have video — I walked out of the house.

We were texting — well, not exactly like that,

we were talking on the phone, and for a few minutes

I was getting ready, trying to make sense of how people even get into the apartment,

how all that happens there, and so

how did it happen? I’m asleep, I hear the intercom,

something through my sleep — someone came up, you know,

who was it? And remembering that across

all of Russia

not only the coordinators of Navalny’s headquarters

but also volunteers had been detained, and in some

cities, like Leningrad (St. Petersburg), they were basically sweeping up

everyone root and branch — well, not literally, of course,

but that’s how they seem to think — so I

thought, half-asleep, well, this is probably about me.

Then they rang the intercom again, and they

did it in that way — as if they’d taken the receiver off — they ring

and then stay silent into the handset. That’s how they were calling me.

Maybe they were breathing heavily or something — I don’t know.

I didn’t go over. I don’t know. But still,

I had this warning bell go off, right in

my head — just the night before, while falling asleep,

I’d been looking at the latest messages from our

headquarters: urgent, urgent, someone detained here and there,

and then this intercom rings, and I think:

very suspicious.

But I woke up, everything seemed fine, no one else

called again. I’m getting ready, thinking, alright then,

what a wonderful

evening broadcast I’ll have today — just needed a topic

to talk about. And then a topic presented itself.

Three men came up to me.

Three guys in uniform said, “Hello,”

“Your documents.” Well, a classic of the genre. I

had gone out without my passport. I said, “Come with

me, I’ll show you the document,” and at that point

it was already clear — as if they really needed my documents?

As if they didn’t already know who I was. But honestly,

then they asked me, “Is your surname Malakhovskaya?”

Malakhovskaya. Well then — bingo, you win, you win.

You win a sightseeing tour of Moscow.

To what destination, I didn’t know in advance. Let’s

watch the video below.

“I introduced myself to you, I came up,”

“introduced myself. Please, your passport.” “No need.”

The conversation went on in that spirit for quite a while.

“I came up.”

“But right now, can you at least once more...” 500

meters.

“Why? Where are we going?” “I’ll tell you — to the central...”

“Could you show some identification, because I’m afraid...”

“I’m a real police officer.”

“Fine, but how am I supposed to know you won’t kill us?”

“How?”

So this warrant officer, together with the others,

drove me, along with other citizens, to the Tverskaya police station.

For a long time they wouldn’t tell me where

they were taking me, but in the end they did tell me, so all was fine.

They brought me where they said they would, though as I’ve heard,

it can go differently. So then

our wonderful lawyer came to see me,

Sasha Golovach, and he stood his ground despite the fact

that Inspector Bandura kept resisting,

kept insisting and saying that yes, he had the

right, and that this very amendment,

this Constitutional Court / Cassation Court clarification,

was supposedly only advisory in nature.

And so Bandura would look at me

and decide whether I should be detained or not,

whether I was dangerous to society or not, and if

I did turn out to be dangerous, then he still had every

right to do it. But Golovach said, no, no,

absolutely not, because no, Bandura,

said, “Submit a motion and I’ll grant it.”

That is, he absolutely wanted it

to look as though it was his

own good will — Bandura’s benevolence, out in the field.

Still, in the end he let me go. Basically, he understood everything,

I think, because Golovach was convincing.

And

he granted the motion. I’m with you now, and

I’m not sure what else I can add.

Since many people are asking what for, and

that’s logical, because I’m a mother and

a decent person — and a journalist, of course —

this is a story about how hard it is for a journalist

to work in Russia right now.

There is nothing in the case materials except our

wonderful May 5 broadcast. It’s an excellent

reason to watch our broadcast again.

You want to know what Malakhovskaya is being

threatened with — jail, a fine, they want

revenge? Great: it’s for the broadcast, above all

for excellent journalistic work.

Look: apart from that broadcast,

apart from the photographs and a disc

— and no one even knows what’s on the disc — but

you’ve seen the photographs — apart from those,

there is nothing else in the case file.

I’m very glad that today you managed

to end up free and that you’re here.

today, and that’s a great reason, generally speaking,

to jump into talking about journalistic

work. After all, you were doing what, in

any normal country, would be considered

completely normal: when something happens, a journalist

covers it; when

a protest takes place, they cover it.

Good journalists who take their work seriously

approach it

and treat their profession responsibly

go live from the scene and explain

what is happening there in real time.

That is exactly what you were doing, and for that

they want to lock you up for 15 or 30 days.

It’s just that, under the law, they can’t

do it under Article 20.2 as an organizer — the “honorable” charge,

12 and so on. What’s more, attentive

commenters on Twitter write: if you are

the organizer, then why is Navalny sitting in jail?

Release him too, then. Yes, but Navalny

of course should be released — and even aside from that, he should

be released because there was no

crime, no offense whatsoever in

his actions. Rallies and public

events in Russia, under the law, are

subject to a coordination process, a notification

procedure; they are supposed to be somehow

discussed with the authorities, and it cannot be

that the authorities simply say no, we

won’t give you any venue at all; you told us

you wanted to go there, but actually

you should go somewhere else, to another part

of the yard. That is not allowed by law, and

Navalny, of course, must be immediately

released.

I’ve actually been trying for quite a while already

to steer the conversation toward journalists,

because this week we published an

investigation.

