Why Khabarovsk Rose Up. Belarus: Our Future. In a Barrel with Putin’s Portrait

[music]

Good evening, everyone. In Moscow, it is exactly 8:00 p.m.

That means we are live on air with

the program *Russia of the Future*, and I am its host,

Alexei Navalny, or a person

whose organization may be declared a sect, which,

as was said not by just some random person off the street, but by

Igor Ivanishko, a court expert and

scholar of religion—that is, one of those very people who

have the authority to submit documents to the court

to have something recognized as a sect,

a destructive sect.

So this is a good, encouraging

sign that I—and obviously

many viewers of this program as well—are not

There are no sects without followers. The chief

sectarian—they’ll declare us a sect and ban us.

Please send in your questions with

the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture on Twitter, and I

will try to answer them. Send in

all kinds of comments. Let me remind you that you

can become a sponsor and friend

of our channel by subscribing to it, and

you can help a large number of

people—for example, Galya, Lyubov Sobol,

Alborov, Volkov, and so on.

We’re sending little ducklings—

they’ll float across the screen. We are continuing to raise

money for the fines that were

imposed a year ago on independent

candidates for the Moscow City Duma, on all

participants and organizers of the Moscow

protests—multi-million-ruble fines. They

will have to be paid.

We are raising money for them. In the description

of this broadcast there will also be a link to

a post by Vladimir Milov, who—many thanks to him—

has agreed to act as a kind of

aggregator. He very kindly

agreed to use his bank account

so that money can be transferred there,

and then he will in turn

pay these fines. It’s just that using the accounts of the people directly involved doesn’t work,

simply because

they are under arrest or constantly

under threat of arrest. Anatoly Ivankov asks:

“Alexei, why do you think

there’s not a word on Russian zombie TV

about the protests and elections in Belarus?”

Obviously, because

Russian zombie TV generally does not

show protests at all,

except those in Western countries.

They do not want anything like that

or anything similar to happen here, and obviously

no one is drawing parallels between Lukashenko and Putin for them.

So where shall we begin? Let’s

start with the fact that in September there

will be elections. I promised to drive you crazy

with constant mentions of Smart Voting,

and I

intend to keep that promise

because it is genuinely super important: 31

regions, 66 election campaigns. Here’s

a question from Ekaterina Shtangi:

“Hello, Alexei. Please tell us

more about the Komi Republic.

There will be elections in the Komi Republic, in particular

in the Komi Republic.

By the way, it is very important from the point of view

that the authorities’ ratings are low there, and

United Russia can be crushed there.

For example, we do not have a штаб (campaign office) in the Komi Republic,

there.

Although we are still recruiting election observers

everywhere, so, guys, this is something you really

need to take part in, because

right now this is basically the main

political direction the authorities are taking—very

quietly, by the way. The events you see—

the arrest of one person, the arrest

of another,

people being dragged off at rallies, all sorts of things—

but in fact the main thing

the authorities are doing now is changing

the election procedure right before our eyes.

They looked and saw that, well,

people were swallowing it, and basically this

altered, perverted procedure

of the nationwide vote (the constitutional vote) somehow

seemed to be accepted, so now they are

introducing laws so that any

elections can be multi-day and held on

tree stumps.

As for observers, right now we

—and the link is also in the description—are gathering

thousands of observers and sending them to other

regions. Roughly speaking, if you live in Moscow,

go observe in Nizhny Novgorod, or

go to Tambov to observe, and you

sign up and say: we will go

observe. And immediately United Russia

introduces a bill under which it will not

be allowed for a person to observe in another

region. That is, if you are in Moscow—

right now that is not the case, but they want to make it so

that you cannot observe in Nizhny Novgorod, or in

Tambov, or even in Moscow Region—

Balashikha,

Podolsk—major elections there—you will not be able

to observe. So they are carefully

watching everything we do, and Smart

Voting, campaigners,

observers—and they are consistently

dragging through all sorts of laws

to obstruct this.

The only way to resist this now is,

first, through more active participation in

the election campaign—not only in terms of

voting, but also in terms of work. And then

we will see. Of course, I think that undoubtedly

all this creeping change

to election legislation, which

will turn elections into

a non-existent procedure, will stop—but only if

there are truly hundreds of thousands of people across the

country involved. And still, we need to understand: Putin

and Panfilova will not stop introducing new measures.

the rules, because if they don’t stop,

they will lose every election until

a huge number of people are out in the

streets. It will have to be done, we will have to

go out, we’ll have to go to jail for it, go out

of prison and then go back out into the streets again, because

otherwise, otherwise there won’t be any elections there anymore

by the State Duma elections, there absolutely won’t be

anything left except the same old stump voting and seven-day

voting, and then the announcement

of the results: United

Russia has won everywhere. So get ready, guys.

For our struggle, for our right to vote, simply

for some candidates, for our right to be

observers, for our right to have at least

something resembling an election, we will have to

fight for it together. On indis 163 they ask me,

“Alexei, has there been any reaction

from the West to the reset-to-zero (the constitutional change allowing Putin to reset his presidential term count)? How can you

comment on that?” I can

comment on it this way: the West

— it’s not exactly that they couldn’t care less, but, well,

they more or less don’t care, because they already

understood everything. The West looks at this

vast one-sixth of the Earth’s landmass

and they understand: Belarus, Russia,

Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan — it’s all

more or less the same thing: some former Soviet

crook seized power and clings to it until death

at the helm. So, well, what else is new?

They view it negatively, because

it’s a huge country that is getting poorer, and from

Russia every year about 200,000 people

flee. And where do they flee? To the West.

The West doesn’t like that. In principle, they

would like things to develop normally, but

if we ourselves, so to speak, are not

fighting for that, then what can the West do? So

the West limits itself to adopting

resolutions saying that they express

deep concern, and tomorrow they’ll

express their deepest possible concern, and yet

Putin will still be right here. And everything

that is happening in Russia, of course, they

recognize as lawlessness. But do you expect

the West to go and fight with our

Ella Pamfilova (head of Russia’s Central Election Commission)? No. They think,

basically,

“Okay, what are we supposed to do — start a nuclear war with

Putin?” Russians have to

stand up for their own rights.

Of course, we want to help them, but how exactly

to help is not very clear. So, well, Putin —

fine, Putin. Putin keeps all the Russian money

in our banks. He has turned this

country into a raw-material appendage, simply into

a gas station for our cars.

He supplies us with timber, he supplies us with

metal. All of this somehow looks very

unfair to the people of

Russia, and clearly, clearly this will somehow

end badly — that’s what the West thinks.

But let’s not run ahead of ourselves,

get ahead of the locomotive. By the way, at the end

of the program, there are 40,000 — 42,000 people

watching live right now. As people keep joining,

we’ll be discussing the most

important topic: Khabarovsk. I wrote about

Khabarovsk. Of course, Khabarovsk is the most

important region right now, but in fact you can

draw various parallels there. Notice

that already this September, and

naturally by the State Duma elections,

the Kremlin will fully unleash

this whole technology of fake

small parties and fake candidates.

We are already seeing this very actively even

in regional campaigns. It’s just that

most people, of course, don’t follow

regional campaigns — it’s not interesting to follow

regional campaigns — but nevertheless

it is happening. And there was this

kind of

interesting thing too, and nobody

paid attention to it — the media absolutely did not

notice it. Do you remember the party

Communists of Russia? These Communists of Russia,

their leader, that Suraykin guy,

who ran in the presidential election —

these Communists of Russia take part in

every election in the country. In an amazing,

astonishing way, their candidates

always collect signatures, always

get registered — everything always goes very

smoothly for them. That is, they always get

very few votes, but they participate in every

election. And then they had some kind of

split, and one of the leaders of Communists of

Russia, later an opponent of Suraykin,

basically revealed the details of something

we knew about, but didn’t know

in detail. For example, in the last

Moscow City Duma elections, when all that

turmoil was going on, in every district there was a

representative of Communists of Russia, simply

in every district. And all of them said, “We

collected 4,000–5,000 signatures,” and all of them

turned out to have perfect signatures. And then this

guy came out and said, “Do you know, actually, that

Suraykin received 120 million rubles (about 1.3 million USD) from the mayor’s office

to collect them and

put forward his fake candidates,”

because, well, Communists of Russia

pull votes away from the Communists; in general they

help United Russia, often — very often.

Almost always, a Communists of Russia candidate

attacks;

he acts like a kind of enforcer

for the United Russia candidate: he files complaints, attacks all

the opposition figures, and so on. So let’s

listen to 1 minute and 6 seconds of it.

Konstantin Zhukov, deputy chairman — apparently

former deputy chairman by now — of the Communists of

Russia party, talks about how things are organized

there. “I am one of the founders

of the party,”

“secretary, deputy chairman

of the Central Committee, Konstantin…”

Unfortunately, as of today our project can

quite frankly be called a failure.

Power and the party have been usurped

by Maksim Suraikin's clique, which has turned

the party into its own commercial project.

It is engaged in trading elections,

cooperates with the Presidential Administration,

and with regional and local administrations,

in order to act

as a spoiler for the CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation), and gets paid for it.

I'll give just one example.

In last year's elections to the Moscow

City Duma, out of thirty-two

candidates, 26 were what you might call

Sobyanin's people. Through third parties, into the party's accounts,

through intermediaries,

the city administration funneled around 120

million rubles (about 1.3 million USD).

The main goal was to prevent

the CPRF from forming a majority in

the Moscow City Duma—and they succeeded.

The CPRF fell short by around five to seven

seats. You see, and this is very important

to understand: look, this is systemic. This is

not just, you know,

an example of the lawlessness that existed in

Moscow and how afraid Sobyanin was that we

would take the majority away from him—the majority,

yes, that's one example, of course. But right now

there are elections in Novosibirsk, and it's the same thing there.

Well, in Siberia too, everywhere—Communists of Russia,

what else, the New People party, and various

others—one of every kind, basically—they put them all on the ballot.

What does that mean? It means

that an ordinary voter simply

has no idea who to vote for.

That is exactly why Smart Voting is needed.

