Navalny at 20:18. Broadcast #004, 11.05

[music]

Hello, everyone. It’s 8:18 p.m. in Moscow. This

means that in our channel’s studio, live on

air, is Alexei Navalny.

My appearance today is more

traditional: no green egg, no

green face, sorry, no cool

eye patch. I hope this won’t

hurt our channel’s viewership too

much. On the other hand, I do

have a small black eye, although these

days a black eye isn’t exactly the kind of thing

that draws much attention on air.

I’m extremely

glad that I was able to go on air today

at the time I was supposed to

go on air. I made a special effort

to get back to Moscow on time. First of all, I want to

thank all of you once again

for all your support. Your words

of encouragement, doctors’ contacts, and everything

else you told me and wrote to me about.

Thank you very much. I’m very glad to have the chance

to answer questions on today’s broadcast,

especially since I’ve read an enormous

number of absurd stories about myself,

conspiracy theories about how exactly

I left the country, how

of course I wouldn’t return to Russia,

or wouldn’t be allowed back into Russia, or

something else. There were huge numbers of

headlines saying Navalny had left and

of course he wouldn’t come back. And when I

left, well, I knew everything about my own situation. I

was reading it all, but I knew what my plan was.

I knew I would have the operation and return

to Russia as soon as possible. And I

looked at all those headlines

spread by Kremlin-controlled media. And it was very

interesting to me, because, well,

in that way they were showing their

hopes. And their hope, of course, is tied

to the idea that people will leave Russia.

People who think critically about

what is happening. People who

look for independent views, people

who are ready to spread

independent opinions. People who

fight corruption, people who

want to go out to rallies and protests. Ideally,

they would all leave. After all, it’s impossible

to jail every one of them. So they were practically dreaming that

I’d go off to Barcelona, have the

operation, and then say: "You know,

I’ve realized, of course, it’s all so hard, they’re

throwing brilliant green antiseptic dye at me, and

there are threats from all sides." So I thought,

probably it would be best to stay somewhere

abroad. But of course not. This is my

country, and here I am, in fact,

an absolutely law-abiding citizen. I,

unlike the Kremlin, conduct myself entirely

within the law. I believe I am right in everything

I say. I tell the truth. And I do not

understand why I should leave. I do not

understand why, uh, anyone

thinks I might leave because I’m afraid of

them—people who break the law,

who steal our money, who

rig elections, who lie on the

news. They should be afraid of us. They

are afraid of us, in fact. So

I have no plans to leave, and never

have had any, and never will. Over the last five years, well,

look, in the last five years, for three years I didn’t

leave Moscow at all. For five years I was

banned from traveling abroad. For one of those years

I was under house arrest. So

the degree to which my freedom was restricted

has varied quite a bit. Right now I have

an international passport; maybe tomorrow

they’ll take it away from me. But that cannot in any way

affect my views, my

goals, or my attitude toward the current

government, or my determination, my

desire to change this country for the better.

So no, uh, I will not leave, and I think

all those guys who are making life difficult for us here

should be the ones to leave. Russia does not belong

to Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov, who has once again

made the list of

London billionaires. It does not

belong to Timchenko, a citizen of Finland,

it does not belong to citizen

Putin; it belongs to us, and I am here

on far clearer

legal and moral grounds than

all of them. That’s why I came back and, uh,

quite normally, by the way,

crossed the border. There were absolutely no problems

at all. It even seemed to me that the young woman

at border control was actually rather glad

to see me back. She said, "Oh, so it’s

you who’ve returned." I said, "Yes, that’s

right, everything’s fine."

So I never had any such plans.

And I hope none of you, none of

the normal people, my supporters of course,

seriously thought that I might

leave.

I received a huge number of questions

about whether I now have the right,

having gone to Spain for treatment,

to criticize officials for

going abroad for medical care. I just wanted

to begin the program with

that. There were a lot of snide

comments. People dug up some of my old

tweets where I said to one

official—yes, I see Kiselyov (a pro-Kremlin TV host) has come up—

why are you going to Israel? Yes,

and I criticized another one, some

Yumashev. I said he was going

abroad somewhere. And now they’ve pulled out those tweets

and are saying: "So, Navalny,

you went to Spain yourself, and now you

have no right—uh, no moral right

to criticize officials for the fact that they

travel abroad or get medical treatment abroad

or something else." What I want to say is

this: after

I went to Spain and had

surgery there, and saw how

Western medicine actually works with my own eyes

in a very direct, everyday

way, I’m not just going to criticize

officials — I’m going to tear into those

officials who support

Putin’s regime here, while going abroad for treatment

to foreign countries. Because I would like

every citizen of this country, every

single person, to have access to healthcare

at the level of, say,

Spain’s. I want everyone here

to be treated properly. And officials who

vote here for the budget, who

vote for this government,

which has been systematically destroying healthcare

all these years, while they themselves go

abroad somewhere — of course they should be

criticized, but that part is normal. Any

person wants what’s best for themselves and their

loved ones. And if they have the opportunity,

and they want to get treated, they go abroad.

Fine, let them go, if it so happens

that our healthcare system currently has

problems. But if at the same time, here at home,

you passionately insist that

everything is great here, if you’re a member of United

Russia (the ruling political party) and systematically reduce, year after year,

healthcare funding, well,

then of course you should be held accountable for that

— absolutely called out for it.

Sorry, but first and foremost

what needs to be criticized is hypocrisy, because

you go on television talking about how

dear citizens of Russia, we have such wonderful

healthcare, everything is so great here. Thank you

to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and then tomorrow

you go to Israel for treatment. That’s where the

problem lies. Of course that deserves

criticism. Russia has

wonderful doctors, but overall

healthcare is, of course, in a

catastrophic state. Do you know

how much a doctor earns, for example, at

the eye disease center I went to?

14,000 rubles (about a modest monthly salary). You understand, a doctor may

have golden hands, may be a

brilliant physician — and there are people like that there,

a great many good doctors. By the

way, my Spanish professor,

who operated on me, knows

the people who treated me here. There is this

well-known ophthalmology dynasty,

the Kasparovs. And he said: "Yes, I know them

." He sent them his regards and said that

they treated me correctly here. But if

healthcare

is underfunded, if the supplies

are poor, if the medicines are not of the right

quality, if everything is falling apart, if

hospitals cannot properly pay for

utilities and municipal services, there will be no real healthcare here. And

so there’s no need for hypocrisy; what’s needed is to

work on the things that affect this

government, including putting pressure on it so

that it increases

healthcare funding to the

levels, to the standards that exist in

European countries. I was treated there in

a public clinic, actually. As a

foreigner I paid there, but it was, in

fact, a state clinic,

as far as I understood from them. Damn, it

looked like a museum. It just

didn’t look at all like any hospital I’d ever

been in. I’ve been in

different hospitals, including

private ones here in Moscow. And I’m

sure the same thing can and should

exist in Russia. And we have enough money

for it — they’re just cutting

that funding. Moscow officials, with

the city of Moscow’s two-trillion-ruble budget,

every year they cut

funding for both healthcare and

education. It’s the same with education.