An investigation about someone very widely hated,

I think especially hated by many,

someone who completely

discredits the profession and is, generally, a very

fine example of a real

piece of journalistic trash: Aram Gabrelyanov.

Well, and partly his son too, the Gabrelyanovs.

We found, no less, that these

prominent patriots, these people who

were for Putin, as Gabrelyanov said,

back when Putin was not yet Putin, and these people

who in our country

are associated with all the vileness, all the

dirty work that is required by

the authorities — people who conduct surveillance,

seize CCTV footage,

so they can show videos shot from below

of opposition figures’ meetings, people who

publish illegal wiretaps, people

who do the dirtiest work of all —

that is what Gabrelyanov is.

His LifeNews, Izvestia, and the rest — his entire

media holding, which exists on

our money, yours and mine — and we discovered that this

man owns a wonderful apartment of almost 150

square meters (about 149 sq m) — and where do you think? Not in

Saransk, but in Paris, not far from the Bois de Boulogne

right there, very close by, right near the water.

You peek out for a moment,

look out the window, and it’s not the Kremlin

of dear Putin, whom you love so much,

but the Bois de Boulogne — and if you go a little farther,

the tower too, yes, if you look just a little

farther away, the Eiffel Tower is also

perfectly visible from Gabrelyanov’s window.

Please play the video

of this building itself, how we filmed it.

.

I am not ashamed, my friends: we are flying over

sunny springtime Paris. On the left

you can see the Bois de Boulogne,

a gigantic city park. It is a very

old and famous park. During the day

lots of Parisians and tourists relax there, but

at night, to put it mildly, it transforms.

The Bois de Boulogne is widely known for having become

Paris’s red-light district.

Every day, hundreds of sex workers offer and provide

their services there, of all genders

ages, and orientations. And it is very

symbolic that the apartment of this clown and his

diamond-loving family is located right on the edge

of this forest — closer to his colleagues.

This building is at 74 Boulevard Maurice

Barrès.

The apartment is on the fourth floor, with a balcony

overlooking the Bois de Boulogne.

The total area is 149 square meters (about 1,604 sq ft). The apartment has

a large living room, a study,

and two bedrooms.

The apartment also comes with a parking space

in the underground garage.

If this building happens to seem

unremarkable to you, don’t rush — take a better look

at the Gabrelyanovs’ Paris property from

a bird’s-eye view.

Not far from the center of a European capital,

with a huge park right in front of the windows,

which you can admire from the balcony, a quiet

gated inner courtyard, and of course

the Eiffel Tower. Gabrelyanov bought this

apartment in 2009 and paid

1.8 million euros for it, or 80

million rubles.

Well then, that was the very

very expensive Gabrelyanov apartment in

Paris. And there is quite a broad context

to this story, because Gabrelyanov

had long been assuring everyone that he had

no foreign real estate at all.

If people asked him about it on Twitter,

he would say: no foreign real estate,

none. Then he started saying that anyone who found

foreign real estate belonging to me could

go ahead and keep it. Well, you found the

foreign real estate. A couple of days have already

passed, and it still hasn’t been handed over to us, although we

are waiting and hoping that Gabrelyanov, in his

honesty, will give it to us. That’s all.

So during that time, we looked into it.

So, this whole excellent investigation

we want to know what we need; I alone, we have

ours, to say that his heirs are also involved in this

are dealing with it, but first, the wonderful

Gabrelyanov gave a response after we

published this investigation. He—we

expected that maybe he would somehow, in essence,

refute everything. Well, that he would say it was

some namesake of his, born on the same

day as him and having a son with the same

name. Fine, then Aram in the evening

got confused, found many diamonds, and figured out what

to answer. Gabrelyanov replied—let me

read it out—he replied by calling

Navalny a “little rat.” I

don’t know how to pronounce it correctly,

but that’s what it was.

Aram Ashotovich Gabrelyanov, and on Twitter

which he mentioned—if we turn on

the camera, I can even show it—we wrote on

the cups the word “little rat,” and as you

can see from this inscription,

we don’t have a separate person whose job it is

to draw on cups, so we have to

do everything ourselves with our clumsy little hands.

As for the investigation itself, how

it began and how long it lasted,

honestly, for me personally it’s quite

pleasant to talk about, because I can

talk about the project for a long time. For me, as

a non-professional—honestly, to put it bluntly—

going on air with something like this is quite convenient.

The investigation itself was fairly

long-running for us; it was

spread out over time quite a bit, because

at first we found

Gabrelyanov’s Cypriot company,

Ranson Limited, which they had

set up quite a long time ago.

And then we officially requested the financial statements

and received them.

We saw that among the founders were Aram

Ashotovich and that there was a father and son involved.

If you strip it down, everything there was fairly

official, and in the documents, in

the statements, there was of course no

address for the Paris apartment. But it did say

that on this company’s balance sheet there was

something worth more than—well, it wasn’t clear exactly what—

worth more than about 3 million euros.

Then there was the hacking of Gabrelyanov’s email—that was

a couple of years ago—when it was discovered that he had

some kind of real estate abroad,

but it wasn’t clear what exactly.

And then, probably about a year later, we

discovered that Gabrelyanov’s

mother and wife had been living in that apartment.

Gabri Leonova.

