Everyone Hates Greta Thunberg, Destroy United Russia, 29.09: Let Go!

[music]

Good evening, Moscow. It's 8:00 p.m., which

means that the program is live on air:

*Russia of the Future*, and I am Alexei Navalny.

Or,

as the governor of Yakutia called me, a man using a shaman

for political purposes,

as described by the governor of Yakutia, in the wonderful

Yakut media. And many thanks,

many thanks to Ilya Yashin,

who hosted the last program for me

while I was on a short vacation. Many

thanks to everyone who watched him and to those watching

me now.

What does Alexei Navalny do at the beginning

of almost every program? He calls people to come to

a rally. And I call on all of you, those who

live in Moscow, to come on the 29th to

Sakharov Avenue at 3:00 p.m. There will be

a rally in defense of political prisoners,

really a rally against persecution

for political reasons, including the case against

the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation).

In fact, this is a rally for the right to have

any rights at all. Because why do people

become political prisoners in

modern Russia? They go out to demand something

they are entitled to by law. They

read the Constitution, and the Constitution

says:

you have the right to go out for a picket or a rally

and demand what you believe in. He goes out to demand it, and then

he gets thrown in jail.

And on the 29th, on Sakharov Avenue, there will be a rally for

the idea that we should not imprison and keep people

in jail without any real reason.

In fact, what is happening now with

the Moscow Case has already confused absolutely

everyone, except perhaps the journalists who

write about it. Because just recently I

spoke with someone who

seems interested in politics, and he said:

"Well, probably not many people will come on the 29th,

since they've already let everyone go, right?"

And today they even dropped the case against Alexei Minyailo,

essentially acquitting him.

So, everyone has been released already. And I

listen and think: how little people actually

understand what is going on. Let me remind you: just in

the Moscow Case alone,

let's take a look, six people have already been convicted.

You'll see their names here. And actually that's seven

people I see here.

Looking at this image—Pavel Ustinov has now

been released. He was convicted, but his

pretrial restrictions will be changed.

That will happen in a few days. So

seven people have been convicted, and the sentences—

just look at the terms:

2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years. There is a person

serving 5 years in prison for a tweet. That tweet

may not be to someone's liking, maybe it was

a very bad tweet, but 5 years is the kind of sentence

given to people who

took part in premeditated murder. And

someone who runs another person over with a car

and kills them will almost certainly get less

than five years for negligent homicide.

People commit serious crimes and

get 2, 3, or 4 years. Here it's 5 years

for a tweet. These five people are already in prison. And several

more cases are ongoing; currently under arrest are

—let's take a look—another five

people. Of them,

two are under house arrest, but still,

that is still arrest. One person is

under travel restrictions, and in fact

I now count six people

—yes, six people—

who are currently free. But we must

remember that a huge number of people across

the country are subjected to this kind of

persecution. They are not in the public eye,

fewer well-known people speak up

for them, but they are exactly the same.

Right now, literally half an hour

ago,

the prosecutor asked for three and a

half years of deprivation of liberty for our

coordinator, the coordinator of our headquarters in

Arkhangelsk.

three and a half years of forced

And this is being presented as though

—his name is Andrei Borovikov—as though

they are asking for a punishment

not involving imprisonment. Wonderful.

The man lives in Arkhangelsk, you understand, and

as I said, in Arkhangelsk

he was protesting over Shiyes (the proposed landfill site in Arkhangelsk Region), over this

dump, going out and standing in solo

pickets. And now under this very Dadin

article, they are telling him: you will get

three and a half years of forced

labor under the Criminal Code.

Forced labor—and they can send him to another

region. This is what used to be called

"khimiya" (a Soviet-era term for penal forced labor), meaning a person

is effectively pushed into a kind of servitude for three and a

half years

because in Arkhangelsk he somehow bothered someone

so much just by standing there with his sign

that they now need to prosecute him

criminally

and convict him. He himself was under travel

restrictions. The terms of those restrictions were interesting:

various bans were imposed on him,

including an official prohibition on

communicating with his wife. This very clearly

shows the degree of

idiocy surrounding all

these criminal cases. For example, in Kolomna

there is Vyacheslav Yegorov, another man who

spoke out against a landfill right outside people's windows.