That’s why I believe that,

without question, I still have the moral

right to criticize officials who

go abroad for treatment. I still

have the moral right to criticize

officials who send their

children abroad for

treatment. Because by

going there themselves or sending

their children there, they are doing

something good for themselves, but something very bad

for the rest of us here, because they support

the system that does not allow people to get

proper treatment. In general, the way

Russian healthcare is structured, we have

maybe half a percent of people, or

even 1 percent, who can

afford treatment abroad. You can

go to somewhere like Israel,

Switzerland, Spain — anywhere — and

pay for yourself there. That is just a

tiny number of people. There are also

another two or three percent of people

who have doctor acquaintances

or can pull strings (use personal connections)

or they simply got lucky and know

good doctors, and actually end up

receiving quality medical

care here in Russia itself. But

all the rest,

95 to 98 percent of people, receive medical

services that are simply

catastrophic — catastrophically

unsatisfactory. Simply

awful. And this is not some personal

fantasy of mine; it follows directly from, among other things,

life expectancy in

Russia. So yes, this needs to be criticized, it needs to be

to keep exposing the hypocrisy of all these

guys. Uh, yes, but what I regret is

that I can’t have a proper

operation here in Russia. I have to have

it in Spain. I want it to be possible

to have it done in Russia, but for now it can’t

be done here, so I’ll keep going there. Yes. A few more

questions that I’ve been asked. How did it

happen? Here’s a question from Gleb Likhachyov: tell us,

how did it happen that you were given a visa precisely

at the moment when there was an urgent

need to travel abroad? Could it

be that you really are a Kremlin agent after all? Well,

first of all, the Kremlin doesn’t issue visas. And, uh, I’ll

combine this with a question from Probki TV.

Why was Navalny given a foreign passport at exactly this time

when for five years he hadn’t been

given one? People, don’t read Telegram channels

with political analysis. Today, after I’d already

come back, they gave me some of

this nonsense to read, the stuff that’s been written.

Some articles by political

columnists. So, let me tell you how

it really happened. It’s all pretty

simple. So, on the second day my

treating ophthalmologist said that

things were bad and I needed to go

abroad, especially if it turned out I needed a

corneal

transplant. So, basically: somehow get yourself a

foreign passport. Well, how exactly

could I get a foreign passport?

No way. And yet, under the law—well, for five

years they really didn’t give me one. I, uh, I

read the law. It says in the law that

there is an emergency procedure for sick people.

It’s available to everyone—well, it’s available

to patients. You write a special

application, and within three days you get

a foreign passport. So I pursued two

routes. I had already been suing over the fact that

I’d been denied a foreign passport several

times. And my current case is before the

European Court of Human Rights.

So my lawyer filed a request with the

ECHR, asking it to issue an urgent order

to Russia to, uh, issue me a

foreign passport within three days. That was

move number one, so to speak. Move number two: I simply

sat down at this very, well, exactly this

computer and wrote an email to Mikhail

Fedotov, the human rights ombudsman,

saying: “Dear Mikhail Fedotov,

uh, here’s the situation: I need a foreign passport,

I’ve been illegally denied one, and I’ve lived with that for five years,

but now I need to travel

abroad because I need to have an

operation. Please put a stop to these

illegal actions and give me a

foreign passport.” Fedotov wrote back to me: “Well,

okay, write the same thing addressed to Vaino,

the head of the presidential administration.” I sent

the same letter to that same email address. Uh,

I don’t know what they did internally after that,

but in parallel, alongside all this, I

went to the regular, what’s it called,

multifunctional public services center. In a post I made

for you, I wrote that it was the FMS, the migration

service. That really was a mistake.

That’s not what it is. It’s now called the

multifunctional center of the Yuzhnoportovy District

nearest to my home.

I submitted all the documents there, after which the

next day they called me from that

multifunctional center and said:

“Come in and pick up your foreign passport.” I don’t

know what was going on behind the scenes. Whether

Fedotov helped me there, or Vaino helped me,

or whatever was happening internally—I

really did send an email to the

human rights ombudsman so that they would,

within an entirely

lawful procedure, without departing in any way from

the requirements of the law—on the contrary,

by complying with the law, uh, within

this procedure for issuing an emergency

medical passport—carry it out. And they did.

Uh, I got it and left. Well,

probably, probably—I don’t know—maybe

someone in the Kremlin

felt ashamed that they had splashed me with

brilliant green antiseptic. Though I doubt they felt

ashamed,

probably. Uh, well, maybe they

thought they didn’t want to bear

responsibility for me ending up

without an eye, or something like that. Again, whatever

was happening internally, I have no

idea. I doubt that anything

particularly extraordinary was happening, because

as I said, the procedure for issuing a

foreign passport for medical purposes

is laid out in the law, and I think it’s

not all that rare. It happens. So I

officially submitted my documents to the

multifunctional center and officially

received it. That’s the story. And all these

stories about the Kremlin being behind me, or behind

this side or that side—well, it’s all just

made up by people who need to

write a column. And you think there’s

some kind of elaborate conspiracy,

one side, two sides, some kind of

Kremlin towers (rival factions within the Kremlin), when in fact some guy is just sitting at home

thinking, “This idiot has to turn in

tomorrow’s column.” So he

sits there writing down his own political nonsense,

and then you go and read all of it.

Evgenia Parker: “A hospital in Russia is

a nightmare. My grandmother was recently in one; the walls are

crumbling, there’s no treatment. Vendors walk into

the rooms of seriously ill patients. Rudeness

from the staff is constant—just awful, in a

word. Well, that’s exactly how it is. It is. And no one

is going to fool us. You know, no matter how much, uh,

no matter how much officials tell us

that Russian healthcare is improving

or that it’s good

Russian healthcare, but we’ve been

in those hospitals ourselves, so we know

perfectly well what it’s like, and no one will ever

be able to convince us that this is normal. And we

know there are excellent doctors — there really are.