And in some Paris telephone

directory, they had apparently left this

address as their contact

address, and that’s when this case more or less

came together for our investigation, because

we learned the address and requested

the records for that address. In

France, the system is set up rather inconveniently:

you can’t request someone’s real estate records by a person’s name

or by a company’s name.

That delayed this

investigation quite a lot until we found

the Paris phone directory. We requested

the documents for this property and saw that it was

that same Cypriot company we had already

found earlier. Then, after some time,

it turned out that for some reason—still

unclear why, for reasons of their own—

they transferred this company from

they transferred this apartment from the company to

themselves, paying tens of thousands of euros in tax.

And it turned out that in the actual

purchase agreement there were some fairly

interesting things mentioned: something for 50,000 euros

and lots and lots of expensive furniture, which

was also included. But what’s interesting is that this

apartment is worth 1.8 million, and there’s maybe 50

to 100 thousand worth of furniture there, so where

did the other more than 1 million euros go? We still

can’t figure it out. Well, maybe it’s all still

sitting in that company, or

maybe they bought a yacht, a scarf, a car, or

they just forgot about the money—they’re

rich people.

It’s not hard to do. They forgot five keys to

this apartment.

Bring them—we’re waiting for the keys. We’ve already

basically written down who moves in when

in this apartment, who vacations there and when,

so please don’t disappoint our

colleagues. They’re really hoping you’ll fulfill

the terms of the bet, after all.

Only rats keep their promises, so we’re waiting for you.

Well then, wait—how did you film it, how

did we film it? Yes, of course.

We filmed it, and about a year ago it wasn’t me filming,

it was my colleague from the investigations team.

We weren’t even filming with our new drone then

because we didn’t have it yet. We were filming literally with whatever

we had on hand, just so we had something to shoot with, but

we got decent footage. They even chased

the person filming with French police,

but it all ended quite

successfully. The shots of the mouse or rat

and the beautiful pan toward the Eiffel Tower—we

managed to get that, and it turned out quite

effective. I won’t ask about the creative

plans of the investigations department—that favorite

question of journalists. Creative

plans? The plans are to work. Work means

doing investigations, publishing them,

telling stories, making videos—those are our

creative plans.

Obviously, I can’t say anything specific,

because the more specifically we

spell out what exactly we’re

working on, the greater the chance

the greater the risk that something

won’t work out.

and the greater the threat from

the people we investigate.

That’s why we always work under conditions of

strict secrecy, and no matter how much I’d like

to tell some

cool stories—which, believe me, believe us, we have

a lot of—but every story

has its own time.

In the wonderful Russia of the future, your memoirs

will be very popular, I think. We also wanted

to separately, wrapping up the topic of May 5,

yes, and Navalny’s arrest, and the detention

—

today—we wanted to talk about

how many staff members from our campaign offices were detained and

arrested: 28 administrative reports were filed against employees

of our offices, 163

days of arrest—I’m honestly thrown off by these numbers in total.

Altogether, people will spend under arrest, and

for May 5, 1 million 231

thousand rubles in total fines (about 1.231 million rubles).

There is even one criminal case.

In general, yes, these figures

are being updated literally every

hour—more and more arrests in the regions. Well, this

can only be explained by one thing: the protest action

on the 5th went very well—well enough to

seriously irritate the authorities, especially

since it was timed to Putin’s inauguration. All of this

is very unpleasant, and honestly they may

be thinking: we need to make it so that for people

it feels risky to come to these rallies, and so

they keep piling on these jail terms.

The fines are piling up too—they’ve gotten to the point where even

people who held so-called

authorized rallies and pickets—that is,

events that the authorities had formally approved,

basically saying on paper, yes, come hold it—

even in that case

people are now being detained. So this

line between “authorized” and

“unauthorized”

has been completely erased, and now there is

no difference whether you go to a protest

that was authorized or not authorized—

your risks are roughly the same, and they

decrease as the number of participants

in the protest increases. If 100 people came to a rally

and 10 were detained, your chance of being

detained is 10 percent. But if

10,000 people came and the same

10 were detained, then it’s 0.1 percent. So the more

people there are, the lower your chances of being

detained.

And one more thing: since I had a chance

to speak with our lawyers, the point is

that, as I understand it, they can’t just

detain you and let you go; they can

detain you and then give you some kind of small

fine or something else. The thing is, they

seem to have a kind of quota. They’ve taken on

a plan and they have to fulfill it, and if

a person ends up on the list, they have to process them.

That is, well, in their work there are lots of these

lists—in St. Petersburg and other regions as well—

where officers simply compile

A4 sheets with people listed on them. Friends,

what does this mean? It means that it does not mean

the people who were detained actually did anything.

They could have just been passing by and gotten caught up in it;

their surname was written down, and then they came for them.

So this goes back to the same question:

“What am I being punished for?” For nothing, really, for nothing.

You just ended up on a list. There’s a face,

the surname showed up, the face showed up—okay,

let’s take a look, and maybe while we’re at it we can pin something on them

too. That’s roughly how it’s done.

It works this way even with journalists: you

are essentially being targeted—they want to jail you

even though legally they won’t be able to do it

for covering protests the “wrong” way.

Gabrelyanov earned money for his apartment

from our money because he

covered these events the “right” way. That’s how this

system works. Let’s move on.