Because there are all these fake pseudo-

opposition figures who, by appearance, by

name—say, with a name like Communist

of Russia, or opposition something, or the New

People party—people think, well, maybe that's some kind of youth party,

and then some other party of, I don't know who,

and then there'll be Sergey Shnurov's party (the Russian musician), oh,

Sergey Shnurov—maybe people will vote for him,

and then all sorts of urbanists, or whoever else,

feminists, men or women,

and all of this is just planted window dressing.

It's designed so that one gets five percent,

this one gets seven percent, that one gets

two percent, and the United Russia candidate

gets 15 and wins. Without Smart Voting,

there is simply no way to win.

Because no matter what city you live in,

even in Moscow, most likely you don't

know any of these candidates at all. There are no debates,

and it's impossible to sort them out, and

only Smart Voting allows us

to consolidate enough votes around the strongest

candidate so that he

gets 30–35 percent, and that's it—then

he will defeat the United Russia candidate. This matters.

Of course, all of this needs to be explained, because

well, it's not a very simple concept, and

those of you who are able, maybe better

than I am, to explain all this to other people,

please do explain it, because it is

very, very important—super important. And as for

the question of why Sobyanin was afraid that

the communists—or, more broadly, the opposition, not

United Russia—would get a majority: it's because

they've already been exposed all over the place, including our dear

Shaposhnikov.

We caught him

failing to declare a billion rubles and an apartment.

As we told you, deputy

Maksim Kruglov, head of the Yabloko faction in

the Moscow City Duma, wrote a letter

to the prosecutor's office saying,

check this guy—he failed to declare

a billion, and it's all proven, all of it.

Tax experts wrote that

Shaposhnikov failed to declare a billion.

And what is the prosecutor's office saying now?

In an exclusive shared by Maksim

Kruglov, they tell us: you know, we

checked, the Moscow prosecutor's office checked, and no

violations were found. Everything is perfectly fine,

everything is entirely legal, and deputy Shaposhnikov

is completely innocent. Could there have been

any other answer to that question? Answered by

the Moscow city prosecutor, about whom you also

did an investigation—Prosecutor Popov.

A villa in Spain,

hotels in Montenegro, a fishing lodge,

some houses here and there—you know the story.

Well, if Shaposhnikov needs to be removed from office,

then Prosecutor Popov ought to be

put in jail. So that's how they protect each other.

Shaposhnikov protects him legislatively,

and he protects Shaposhnikov from the legal side. But

no matter how much they try to

cover for each other with paperwork, they still go up to the podium,

the deputies do, and here is a completely

fresh recording. It starts with: come out, I'll show

you... [inaudible]

Stupin comes out, and they are acting absolutely

correctly. This is purely political:

draw up whatever papers you want, but we will come out and

we will begin every speech by

asking you to explain, please,

where you got two billion from, and how you

got this apartment, how you got that

apartment. That's absolutely the right approach.

I'll show you now—well, it had to be

cut down a bit. Inga gave a better speech, but then

Stupin comes out and continues the same

conversation.

For 1 minute 40 seconds, like normal

deputies, they just tear into him—and rightly so.

This is the speaker of the Moscow City Duma,

Shaposhnikov, a man who still has not

shown us a declaration proving whether it was legal for him

to suddenly acquire two billion rubles.

Where did the money in his account come from?

There had already been 870 million there before, and

the most astonishing thing is that this man,

while being a shareholder,

such an enterprise was subsequently sold

and on top of that, received 2 billion rubles

an apartment from the city, apparently as someone very

much in need. A very interesting discussion has unfolded

now following

the question that Alexei Valeryevich asked me

about the apartment’s address. Everyone is now

writing: yes, yes, we want the apartment address too.

So, journalists from

Open Media contacted me and gave me the address:

2 Konstantin Fedin Street. It was registered on

September 16, 2004; as for the apartment number,

I thought Alexei knew it perfectly well himself.

Let’s assume Yekaterina still

asks you to provide evidence

that this apartment was given to me by the city.

That was your statement from the podium, so if

you made it from the podium, then please

present evidence that it was specifically

this apartment at the address on Konstantin

Fedin Street

that was given. There was a publication in

Open Media, on the basis of which my

colleague Yekaterina Engalycheva is now

saying that it contained information that

Shaposhnikov received an apartment in 2004.

If you, Alexei Valeryevich, disagree with

this, you can

accordingly go to court against

Open Media and refute it.

Chair, I ask that this be entered into the record.

It is incorrect to call me to order

when I am the one being discussed. Thank you, and respected colleagues, within

the agenda,

you can see how this really works.

Imagine: even when they were the majority,

and even in the minority, they come in and

quite rightly, on absolutely any agenda item,

they begin with: show us your declaration,

show us where your 2 billion rubles came from,

explain where the apartment came from.

It’s clear that not many people watch the broadcasts from the Moscow City Duma,

but

these videos still spread among those who

follow this stuff.

They see it, and whenever any number of

voters—and voters of any

political leaning—watch these kinds of

speeches by deputies, whose side do you think

their sympathies will be on? On the side of a United Russia member

with 2 billion rubles, or, by contrast,

on the side of a person who came to the podium in a T-shirt?

Well, of course the United Russia candidate

will get zero votes.

And they will do absolutely anything not to

let the opposition through. Right now, we all

need to watch very carefully

what is happening. This

September, we need to work as hard as possible

as election observers and see whether we can

in this new situation get at least

something resembling an election.

Maybe they’ll let some people through, maybe not.

Maybe they got a little scared by Khabarovsk (the city known for mass protests in 2020), and

therefore won’t falsify things too heavily.

Or maybe, on the contrary, they were so

frightened by Khabarovsk that they’ll

let no one through at all.

But the root issue is the same:

United Russia cannot honestly win in Komi

or even come close in Novosibirsk.

There will be elections in Tomsk, but come on— in Tomsk

no one is going to vote for United

Russia. And maybe they got so scared

that they’ll simply purge everyone.

If they do,

by what other means, besides taking to the

streets, will we be able to defend anything?

Vitaly Sharov asks me:

what is the difference between the situation with the shaman

and the situation with the pseudo-

hegumen (abbot), and why did one suffer while the other

continues his speeches with impunity?

We’ll discuss all of that. I even have

a video about the hegumen and about the shaman—it’s

very interesting. Vyacheslav, or maybe Sergey,

asks me: Alexei, will there be any point in

trying to persuade everyone to go on the last day of voting

so that

the first unnecessary days show zero turnout?

I’m not sure that will work.

Let’s first see what rules

the final rules will be

adopted for this election campaign

in September, and then directly decide on

the tactical steps.

We’ll determine what will work best, because

it’s not certain that this approach will work. We don’t

need to show zero turnout here; we

just need to come

and vote, and during the first two days the most important thing for us

is to monitor all of it.

So if you want to participate more actively,

sign up as observers; the link is

below, under the video.

There is also a link to the website of all our

headquarters. Last time, a lot of people asked me

because I mention regions here,

say something, and people can’t find their

regions. So now I’m giving

a general link; it has addresses and

information for all our headquarters—that is,

40 regions where our headquarters operate—and

so you can get in touch with them,

find things out, come by, and

generally connect with others. Because I

of course understand very well: you sit

at home alone, watching a program, and think,

I want to do something, but

alone it’s unclear, it just feels confusing.

I was like that myself once.

I sat there thinking and then thought: I’ll go

join the Yabloko party (a Russian liberal political party). And then you show up

alone, sit there like an idiot, afraid of everything.

People are walking around, doing things, and on your own

it’s scary. So come to us, and we’ll

try to unite somehow with you.

The most important news, the main news of all:

in the state media this week, how

do you think—what? Khabarovsk? Not even close.

Khabarovsk? Nothing of the sort. Belarus? No.

Definitely not Belarus.

The main news story, of course, is Vladimir

Putin and his magic pen. The first time

everyone was still laughing when, remember, I showed you

there was that episode when Putin

during a meeting was saying something or other

about something, put down his pen, and that was it.

Newspapers actually came out with headlines about

how Putin, in a rage, threw down his pen.

Let’s take 8 seconds to see what

rage looks like from the point of view of the state

media. Naturally, when a person

loses their home or their life

is in danger, rather than working themselves into

a rage and throwing a pen. Back then everyone laughed,

but it has a sequel: Putin and

the magic pen. This time, in all seriousness,

a large number of media outlets

interpreted this whole thing—I mean,

as if it were some kind of signal, that Putin

twirled his pen, he twirled it like this.

Margarita Simonyan

costs us 20 billion rubles a year

—this, this pathetic excuse for media. Again, if you

remember, at one point she sued me

because I called the RT channel

pathetic. Well, this pathetic outfit costs

us 20 billion rubles, and it publishes

news stories about Putin twirling a pen once.

And during the Soviet Union, Western

journalists had a kind of special discipline

—Kremlinology—and from the way

people were arranged on the Mausoleum during

parades, they would interpret all sorts of things

and make various predictions. We’ve progressed

compared with that, because now

what gets interpreted is this very

nine-second episode, because Putin

twirled a pen, and apparently that means

something.

with the resources you’ve already

mentioned. Still, I’d like you to

say a few words specifically about this

direction.

You see, yes, he twirled the pen, but I’m not bringing it up for nothing.

What could it mean? Maybe he’s furious,

or maybe the opposite—maybe it’s some kind of

gesture of encouragement, like

the pen periodically points at

one of the governors and tells him,

‘Well done.’ Or maybe he was lost in thought,

twirling it because he was coming up with

a third article about World War II, or

something else. I mean,

it’s funny, but it shows

and at the same time it shows the degradation

of the state media, and the degradation in general

of politics. But what else are they supposed to discuss? They’re

forbidden from discussing, basically, everything: about

Belarus—no; about Khabarovsk—no; about

the protests—no; about rigged elections—

no. They can’t talk about anything. So instead they write

news stories about Putin twirling

a pen. Robert Petrosyan asks:

What do you think about the war on the border between Armenia and

Azerbaijan? Why is Russia staying silent instead of

intervening? What is the CSTO even for, if not for this?