He went out with pickets. Exactly the same thing:

a criminal case under that same Dadin

article. He is facing a real prison

sentence. So people are in prison right now,

and people will be in prison in the future as well.

Obviously, because the authorities clearly decided to

take the path of jailing people, and we must

come out.

Because today we saw

a truly remarkable example involving

Alexei Menyailo and the campaign headquarters volunteers.

A man who had been held on serious charges was released, and

released.

He immediately went to the Investigative Committee (Russia's main federal investigative agency),

and the investigator issued a ruling saying

that, as it turned out, there had been no

riots at all, nothing whatsoever that

could have justified

the reason for prosecuting him.

Even though he had spent two months in detention, simply

sitting there, with nothing happening to him.

They grabbed him and took him there.

He sat there for two months, and there was not a single

interrogation,

not a single investigative action, nothing at all.

They were simply holding him.

And it seemed completely impossible

to change anything about it anymore,

impossible to turn this situation around,

impossible to overcome it. But first

with Ustinov, and now with Menyailo, simple

solidarity worked — these people

were released. Those who went to the pickets (single-person protest actions),

thank you so much to everyone who said at least

a single word and made possible today

these remarkable images of how

Menyailo was let out of the cage. Let's

take a look.

A victory for civil society is a huge victory.

The hall erupts in applause.

"I am very pleasantly surprised," says Alexei

Menyailo. But now we can laugh at

those words — we are all pleasantly

surprised too. But in fact, the essence of these

events really does look

quite shocking, because just

a moment ago the authorities were saying: we will

jail random people simply

to intimidate others, and we don't care at all

what happens or what kind of

videos you spread on YouTube proving their

innocence — we don't care at all that

this Menyailo never even made it to the rally.

There is simply evidence showing that the man

took a photo

at the signature-collection center where

Lyubov Sobol's campaign headquarters was located; he walked out of it and

five minutes later ended up in a police van,

from which he also posted a photo. He never even made it to

the rally.

He was accused of organizing mass

riots. In other words, it was just

done with deliberate cynicism. Nevertheless,

they are releasing people now. Why did this

happen? In part because

there was, of course, a real breakthrough

in terms of solidarity, including professional solidarity,

and artists played a very major role here,

as they began speaking up for

political prisoners. And personally,

I would certainly single out Aleksandr Pal

and

Yana Troyanova — those who, you know,

set the process in motion, and then it took off. Because

it's one thing when you and I go out and

stand in these pickets — yes, it's clear: some

people are involved in politics, and other

people involved in politics defend them,

while the rest of the public

looks at it and maybe

sympathizes, saying, yes, yes, it's outrageous,

they jailed some

young guy for nothing — but stays silent about it.

Not everyone stays silent, of course, but generally speaking,

for the most part. And some parts of the creative

community — especially successful people,

successful, fashionable young actors —

mostly tried to keep quiet,

because, well, you could lose roles,

you could lose certain opportunities,

you might simply stop getting invited to cool TV shows,

and then that's it — you become

an unknown actor,

or rather a forgotten actor. But these

truly wonderful people did not just

say something publicly — they also

literally began organizing

the work of these pickets. First,

let's watch a short compilation,

52 seconds of different artists

speaking out for political prisoners.

Today our colleague Pavel

Ustinov was sentenced to three and a half years

in a strict-regime penal colony. What he was tried for, to me,

does not seem to correspond

to reality. I think this is

a completely fabricated case. I

think this is absolute arbitrariness and

mob justice. Friends, what do you think? What outrages me most

about this story is that

the video, which clearly shows

the actions of both Pavel and the

law enforcement officers who

detained him, was not attached to

the court materials. This monstrous

lawlessness and injustice must not

go unnoticed, be met with silence, or remain

unpunished. Journalists

stood up for him, rappers stood up for him,

rapper Husky stood up for him, and honestly I just don't

know what word should be used for all of us

if we do not get involved

in this situation, as the saying goes.