Roskomnadzor in action.

Roskomnadzor literally every

week gives us a reason to talk about them.

This time they blocked

several million more IP addresses,

including IP addresses used by WhatsApp,

Viber, and

Book and other services, and we have

a comment

from our expert consultant. And now

Vladislav Zdolnikov, who

is on the front line

of this fight with Roskomnadzor for

a free internet.

Please play Vladislav’s

comment.

In fact, this looks like some kind of

drawn-out, low-quality comedy

series, but today Roskomnadzor once again

shot itself in the foot and for some

time blocked a huge number of

IP addresses belonging to popular resources, and

among them, for example, were 329

addresses used by the WhatsApp messenger and the CDN service

that is used, among others, by Apple

and Google. This led to partial

inaccessibility of these services. There were even

some addresses of Russian internet service providers and

ordinary Russian users.

This can only be explained by the mechanism

Roskomnadzor uses to block resources.

They have a special computer to which

a device is connected with the Telegram app running

or with the website they want

to block. This computer

tracks the IP addresses that

the application connects to and then

in a semi-automatic mode sends them

to be blocked.

And if some ordinary user was again connected to this computer, or

if someone was using these resources,

that would explain why

those IP addresses ended up in the registry.

ordinary Russian users

is explained by the fact that on this computer

a torrent client was running, and at the same time these

monkeys with grenades, and for some reason, as

usual, they brazenly lie that WhatsApp IP addresses

were not added to the registry, even though everyone saw it

the most interesting thing is that right now

at this moment, there remain just over

10 million addresses in the registry, and Telegram

meanwhile perfectly

continues to work, and all this hellish

rampage, this hellish meaningless rampage,

has no effect whatsoever on how it works

and today we’re being told that today these

addresses—WhatsApp, Facebook, apparently—

were unblocked

an hour after being blocked. Also today in

Russia, disruptions began affecting Viber

and we even have a kind of map where

you can see

the hotspots of these disruptions, and as you can see on

the map, messenger outages were

recorded not only in Russia but also

most of the problems were reported

still, most of the problems were reported by

residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Samara

Saratov, Yaroslavl, and Nizhny Novgorod

in just one month, Roskomnadzor (Russia’s federal media and communications watchdog) managed to

block about 1 million IP addresses

belonging to Google and Amazon, and there were also widespread

disruptions in online games

and resources that even scientists use

well, scientists—you know that better than I do, a hundred

times better than we do, and today I, as a scientist,

personally just saw a message on Twitter

saying that not a single messenger works

except—well, the funny thing is, you know, all these

officials who passed the laws on

blocking Telegram and who are enforcing

this law—this Telegram blocking, this

internet blocking

they themselves are all on Telegram, and I

simply, for work-related reasons, have

quite a lot of contacts in my phone

including some from Roskomnadzor’s leadership

and State Duma deputies, but not because

I call them, but because at night when filing

and calling around—well, not because I call them, but

because, well, I obviously come across these

numbers somewhere and add them in VKontakte so I can

look at the nickname and photo in

messengers; that can be quite

effective in investigations when you

don’t have a photo of some person of interest

and then that person goes and puts

such a photo on their profile picture, and you

just grab it right there; in those kinds of

contacts, there are quite a lot of them—Milonov,

for example, is in Telegram. Yes, yes, yes, we

the investigator who handled my

criminal case at first, so

his avatar used to be Tigger, the cartoon character

and when Crimea happened, he

changed Tigger to a grizzly bear—he became

more menacing. So, as for the investigator, I

have plenty of contacts, and in my contacts

I can see that all these people have

kept using Telegram and

continue to use it, even, damn it,

Ampelonsky, if you remember—he was the

former press secretary of Roskomnadzor

who was placed under house arrest without

the right to use the internet—and there he is, sitting

on Telegram. Not only is he using

the internet

thereby violating the terms of his house

arrest, he is also violating

the decision of his own former agency

which banned the use of it

Google wasn’t working today either; it’s hardly likely that their

knowledge there began with me myself—if

before, when I opened the internet and

some site wouldn’t open, I’d think,

damn, some site must be down, oh well

I’ll check later. But now, if I immediately

see that the internet isn’t on or something isn’t

working, I turn on a VPN and that’s it—everything

works for me, works quite well. It’s a kind of

technical education for people

because at my home, half the devices there

dropped off when this

Roskomnadzor started this carpet

bombing, and I just bought a router

the cheapest one, spent half a day

setting up a VPN on that router, and now I

now have a VPN network at home, on which

everything opens, though not very

quickly, and the regular network, if not for

Roskomnadzor, I would never have gotten to this, and

now apparently they’ll be intercepting

slightly less of the traffic that I

send onto the internet. One more small piece of news

in internet education, so:

on Tverskaya Street, Beeline internet isn’t working

at all—it shows that it’s there, but

in fact it isn’t. But there is Moscow Free Wi-Fi there

Sobyanin (Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin) made sure that even on Kutuzovsky