Well, I’m not going to comment on it in particular right now

because I simply don’t

know the situation very well. But I think

Russia is staying silent because Russia

is trying, in this situation, to play both sides

—to be with both yours and theirs. It’s obvious you can get involved

in all of this

and support one side, which of course

would be extremely disadvantageous for Russia—to take

someone’s side. So it tries to stay on good terms

with both. But again, this may be

somewhat wrong or very naive

judgment; I’m not ready right now

to comment on it in detail. Olimpisky

Deyateli asked: what would you say about

the protests that took place yesterday in Moscow and in

St. Petersburg? There were more in St. Petersburg than in Moscow. I

want to say that the people who

came out yesterday in Moscow are truly

great. It was all very good, and I believe

that people should always take to the streets. But I’ll

repeat my view, which I know

many of my colleagues in the

opposition movement don’t like, including

people I have a very high opinion of, like

Andrei Pivovarov and others: protest

actions need to be prepared. You can’t just

announce, ‘Oh, let’s gather at 3 p.m.’

and then do nothing else

and later say, ‘Oh, they didn’t

approve the rally, so let’s then

turn it into a queue.’ That’s not how it

works. At least, I think

that’s the wrong way to do it. We announce it,

and if we’re refused, we say: well, we’re still

going out anyway, because it’s our right

to assemble peacefully and without weapons, and in

any case, if we announce a rally, I

believe this is how things should work:

from that day on, everyone gets to work

inviting people to the rally, making sure

more of them come. They record clips, they

record videos, we badger all kinds of

opinion leaders so that they

support it. That’s how preparation

happens. So it’s great that yesterday

some people came out, but very often the people who

look at all this, for them it’s more of a

confirmation

of a certain weakness in the opposition here, especially

in Moscow and especially in St. Petersburg.

A large share of the residents of these cities

are opposed to the authorities, and yet only

about 500 people come out in Moscow and 2,000 people

in St. Petersburg, and for many this looks like

the opposition isn’t really doing

its job very well. To keep that from

happening, actions need to be prepared very thoroughly.

I don't want to criticize him outright.

A lot of people, including many of my

colleagues, have talked about it at great length, because, well, at least they did

something, and good for them, but still,

these rallies need to be prepared for; we still

will have to come out again and again, very often,

and keep coming out, because apart from

taking to the streets right now,

there is no other way to achieve anything real

and substantial, as we have sometimes

seen many times over.

Any positive changes, or at least

promises of positive changes, are tied only

to those moments when people pour into

the streets and the Kremlin gets scared. Nothing else

frightens them, so this has to be done.

It will have to be done, it will have to be done

together, setting aside all sorts of disagreements

between all of us.

But it needs to be prepared properly, and I don't like it

when something is just announced and then

— excuse me — everyone forgets about it all for two

weeks, and then again, on the last day,

someone writes a Facebook post saying, come on,

bring umbrellas and a good mood,

come along. That's not how this works.

Korvin Krestik asks an excellent

question: I signed up on the website

to be an election observer. When should someone contact

me? Here's how it works:

this is all very tricky and very

complicated too. You signed up as an observer

somewhere in Ukhta, Balashikha, or Tambov.

Then, for you to actually become an observer, we

have to find a person who is a candidate

in that district, or at least in that city,

who will give you the paperwork, because otherwise

you won't be let in. We're not

part of the system here; we're all just people.

We can't issue you an official referral.

The systemic parties probably — as you've

no doubt seen many times — will either get cold feet

and give you nothing, or they'll give it to you and then

revoke it at the last moment. So, well,

what can I say — wait, someone will contact you.

Behind the facade of this whole observer

recruitment effort, there's just a very

complicated, very tedious job going on

to provide everyone with those very

documents for election observation. Who brought down the USSR?

What do you think? And here Vyacheslav Volodin

gave a truly astonishing explanation

of who brought it down, who is to blame, who is

responsible for the collapse of the USSR.

At 1 minute 9 seconds, I just wanted

to show you this as an example of how brazen

these crooks are. Let's go to 1 minute 9

seconds. Volodin: "Here in Russia, politicians

— and names can be named — who publicly

spoke of the need to break up

Russia — they should immediately understand that

there will be liability.

Up to 10 years. For American politicians

who dreamed about our country, there should also

be liability. If they come

to our country, they can be

arrested, and their extradition here can

be demanded. These are concrete,

effective measures to protect our

sovereignty. Therefore, first of all, I would like

to address representatives

of the opposition parties. You and I

have one country.

Party interests may differ,

but we already lost one country once. And especially those

who are now trying to throw stones at

the Constitution should understand that they

bear responsibility for the collapse of the country.

Since you've taken upon yourselves this heavy burden

of succession from the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), there was both

good and bad there — including the collapse of the country."

Isn't that lovely? You see, the CPSU — so now the

Communist Party of the Russian Federation is supposedly its heir, and therefore

it bears responsibility for the collapse of the country. But

it turns out that Volodin, Putin, Shoigu, and

all the rest of them apparently were not in the CPSU at all.

Apparently they never became party members

back in 1978, 1976 — so all of

United Russia, every single one of them,

every person,

well, all the people who hold any kind of

office were members of the CPSU, all of them were in

their district party committees, the Komsomol (Soviet Communist youth organization), every one of them.

But now they really sit there as if

time itself began with Putin and United Russia.

So these so-called communists, supposedly,

bear responsibility for the collapse of the country, while

we, apparently,

were the ones preserving it. And Putin, apparently, was not

an aide to Sobchak (Anatoly Sobchak, former mayor of St. Petersburg), who worked in

the Interregional Deputies Group, and

none of them were in democratic parties.

Not in democratic parties, not in Gaidar's camp,

because there was a party of power under

Gaidar, and they all ran to the party of power.

There was Gaidar's group, then Chernomyrdin's party

of power, Our Home Is Russia.

They ran there, and now they're in United

Russia. And now they're just overflowing with this pathos and

lecturing everyone: we have one country, and you

are going to destroy it, just as you already destroyed one

country — that's what CPSU members are telling us.

People like Volodin, because he was a member

of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,

swore loyalty to it, promised that he would never join

any other party, that it was the best thing,

that he would die fighting for the cause

of the Communist Party — and now all that

has been forgotten. This is important, very important — remember it.

It's important to keep reminding these people of it.

Anatoly Dust asks me:

Tell us about your visit to Arkhangelsk

Region, specifically what Severodvinsk was like.

I'll talk about the trip in general, because we

went to Vidnoye too, and I'll talk about that.

We'll have a segment on Severodvinsk.

It's great. I really like the North in general,

the North, the northwest of Russia — of course, it's

Poverty, terrible conditions, roads that are completely wrecked.

Well, it’s a really great place there, and the people are very

good. The authorities’ approval ratings there are quite low

because, well, you spend a day in

Arkhangelsk and you immediately understand why

people hate this government, because, well,

they’ve basically stolen absolutely everything, because these

regions

under any normal circumstances should

be very rich, but they’re very poor

simply because Putin gradually

let everything be looted and destroyed. In Severodvinsk,

we went to look at a submarine.

You can actually see submarines from the beach,

you can see them a little bit.

I swam in the White Sea,

and it’s very cold there. Even just going to the beach was

really cold. Plus 14°C isn’t exactly warm,

not warm at all.

It’s a great place. Unfortunately, we didn’t

stay there very long, and I didn’t have

the chance to meet with people there in any

significant numbers and talk to them. That’s a shame. But

I had simply gone there for Yevgeny Makarov’s trial.

Alexei, who should initiate

early elections to the Duma? Well, as I understand it,

right now the discussion is about whether

the Duma itself or the president should initiate them

somehow. Well, exactly how they would legally

cook that up isn’t all that important, but I

think it’s entirely possible that they may already

try this winter to push through elections to the

State Duma.

An amazing, just absolutely incredible

story that very few people noticed.

It happened this week. So, there

was this judge in the Moscow Arbitration Court,

a judge named Olga Alexandrova, and if I’m not

mistaken, I had some

cases involving her, and I wrote

some angry posts about her, if I remember correctly.

In general, there were a lot of

different conflicts surrounding her, and now, finally,

now

she’s been fired. And this Olga Alexandrova

became best known for the fact that she

helped seize the company Bashneft.

It was specifically by her ruling that Bashneft

was returned to the state, and that

decision was absolutely unlawful.

And now this

judge, Olga Alexandrova, has been fired, fired

without any punishment at all—just dismissed, which

is remarkable. She was fired because another judge went to the

FSB (Russia’s security service) and recorded this Alexandrova

on a voice recorder, and then handed it all over to the

Judicial Qualifications Board, and

it turned out that the following situation had taken place:

there was some kind of case,

and Alexandrova was putting pressure on her

fellow judge, saying that, well, there were

state interests involved,

and that she had to issue some kind of ruling in

favor of that company. And as the other judge herself said,

this second judge, Lady Agayeva,

said Alexandrova was trying to get from her

a favorable ruling on the claim, and at the same time

on a sheet of paper she wrote down the amount of the

reward as the number 60. We don’t know whether that was 60

thousand dollars or 60 million rubles, but

just think about it. First of all, this perfectly

shows how things really stand in

Russia’s supreme—or rather higher—courts.

Judges there are basically dealing with each other like,

like traffic cops, you know,

like, “So, Anatolich, what are we going to do here?”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe

let’s work something out,” and then he shows

something—say, a 5—just

writing numbers to each other on scraps of paper.

A “reward” means someone brought that money in,

and she was offering it to another judge. And she was simply

fired, do you understand? No criminal case,

no scandal, no one held her accountable

for anything. Just fired. You

get caught, while serving as a judge, effectively

offering a bribe to another judge, and

they just fire you. What could be

a more socially dangerous phenomenon than

a judge who is bought and corrupt,

so corrupt that she corrupts other

judges too, writing the size of the

reward on slips of paper? There is hardly

anything more dangerous. Even a serial killer

is less dangerous than corrupt judges. But even so,

they just, simply fired her, and that was the end of it.

So, just out of, you know,

interest, I’m going to file a complaint and demand that

these facts here—these very facts that

have been revealed—weren’t made up by me, and they weren’t

written by journalists. One judge

told the Judicial Qualifications Commission

about another judge. Excuse me, but

that is a serious crime—open

a criminal case. I’ll write to them myself and

see what happens.