But if a doctor’s salary is

14,000 rubles, then they simply cannot work

properly. What they are doing is

surviving. What they are doing is

trying to earn extra money somewhere, to do

something else on the side. They cannot

focus either on research or on treating patients.

So yes, of course, you are absolutely

right. Alexei is asking me,

Alexander: "Will you respond to

reports by Kremlin media outlets that

are waging an information war against you?"

But they have been waging an information

war against me for quite a long time. Well, this is how I

answer them. We launched this channel. I don’t

know how many people will watch me.

I think quite a lot. I think this particular program

will have more viewers

than some Kremlin print

media outlet. Fewer than television, but

more than any print publication.

So I am answering them. And that is, in

a certain sense, what our confrontation

is all about. They lie about us

endlessly, and they lie endlessly about

the state of the country. We try

to spread the truth, so, well,

we respond as best we can. I also noticed,

I made a note of several topics for myself. There was something written about

medical treatment for officials, about a foreign passport,

whether I’ll come back, whether they’ll let me in or not. It seems to me

that I’ve answered all of those questions.

If I haven’t answered something, so that there are no complaints

that I somehow

left something unsaid about any ties I may have with

the Presidential Administration, write with the hashtag

Navalny 2018, and I

will answer. What do you say about Life? Today they

wrote a lot about your stay in a

luxury hotel. Well, I stayed in a hotel — where else

was I supposed to stay? Yes, I stayed in a decent

hotel in Barcelona. Yes, I stayed in one

in that sense. Life’s big exposé. Uh, I

found it very

funny. They wrote that I had gone to

Barcelona with my family and was, supposedly, spending

a glamorous summer vacation. I went to Barcelona

with my wife and with a doctor, an

ophthalmologist. She went with me — my attending

physician — and she helped me a great deal. She was actually present

during the operation itself. And my children were

very upset when they saw

those headlines, because today they were

actually off on some kind of

school trip around Moscow in raincoats together

with their class, reading articles about how

they were sunbathing in

Barcelona. And as for the church and politics, yes,

Sokolovsky. I was flying out today and watching

all those live broadcasts.

I said this on the previous program, and I’ll

repeat it now: of course, this is absolute

and utterly impossible

obscurantism. And I’ll repeat again that

the judge who brought criminal charges against Sokolovsky

is

a criminal herself. This is a textbook case of bringing

criminal charges against someone known

to be innocent. Sokolovsky could have said

whatever he wanted. I watched

some of his videos, and some

of them are fairly unpleasant. He speaks

very harshly. He is a militant atheist.

A kind of preaching militant atheist.

But the whole country was like that 30

years

ago. We live in a country where demolishing

churches and blowing up churches was considered a good

thing. We live in a country where all of us

were — well, not all of us, but at least people

my age and a bit younger —

Young Pioneers (the Soviet communist youth organization). Every summer I went

to visit my grandmother, and at school I would take

a little book from the atheist library and

try to prove to my grandmother that God did not exist. We

live in a country where, not so long ago — well,

there was this absolutely central

famous line attributed to Yuri Gagarin about how

he flew into space and didn’t see

God there. We live in a country where, until fairly

recently, even the rock opera

*Jesus Christ Superstar* was

banned for religious propaganda.

In other words, ours is fundamentally a society of atheists, and

militant atheists like Sokolovsky

were mainstream not that long ago. And now

this disgusting judge who

today gave him a suspended sentence, fortunately,

although, speaking as someone who has also received a suspended

sentence, I can say there is nothing

good about it. Many people think

that a suspended sentence means you were tried and then

just walked away. But you have to keep going

to report to the criminal supervision office. At any

moment your suspended sentence can

be turned into a real one. It is, in fact,

a genuinely serious punishment.

So anyway, this same judge studied law

in Soviet times, and she

took exams in so-called scientific atheism, she

took the history of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). In Yekaterinburg

the imperial family was executed. And not so

long ago — well, in Soviet

times — the people who executed

the imperial family wrote in their memoirs

arguing over who, exactly, pulled the trigger

first and who fired the bullet into the tsar’s forehead.

And that was considered completely normal. And then

suddenly everyone became so

devout — what can you do. These judges,

these CPSU members, our officials — all of them

are handing down monstrous sentences. This

phrase — that Sokolovsky is shaping public opinion —

that obscurantism and arbitrariness reign in Russia.

Well then, bring criminal charges against me too.

I also believe—and any normal person knows—that

arbitrariness reigns in Russia.

Arbitrariness.

the denial of the existence of the founders

of Christianity and the Prophet Muhammad. Yes,

that is what Sokolovsky is being accused of. And on that

basis he is being subjected to criminal

prosecution. But he is an atheist—that is

entirely his right. When I was 23, or 24,

I too was a militant atheist.

If someone started telling me

some proper and wise things

about religion, I behaved

in much the same way—I laughed, guffawed, and

mocked any sacred beliefs and any so-called

proofs

of existence, or proofs that

some miracles had happened. That is normal;

it is normal for a society to contain such

people. It is normal for society

to include aggressive

proselytizing atheists who spread

their atheist views. It is

also completely normal that there are believers

who do not like this. But,

excuse me, criminal

prosecution is something entirely

different. And I did not put up this picture for nothing,

because the situation with

Sokolovsky, aside from the fact that he has been

illegally subjected to criminal

prosecution, is also important because

the state demonstratively goes after people like him,

crushes them, and spends on them

all of its resources. Investigators,

prosecutors, judges—they kept him under

house arrest, and the penal service was also

watching him, some convoy was transporting him, and he was held in

pretrial detention (SIZO). And meanwhile,

in Vasilyeva's case, billions of rubles were

stolen.

Billions. Compare the public

danger posed by Sokolovsky, whom

nobody even knew, and by Vasilyeva. Well,

these are simply incomparable amounts of

social harm that were caused,

even if we assume that Sokolovsky

also caused some harm—they are absolutely

incomparable. And on top of all that,

besides,

instead of putting anyone on trial for real

crimes, they go chasing after people like

Sokolovsky. This is also a diversion of

state resources. This is all happening in

Yekaterinburg. It is a fairly

troubled city in terms of crime,

troubled in terms of legality and the

maintenance of public order. There are plenty of people there

to prosecute, plenty to deal with,

plenty to bring to criminal responsibility,

plenty of crimes there

to investigate. But that is not happening,

because 50 people, or 20 people,

are busy with this, and enormous

resources are being diverted to it. But in the Beautiful Russia of the Future,

we will certainly bring this judge to

criminal responsibility, together with the

prosecutors and everyone else who was

involved in this, because they are criminals.