there’s internet everywhere

I had the windows open because of the heat

maybe it flew in to me like that

it started crackling, they took it away, I tried myself

to catch the internet—it worked great, didn’t

even try anything, but we’re glad you stayed in touch

during the shoot

she’s somehow calmer, and yes, we

will move on now—you choose, shall we talk

about the bridge or about Tuleyev? Well, let’s

talk about Tuleyev, of course. Tuleyev interests me much more

I haven’t driven over the bridge—cool, but here

this was one of the most

extreme experiences of my life

because we—you’ve probably seen

the investigation into Tuleyev’s residence—we

went there and filmed simply

an enormous, gigantic plot in that area

of a million square meters

with quite a lot of buildings; all of this

is a state residence in which

where Tuleyev lives and which he uses

this state residence, and knowing the special

legal regime in Kemerovo Oblast

or rather, the absence of any real legal

regime, and everything that goes on there in general

how people are thrown in jail there lawlessly, how

people are detained, we decided not to

fly straight to Kemerovo

the way Mikhail Svetov did

when they were simply sent back from the airport

by the security services back to Moscow, so we flew

via Novosibirsk

Sergei Boyko helped us there, the coordinator

of the Moscow headquarters—well, rather,

the Siberian one—he helped us

So we drove from Novosibirsk by car

with a huge new drone in the trunk, and

headed to Kemerovo

I thought I’d sleep on the way because

I hadn’t gotten enough sleep on the flights, but it was the most

terrible road I’ve ever seen in my

life. In Magadan

I lived for a couple of months when I was there

during the election campaign, and the roads were far

better. Here you drive on a road with two lanes, one

going one way, the other going the opposite way, and

it’s hell: potholes everywhere, some kind of

speed bumps that make you just

slam around at 120 km/h (about 75 mph)

It all looked absolutely awful, and

it was obvious where the money goes. The money goes

when you arrive in Kemerovo Oblast

you can immediately see it doesn’t go to the roads, it

goes to Tuleyev

to his luxurious lifestyle, while the people who

drive on those roads are simply putting

their lives at risk. While I was riding, I got a bump

on my head because our car

was bouncing around like this

I thought we’d have to raise money for a new drone

because the old one in the trunk

had definitely been smashed. Wait, Georgy, is this

that not the dacha that supposedly doesn’t exist? It’s the dacha

that supposedly doesn’t exist. You probably saw—not

just you, but the prosecutor’s office saw it too

they saw your report. As we got

closer to this dacha, and as

the road got worse, it became clear that the dacha

must be impressive. And indeed,

that’s exactly how it turned out—there was quite a lot

there. Naturally, we filed

a complaint with the prosecutor’s office and everywhere else

we needed to, because Tuleyev

left his post, but nevertheless

continues to use this

state residence

What the hell, I ask? Fine, if you’re

the head of a region, maybe you’re entitled to something

while you’re in office—but when you leave and this

luxurious residence

surrounded by forest, with fresh air, its own

artesian well—when all of that stays with you

what the hell? And why, I ask,

do all the other residents of Kemerovo live in

conditions of outright environmental

catastrophe, while you sit there in a pine

forest sipping water from an artesian

well, breathing in pine air and living the good life

when you have no right to be there

We wrote about this, and it outraged us

We have a recipe for

the prosecutor’s office. It goes like this: Dear

prosecutor’s office, how do you find that residence?

Tuleyev’s presidential-style residence, how

do you find it? You drive along your usual

potholes, and once the potholes

suddenly end, that’s where it is

When they end, that’s when you turn

toward the place where the road gets better and better

You’ll know you’re on the right track when the air gets warmer—warmer

warmer—Tuleyev

That’s it. And the air changes too

it becomes easier to breathe, which means you’re

getting closer

which means you’re closer to Tuleyev. Though I don’t know

about that “easier to breathe” part, by the way—we may

be exaggerating, because he’s already

started feeling unwell after two investigations. Well, yes, he

even made a rather ridiculous statement

saying he was leaving politics because

because

he was offended by our investigation, because

we had supposedly destroyed his faith in

people by flying a drone over his dacha, of course

That’s flattering enough for us, because

to have a character like that as

a little star painted on our plane is, of course,

nice, but we understand that he’s hardly

likely to be telling the truth, because Tuleyev

is a pretty nasty, slippery type

who adapts to the situation and at

any given moment says what people

want to hear from him. He’s trying to rise above it

and claim that the investigation morally

humiliated him. Today everyone can see

this supposedly wonderful, sweet man who absolutely did not

want to morally humiliate anyone, but simply

Honestly, it’s infuriating. Sorry, if investigators are writing this

about all this—is it a joke or not? In fact

Tuleyev himself filed it against us

Can you imagine? We did an investigation about someone

and he personally filed a complaint against us

with the prosecutor’s office. That’s never happened before

But now I have a recipe for

you: if the prosecutor’s office forces you

to retract something, don’t forget

to show directly once again

what exactly you are retracting. Because in fact

the prosecutor’s office is refuting something we never

said. The prosecutor’s office issued a statement

saying that Tuleyev does not own this

dacha and that they are considering

opening a criminal libel case, and

but we never said that this

property belonged to Tuleyev. Look at

our investigation—we say all along

and even show official documentation that it is not

legally registered in his name; it is registered to

the administration, and all of it is funded

from the budget. I mean, it used to be recorded under

Tuleyev's account, and fewer budget funds

were spent on it. But now all of this is maintained

at the expense of the budget, with the very money

that is already lacking for roads and other needs there.