Birsa Toriya writes to me:

“Can you talk about the second accident at Nor

Nickel in Krasnoyarsk Krai?” As I understand it,

what’s happening now is not that there has been a

second accident at Norilsk Nickel in Krasnoyarsk Krai,

—

but simply that the press is paying attention, and this is

an endless disaster that keeps happening at

Norilsk Nickel. It’s just that journalists have now started

writing about it, because every

week there’s some huge spill

of oil, diesel—well, not oil, diesel fuel,

some chemicals, and so on, because

the whole of Norilsk Nickel is basically one giant rusty

plant. When it was privatized, it

was a modern, excellent enterprise. It

brought in tens of billions of dollars

for Potanin, Prokhorov, and all the other

officials. It made everyone fantastically rich.

Yachts were bought, planes were bought, but not

a kopeck was invested back into it, so now it’s just

an endless expanse of rust, and people...

who are walking around filming us right now

they flooded us with videos, and that’s basically it somehow

everything is leaking and falling apart, and this isn’t the first time

look at what Norilsk

Nickel and the oligarch Potanin have brought things to

and I’ll repeat what I already said: I

believe that he, and Prokhorov as well, who

has already exited Norilsk Nickel

but nevertheless, they did this together

all of them should be stripped of their fortunes

for many, many years they made a great deal

of money; let them pay that

huge amount of money, or a significant part

of it, in order to

restore the surrounding environment and

rebuild this plant. Only in this way

can anything be done, but unfortunately as long as

Putin is in power, this won’t happen, because you

just send one truckload of money

to the Kremlin and that’s it — you buy, I don’t know,

new planes for Alina Kabaeva or Svetlana Medvedeva

and that’s how you solve your little problems

That’s exactly how it all works, that’s how everything

works.

Alexei, after swimming in the White Sea,

you prompted the authorities to focus on survival

in the Arctic — the so-called Arctic Hectare, a new

vision of Putin’s Russia. There really

is such a program, the Arctic Hectare

Before that there was the Far Eastern Hectare

program, which, it seems to me, was very

well conceived, but overall it did not

work very successfully.

Simply because of corruption. The idea is that

you can apply no matter where you

live — at first it was for residents of the Far East,

and then for all residents of Russia — and receive

a hectare of land there, in Ussuriysk

and now, presumably, it will be possible to get

a hectare of land in the Arctic, in Arkhangelsk

Region

or somewhere in the Komi Republic, something of that sort.

But it doesn’t work very well because

there are too many restrictions there, and you’re supposed to

receive it, and then after five years you’ll be able

to sell it. Why? Let people sell it right away.

One thing we certainly do have is plenty of land.

It needs to be brought into use, so it seems to me

that this program is the right idea, but it

needs to be implemented much more boldly,

of course, and all this enormous

amount of land should simply be given away

so that people use it in some way at least,

because nobody lives there, there are no

people there except for some

tiny pockets in the form of towns.

So this land simply needs to be brought

into use. Father Sergiy recorded

a video address. He’s a rather

aggressive priest — as you can see,

gray-haired, with a full beard, but

as I understand it, he’s actually a relatively young

man, and you’ve probably seen before

some of his statements, quite

aggressive and right-wing in tone, which he

made earlier. But now he has truly drawn

widespread attention to himself because

he was defrocked, and together with

some Cossacks (members of a traditional paramilitary social group) and a group of women, he seized

a convent, and they are holding

their ground there and, basically, attracting

media attention to themselves.

And in particular, this week he released

a rather absurd but striking

statement in which all sorts of things were mixed together:

some completely

antisemitic nonsense and attacks on

Putin and everything else under the sun. But this is very important.

This is not an entertainment video. Let’s

watch it — you can laugh at some of

it, of course,

but it is actually important in order

to capture

a very important phenomenon and, in fact, the consequences

of Putin’s policy of cultivating

such right-wing radicals. One minute and 45

seconds of Father Sergiy, who has weighed

Putin, found him wanting, and now demands

that Putin hand power over to him, in the name of the Father and

of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and

Dear fathers, brothers, and sisters, by the prayers of

the foremost apostles Peter and Paul,

I declare and propose to you, at the international

level,

that the President of Russia, Vladimir

Vladimirovich Putin, transfer his powers

to me, Schema-Hegumen Sergiy. In three days I will restore

order in Russia. You were given 20 years

to show who rules Russia. You, Mr.

President Vladimir Vladimir

and Patriarch Kirill Gundyayev

— all of you are hidden enemies of Russia. You have placed your flesh

above eternal life.

Lay down your powers, otherwise

you have been weighed and found wanting, and your days

are numbered. I await your repentance, together with

Patriarch Kirill Gundyayev, before me.

Tens of thousands come to me —

pensioners,

your fathers and mothers, whose pensions are five

times smaller than abroad and in the near abroad

— in Lithuania and Latvia

there pensions are up to 80,000 rubles (about the equivalent value in local currency),

and in Switzerland up to 200,000 rubles (about the equivalent value in local currency),

in countries that do not have as much wealth as

Russia.

People can barely make ends meet, and yet

Khabarovsk is prospering — that is your first

swallow (a first sign of things to come).

The swallows are already living all across Russia and

are even flying over the Kremlin.

I really liked this, this

particular phrase,

this cold turn of phrase: “weighed and found

wanting,” and the bit about the swallows in Khabarovsk. Why

is this important? Because Putin simply

has consistently pursued a policy of

strengthening right-wing radicals, and this was

His key idea was that there are certain

liberals running around

the streets of Moscow, and then there is the worker from Uralvagonzavod (a major Russian tank and railcar manufacturer)

who recorded videos saying, basically, “We’ll come ourselves,”

“and beat up the Muscovites,” and there were also some

priests who said, “Now we’re going to

deal with all those people over there dancing around,”

“we’ll crush them, in three days

we’ll restore order.” This was strengthening the right-wing

regime, and Putin really liked it, and he

would exclaim, “Oh, this is great,” and he gave them

airtime; he supported them in every possible way

because for some reason he thought that

these right-wing radicals, they, they

would always be fake. And I’m not even talking about

actual radicals here, but people

with right-wing views. But that Father Sergiy (a Russian Orthodox cleric), well,

he’s a typical person with right-

conservative views. There are plenty of people like that in

Russia, and there are plenty in America too—probably even more

than in Russia.

It seemed to Putin that this was very

useful: they would always be his toy, and

that this generalized “Father Sergiy” would always

be someone Putin could

put on display, and Father Sergiy would say,

“Yes, we’ll disperse all these people here, whether in

Khabarovsk or in Moscow. We’re for, for

Putin, for the Patriarch, for Shoigu, for Alina

Kabaeva, for the palaces, for Norilsk Nickel,”

but it turned out that no, they are not at all

necessarily fake right-wing

radicals. For years, they—and everyone else—were

told: “Guys, read the Bible, live according to

the Bible. Guys, read the Quran,” likewise

—and by the way, much more so in Dagestan (a republic in Russia’s North Caucasus),

for example—“Guys, read the Quran and live

according to the Quran.”

So a few years passed, and now

a huge number of people have appeared

who have raised their heads and said,

“We read the Quran and the Bible, and here

it says that people like you ought

to be thrown the hell out of the Kremlin altogether,”

“because here, in our holy

texts, it says that you are scoundrels, that

you are thieves,”

“that you are hypocrites, and the people of Khabarovsk

are right, and it says here that the poor

must be helped, and we don’t need your oligarchs.”

It’s just that Putin, since he himself is

of course an unbeliever, like the entire leadership

of the Russian Orthodox Church—they are unbelievers, absolutely

cynical people—it seemed to them that, since they had

this false patriotism and false

piety,

everyone else would have the same thing;

they would pretend that they

read the Bible and the Quran, but in reality they

would just be chasing money. But no—of course

some number of people

really did believe, or really did adopt

extremely reactionary positions, and now

even a reactionary—of course, I

understand that Father Sergiy, conditionally or literally,

doesn’t particularly

like, or doesn’t like at all,

Moscow liberals, and doesn’t like

certain

opposition figures like me—but even his

far-right position is absolutely

against Putin. They are all against them. And this

cultivated segment that they had nurtured,

that they had simply supported—like some kind of

“Surgeon,” remember him, that biker nicknamed Surgeon (Alexander Zaldostanov, leader of the pro-Kremlin Night Wolves), well,

he’s just some biker, not a real one,

a fake, a toy, living off

Putin’s payroll. But if you support people like that,

then sooner or later

the real ones will begin to rise up, and

the genuine ones will come out and say, “Well, so what

have you all been mumbling about so weakly?

You keep muttering something about

the need to restore order, so we

will come right now and restore order in three

days.” And for them, “restoring order”

means the following:

it consists of taking machine guns and

shooting everyone to hell right now, all of them.

And not just the

opposition figures,

but you too—all that Kremlin [__], we’ll

shoot you all, and the people of Khabarovsk are our

friends. This is the first swallow (a Russian idiom meaning the first sign of a coming change), a swallow

flying over the Kremlin. This is actually a very

important political process that

shows that Putin’s false position,

his hypocrisy, is finding less and less

support beneath it.

I mean, you can’t yet say, of course,

that the ground is slipping from under their feet, but

there is less and less of that ground,

and already even among the

radical right wing, among these kinds of

stern conservative men, you can no longer rely on them. And

look at how the army voted in the

last election.

If you look at the voting in closed

military towns, you will see that

the military voted for the constitutional amendments

less than anyone else—worse than ordinary

people, even in the Moscow region.

Take that same region: there are two places where support

for those amendments was at its

lowest.

One is Pushchino, a science town; obviously, there are

very smart people there, and they voted against them.

And the other is Krasnoznamensk, a closed military

town where my parents live, where

only military families live. These military people have had enough—right up to here,

you understand? Just like the workers at Uralvagonzavod.

They’ve had enough, just like Father Sergiy and all

the other people with conservative views.

They’ve had enough of Putin—right up to here. They can no longer

stand him, they don’t want to anymore. And that is why they are now already

speaking out against him directly. This is

actually very interesting, what

is happening, and it shows precisely that

Well, you simply can't sincerely

how to put it correctly, the sincere

passion, the sincere faith of people, you can't

always control it. Go and look

at the same Instagram pages and

public groups in Dagestan, where very

conservative people really do

hang out—right-wing conservatives there absolutely tear into

Putin in a way that no

liberal could even dream of, because

if you're a person with conservative, right-wing

views and you live according to Islam, then you

ought to hate this government with every

fiber of your being—and they do, of course.