They committed a crime against

Sokolovsky; they committed an abuse-of-office

crime against all of us, because

they spent their time—and taxpayers' money—

on all this nonsense. And of course,

we will put an end to

obscurantism. People often ask, "But why

did they go after him in particular?" You know,

I have a

theory. They do not like people who can

speak out loudly. Sokolovsky has,

I have not checked, but I think he has around

half a million channel subscribers, or even

more. Someone check, if you have

time—someone is prompting me. 300,000,

right? 300,000 channel subscribers.

Well, that is more than any newspaper.

That is why people like him are crushed, because

this government loves an information

monopoly. It

hates anyone who can

speak to large groups of people. And

it thinks: "How dare you? You are

forbidden to sit on Facebook and broadcast

something so that 10 people can hear you."

It is we, in our Komsomolskaya Pravda (a Russian newspaper)

or Argumenty i Fakty (a Russian newspaper), or on Channel One

or Yevgeny Kiselyov,

who are allowed to speak to large groups of

people. But you, Sokolovsky, are not allowed to,

and neither are you, Navalny."

That is exactly why they seized equipment from us here.

They are extremely sensitive

about precisely these things—when

people communicate with a broad audience.

So that was probably one of the

reasons for such a manic, if I may use

the word,

persecution. Alexander Khudich asks me:

"What are your thoughts on

Putin's latest initiatives to ban

assemblies, ban foreign payment

systems, and abolish anonymity on the

internet? Let's start with the ban on

assemblies. Let's begin there. It is an

astonishing thing. Do you know that Putin

issued a special decree under which, in

a number of major cities—really, in

almost all major cities—it will now be impossible

to submit

applications for rallies and have them approved through the

usual procedure. They must now be

cleared by the FSB (Russia's security service). The most astonishing

thing is that this has been done under

the pretext that rallies might interfere with

the Confederations Cup, the

warm-up event before

the FIFA World Cup. But the tournament itself

doesn’t start until the 17th, while the ban

was introduced on June 1. And the reason for that

is completely obvious. On June 12, 147 cities

had already announced that they wanted to take part in

anti-corruption rallies. And of course, right now

I’m seeing a huge

number of questions: does this change our

plans? Guys, let’s

think about it. Does it change our plans? Were we

granted approval for anything on March 26?

Of course they don’t want any

rallies. Just think about it, imagine

yourself in Putin’s place and ask yourself: would I want,

if I were Putin, stealing billions

of dollars, with all my friends having become

billionaires, would I want thousands, tens of thousands,

to come out into the streets of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar, or

Vladivostok, or any other city,

carrying banners saying

“stop stealing, stop lying, and

stop stealing,” and shove in my face those

little ducks associated with Medvedev

or Roldugin’s cellos, and all those

yachts and palaces? People come out and

point to them, and they remember

healthcare, they remember

education, they remember their

salary, and they draw these simple

parallels between their low wages and

all those lavish palaces. So,

of course they don’t want that. These rallies

are the worst thing for them. Because

tens of thousands come out, maybe hundreds of thousands,

and millions know about it.

The whole city is buzzing because

people realize: wow, in our city

for the first time in decades, people

have taken to the streets, unauthorized,

to protest corruption. Polling

shows that all these rallies

are supported. So, simply put,

public opinion is changing. If

before, public opinion was like this:

“Yes, the stealing is terrible, but they’ve always

stolen, they always will steal, and

nothing can be changed, so we all stay silent,” then

now everyone sees that no,

we’re not staying silent, and it can be changed. The critical

mass is growing, and people can take to the streets and

put pressure on the authorities. And as in

normal countries, this will lead to

a reduction in corruption. And do they want to reduce

corruption? Of course not. That’s why

today, under the pretext of the FIFA World Cup,

tomorrow under the pretext of

some film festival, I don’t know,

the day after that a youth and

students’ festival, then a dog show,

then a flower festival, then a day of

jam or honey or who knows what else.

They

will never simply allow us to

just come along, guys, and hold a rally

against us.”

Does this change our plans? Obviously,

no. Has our attitude toward corruption

changed? No. Have we received more

answers to questions about corruption? No. But

do we see that we are right? Yes, we do. And this is

yet another confirmation that they are using

this kind of plain cheating and

petty fraud to try to

make it harder for us to hold rallies. Once again, we

are convinced that we are right. So on June 12,

Russia Day (a national holiday in Russia), regardless of

their decrees, we will of course hold

our own

rallies as we see fit. Peacefully.

We will submit applications. We will do everything possible

to make sure these rallies do not inconvenience anyone.

We will separate them from other official

events so that everything goes

smoothly and without problems. We hope

that the authorities will come to their senses and won’t

interfere with us, and that in accordance with the law

they will say: “Yes, people have the right to hold

a rally.” But if they say: “No,” then we

will hold them anyway, because we

want to defeat corruption, because we

want to live more prosperously, because we want to live

better, because we want to create that

very atmosphere of total intolerance toward

corruption that Peskov (Putin’s press secretary) talked about and

that Putin was recently told about at

his ridiculous meeting on

fighting corruption. But they hold

these meetings as a ritual, and then behind

closed doors they probably laugh: “Ha-ha,

well, Dimka (a familiar form of Dmitry, referring to Medvedev) got in a little jab there,”

by talking about, uh, an atmosphere of intolerance.”

But we take it seriously. We

know that there is a direct connection between

our wages and the level of corruption.

That is why we want to reduce corruption,

we want to raise wages. By June 12,

come out, and check the description. We

will post a link to all the groups now. 147

cities are already taking part. Look for your city.

If your city isn’t there, submit your city

and

join in. So, hello. They say internet anonymity

has been shut down—did you hear about the decree of May 9?

I haven’t heard

anything yet. I don’t think they’ve shut down

anonymity. I think they’re simply

continuing their blocking measures as before.

And they will

keep doing it. They view the internet

as a dangerous tool through which

undesirable

information is spread.

They saw the film *He Is Not Dimon to You* (Navalny’s anti-corruption documentary about Medvedev), and

they have one practical task. They

sit there thinking: how do we make sure

that no one can spread

links like that? So they are constantly

coming up with new ways to do it, and they will continue.

to make things up. It's a constant

strategy. What else are people writing to us about? Meduza

has already published a news item: "Navalny wrote to

the head of the presidential administration to

get a foreign passport." I condemn,

you, Meduza, for writing a story like that,

because you should have written the story

as it actually was: Navalny

emailed the Human Rights Commissioner

of the Russian Federation. And

that sounds completely different, you'll agree.