It might seem like these were just some

little videos people posted on

Instagram, but those videos

first of all seriously frightened the Kremlin,

for an understandable reason. Because it's one

thing when some generalized Navalny figure — people

like Navalny and his allies — are constantly

outraged about something on YouTube, and they're watched by

people who are always outraged about something. But it's another

thing entirely when wonderful, likable

Very prominent, admired people known across the entire

country, people loved by the whole country, who

suddenly come out and say: no, we will not

stay silent, we demand the release of these

people, and they directly accuse the authorities of

having imprisoned people unlawfully. This

damages the approval rating, and that is why

radical changes happened. As is well known, Putin

governs by opinion polls; I have said this many

times before, and so they looked at

yet another poll and saw that

a huge number of people had learned that

Yana Troyanova

one of the most famous actresses

of our time, was not just standing in a one-person protest picket

— she was out there every day, and on her

Instagram, where she has several million

followers, she was posting Stories with the hashtag

#LetThemGo #WeWontDisperse. It was not just a one-off — she

stood in a picket, and the next day she

was standing there again. Just imagine

that. This was not the usual sort of thing

where, if you want to seem like a decent person,

you go to one rally once. Here, people

started going repeatedly — once, then a second

time — they self-organized; actors there

set up a rota, and Troyanova and

Bortich and Pal and Kukushkin, they actually

kept coming, organizing

shifts, and everyone saw all this, and

people completely far removed from politics

watched what these

actors were saying and said: yes, you know, we

know cases like that too.

Like, one acquaintance of ours

was imprisoned for nothing, while another acquaintance

who really should have been jailed was not

because he, because he managed to get off the hook, and

here they seem to be jailing some guy for

nothing. We are unhappy with all this and no longer

support Putin. And in the presidential administration

they understood that these artists

would now simply shave off an additional

five or six percent from his approval rating.

When you have 85 percent support, you

can afford that. But now Putin

simply cannot afford any further

drop in his rating by another

5 percent. That would have happened — and I think it did

happen, actually — because after the

artists, others spoke out:

priests, then doctors, then teachers,

and so on, academics too — a huge

number of different professional groups

spoke out about the political prisoners

and they did so quite

openly — I would even say rather

aggressively, meaning without any of those

you know, vague formulations.

They directly demanded that everyone be released,

they openly called on everyone to go to rallies, openly called

on everyone to join pickets, and they were not afraid even to

say this outright in their own theaters. Let us

listen to a statement made right from the stage. 40

seconds. The convicted participants in the so-

called Moscow

Case (a major protest-related criminal case in Moscow) — I hope that our

concern, our participation in this rally,

will be able to change something for the better in our

country. Thank you very much. The point is that on the 29th

of September at Prospekt... 40 den

missing social support and

justice... educational... regarding the

Moscow Case... begins to strike with the left...

part of this person... wash... imagined...

I think about my country. They burst that

bubble of fear, because it had seemed

as though — well, damn, how is that possible, in a theater

— after all, these are state theaters,

even if they are not fully state-run, they receive

some subsidies. You say something like that, and

they will cut everything off for you immediately, throw you out. But they came out

on stage, said it, the audience was delighted, and

nothing happened, because you cannot do that to everyone.

You cannot fire, tomorrow, all

the popular young artists all at once.

Well, of course, you can try,

but all of this is done very, very

clumsily, and they saw that the rating

was falling because people were posting on their

Instagram accounts, on Instagram stories, and

what happened was exactly what I am constantly

talking about: if each of us, somewhere,

mentions something on social media and at the same time

shows at least a little

persistence — posted today, did not forget tomorrow,

posted again the day after tomorrow, and after 10

days went about their business but did not forget to

mention it somewhere — that simply creates

an immediate chain reaction. Everyone feels — and

that is indeed what happens — that everyone is talking

about it, and it cannot be ignored.

The Kremlin, of course, is suffering and struggling

because the Kremlin is not some kind of

uniform entity, and today there was

a rather interesting situation with

Pavel Ustinov, who should have been

released and who, quite obviously,

should have been acquitted, because his

pretrial restraint measure was changed. He had only just

been sentenced to four years, and then he was

released, but today, as part of the

appeal proceedings, they were supposed to

change his sentence — but they did not.

They postponed it. Why? Because they are

interested in how many people will actually

come out on the 29th. I was released, and

so now he is free too — so why would anyone

stand up for him? He is walking around,

yes, there is still potentially a sentence hanging over him, but he is

free, sitting at home, watching television,

eating home-cooked food, so why go to a

rally? They are interested in how many people will now

come out. But that is the second reason, and the first

reason is this:

just imagine how the authorities are twisting themselves up right now —

these same judges, these same prosecutors, these

same investigators who only just now directly...