And Putin and the new leadership of the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) want

to cultivate an absolutely

loyal, bootlicking church, or

bootlicking so-called conservatives, one

of whose symbols became a completely

astonishing priest from Belarus, where

exactly the same process is underway. And the video

was shared widely by many people. It really

made a big impression on me at first.

At first glance, here's a priest, supposedly trying to sort things out,

after all—a Russian man in a cassock,

a person who is presumed to be

a believer and therefore ought to speak on

the side

of his faith, on the side of his

parishioners—and instead he is simply leading

Christianity into the police van, literally

explaining that, from the point of view of faith,

the Bible, and Christ, a police van is a great

thing. Let's listen to 1 minute and 50

seconds. And now let's think

about how humble and meek we are in our

lives. Right now elections are coming up, and

many people come to me in horror

telling me that police vans are out on the streets,

snatching up people who want to express

their position, and throwing them in prison. They ask:

what, then, does Holy

Scripture say about police vans?

The Epistle to the Romans says:

the authority is God's servant

for your good. But if you do wrong,

then be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. The sword—

that means all those measures that are taken

in order to stop the lawless person. He,

that is, the representative of authority, is a servant

of God. Why are we surprised?

Wasn't it Christ who appointed him

as an instrument of His wrath against the one who does evil?

Or, in my translation: they are servants

of God and act for your good, but if you

do evil, then be afraid. So who

should fear the police van? The one who does

evil.

As for me, thank God,

I haven't ended up in a police van in the last 40 years,

well, I haven't managed to turn words into deeds

in such a way that

I would interfere with society's life. But there are

people who don't understand their own

behavior, and for them there are

such measures. What's so surprising about that?

There you have it: an ultra-servile lackey in a cassock comes out and

says that Jesus Christ is in favor of the police van. There are

many like that, of course, many in the ROC, but not all

can be like that, and these people hold

rather exotic and very often

completely unacceptable views.

But nevertheless, this shows that on the

right, things have completely ceased to be what they once were.

By the way, here's a question I get asked:

"Gamarjoba (Georgian for 'hello'), tell us about the criminal

prosecution of Spartak fans for

seeing off the team and blocking an empty

road a few years ago." All these

football clubs and fan firms also

used to be a stronghold of support for the authorities; fans were very often

hired to attack the opposition and so

on. Now they are genuinely among the most persecuted

groups in society, considering the very real

police repression. No opposition

activists experience the kind of

pressure that fans do—

Spartak fans and fans of many other teams. People are genuinely

being beaten; it's just total lawlessness, and

no one stands up for them, simply

no one. A few years ago, I no longer

remember whether it was Volgograd, there was a video

showing them being beaten with electric shock devices

just for walking along, and they were simply

being attacked by riot police. I filed a complaint

and demanded that at least that one incident be investigated. I am

quite far removed from all of this, and

that's why I suddenly discovered that I was, like,

the only person standing up

for them, for all of them. And even now, very few

people speak up or even know about it. But

football fans are simply being crushed,

jailed; they have no rights there.

Apartments are broken into, searches are carried out, and

well, that is also a fairly

conservative part of the population. These are also

people who are most often right-leaning, people with right-wing

views. The authorities hate them and fear them even

more—just as they fear Father Sergius.

I was asked about this earlier; the question was

how the case of the shaman differs from the case

of Father Sergius. The difference is that

there is one shaman, and there are rather few shamans in Russia,

whereas priests with views like this

Sergius are quite numerous, because they have been

cultivated in recent years. That is,

of course they will now try to

discredit him, imprison him, imprison the people

around him if necessary, and then

what happens next—no one knows how many such people will harbor

resentment, how many people will stand up for him.

No one understands this at all, and

here the authorities will have to crack down on

and jail people whom they have always

supported absolutely, directly.

Back then, their cannibalistic views

didn't bother the authorities at all—on the contrary,

it seemed great when they said that

Let's, like, go after those Pussy Riot people there.

Let's shoot them and torture them too, and...

When they... let's...

Let's shoot them, torture them, and while we're at it...

Maybe we should shoot everyone in the Kremlin too...

Hang them and torture them right away.

stopped liking it.

Lev... Voloshin, Voloshin is asking.

Alexei will tell us what happened at the hearing.

As for Ruslan's case... yesterday I...

got back from Arkhangelsk in the evening, and

the trip was successful in the sense that

for the first time in seven years, we finally managed

to see Ruslan—someone other than

the military was able, for the first time in four months,

to speak with him, exchange some

messages, and generally find out what was happening to him,

because

before that, we truly had no idea at all

where the guy was. I mean, we knew that he had been

taken away somewhere, and that he was serving somewhere

near a nuclear test site, and that he was located

in a place with absolutely no communications at all. That is,

even if he had a mobile

phone, it wouldn't work there.

There are no towns nearby, and getting there

is impossible by any means of transport except

a military helicopter—there's nothing else. But

for several months, we methodically

filed motions in court demanding that he be

brought in, and finally it happened. We

saw him and at least learned how

he is living. Ruslan is keeping his spirits up.

There's a four-minute video where I did a kind of

short interview on the

Navalny LIVE channel—you can watch it.

Let me show you 23 seconds of it.

The general idea is that

Ruslan, despite everything, talks about it rather

cheerfully, but in fact it's all quite

sad. Here's a minute and a half of the video.

This is where I live. Now please explain:

I heard you're living in a barrel—is that literally true?

A real, physical barrel?

Are there beds in it? Say that again—a barrel?

Like Diogenes lived in? What does it look like?

And your barrel—is it really just a barrel?

A literal barrel. There's nothing there.

It's like a huge tank—like an old fuel or kvass container.

Well, it's a very large barrel that used to hold

kvass, basically. I also

showed a couple of other guys' places too.

to me.

And around it—around the barrel—what is there?

Nothing at all.

The sea, mountains, and that's it—no real facilities.

There are some structures, and helicopters come in, but not much else.

Where do you get... where do you get

water? We go about two

kilometers (1.2 miles) for it.

Every three days.

We have a large container here,

and we go with buckets to fill it up.

That's our drinking water.

What's the nearest populated place?

About 270 kilometers (168 miles) away.

There are polar bears there too. They said they often have to

keep watch around this

barrel.

Recently, one of them started

hanging around there all the time—apparently because of fish.

There was fish there, and it came for

it.

Where do you get food? Once a month,

they drop it off to us from above—basically

without landing.

They send canned food, flour, sacks of things, and all that.

That sort of thing.

If you start googling nuclear

tests on Novaya Zemlya (a Russian Arctic archipelago), you'll

definitely come across this well-known fact:

that this is where they tested the so-called

Tsar Bomba—the largest

bomb ever detonated by

humanity—something like 58 or

100 megatons. And this is the very test site where that Tsar

Bomba was tested.

bomb.

If you want to know where Ruslan is living,

the bank employee who was abducted

and has now simply been isolated,

it's right there—not on the test site itself, but

at the nearest point to that nuclear site.

I think it's literally about 50

kilometers (31 miles) away.

It's right next to him, and we can't even

get a clear answer or understand what

the radiation level is there, because the answer is always:

"You know, the radiation level there

is

lower than in Moscow." But who measured it?

Who took those measurements?

Could they at least give him a dosimeter so he could check?

No—nothing is allowed, absolutely nothing.

And in that sense, of course, this is

a lawless situation,

orchestrated, of course, by the leadership

of the Ministry of Defense.

He was transferred to this site because he was

appointed diesel operator at a radio post.

To appoint some ordinary private as a diesel operator there—

well, clearly that would normally be decided at most by

the unit commander.

But he was assigned there by personal order

of the deputy army commander,

Major General Tseluy, who is stationed

2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) away from that place,

at headquarters. He

personally appoints Ruslan as a diesel operator there.

It's clearly a refined form of abuse.

It's cold in that barrel, there's condensation inside, and

water is constantly dripping onto your head.

It's endless. I separately asked him

to record a bit about this part specifically,

because it's not in the video you've already seen—so that he could

explain about the water, because I was struck by that.

At the hearing, the judge said, "You know,

well, first of all, guys, of course he..."

soldier

But there are only five soldiers and officers living there in total.

Just five people: three soldiers and two officers.

They are supposed to be guaranteed basic civilian

rights, and that includes

access to drinking water, among other things.

When your servicemen—officers and

soldiers—are drinking melted snow or hauling water

from a river, that is not how

the Russian army is supposed to function. Let’s

watch a minute and a half where Ruslan

explains specifically how they have to

get water. Please, tell us—how is it there?

There’s no drinking water there, so now, in the

warmer season, relatively speaking, we walk two

kilometers to the local river and fill up

three one-liter canteens and carry them back.

We bring them back to our shelter, and that lasts us about three

days. —Where to? —To the stash, the shelter.

There’s a big, big barrel there where we all

store it.

It holds 200 liters, but at one time we can

fill about 150 liters. We don’t drink that water;

we use it to wash ourselves and cook with it.

That is, it’s our only source

of water. And in winter, when I arrived there,

there was a lot of snow.

In case anyone doesn’t know, everything there is like that,

because the river is frozen, so you have to gather

and cut out chunks of snow for yourself.

You carry them to the barrel and melt them down until

enough builds up—basically, that’s your water for

washing, brushing your teeth, and cooking. We

cook using melted snow.

Of course, the first time I saw that, I thought: no way, that can’t be real.

But then—what else can you do?

There’s no water. That’s how it was in the summer, and

now we go to the river and collect water

there. Right now it’s about a kilometer away.

You haul 50 liters somehow, barely managing.

It’s just—I don’t know how to explain it to someone in a city.

Walking 2 kilometers with water—you see, I’m walking

thinking I’ll never drink water carelessly again,

so that it never runs out. But there

you have to—it sounds like something out of a survival movie.

Like DiCaprio in *The Revenant*—he was just surviving out there.