But really, I don't care. Whatever

headline they use for clickability

is nonsense. I'm absolutely right.

Do I have the right to get a foreign passport? Well,

of course I do. There are rulings by the European

Court, both on Bulgaria and on Russia. A member

of our Progress Party, Mikhail Benyash,

was in the same situation, won

at the ECHR, was issued a foreign passport, and I

will win this case too, and I will be given

a foreign passport. Well, I would write

a formal demand: I demand that I be issued a

foreign passport and that my rights not be violated. Well,

excuse me, then go ahead and run

headlines saying that all day long I write to

Prosecutor General Chaika or President Putin,

I write and complain about some

Rosneft issue. All day long, I—and all the lawyers

at the Anti-Corruption Foundation—they write to

various state bodies demanding

that the law

be enforced. And, uh, now I'm being asked—and

our social media department is giving me a stern look—

to promote

Instagram. "Alexei, more photos on

Instagram would be great." As I understand it,

you've just made up

a listener question, right, so that I would

mention Instagram. Anyway, there is

Instagram—subscribe. We want

to get more followers there,

because all the research shows

that, especially in the regions, it's a very

popular social network. I'm there as

Navalny 4 on

Instagram.

Ah, Juliette Makrotchan asks me:

"Alexei, will you be attending

future campaign office openings?" Of course,

yes, I will. The only thing is,

to my great, great regret,

this Far East tour—I

simply have to miss it for medical

reasons. The doctor told me, basically,

to take it easy for another week and not go

anywhere, because, well, they only just

stitched this thing onto my cornea, and I'd

better avoid any sudden

movements. So for the Far East

tour, Volkov is leaving tonight, along with

campaign staff. But of course I will be there later.

That's my job as a candidate. That's how a candidate

is supposed to run an election campaign:

travel around opening offices, meeting

people,

uh, answering their questions, answering

journalists' questions. That's what I do. That's how

an election campaign is supposed to be run.

I'm very sorry that I'm missing

Vladivostok. They've created complete chaos around our

campaign office there. And the local

governor is completely lawless. And,

by the way, it's interesting that the

lower a governor ranks in political stability,

the bigger the show he puts on around

our office. In regions that would seem

more problematic, like Tatarstan or

Bashkortostan, it's completely calm—nobody

bothers us there. But as soon as we arrive

in places with weak governors, like

Miklushevsky in the Far East, they

start running around trying to curry favor with Moscow and

detaining people. They jailed

the head of our office there for 15 days, and they also

intimidated another young woman and are causing problems with the

premises. But even so, we have lots of volunteers

there, and we are going to run a very active campaign

in the Russian Far East.

And the rally on the renovation program is on May 14.

I won't talk about it for long, because

every episode of Navalny Live

has been about these five-story apartment blocks by about

20 percent. I'll just say that everything

that has happened so far, including

over the past week, has once again shown us

that a major scam is being prepared.

What is happening is this:

Muscovites are being set up for the theft of budget funds.

And all other Russian citizens

are also being set up for the theft of budget funds

taken out of their regions

and brought to Moscow so they can be

carved up there.

If you live not in Moscow but in

any other city, even a city

with over a million residents, even in St. Petersburg or,

I don't know, in wealthy cities like Tyumen,

Khanty-Mansiysk, or absolutely any other

city—are they relocating people out of five-story apartment blocks there? No.

Maybe they're relocating people out of barracks where you live? No.

No. Are they even relocating people out of

unsafe buildings? No. People spend years running around and

shouting. They live in genuinely dangerous buildings

and say, "Relocate our building's residents,

do something, anything." But they are never

relocated. But in Moscow,

they've decided to use this as a pretext

to skim off an enormous amount of

money. As I understand it, on May 14,

official approval has already been granted. On

Sakharov Avenue at 2:00 p.m., there will be a rally about

this renovation program. So

please come. It's important—for those

who live in five-story apartment blocks, and for those who

actually want to achieve a proper demolition of their

five-story building, and for those who

want to be left alone. For all of them,

who have nothing to do with

the five-story apartment blocks, but are simply concerned about

how public funds are being handled. Those who

are sick of watching how

people are being deceived by these

online votes, come out, this is

important. It is both a Moscow issue and a nationwide

one. Artyom Azizov asks me what

will happen to the homes of corrupt officials that

will be confiscated by the state when

you come to power. What will be done with them?

Well, they will be transferred to the state budget, as

the law requires. Corrupt officials

stole our money. With that money they

built or bought real estate here and abroad,

uh, bought themselves yachts and

vineyards. All of it will be sold at

proper, honest auctions. The money

will go into the budget. From the budget, that

money will be spent the way it

is supposed to be spent from the budget. That is,

normally, honestly, and humanely. That

is exactly how the system should

work.

And Mikhail Pavlenko asks me, Alexei,

in one of your live broadcasts

you said that scientists should themselves

fight pseudoscience. But how, if the media

promote obscurantism and even give airtime to people

who have an interest in it, because there is

demand for it. That only makes the role of

scientists even more important. Well, who else is going to fight

obscurantism? Scientists have fought it before.

Educated people in the broadest

sense of the word. They can and must fight

obscurantism, and no one but them can

fight obscurantism. That is what it means to be

educated people. Maybe they were, well, somehow

luckier in life. They received a better

education than everyone else. They may

also be a little braver

than everyone else. That is why they must

fight, because if they do not,

then we will once again see the whole

country charging water from Alan Chumak (a Soviet-era TV faith healer)

or being treated by Kashpirovsky (a famous Soviet TV psychic healer) through

the television. Of course scientists must do this; it is

the mission of scientists to move society

upward along this spiral. So of course

the state has an interest in it.

Right now, the state is interested in

crushing absolutely everything. The state

is interested in us, uh,

going back politically and mentally

to somewhere like the 15th century, while still having as much money as

the 21st century. But

politically, we would be living in the 16th century.

A monarchy, an anointed ruler of God, and

everything

is supposedly fine. We must not agree to this,

and we must fight this obscurantism,

despite the fact that they will

promote it in every possible way.

And Cracken One asks me, Alexei:

"Good evening." Good evening. What

will you do under your rule with

crooked investigators who

break the law for a bonus? And what should

be done with crooked investigators

who break the law for a bonus? There is

no tricky answer to that question,

no especially clever answer,

or, you know, some original

answer, and there is no new

information I can give you: if

investigators break the law, they need to

go to prison, and we will put them there. People

who engage in this—well, I do not know exactly what

is meant specifically by crooked

investigators, but I take it to mean those

who fabricate criminal cases in order

to advance their careers or

improve their statistics—but they are criminals.