They were locking people up outright lawlessly, just throwing them in jail for...

It couldn't sink any lower. And it wasn't them acting alone in all this — it was all those judges...

Krivoruchko.

But he didn't hand down that sentence on his own — he...

got a call from the Moscow City Court. Some Olga...

Yegorova said: right then, Judge...

Krivoruchko, I got a call from the...

Presidential Administration (Russia's executive office).

And they said: give all of them the maximum...

severity allowed by law, and so...

So they started handing out sentences: five years for this one...

four years for that one. And then suddenly people came running...

all sorts of people — Aleksandra Bortich and just ordinary people...

standing in pickets, and the Presidential Administration...

realized its approval ratings were collapsing and that it had to...

walk it back somehow. But how do you do that?

Just imagine — even the Presidential Administration itself...

calls Olga Yegorova and the judges...

and all those FSB people...

the investigators and the prosecutors, and tells them:

you know, they need to be released.

And the prosecutors are told: you know, you have to...

demand

that they be released now. But how is that supposed to work?

We'll look like clowns and...

idiots, because literally a week...

ago we were demanding five-year sentences...

and now we're supposed to demand their release.

Judge Krivoruchko was just sending them to prison, and now...

now he has to let them go.

So Judge Krivoruchko goes to his...

trusted, loyal person...

the chair of the Moscow City Court...

Olga Yegorova, and says: Olga, somehow...

[patronymic omitted]...

you and I are old hands in this mafia, and we...

lock people up for nothing, by orders delivered over the phone...

by telephone justice, on command, because, well...

that's our job. In return we get...

apartments,

all kinds of perks, we drive black...

German cars, and we had an...

understanding about this — that's what...

our social contract is. And in this...

mafia, the Investigative Committee and...

the prosecutor's office are involved too.

We all drink together here — first on Police Day...

Police Day,

then on Prosecutor's Worker's Day...

then on FSB Officers' Day, then...

on Judges' Day — that's our circle. So why is...

this terrible thing happening to us now?

Now we have to undo all of it, and it's...

unpleasant for us too — very unpleasant for this whole mafia...

when its face is being rubbed in it.

And now I don't have the slightest doubt...

that, of course, those people — we more or less...

understand who the initiators were, and...

the media outlet *Proekt* wrote a lot about it, and many others did too.

They wrote that it was Sergei Sobyanin, the same...

Natalya Sergunina,

Viktor Zolotov, and that whole circle of people...

who demanded the harshest possible...

punishment, because, after all, they threw...

a plastic cup at a National Guard officer, because they...

were walking around trampling our lawns and...

our curbs — so they mustn't be allowed in, that's the idea.

Those people are, of course, suffering terribly...

really agonizing over it, because they...

ended up in such a humiliating position. Well...

good. They should be in that...

humiliating position. We should humiliate them...

even more.

Including by continuing to go out to rallies...

including demanding that everyone be released, and...

they will release everyone if we clearly...

understand the strategy: keep talking about it...

constantly, inform the largest possible...

number of people, compare these cases with other...

sentences. Look, today I saw a report:

a police major tortured a detainee...

actually not even a convicted prisoner...

with electric shocks in order to...

force him to confess to stealing 5,000 rubles (about $50–$55)...

and then, having gotten nothing out of him, let him...

go home. So the man filed a complaint...

they brought that major to court, and the court...

said: well, it's nothing serious, really — he just grabbed...

someone off the street and tortured him with electric...

current, so let's just put him under house...

arrest.

They didn't even put him in pretrial detention, and we need to...

keep talking about this constantly. We need to...

make these comparisons so that even people who don't...

care about politics — even if they don't...

care about politics, but they have...

relatives or acquaintances who were...

tortured with electric shocks, or they have...

a relative or acquaintance who...

has run into this system...

they need to know about these absolutely...

unjust political trials.

They need to know that people are being...

sentenced to four years for four pickets, and through...

this we must bring down Putin's approval rating...

further, and then they will start releasing everyone.

This is extremely, extremely important, and we must...

without question...

respond as harshly as possible to all this...

nonsense that is being peddled...

by these communities of degenerates...

who keep trying to...

prove to us that, well, in America...

it's supposedly the same — that if you throw...

a plastic cup at an American police officer...

he'll definitely shoot you on the spot. Let's...

take Peskov, for example — and when we say degenerate...