Honestly, it really is survival.

Because if you remember that scene—

he’s crawling through the snow,

he fought off a bear—but that’s nothing compared to

dragging the last chunks of snow when you’re exhausted.

It may sound wild, but it’s really hard there.

Right now we go as far as a kilometer for water.

As you can see, he’s clearly not losing his spirit.

He hasn’t lost it, and he tells it all

almost humorously—but this is real,

these are torture conditions, simply torture

conditions. On top of that, the person is being directly

threatened: if you do not withdraw

your lawsuits, things will get worse for you. He is being tortured

through sleep deprivation. He is assigned to duties

where he has to stand there for two days

in a row, which is directly prohibited, but they

do it like this: you stand there and are left for a full day,

and then after 23 hours they say, all right,

go sleep.

You sleep for two hours, then they wake you up again

and tell you to go back on duty for another 24 hours.

This is outright torture by

sleep deprivation. I also asked the judge that all of this

be formally recorded. They issued

a special ruling. Of course, we are not going to

just let all this go, because

this is abuse of our people

and, incidentally, of other servicemen

who are there absolutely without

any rights. And besides,

you know, talking about some kind of great

army and

our wonderful officers when, when

they are drinking melted snow is simply

absurd. Meanwhile, Shoigu (former Russian defense minister) is doing just fine—he

is a billionaire, his relatives are billionaires,

all the deputy defense ministers there are

among the richest people—billions are being

spent on that cathedral they built

in the Moscow region,

while somewhere on Novaya Zemlya (Russian Arctic archipelago), someone is hauling on his

back, uphill, concrete

and 50 liters of water because they simply

have nothing else to drink. So, anyway,

write letters.

Write to Videnny and to Artyom Ivanov, who was

also abducted in exactly the same way. We are now

talking about the secretary of the Doctors’ Alliance (a Russian labor union/activist group), who was taken to Chukotka,

and about Konovalov, who is also

somewhere in a training unit in Arkhangelsk.

Then they distribute them farther out. This is also a very obvious

and, by the way, one hundred percent

copy of the system from Belarus, in which

opposition activists

under 27 are simply abducted

and taken away somewhere. And that’s exactly what happened with Konovalov

and, as you can see in the photos, both of them were taken

somewhere far to the north, just like that.

They take you away, and when you show them your documents,

your papers—whether you are fit or unfit—nobody

cares at all. Ivanov has had

asthma since first grade, and he shouldn’t have been there at all.

He should not have been in Chukotka, and when

they were taking him there, he said: Guys, I have

all the documents, I’m unfit, I have asthma.

They said: Look, headquarters says here that you’re fit. Goodbye,

you’re flying to Chukotka. That’s how

the whole system works. And to wrap up, to wrap up,

about this Arkhangelsk tour of mine—there was an amusing

situation that perfectly shows

what the United Russia party is, and why

it needs to be fought. There, in one district, there was

some kind of mini-

scandal unfolding because

a City Duma deputy, Valentina

Surova, from United Russia, and as a result of some kind of

apparently internal

conflict within United Russia,

someone filed a lawsuit over whether

she could even legally be a deputy at all, and

whether she actually has a higher-education diploma.

the education credentials need to be checked, and during

the court hearing it emerged that this

person did not even have a complete secondary school

education. You know, it’s like in *Heart of a Dog*

(*Heart of a Dog*, a famous satirical novella by Mikhail Bulgakov).

Excuse me, but when did he ever serve in

sanitation? The person was the leader of the city branch

of United Russia with a fake higher-education diploma

and without any

evidence that she had even simply finished school.

And yet, you know what kind of annual declaration she has?

What an annual declaration.

80 million rubles in property (about US$1.1 million) and a house

in Cyprus. That’s how United Russia works.

You don’t need anything at all there. You can be

the dumbest person in the world

and not even have a school

education, but if you join this wonderful

party, you’ll get a job and you’ll have a house in

Cyprus and 80 million rubles (about US$1.1 million) in

family income. That, of course,

makes an impression. They kicked her out for now,

and we’ll see how the situation develops from here.

76,000 people are watching the Smart

live stream. Ask your questions about

Belarus—you’ve absolutely flooded me

with questions, of course, about what’s

happening there. What’s happening there, guys, is our

future. Look at what’s happening there

and understand:

we all need to understand that this exact same thing

will happen in Russia

if we do not, if we do not

go out into the streets, if we stay silent.

Because there too, things were pushed to this point. After all,

people tried to come out, and they were dispersed.

It’s frightening, you don’t want to go out again, and

it’s dangerous. But the only alternative is that

everything will just keep getting worse and worse and worse.

And when we see

well, what is happening right now

in Minsk—like that police officer who

runs out and starts, I don’t know, beating

people—it really looks like some kind of

fascist operation already.

They’re simply beating people there. Let’s watch 16

seconds of what was happening on the streets of

Minsk.

[music]

[applause]

At this point, they’re not even really detaining people there anymore—

they jump out of the vehicle first and

simply beat people.

Why are they beating people? Because

there is a political crisis. Lukashenko and Putin

run into a political crisis, and

the only response to that political

crisis is what? To beat people. Because

this kind of operation can be based

exclusively on fear—on taking

a relatively small number of

police officers and having them beat a relatively

small, still limited number of people, but

to intimidate and terrorize a very

large number of people. So that is why

power in all

authoritarian countries—Russia,

Belarus, anywhere—rests only on that. Well, of course.

I very much want

to emphasize first and foremost: they are trying to frighten people.

And of course there are these truly outstanding

examples—Stas Mikhailov, the Russian singer. But my God,

it was disgusting to watch. He

came to Minsk and has now, obviously,

been paid for publicly

supporting Alexander Lukashenko. Let’s

watch 38 seconds of how this [__]

literally runs off the stage to hug him and

earn his pathetic dollars. 38

seconds of shameful Stas Mikhailov.

Good evening, Alexei. Unwelcoming

Belarus—but I also must

say, may I come over to you?

Greetings, good evening to all of you.

Thank you for inviting me, thank you that we have such

celebrations. Don’t forget

Russian artists. You create such

beauty. Thank you, health and blessings to you.

Thank you, thank you for such celebrations

that bring three countries together

here, and people sing. Thank you.

Let’s celebrate this event today.

I’ll set the example—let’s sing together.

The rain is no obstacle, let’s try.

So, in other words, absolutely vile

toadying—which, as we can see, by the way,

is no longer especially effective. There he is,

Mikhailov, coming out in his little yellow suit,

saying, “Let’s hug, thank you,” but we

can see there is no particular support

left anymore. It’s all utterly disgusting, so

what gets used is

the only possible mechanism, namely:

not allowing people onto the ballot. And Viktor

Babariko, who is, well, judging by

some polls, the leader of the race—there

was a lot of intrigue over whether he

would be registered. In the end, no—he was removed.

They stated that he was being removed, that he was

removed not only because

he had foreign financing, but also because

he is allegedly the head of an

organized criminal group. Let’s

watch one minute.

Babariko directly created

and led the activities of an organized

criminal group made up of former and

current executives of

Belgazprombank.

Its members registered, in

the offshore jurisdiction of the British

Virgin Islands, with accounts in banks in

Cyprus as well as other countries, a network

of controlled so-called shell

companies. In addition to the above,

the State Control Committee

has reliable information about

facts involving the use by Babariko...

by a person being nominated as a presidential candidate

foreign financial assistance and so on

after the official dismissal from

the position of chairman of the management board

Belgazprombank, as well as after

the registration of the initiative group for

nomination for election as a candidate in

the interests of the election campaign

the latter used material and

other resources of the said bank. For reference,

this bank is more than 99 percent

owned by two shareholders: Gazprom

of the Russian Federation and Gazprombank

that is, it is almost entirely a foreign

enterprise

So you see, this is not even a court anymore, and yes,

not even the prosecutor's office alone — it’s just

this woman from the election commission, or I don’t even

know who she is — she just comes out and says

you know, this candidate

was supposed to be registered, but

I am informing you that he is the leader of an

organized criminal group

a bandit, and according to information from some kind of

oversight body

he possesses some kind of property, that’s it, and

they simply did not allow you onto the ballot, and you were

just declared, without any

evidence, without any trial

without anything at all — some woman with a

piece of paper declared you the leader of an

organized criminal group, but they

might even execute him tomorrow there in

Belarus — the death penalty still exists there

They can do absolutely anything, as long as

they keep him off the ballot and just

keep people in this kind of fear

of total shock, because on the one hand

people are actually being beaten in the streets, and on the other hand

people are watching all this lawlessness, but

it’s impossible to live with this lawlessness, because, well, how can you

they just take any person and accuse them

of any crimes whatsoever, completely

at random. This Baryiko was not allowed onto the

ballot. Valery Tsepkalo was also one of the three

candidates who enjoyed

broad support, and he too was barred from the election

on the grounds that, supposedly, there were not enough signatures

So far, only Sviatlana

Tsikhanouskaya has been registered

Well, we’ll see how the situation

develops further, but the most important thing

that happened today is that the campaign teams of

Tsikhanouskaya, Babaryka, and Tsepkalo

have united to continue the

struggle. This is a great photograph

of the wives of the unregistered candidates

and the arrested candidate — they have united

This really is a very good

and beautiful photograph

It has simply become a symbol of what is happening

Already there, the men are being jailed, and the wives

who were not used to being involved in politics are now — well,

of course, right now one really wants

to support all Belarusians, all

the candidates — really, just all the people

who are demanding some kind of justice

and hoping for something fair, well

sooner or later, I am sure, they will achieve

their justice, because, well

it is impossible — they are being beaten in the streets now

for absolutely no reason

Why are these people being barred from the election?

Simply because they do not want to let them in, that’s all

Instead of everything real and alive, they want to

show this clown, Stas Mikhailov (a Russian pop singer)

who was given a couple of bundles of cash and then

comes out and says, “Oh, let me kiss you all”

Nobody likes that

But people are being jailed and beaten, so, well

I support all the decent

good people in Belarus, and of course I want

to express my support for them

Alexei, a bill has been introduced in the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament)

providing for fines of up to 15 million rubles (about 15 million RUB)

for refusing to remove information

from websites. Alexei, do you think this

is connected to the refusal to remove the film *He Is Not Dimon to You*?