Tuleyev lives there, and why the hell is he living there

when, from the moment he resigned from the post of

governor, it's completely unclear? There are no

legal grounds whatsoever for him to remain at

that dacha. That's what outraged us. He

is now the 'People's Governor,' apparently, and the newspaper

has split everything into 'the people'—he's become 'people's,'

a 'People's Governor.' That's enough about the house, I'll

tell this story. We hadn't even published it

on air yet—you can talk about it freely, it's

or are you asking about something else?

For now, if you want, by the way, ask questions about

what's going on now—we'll still be

telling the truth. We have some

residents of Kemerovo staying on the air, and

we'll be talking with them, so if there's something

interesting... Still, what I wanted

to add—well, first of all, 'People's'

Governor'—what is a 'People's'

Governor, exactly? A 'People's Governor'

is a title, a title called 'People's Governor,'

which they awarded in Kemerovo. You might think it was given to

Tuleyev because, well, there simply were no other

governors there. And this title was established,

this award, this order—or whatever it is—

by a man who worked under Tuleyev

and who, for some reason, for a short

time became acting governor. Well,

apparently Tuleyev decided not to

sign the decree awarding himself

the title of 'People's Governor,' so he appointed

some other person governor for a few days,

and that person signed the

decree. And then Tuleyev once again became not just

governor, but also the 'People's Governor.'

And now for the best part: this is not

just a title you can add to your

Wikipedia page. First of all, you get

some kind of gold star that you

hang around your neck, and it really is made

of gold. It comes with a description, like

it's suspended in such a way that it doesn't hang too far forward,

with another heavier part at the back,

and it's officially issued to you.

And not only do you get this gold trinket,

issued to you by our

you are also entitled to monthly cash

payments—something like 60,000 or 100,000 rubles

which, for Kemerovo Region,

is a lot of money. And Tuleyev invented

this title for himself and effectively awarded it

to himself through an aide, and now everywhere

he proudly calls himself the 'People's'

Governor,' even though there had never been any governor other than

Tuleyev at the time it was awarded, and in

Kemerovo there never had been.

Everyone was talking about him and the KAMAZ truck (a Russian truck manufacturer), KAMAZ, KAMAZ,

and Putin, Putin and the KAMAZ. In fact,

of course, after Putin drove the

KAMAZ, everyone started discussing his traffic-law violations.

In particular, he was not

wearing a seat belt, not buckled up. Like everyone,

when I'm in a car, I

would scold him for that whenever there's someone

to set an example—of course you should always buckle up.

As someone who tries to follow the rules, I always wear mine,

but Putin did not buckle up.

But I don't really see much point in discussing that

in itself, because this is exactly how everything works

in this country—this constant refusal

to buckle up, this total disregard, because

well,

why bother with seat belts at all?

Whether you flew or not, whatever—don't make me

comply. But really, this

whole story, in my view,

well,

it seems to me that would have been too much—it

would have looked straight out of the TV series *Truckers*.

Anyway, in reality the story

of Putin's relationship not with these

codes and rule-following as such,

whether traffic regulations or the Air Code,

but his relationship with all these

pieces of paper, as he seems to regard them,

has a long history. Because Putin has already

ridden without a helmet and without a license on a

motorcycle together with the biker group the Night

Wolves. That too was a direct

violation of traffic law, and back then they said

that if the road is closed off, then

it somehow ceases to be a road, or

becomes some kind of place of public use,

a place for public presence

of citizens—some kind of

bureaucratic nonsense.

A senior traffic police official said that, and Putin was let off the hook then too.

Even before that, Putin had also violated

the code—this time the Air Code—when he

piloted

a seaplane; I think it was a Be-200,

that EMERCOM aircraft

used for fighting fires. And

at that time Putin, obviously having no

pilot's certificate,

without having undergone any flight

training, any medical clearance, any

pre-flight medical exam—well, this was not

the EMERCOM plane in Oryol that was putting out

a fire, but still, here too Putin

was on an aircraft, and Putin, with no

training whatsoever, sat in the captain's seat,

the left seat of the aircraft, and

was flying the plane—and again, nothing happened to him.

Maybe, perhaps, what—

maybe he doesn't need a license? But here

he was, in fact, violating the law.

Someone might get the impression

that Putin has some kind of special legal

status, that he can violate

codes that are meant to increase

people's safety—and the answer is: yes.

That really is how it works: Putin can break the law

and the traffic police won't do a damn thing to him for it.

They won't do it; instead they come up with 150

different tricks, 150 such legal

constructs that would make any lawyer's

brain explode, and all of it only so that

Putin won't be fined 500

rubles (about $5), because really, how could Putin

and a 500-ruble fine possibly exist in

the same world? Under this government,

that simply cannot happen. So the question is: can the same happen with

Slutsky? No way with Slutsky. I keep waiting

for Slutsky to hit a thousand traffic fines,

and when he does, I'll probably celebrate it with a cake.

I'll probably bring a cake to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), because Slutsky

is now at 960-something fines, but

as I understand it, he's switched to

another car. We were sent a photo from

the State Duma (the lower house of Russia's parliament)

where he's no longer in his own

Maybach, the one that had almost a thousand

fines on it, but is already in another car

that is, damn it, gold-colored.