They are worse than those who steal

wallets from people on the subway, because

they are more dangerous to society. A thief

who steals wallets or slashes bags

is very dangerous. But an investigator who

fabricates criminal cases in the name of the state

may be the most dangerous

person in the country. He can destroy other people's lives,

he can send people to prison, he can

destroy a person, he can destroy

their family, their health, trample everything

they have. So of course people like that

will be sent to the defendants'

bench. I also wanted to say something about Rosnano.

The situation there is astonishing.

This morning we heard that

Milamed, who was accused of large-scale

embezzlement at Rosnano, had been released from

house arrest because his maximum

period of detention had expired. And the case, in

general, seems to be falling apart because

the prosecutor's office sent it back. And then, bang, by

evening the news came out that the case was after all

being sent to

court, uh, and the decision to send it back

for further investigation was revoked. In general, sending a case back

for further investigation is a classic

way of making a case collapse. Any lawyers here

know that perfectly well. Nevertheless,

in this particular situation it seems to me

that everything is still heading toward collapse, just in a more

elegant form. They cannot

after having themselves created a huge

stir and heavily publicized this Rosnano case. Everyone

knows perfectly well, the whole country knows, that

Rosnano does nothing useful. And I

know it, and I took part in debates with Chubais

and he told me a great many things.

And since those debates,

about two years have passed, and on every issue

we argued about, I turned out to be right.

I want to record a video about this.

There are no nanotechnologies there. There is only,

at best, wasteful spending, and at

worst, outright theft of money.

But we need to be clear that this is

Putin’s personal project. And Chubais,

a man who is deeply unpopular with the public,

is kept in power personally by Putin, who hands him

these tens of billions of rubles to manage

(hundreds of millions of dollars). That’s why I’m sure this case

will simply be buried in some

other, more inventive way.

They’ll send it to court now, or else

it will somehow come to nothing in court. In other words,

Milamed and the other people involved, I

don’t think they will suffer any serious

consequences, and certainly no

money will be returned, because,

well, in projects like this, people enjoy

immunity. From the very beginning it was clear there

would be a carve-up of public money here. Right

from the very start, when

Skolkovo (Russia’s state-backed innovation hub) existed only as an idea, when

it was being created, it was obvious that

there was nothing there except

embezzlement, because you cannot

create some ultra-advanced

industry, some branch of

technology, in one specific place. It

just doesn’t work that way. Industry as a whole has to be developed,

high technology has to be developing

across the board, and there has to be, in

general, a growing and developing

educational level for something

somewhere to really take off. But this idea that

you can just dump money into some

place, take a few gold coins,

bury them under a tree, bury them in the ground, and

nanotechnology will grow out of it — that’s not

how it works. And it was obvious that it wouldn’t

work, but they went ahead with it anyway.

It’s obvious why they did. They all, uh,

grew their own little golden

trees by burying a few

coins in the ground. And the beneficiaries of all this,

of course, will never allow any

criminal cases to go anywhere, and nothing there

will end the way it

should end.

I can’t deny myself the small

pleasure of bringing up here

Governor — or rather Vice Governor —

of St. Petersburg,

Albin. You remember, I recently

put out a video about Zenit

Arena, and I said there that Zenit

Arena cost 48 billion rubles (roughly $800 million). And its

pitch is absolutely substandard. And we

saw in the first match that, well,

nothing there really works. Exactly. None of it

matches a price tag of 48 billion rubles. And this

is a failure. This is a textbook example

of how this government cannot do

anything properly. They focused on

one project, poured as much money into it

as they wanted. It started, after all,

with a 6 billion ruble estimate for Zenit Arena, and ended

at forty-something billion. And what came of it? Nothing

good. What we got was a rather

mediocre stadium with problems. And

after that, Vice Governor Albin

wrote to me in a Facebook post and called me,

what was it he called me, a lying

good-for-nothing. And basically, in a million

letters, he wrote about how everything was wrong and how

the pitch was magnificent, the stadium wonderful, everyone

loved it. So apparently I’m this lying

person who only looks for the bad. And

of course, the whole point is to discredit

our dear, wonderful

president. So what was the latest

recent news? That Zenit

refused to play on the new pitch because of

the condition of the field. And this quote from

Zenit’s head coach is just priceless:

Luchescu: “There isn’t a single pitch like this in Ukraine.

Not even the bottom teams in the league

have a pitch like this. In 13 years I have never

seen anything like it. Not even in spring, when

the season is just beginning.” 48 billion rubles. 48 billion

rubles. The most expensive stadium on planet

Earth, built under the personal

supervision of Putin. And the governor was there,

standing around in a hard hat, and Miller from

Gazprom, and everyone was fussing over it. And what

do we get? The head coach of the team

the stadium was built for says

that in 13 years he has never seen such a

terrible pitch. In other words, they built the worst

pitch in Russia for a completely

unimaginable amount of money. So then,

Governor Albin, who I’m sure

will watch this broadcast — will you argue with us

this time too? You see, you can’t

keep deceiving people forever. While you were

building it, you could lie that

everything was fine, but sooner or later

the moment comes when footballers actually have to run

on the pitch. And the footballers

refuse. They say the pitch is very

bad. And that’s it — nothing will help you now,

not Dmitry

Kiselyov, not Channel One, not Channel Two,

not the St. Petersburg media, not anything

at all will help you, because you won’t be able

to make Zenit’s players run

on this very bad pitch.

That’s why I would very much like the St. Petersburg city administration

to apologize

to the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and acknowledge that

the data we published about

the real cost of Zenit Arena

was correct, and that perhaps the federal

government should hold

those responsible accountable — perhaps

remove this Albin from office,

perhaps even bring criminal

charges against him. Someone has to

be responsible. Even if it’s just a fall guy.

Fine, then find one — find at least

a scapegoat. Point your finger at

the person who is to blame for the fact that we

They built and built and built, and in the end they didn't...

they ended up with the worst pitch, worse than what even

the bottom-ranked teams have, according to Zenit's head

coach. Someone has to

be held accountable, but so far they're just keeping silent. Well,

I'm really looking forward to Albin (a Russian official) or someone

else showing their eloquence again and

writing me, you know, an open

letter. And Sabina Gasanova writes to Alexei.