Of course, yes, absolutely, it is

another bill aimed directly at

the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation). Just today there was another

court hearing involving Zhdanov

Tomorrow there will be another hearing; he is already being

held criminally liable

for refusing to remove the film

*He Is Not Dimon to You*, which he cannot remove

because it is on my blog

and we are not removing any

of our investigations at all, I’m not

Guys, these fines are completely insane

This is directly connected. Andrei Fadina

asks: “Alexei, please comment on

the Kremlin’s reaction to the rallies in Khabarovsk”

What is happening really is very, very

interesting, and the Kremlin’s reaction

is quite panicked, and we

all understand why, because

what is happening in Khabarovsk

has undoubtedly come as a complete shock to

everyone, probably except the residents of Khabarovsk themselves

because something

completely unique has happened, after all

Previously, the arrest of a governor was a kind of

regular Putin trick to boost

his ratings, because, well, everyone knows

that all officials in our country are crooks

And of course, under Putin’s system, a senior

official cannot help but be a thief

so let’s arrest

a governor and raise Putin’s approval rating

Let’s say that we found this and that

on the governor, the deputy governor, the minister

some money, and the ratings also

go up, and then you can say, “See,

at last a real fight against

corruption has begun,” but here they ran into

a brick wall with Furgal, and now it is already completely

obvious that they simply made up some kind of super-

They say the most horrific crimes happened there.

That he killed a whole lot of people, and the residents

of Khabarovsk said, “Sorry, but no. We’re not”

buying any of this. First of all, we don’t

believe it, and second, show us some kind of

evidence.” And to this day, there is still no

evidence. You know, the trial over Furgal (former governor of Khabarovsk Krai)

is being held behind closed doors. And why is that?

What is this, a spy trial? Some kind of

secret witnesses? These murders supposedly happened 15 years ago.

There is not a single reason

why. Murder trials in Russia

take place in every court, three a day

sometimes. Unfortunately, there is a lot of lawlessness in Russia,

but here it turns out that everything

has to be closed off because the evidence

isn’t there. There is no evidence at all. That’s why in

Khabarovsk

people really did rise up, and it was unique.

It looked like they were standing up for an official, for a governor, but in essence

of course they were standing up for their own rights, for their right

to their own lives. Because they had defeated a United Russia candidate,

and then a United Russia man came in and, by other means,

tried to break everyone and tried

to force them.

But even so, people took to the

streets because they saw not just

a slightly different type of politician. Furgal,

an LDPR representative (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia), from what is probably

the most cowardly and corrupt party there is, but he was

somehow a little different. And people noticed

with what pleasure, and with what

shock, everyone is now sharing

videos of Furgal, and it becomes clear

why people support him. Well, because

he simply wasn’t such an

brazen, shameless face like all the others. One of

his videos, where he talks about

school lunches, shows him speaking simply like

a normal person. At 0:54, he says:

“What, have you all lost your minds? Don’t you understand? These are

our children. What money? How much are we spending

on meals

for low-income and large-family children? 106

million rubles a year (about $1.1 million). And what happens if

the parents can’t pay the extra amount?

Where does that compensation go? Tea and a bun? 11

billion rubles (about $120 million) we spend on ourselves,”

“and for the child, just part of a bun? Aren’t you

ashamed? First of all, let’s cut

everyone’s bonuses. If we don’t have money, we have no

right today

to pay such salaries to deputies,

officials, and everyone else. If parents can’t

pay, then we will pay

for the meals.”

And that’s what they jailed him for. The most extremist thing

he said was simply repeating exactly what

absolutely everyone says. If you

can’t buy a child tea, a bun, and

I don’t know, maybe a bowl of soup, then maybe

you shouldn’t be buying a car

for 7 million rubles (about $77,000). Maybe then

you shouldn’t be flying business class.

These aren’t huge sacrifices, and absolutely

everyone says this. But then a man whom

people elected governor comes out and says it all

out loud, and Putin and all of United Russia are

simply furious because the people

say, “Well, good for him, he said exactly

what we’ve been saying.” Let’s listen

to what he says about the problem of logging.

There’s endless

waffling on about it:

they keep saying everything is being cut down and shipped to China, but then

the governor comes out and says simple,

ordinary, human words: “Wonderful.

You live there, and they came in and cut everything down,

wrecked the hills and the lake, and there’s no one responsible?”

“No, you’re mistaken. We’re creating a commission. All

the relevant agencies, including

the Ministry of Natural Resources,

the forestry administration, units of

the security department,

as well as federal bodies that oversee

forest use,

are planning to go out there together with equipment,

with technical tools, in order to assess

the clear-cutting that was carried out, and

also to

take water samples to determine how badly

it has been polluted. Who signed the permit

for the logging? Who? Who actually signed

the permit? The entire forestry administration signed it.”

“What do you mean, the forestry administration?”

“Forestry administration isn’t a surname. I want the names of specific people.”

And this concerns not only this one place.

That’s why I gave the order: not a single

cubic meter of timber

from so-called sanitary logging is to be sold

to God knows whom anymore.”

You can call this

populism or whatever you like. You could

say he’s just performing for the camera,

playing the role of a tough governor.

But he was saying basic

things that every one of us

repeats. At Putin’s meetings, it’s always:

“Well, something was cut down, some agency is to blame.”

Yes, the agency is to blame. Well then, let’s

conduct an additional review, let’s

issue instructions to look into it.” But here

the whole country looks at this and says:

“What is there to look into? Sure, let’s

look into it, but there’s already some

person who signed all of this, and he and

his boss took money for that signature.”

Everyone understands that, including children.

At Putin’s level, and at all the other

levels of United Russia, it’s obvious that they

didn’t take money for this one thing, they took it for that, and we took it

for this—what’s the point of splitting hairs?

“Let’s issue instructions.” Then those instructions

go under supervision, and later are taken off

supervision, someone writes up a piece of paper, and

it all ends in nothing. But then Furgal comes out

and says: “Don’t talk nonsense. There’s a surname, there’s a name,”

“and I forbid timber from being sold through”

about so-called sanitary logging, and people look at that

and say: that's right,

right, we voted out the United Russia candidate,

that's the main message being heard in

Khabarovsk

and the Kremlin really doesn't like it: people

voted out the United Russia candidate and saw that it

was absolutely the right thing to do. Then

they jailed the man who beat the United Russia candidate, and now everyone

is already coming out with political slogans, and

this panicked reaction from the Kremlin

is connected precisely to the fact that the main

slogan heard on the streets of Khabarovsk

is what you're about to hear in

these 27 seconds.

[applause]

There's none of that anymore—none of this 'let's'

'get on our knees before Putin,' or

'let's appeal to him, let's ask,'

'let's do something'—there's nothing like that

even close to it anymore. What is happening there is a purely

political understanding, a citywide awareness

of how this system works. And in response to Putin's

statement that Furgal is a criminal, they

chant: 'Putin is a criminal himself.'

'Putin is a thief himself,' and they are chanting slogans

that used to be chanted

only by human rights activists. For a week now, all of Khabarovsk

has been coming out to rallies every single day,

blocking roads and chanting for a fair

trial. Let's listen to 40 seconds

of chanting, when all the residents—just ordinary

people—are chanting for an honest court.

[applause]

[applause]

And this is already day 16, meaning

this is not the first day of protest, when on

Saturday there was an enormous number of people.

This is truly the biggest demonstration

in the entire history of the Russian Far East.

Probably—probably nothing like this

happened even during the war or the revolution;

never before has there been a gathering of people this large,

protesting and making political

demands. There simply has never been anything like it—not in

Vladivostok, not in Khabarovsk before,

in fact nowhere in the entire Far East has there ever been

such a number of people.

Interestingly, even the police there

reported 12,000 people, although

there were far more.

And when the federal authorities found out,

they chewed out the local police, like, 'Why did you give such

a high number?' But it was simply impossible

to hide it. It would be like if in Moscow

600,000 or 700,000 people came out

into the streets—really.

An extraordinary rally. And what's more, this

isn't just in Khabarovsk—Khabarovsk,

Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Vanino, the settlement of

Vanino—here are 30 seconds of what those rallies look like.

[music]

[music]

[music]

That's why the Kremlin is in shock. Go on,

now try saying they're all 'liberals'

or that they're all bought off by someone, or that they were

bused in. Of course, they started saying that

right away—naturally, the talking points

were immediately circulated.

First they said our штаб (campaign headquarters) organized everything, then

they started saying that the rallies in

Khabarovsk

were made up of workers bused in from the Amurstal plant,

which belongs to Furgal, or Furgal's

people. A well-known internet propagandist

started pushing that line, but

they didn't even check that Amurstal

is located in Komsomolsk-on-Amur,

a couple hundred kilometers away from all this.

But even that doesn't work, because there are

so many people there. And when you just see

ordinary people walking down the roads, it doesn't

look at all like some Moscow liberals

who got carried away, or members of Navalny's

headquarters. The overwhelming majority of the people

who are taking to the streets in Khabarovsk

and other cities in the Far East

have never in their lives watched any of my

programs. They're just ordinary people who

right now

are simply standing up for what they believe is right. They

live very far away, and there has always been

this sense that they are separate,

and then there is this other Russia—a Russia that

has basically abandoned them and, of course, does not help

them at all.

But then that United Russia, that rest of

Russia, comes in and devours your

governor, and people take to the streets

simply to say: 'Have you completely lost it?

Because we get nothing here,

our salaries are tiny,

we are far from Moscow, we derive absolutely no

benefit, none of the fruits

of our natural resources, and on top of that

you came and took the man we elected—you

just brazenly, lawlessly stole him away and took him

to Moscow, and now you're trying him behind closed doors, accusing him

of murdering people. Well, it's obvious that

now you're going to lock him up for 25 years

or even give him life for some

made-up murders that nobody has

seen and that no one will be shown.' That's why the Kremlin is

in shock. Of course, they are trying various tricks. First of all, they are putting pressure on the LDPR

(Liberal Democratic Party of Russia), and

because they forced it

to issue a statement saying that, well,

they are against certain protest actions;

they don't object to some things, but they have already

put Furgal, of course, in a very vulnerable

position. He's sitting in a cell, and they

can do anything they want to him. And of course

someone is going to him right now, I think, at this

very moment, and explaining: 'Dear

Governor, choose: either right now we

give you 15 years for these invented murders,

or, if people don't...'

they’ll disperse, and you’ll keep supporting them, you...

you’ll get 25 years, or maybe you’ll just...

one day

slip in that cell, damn it,

fall headfirst into a noose and hang yourself, or...

your veins will somehow get slit, or something else will happen.