Which, honestly, surprises me in Slutsky's case,

though it does nicely complement his

image. But I think we'll mark the thousandth fine

somehow in our narrow circle, and we'll keep investigating.

Nadezhda Baranova writes

something absolutely correct about that same nonsense

that

I don't know whether it's awkward for you too,

but really—what traffic rules, what air safety?

Putin constantly violates the Constitution.

I wanted to say that it's rather amusing

that you say this in front of Georgy

—the surname there was Tuleyev.

And here, basically, you're being told

about the recognized Slutsky, which means

it's all turned into a kind of verbal camembert

where words just float around

and live their own lives, not knowing that you

are talking about a cake and the thousandth fine.

But listen, we live on not knowing what exactly lies

behind each of us. Of course we know that behind

each of us there are a couple of

FSB officers (Russia's security service) assigned, who probably also

mark our

small joys and lifeless

defeats among themselves. Like, so, your car wouldn't start?

Your car?

So your FSB guy bought a cake for the colleagues,

because that has to be celebrated somehow too, and I

only find out about it later, off camera.

Today the bridge appeared on Google Maps,

so yes, I'm already aware of the Crimean Bridge story.

Russia's Investigative Committee

has opened a criminal case against an American

journalist. The investigators—well, not only

Russian journalists do this, you know—they give

these formulations. The investigation found in an article by Tom Rogan

calls for terrorist

activity aimed at destabilizing

the work of the government bodies of the Russian

Federation. By the way, the article is titled

"Ukraine Should Blow Up Putin's

Crimean Bridge," and its content, broadly speaking,

matches the headline.

The Investigative Committee also did not ignore

even the editors of the *Washington Examiner*,

against whom a preliminary inquiry is underway

over the publication of the article.

Who knows, maybe

after the broadcast I'll get 150

messages saying what an ignoramus I am for not knowing such a

great publication, but to me that means

it's some outlet of that sort—not exactly the *New York Times*, let's say.

Not really. I'm just saying here that I wouldn't

claim to be some expert on American media,

but this is a fairly long-running

and already well-established policy:

offense, offense, offense. You can never

say enough of it when you yourself

take offense at absolutely everything possible.

Day and night they sit there looking for something

to be offended by—who else has insulted them, whom else

they can open another criminal

case against.

Listen, and this publication that

nobody even knows—who found this article in the first place?

This article?

It all somehow fits into the same overall

context: they're looking for someone

to be offended by, someone to prosecute. And here

all you need is to put together three words: bridge, Ukraine,

and that's enough for them—whatever the status of the outlet is,

whatever it's about, none of that matters.

Everything lined up. And it didn't start there either—already on

PlayStation Network things are still working badly,

still.

A great many websites, a great many resources,

are working very poorly. Telecom

is working great, Roskomnadzor (Russia's media and internet regulator) is working

terribly, and the internet, of course, is now

under heavy attack.

This is one of the most important topics right now, so

what else did we want to discuss? There was

a good topic that literally appeared

an hour or two before our broadcast. Let me

read it out: a bill has been introduced in the State Duma

on fines—fines for

abusing the right to hold

rallies. United Russia, represented by deputies

Gribov and Vyatkin, believes that people should be

fined if a notification is submitted without

the intention of actually holding the event. This law,

naturally, is yet another one of those 150-thousandth

laws they came up with supposedly for

the sake of fighting corruption, and I'll tell you now about a wonderful case

that fits the wording of this law perfectly

perfectly,

but in which it will never

be enforced, and no one will ever

be fined. When we submit

notifications for rallies in the regions,

dozens of them in every region,

we get the reply: guys, sorry, this place is

already booked, we've received notifications for

all 50 key locations in the city.

there will be events there

so please go instead to

the cemetery

twenty kilometers from the city, there in

sector A2, you can meditate as much as

you like, but without any hand gestures, amplifying

sound-amplifying equipment, so as not to disturb anyone

and these constantly invented pretexts

for refusing permission to hold rallies, saying that

someone will be there and will be

holding something there, and this happens every time

it keeps happening, every single time when

we are refused, the people who work in

the campaign headquarters look at the refusal to hold

the event, where it says what will be held and where

and why you cannot be there

and hold a rally; people go

to the place where they wanted to hold

the rally, and where they were told the place would be

occupied, where someone else’s

rally would already be taking place. They come and look

to see what is supposedly going to happen there, what exactly

is happening there, where that grand rally is

because of which they denied me this venue

people come and end up seeing

emptiness, a flat expanse, just

the scorched Lenin Square

usually there is nobody there, and this whole

law, if adopted, will first of all of course

formally, if we take this

law seriously, if we seriously

approach the enforcement of this law, then first of all

of course it should apply to

the administration that invents pretexts

to refuse to provide this venue for

holding the event, and to those people who together with

the administration filed this fake

application in order to push

our rallies out of the central squares. Those are

the ones who should be held accountable under this law. Well,

naturally, naturally, they will not be held

accountable for it. And then the next thing is this:

when we submit applications for rallies

having learned from bitter experience, those applications

are filed for several locations at once so that

if permission is denied for one

venue, we can move to

another venue that is also suitable

for us from our point of view. And obviously

a rally cannot take place simultaneously

in several places, so as a precaution

such applications are submitted, and then they

are promptly withdrawn if approval

is received. Nothing terrible

happens; nobody mobilizes

police units to guard all

the locations at once

but most likely this will be used

somehow against us, possibly in exactly

the scenario I just described

or perhaps something else, but never

under any normal circumstances will it ever be

used to punish

the administration that violates

this law dozens of times a day across the

country. But even if this scenario

that you described as unrealistic—that is,

when the administration simply doesn’t produce anyone

and just says, “Look, on the square—listen,”

even if, I think, you go to the prosecutor’s office

for your whole life seeking enforcement—it still won’t

lead anywhere, or wherever people like to file complaints

they’ll bring out the Cossacks (state-aligned paramilitary/traditionalist groups)

and say, “There was some event there, the goat ate the list, two

grandmothers showed up—we had registered 55 people for it”

well, four grandmothers came, and they were holding it

we can’t find the paperwork right now, but they definitely

were there, so everything is fine.” So

that’s how it will be. I’m already sick and tired of

all this bureaucratic formalism

that the authorities constantly engage in, and we

know perfectly well all their tricks, how

they will carry things like this out. And then

that brings us to another wonderful

law—just how, really, how

monstrous it is. Explain to me the law on

criminal prosecution for assisting

anti-Russian sanctions—what exactly is it?

of course, this is a law for some people

and a different law for others at the same time. That is,

we already know in advance that no

Sberbank or Gazprom, for directly

complying with anti-Russian sanctions,

because Sberbank—good Lord, if you somehow

don’t know—does not operate in Crimea because

it does not want to fall under sanctions

so the law is written as if directly

for punishing them, but what matters here much more

is not the law that punishes

for complying with sanctions, but the law

that introduces criminal liability

for helping to bring those sanctions about

because that one is clearly aimed—well, it is

written even less with us in mind

and more with people like Kara-Murza (Vladimir Kara-Murza, Russian opposition politician) in mind, who

quite actively and rightly

lobby for these sanctions. Let me repeat:

these so-called anti-Russian sanctions

are sanctions against specific crooks

who steal from you and me, who

buy things—like Rotenberg’s watches, or some

hotels and theaters in Germany—and put

our money into them, money that

was taken out of the country

and imposing sanctions on Rotenberg

Timchenko, Kovalchuk, Malofeev, and all the rest

this whole horde of parasites

is an action in the interests of every

citizen of Russia: the less these people

are able to take out of the country

the better it is for you and me. And of course the authorities

find this infuriating, because their

long-term life plan—these

Rotenbergs and Kovalchuks—is to steal here

and then live with their children under protection somewhere in

Portofino, enjoying themselves there

while the rest of us live here, and now they

see this place merely as a territory for making money

This isn’t about their money or the mine they come to,

where they arrive and from where, effectively, they haul away

their little stash of gold and then carry it off to

some little chest somewhere in Europe.

But that irritates them, and the problem is one of understanding,

because they themselves brought into circulation

these absurd laws of theirs.

In general, with their own

Kiselyov-and-Solovyov-style propaganda (a reference to pro-Kremlin TV hosts Dmitry Kiselyov and Vladimir Solovyov), even the very phrase

“anti-Russian sanctions.” And now

I have to sit here on air, twitching,

explaining that they are not anti-Russian

sanctions. Anti-Russian sanctions are when you go to a store

and, because of them, instead of normal European

products, you’re forced

to eat some incomprehensible Kuban cheese

that costs twice as much as

French cheese, even though, you understand,

that at least would make some sense.

We literally, literally have four

minutes left, and I’d like a small

musical, so to speak, a musical

interlude. You won’t sing, I hope?

No, the Georgians will do it for me. They

put on a rave. You look at it and think: all right,

I don’t know what’s coming next—what kind of thing is this?

After a rally in Georgia, a crowd demanded

the resignation of the prime minister and the interior minister

so as not to repeat the Russian

scenario, when police beat people. But there,

the beatings were, let’s say, a little more

mild—lighter stories when it comes to human rights.

Supposedly it all started over some kind of drug issue;

raids began on nightclubs.

But what people didn’t like, of course,

wasn’t that someone was fighting

drugs. What they didn’t like was how it was done, because

it looked too much like us—like what happens here.

All that arm-twisting, dragging people out without

any due process—pulling them this way and that.

People came out in crowds, and I want to show

what it looked like: a rave in Georgia in front of—well, in front of

the Interior Ministry.

[music]

Yes, and now we’ve seen that building—

the parliament building.

Why think small? Go straight for it, you know.

The Beautiful Russia of the Future (a political phrase meaning a democratic, reformed future Russia) is when

a country’s citizens gather and tell

their authorities: we want things to be like

they are in Russia—we want them to be like in

the Beautiful Russia, where the police are honest,

the courts are fair,

and institutions are independent—that’s the dream. But now

as things stand, when people gather,

what they fear most is that it will turn out like

Russia—with the same kind of police. That, of course,

is frightening. And I hope that in the Beautiful Russia

of the Future, all of this will be fixed, and Russia

will become an example for its closest neighbors

and for the rest of the world.

Bring that wonderful time closer together

with us. Bring it closer, as we do—bring it closer

even better than we do. We’re saying goodbye now—see you, bye.

Bye.

[music]