Alexei, I really want to go to the rally, but

at my school they made us sign

a paper saying that if anyone is

involved in it, they will be immediately

expelled.

Sabina, those papers have no legal

force. In fact, they have

no practical effect at all. They're

just trying to scare you. No one can

expel you. They're just, well, with students,

stringing them along, trying to frighten them. They can't actually do

that. If there is such a paper,

take a photo of it, send it to us, and we

will sue your university, we

will take some other

steps as well. They're doing all this

because they understand that they cannot

stop people from coming, they cannot

prevent people's desire. So now

they've started

simply scaring not even the students themselves, but

their parents, saying, "We'll expel all of you,

we'll do something to you,

we'll make trouble for you." They can't do anything to anyone.

I believe that the real chances

of expulsions are, first of all, minimal.

Second, your best guarantee, your best

insurance, is this: photograph all of it,

record it and post it online. And you

will see, just as in all the cases that

have happened before,

they will immediately start denying everything.

They will start saying, "We were misunderstood,

of course we never said that we

would expel everyone." And then the person

who actually said it will, how to put it,

be described as having blurted out some nonsense, and that

no one authorized him, and so on, and so

forth. So, well, don't let yourself

be frightened by this kind of nonsense.

We will never defeat corruption if

we believe every bit of nonsense said by

some shady vice-rector of yours,

who is just as corrupt because

he sits there skimming money off public

procurement contracts. The hashtag for questions on Twitter is

Navalny2018. Send your questions.

And Leon says: "This stadium is damaging

Zenit's reputation. Zenit is the best club

in Russia." There are many different opinions

about which club is the best, but yes, without a doubt, this

stadium is damaging Zenit's reputation.

Zenit is a wonderful team and enjoys

enormous support across the country, especially

in St. Petersburg. It's really not

pleasant that Zenit's name

keeps being invoked in connection with this idiotic

stadium. Zenit is the main

victim here, so of course, well,

I do sympathize with Zenit's fans over

all of this.

And Vera Aronova asks: Alexei,

please comment on the situation with

the closure of some campaign offices and

the termination of lease agreements by landlords.

Wishing you a speedy recovery. Thank you

very much. We have no office closures. In not a single

region have we closed an office.

We have had situations where

some security officials or

bureaucrats came and pressured landlords, and

we were simply forced to move from one

premises to another.

Uh, in most regions this

does not happen. It happens, perhaps, in

10% of regions where, as I already said,

there are simply the most cowardly

governors trying to curry favor.

But we are not closing offices; we are moving

to different premises. Well, sometimes to

a worse place, and sometimes it's a shame to give up

a space. It was somewhere in the

central part of town, in a central

location. In Volgograd we had a great

office on the main street. Now

we have been forced to terminate the

lease, but we will find another place.

But in the end, what matters to us is not the premises

themselves. What matters to us are volunteers,

what matters to us is real work. And

the volunteers are there, the campaign coordinators are there,

the real work is there. We will keep doing it,

and no one can really throw us out

anywhere. If they force us out of

all our premises, then, well,

we will coordinate our activities without premises at all,

send out stickers,

leaflets. People will distribute them

themselves. Right now we have, uh, 102,

102,000 volunteers signed up, I think.

That is a huge force, and you can do all this even without

stickers, without, without premises, all of

this you will still do. You do all this

for free. You don't need any

offices. The most important thing is that we have

our idea and the fact that we are right. That is what we will

work with.

Ivaka666 says: "Tomorrow

Albin will write that the poor quality

is Alexei Navalny's fault." They will. In

fact, you're laughing, but that's more or less

what they will write. They'll write something like that.

These so-called liberals who ran the country

for many years have brought us to the point where now

we can't even build a stadium because

we don't have good engineers. Of

course, they won't mention

that Putin has been in power already

longer than Yeltsin and Gorbachev combined.

picked out. They still blame some people

from the 1990s, and they will keep doing

that. They will keep saying it, because

what else can they say? They’re not going to

say: "Here we are, our entire

Putin mafia from St. Petersburg, we’re

such incompetent crooks, we can’t

do anything, we can only steal."

And even when we steal a great deal, we

still can’t build a stadium or the most

important construction projects. Of course,

they won’t say that. They’ll look for

someone to blame. Who’s to blame? Well, the CIA

or someone like that, I don’t know—Obama. They’ll say:

"Because of the sanctions, we couldn’t

buy proper cement or

something else." Of course, they’ll shift the blame

from the guilty party onto

the innocent one. A small sports update.

Well, it just made

an impression on me.

I just went online when I was still

in Spain before my flight. And yesterday,

when Putin was playing in his hockey

Night League, I was absolutely struck by

the sheer scale of

the coverage. All right,

he’s into hockey, everyone knows that, this is

the Night League, they play, there are news reports about it,

some people are interested. But I actually

saw that Match TV, the state

sports channel, broadcast the entire match

in full during prime time. On every news program

they ran seven-minute segments about how

they were out there playing hockey

and how Putin scored eight goals. And this

was literally the top news story

in the country. A country where, well, an enormous

amount is happening, an enormous

number of

problems, an enormous number of

crimes, a low standard of living,

meager wages. 20% of people live

without sewerage.

Excuse me. And on the news they show

these seven-minute segments about this

little entertainment. And it really looks

like some kind of perversion. And when I was watching

this, I

remembered that I had recently been reading a scholarly

biography of Stalin, and it interestingly

describes how toward the end of his life

he had really lost his mind and, well, made

everyone entertain him with strange

pastimes. For example, he would

walk around with his guards all the time and carry

a tape measure with him, because he had

this game: "How many meters is it to that

tree?" And everyone had to say: "About

8 to 15." Then they would measure it with the tape, and

find out who had won. And everyone

understood that, well, he had simply lost

his mind and was busy with this nonsense, even though

he was supposed to be governing a gigantic country. But

no one could say it. And here it’s the

same thing. These people have simply lost

their minds.

They are busy entertaining

themselves. And it’s this absolute

little closed circle of crooks. In that same match

there were all my favorites: Arkady

Rotenberg, Roman Rotenberg, Boris

Rotenberg, Gennady Timchenko, all these

wonderful citizens of Finland and

Switzerland who, at the same time,

are Russia’s main state contractors

or the main sellers of Russian

oil. And they came up with this hockey

league. They entertain themselves, and a crowd of flunkies

runs around after them and starts filming it.

The lackeys of television say:

"Listen, this is so great,

so interesting, let’s broadcast it

live to the whole country in prime time."