So of course they’ve already backed him into a corner, and his whole...

team there is being intimidated, arms are being twisted,

they’re being pressured and forced

to make statements saying that they do not...

they thank people for some things, but say everything must stay within the law.

Let’s listen to this 30-second clip.

Furgal’s representative

Sergei Walter said he has absolutely nothing to do

with those demonstrations by residents

of Khabarovsk Krai (a region in Russia), his voters there. And so he...

thanks them, but today he stated in court

that he does not approve of these mass

protests, since he is the governor of the region

and believes that his voters should

conduct themselves within the bounds of current

legislation. Well of course—how else could you...

approve of them if you could actually be

stabbed to death in your cell the next day if...

you say, “Guys in Khabarovsk, thank you...”},{

keep coming out.” But fortunately in...

people in Khabarovsk already understand everything anyway, but...

they understand perfectly well that he can’t say anything

so they keep coming out, and...

they’re absolutely right to do so.

Of course, there’s a difficult problem there right now.

Because, as usual, these rallies

begin—as they did for us in 2012—and then what?

What is this supposed to end with? They shouldn’t...

just keep growing; they shouldn’t...

storm the administration building and the Kremlin?

That’s what they’re waiting for. Of course, they’d love to simply

fly in some OMON riot police

and disperse everyone.

Because sure, you can disperse 20,000 people there,

20,000 people,

but what if tomorrow 80,000 people come out and they

smash everything there to hell

and back? What if they simply

take over the airport and don’t allow

any riot police to fly in, because there

people have genuinely risen up—it’s real

people.

No matter how much all this very

ridiculous

Kremlin propaganda lies about how, supposedly,

I received a million euros to organize

these rallies in Khabarovsk,

it only works against the Kremlin.

Because people in Khabarovsk

look at all this and they genuinely

get furious, because they most likely have no idea who

Navalny is and probably

haven’t even heard of him, but they know why they are coming out.

They know why their neighbor is coming out, but...

then some Kremlin gang, I don’t know,

some lapdog journalist paid next to nothing,

Oleg Lurie,

puts out a whole “investigation” claiming that

all of this was done with money from

Western sponsors. Let’s watch this—

9 seconds. And one more point:

Khabarovsk, Khabarovsk Krai,

is now being used

also to demonstrate to their Western

handlers—investors, sponsors, rather, not

investors but sponsors—they’re using it to

show them: “Look, guys, what we

can do. Elections are just around the corner, we’ll give them...

...all of this.” It’s muscle-flexing.

Even the opposition is demonstrating to its

masters, to all kinds of success stories and foundations:

“Give us money, look how great we are,”

“look what we can do, how we can stir things up.”

Now it’s September—any fool will believe it and give them money.

They believe it and give, because it’s such a nicely drawn

picture: people, demonstrations, all of this,

the transformation of a governor who is a murderer

—an alleged murderer—into a political

prisoner. Naturally, they

are demonstrating strength and asking for

big money.” Of course, all of this works

against the Kremlin, but they simply don’t know how

to do anything else. All they know how to do is

simply disperse people—which in Khabarovsk

is a bit scary for them.

Fake trials, which also won’t work in Khabarovsk

right now. That’s why they

took Furgal away

to Moscow. And then there’s just endless lying.

So they lie like this, and the whole Far

East and all of Khabarovsk are watching and saying:

“You Moscow thugs, damn it, you’re just...

lying. I’m going out, my neigh—what

Western sponsors? What foundations? What are you

even talking about?” That’s what people are saying. That’s exactly why

they are not leaving.

They’ve already stayed on the streets for 6 days, because

it’s impossible to put up with these lies. Everyone knows

why each person in Khabarovsk Krai is coming out.

Everyone knows that this video I showed you

last time—the audio, basically—

yes, in the rest of Russia, in

Moscow, people didn’t know about it, they hadn’t

known about it before. But in Khabarovsk Krai

everyone knew perfectly well, because the campaign

against Furgal has been going on for several

months, and they’ve been pressuring him because his

approval rating is higher than Putin’s. Let’s listen again

to these 50–55 seconds, which

perfectly explain why this man is now

sitting in prison on murder charges. What

is happening today is already beyond the pale,

honestly—simply beyond even

the bounds of reason. They’ve simply started to

destroy the ratings—the ratings of the authorities,

the rating of the government, the rating of the president.

And they’re doing it deliberately, properly,

professionally—people brought in from

Moscow. And anyway, I didn’t quite understand...

that he isn’t interfering, because you

said that a movement is being formed: “Let’s defend

the governor.” So the population is defending you...

Wouldn't you like to see what's happening—you and...

Well, that's because people are coming...

Just a second, because if you look at the numbers, the story...

looks very...

the burden on the president's approval rating...

is falling, and accordingly anyone seeing such a...

policy—not me, not Reksane, not Alexander...

or anyone else. Though, as you heard, the presidential envoy...

Trutnev spoke a bit ironically...

saying, here it is, the “Let's Defend...” movement

the Governor” movement. But now, probably,...

they're no longer speaking ironically, after he saw...

the real thousands of people who are coming out and...

defending themselves. What should the residents...

of Khabarovsk do? People in Khabarovsk...

and the Khabarovsk region must not give up; they need to...

look for other forms as well, maybe...

a strike. Actually, it would be great to...

try at least a one-day...

citywide, regionwide walkout...

a strike, or some other formats...

to try, because Putin, obviously...

what he's doing is waiting for everything to...

run out of steam. It's simply impossible to keep...

going out into the streets forever: you go out once, you go out...

twice, you go out 22 times...

but then people seem to get tired of it. The example of Shiyes...

shows perfectly that people went out there...

again and again; it seemed hopeless, and already...

it all looked marginal, like some kind of...

tent camp. By the way, I...

spoke there a bit with the defenders of...

Shiyes; they told me how...

hard, difficult, and unbearable it was—everyone was already...

tired of defending it, and it seemed...

pointless. But still, they stood there, and...

they achieved their goal anyway. That's why people very often...

write to me asking why you can't take...

the leading role there, your headquarters. But we...

can't, because we can't be...

more Catholic than the Pope. In any case...

there is Furgal.

If we jump in there now, then...

they'll force him to howl and say that...

you know, first of all, I am of course...

outraged that Navalny is doing something there...

in the Khabarovsk region. I want to say that...

this is all—and that together with him we killed those...

15 people, because of course the LDPR (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia)...

and all the rest of this whole power structure, they...

can be made to do all sorts of things and...

say absolutely anything.

So in any case, the main political...

force there, and the ones tightly controlling...

the message, can only be local people and...

some people who are part of...

Furgal's team. And he himself, despite all...

the situation, though we understand perfectly well that...

well, he's simply being beaten down.

If he really starts to...

coordinate anything, then... So simply...

dear residents of Khabarovsk, dear...

residents of the Russian Far East, you simply need to...

stay persistent.

Look for ways to supplement what's happening...

with some new methods. It seems to me...

that an attempt, for example, may or may not...

work out—but to organize some kind of...

citywide strike, where people simply...

show up for work but do not work...

stop all work, try to...

shut down all institutions for one day or two...

days—things like that should be attempted...

because otherwise...

they'll just talk it to death, drag everything out gradually...

expanding and expanding the initiative group...

and gradually, through lies, deceit, and meanness...

they will try to tear everything apart...

to wreck it all. But right now, the main thing is that truth and...

the people are on your side.

The residents of Khabarovsk are in the right, and no matter how much...

they lie, they cannot drown out one thing. I wanted...

to show you at the end—the program has been going for an hour and a half...

already, 85 people are watching...

live—44 seconds...

the very video, out of all the ones that...

I liked most. It's people...

residents of neighboring settlements near...

Khabarovsk, walking to the rally, and visually...

visually...

if you turn off the picture—rather, turn off...

the sound—and don't tell you where this...

is happening, you'd watch it and say: well, this is...

some kind of pro-Putin rally, people marching for Putin...

most likely some kind of Putin squads...

these are elderly women, or simply...

women going to some demonstration...

they were probably paid 200 rubles each...

to go and rally for Putin. In other words...

everything has turned out...

completely differently. And absolutely ordinary...

people, whose support...

real or imagined, United Russia once prided itself on...

United Russia and Putin—now they...

are absolutely against him. Everyone, everyone is against...

him. What it looks like there, what those...

44 seconds show, is truly some kind of...

uprising people that Putin...

no longer has. He has lost these people...

completely.

And looking at this video, no one will say anymore...

that these are the State Department, “liberasts” (a derogatory Russian term for liberals), liberals...

some kind of Westernizers, or anyone else, because...

this is the most genuine, plain...

Russian people, coming out of their apartments...

and walking along the highway...

in order to defend their governor. Forty-four...

seconds.

Let's open it...

[music]

and, and...

Good Lord...

You see, they're just walking down the street...

they simply don't know what to do with them, and...

they just lie—telling them to go away because...

some school, some technical college, whatever—but the people keep going...

they keep going and going. Well done...

They're simply an example for all of us. That's why I...

I’m certainly impressed.

by the residents of Khabarovsk—right now,

the whole country is watching you. I was in

Arkhangelsk.

I told them, “You are defenders—well done.”

I mean, it’s really hard to compare with you.

In terms of protest activity in general, and your

passion in defending Russia—and they told me,

“Well, of course, right now no one can

compare with Khabarovsk.” That’s the plain

truth.

Moscow, St. Petersburg, Arkhangelsk—all cities, the whole

country is watching Arkhangelsk. We wish

you good luck.

And we’ll help however we can. Thank you

very much to everyone who watched the broadcast. See

you on Thursday. Bye.

[music]

[laughter]

[music]