Peskov comes to mind immediately.

Let's listen to him: the investigation...

has established — is it really acceptable to throw...

objects that pose a danger?

And on top of that, this disgusting, lying, mustached...

crook spouts this nonsense and does it with such...

self-confidence — as if to say, understand, this is...

the law; in Canada they'd shoot you dead...

— just making up these tall tales. By the way...

a huge number of police officers...

actually believe this nonsense. Very often I...

they detain people, and when I talk there

I said, well, what are you doing there, locking people up like that?

You're jailing them for nothing, and on top of that you write

these false statements of yours. I have

a pain in my leg, my arm hurts too, the same thing

He was with me when I was detained at the

rally. He won't let you lie — Dimon was there.

They even filed a complaint against me for violence

against a government official. One

police major wrote in his report that when

they were dragging me into the police van, I was kicking and

hit him with my foot in the thigh or the shin

thereby causing pain.

They simply didn't pursue that

criminal case any further, but I was questioned

by the Investigative Committee (Russia's main federal investigative authority); a case had been

opened over it, and the police

believe it. But it's an absolute lie, it's

completely alien to me. Of course, if

an American police officer stops you there

and you start grabbing for something and

pulling out something that looks like a gun,

it's quite possible that, like in the movies,

he'll shoot you. But at

rallies

nothing of the sort happens.

Police in those countries I mentioned

protect demonstrations; most of the time there isn't

even the slightest reason for conflict

because everyone has the right to protest.

There generally isn't, in principle, in most cases

in 95 percent of cases, any conflict between

police officers and demonstrators

because the police, well, they

answer to an elected mayor, and the elected

mayor understands that in that city

some local person has every right

to go out, please, go out and

the police will protect you. They don't even

talk there about someone throwing a plastic

cup, but if you throw a

plastic cup, nothing

will happen. Show 33 seconds of the protest

in Ferguson, and let's take a look.

Of course, there's nothing good in these

confrontations. These may be

extreme examples,

but as you can see, nobody brought in a

machine gun there, and people aren't being gunned down for

throwing flares and so on and so forth.

In fact, confrontations

between protesters and police in

all European countries are much more

intense, because people have the right

to resist, because people come out for

their rights, and they have the right

not to disperse. They simply come to

a street and say there,

'We're not leaving,' and the police have

exactly the same legal constraints there, and you

can go and sue that police officer,

and that has happened many times.

There are many cases where civilians

successfully sued police officers far, far

more often for unlawful or excessive

violence than the other way around. That's why Peskov (Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson) and

all the others are simply brazenly lying about

this topic, not to mention the fact that

it's genuinely absurd that some

cup was thrown — it's an absolutely vile

lie, and we need to talk about it, we need

to keep saying it constantly.

And we need to expose them, to not

grow tired of saying that these

people should be jailed for lying. Do you remember

what Sobyanin (Sergey Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow) said in his first

comment after the first rallies? I can't

play you the audio because

the TV Center clip and our video got banned. Let's

look at the exact quote of how Sobyanin

assessed the rallies:

'I assess them as mass riots. There were no

applications filed, no one asked us about

authorized rallies. An ultimatum was voiced, and there was

a call to storm

City Hall.'

But that's a lie too — the lying scoundrel is lying

right to everyone's face. That so-called ultimatum,

yes, I voiced it, but there was

no ultimatum, there was no

call to storm anything. What was said was:

'Either you register the candidates, or you

must somehow meet with

us at City Hall, meet with those very

candidates, look at the people who

have come, because people

have the right to express their dissatisfaction.' And

as it turned out several months later,

we were completely right. We won

those elections.

A larger number of people voted

for opposition candidates, and

a smaller number voted

for Sobyanin, for United Russia, for all

the rest. It's simply a medical

fact — even taking the falsification into account, it's

simply a medical fact. Therefore,

of course we had the right to come out, and we have

the right to come out, and we must continue

to demand the release of all these people.

Now the situation is changing, and calls to

free political prisoners are receiving

broad support and widespread sympathy

even from people not involved in politics.

So once again, on the 29th, guys, whether there's

bad weather or good weather,

rain — it doesn't matter, you need to go, because this is

absolutely crucial. We, we —

I'll repeat — we already even in the elections

defeated all these crooks.