And this madness of people who have been

in power for 18 years—it, well, it

takes over everything. It devours the whole country,

including simply because they do not

work.

They occupy themselves with these

little amusements of theirs and force all of us to be

drawn into them, and

they try to prove that this is normal,

that since the president is into

hockey, we should just broadcast

full matches live. Let’s

applaud him. He scored six goals and,

I don’t know, beat professional

hockey players. How wonderful, what a great man.

This is genuinely a sign

of madness. No exaggeration. We are

moving toward some kind of

leaders who gave speeches for 68

hours, or toward emperors who

set things on fire and appointed horses to the

senate, and all the rest. This is a typical

sign of madness that comes from a person

having sat in power for many years, and he

simply no longer understands anything, and there

are no people in his circle

who could say anything to him.

On the contrary, the only people around him are those who say:

"How great—come on, let’s

show you around the clock

playing

hockey." What will happen to the state corporations,

Dmitry Saikov asks me. They are, for the most part,

not needed. The overwhelming

majority of state corporations are basically

unnecessary. They are invented constructs

that exist solely

to enrich this elite. And

they are a mechanism for stealing money,

nothing more and nothing less.

Will you be at the opening of the campaign headquarters in Moscow?

Vika Klaus asks me. Will

volunteers receive emails with information about

the place and time? Will there be room for everyone?

thousands of registered volunteers? Well,

of course, I’ll be at the opening of the campaign headquarters in

Moscow. And to be honest, we do have

something of a problem finding a venue for

the headquarters in Moscow, because, well, from the experience of

other regions, we understand that

a lot of people will come, so we need a large

space, a big building, a large

venue. There probably really will be

thousands

of people. Most often, such large venues

belong to the state or

are under state control.

So when we come and say:

"We need a meeting with volunteers here for 4,000

people," they all get scared and say:

"Oh no, no, no, we’re afraid, get

approval from the mayor’s office or something." But

nevertheless, of course, we will find a venue

and we will hold meetings with volunteers.

It will be a working meeting,

a normal meeting, the way it should be done

during an election campaign. I very much

hope that many Moscow

volunteers—or at least those who

want to attend this event—

will come, and I’ll be able to

talk with them there. That’s important.

Gennady Koshelev asks me: "

Does Alexei think that if the salary

of a janitor from Kondopoga in some backwater,

Kondopoga, I think, actually

rises to the level of an engineer’s salary in Kazan

of 25,000 rubles (about $275), will that intensify the brain drain

from the country and the decline in the status of

intellectual labor? No, I don’t

think so. Apparently, uh, this refers to my, my

position that

we should invite fewer migrants here

and instead raise wages more, including

for janitors. That’s what I believe.

Just because an engineer in Kazan

earns 25,000 rubles (about $275). That is a disgraceful

situation, and of course the salary should

be higher, that does not mean a janitor

should earn 3,000 rubles (about $33). In other words, the low

salary of an engineer in Kazan

is not some kind of benchmark. Simply put,

an engineer in Kazan, a major

city of over a million people, how much should

an engineer earn? Well, he should earn,

probably, no less than

80,000–90,000 rubles (about $875–$985). That would be normal, in

a normal developed country, based on

the parameters of the budget, based on the parameters of

our economy. I’m not saying he

should earn, as in Western Europe,

3,000–4,000 euros there, but 80,000–90,000 rubles

is what he should be making. A janitor in that

backwater should also earn

a decent wage, because, uh, well,

what’s wrong with being a janitor? It’s a normal profession,

that doesn’t mean the person should be

some kind of, excuse me, homeless drifter and live

somewhere on the street or rent some

tiny corner. A janitor is a janitor, and he also

has a family; he also needs a separate

apartment. And the money—huge sums of money—that we

allocate to housing and utilities, they

are enough to provide a decent standard of living

for all housing and utilities workers, for everyone

working in this sector, including

janitors. "A Piece of Bread" asks me.

Great username. A Piece of Bread. Alexei,

when you become president, will

the archives on the Great Patriotic War

(the Soviet term for World War II on the Eastern Front) and the USSR as a whole be declassified? Well,

absolutely, yes. And it is disgraceful

that we still have closed

archives on the Great Patriotic War. We

still have archives closed on, say,

the 1920s. This

destroys historical scholarship. It does not

allow historical science to develop. It

prevents us from educating our citizens.

It prevents us from creating normal

school curricula. The fact that all of this

is classified, and that historians cannot

work with it, causes, I believe,

colossal damage to our

society. Alexei asks—Anton

Simovskikh: "Will you seek

a visa-free regime with Europe when

you become president?" Of course, yes.

Of course, yes. We should have

a normal visa-free regime with Europe.

Russia is close to European countries. In

fact, our standard of living is so low

because of our problems, including

because of corruption, including because

the same people have been in power for

many years now—18 years—but we are close to

European countries. Raise

the standard of living a little, and we’ll be fairly close

to a country like Spain. There is nothing there

that is so radically

different. We are, uh, unquestionably,

a European country. Unquestionably, the goal

is integration into Europe.

Ideally, even a leading position in Europe, but

and, of course, a visa-free regime with

European countries. We want it.

Russian citizens want a visa-free regime

with European countries, but a visa regime

with the countries of Central Asia is what we

should have; instead, we have exactly the opposite. Here, a citizen

of Uzbekistan can come here even without

an international passport, but a European foreigner cannot

enter here, and we cannot

travel there. So, of course, this is

an absolutely wrong system, and it needs to

be changed.

Syrna Baka asks me. I see, I see,

I see. They’re waving at me that I should

wrap up. Alexei, what can you

say about the Federation Council?

I still don’t understand what this body does.

Is it necessary, or who even sits there? Nobody

understands. And I don’t understand why we need the

Federation Council (the upper house of Russia’s parliament). But really, the

Federation Council isn’t needed by anyone. In its current

form, it is an absolutely pointless body,

where some louts sit around, collecting

large salaries, enjoying immunity,

free business trips, and big black

official cars, while providing

no benefit at all. But in the beautiful Russia

of the future, of course, we will reform

all these institutions in order to

give them real purpose and some

usefulness. Our program has come to

an end. Huge thanks to everyone who

watched me live.

Subscribe to our channel,

subscribe to all our social media

accounts, watch the programs on Navalny

Live. There are quite a lot of them. We had two

premieres this week.

We are fighting television, we are fighting

the zombie box (a derogatory Russian term for propaganda TV). We hope that with your

help, we are at least dealing it

painful blows with our

programs. Thank you very much. See you

next Thursday at

6 p.m.

[music]