And they're still holding people for

nothing — literally for nothing.

A person stood with a placard four or five times and

gets four years in prison; three years in prison for

Kotova — it's just absolutely

a mockery of common sense, and we

just

those who aren't ready, or are afraid, or stay silent

or thinks they don’t need to get involved in

this whole thing. But it seems to me that such people

simply have no conscience. They should be

very, very ashamed that they are not ready to

stand up for you—for people who are being targeted absolutely unlawfully,

people who are completely innocent and whom

they are trying to devour right before our eyes.

The Fabric case is one of the cases

that became a reason for this rally, and

the Libertarians, who are listed as

the organizers of this rally, explicitly named there,

including the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation), did this, and we are very

grateful to them for it.

This matters to us because this whole thing

is continuing. Searches were carried out at 151 of our people,

and 52 of our people had

absolutely all their accounts frozen. We cannot

pay salaries. We have

the accounts of all our legal entities blocked.

A huge amount has been seized from us, and you know, this huge amount

of equipment—and just like in the Moscow case,

where people were arrested, none of this just

happens on its own. They simply seized everything from us,

carried out some searches, and there is no clear

explanation of what crime it was

in connection with which all this happened. Were we

laundering some money? What money? From

what crime? Nothing is happening,

there are no explanations, and this is a

state-sanctioned

state-sanctioned crime

committed by the authorities. That is why I now,

personally, as the founder of the Anti-Corruption

Foundation,

am calling on all of you: come and defend us.

Protect us. We want to, and we will continue to,

carry out these investigations no matter what. We have the right

to conduct these investigations.

You have the right to watch these

investigations and to know what is happening

in the country, and right now we need, among other things,

your protection and support. United Russia

continues to behave quite brazenly and

aggressively, and of course we are seeing this now

to the fullest extent.

In

the situation in St. Petersburg, in my

previous program I said that

it was very difficult to sum up the election results

in St. Petersburg

because of what happened there. By

that point, more than 10 days—10 days—

had passed, and there were still no results, because

the counting was still going on, because even then

there were still some absolutely monstrous

falsifications. Today I am very glad

to tell you that indeed we

performed quite successfully with our Smart

Voting strategy in St. Petersburg.

Previously, across all of St. Petersburg there were only

125 non–United Russia deputies; now there are 601

independent deputies, and 366 of them

were backed by Smart Voting. These numbers would have

been much higher if not for

the falsifications that were simply

carried out on a total scale.

And in St. Petersburg, of course, they produced

more absurdities than even United Russia usually does.

A striking

example: last Friday, you are about to see

how the ballots on which

independent candidates had won

were simply, effectively,

stolen from the election commission. The following happened there:

independent

candidates won. The ballots were kept there for some time

inside that commission because

the authorities refused to recognize them

as the winners. The winning candidates said:

we will not let you take these ballots

anywhere.

Let’s take a look at how, nevertheless,

these people carried them away. They had 30 seconds.

Make way, make way!

Something from above...

There.

So you see, in broad daylight,

with journalists filming them, four

police officers and two commission members went in,

took the ballots. People had voted,

elected independents, and then the ballots were taken away and carried

off somewhere, after which

a United Russia victory was declared. And at that point even

our mutual friend Ella Pamfilova (head of Russia’s Central Election Commission)

started squeaking in a thin voice, because

Ella Pamfilova, of course,

is there in order to facilitate

falsifications. But when she accepted

this position, she thought that at least

the falsifications would be somewhat

more or less presentable. They would still be disgusting

falsifications, but here Pamfilova

would at least be allowed to tie a little bow on them, and here

add some little decorative touch—here we’ll plant

a geranium, and here something else, and here there will be

bumblebees flying around, and

so our falsification will

look not quite so revolting. But in

St. Petersburg we saw all the guts of it laid bare:

the police, beaten candidates, everything

else. And the Central Election Commission has already stated that in

St. Petersburg there is complete chaos. You see,

there is no real authority at all—they do whatever they want

there.

How did this happen? For twenty years

Putin has been in power building his so-called vertical of power, and

there it is, this neat little vertical:

here is the police branch, here is the FSB branch,

here is the Central Election

Commission branch,

and here is the executive branch, local

self-government.

And it turns out there is no authority at all, and even

Ella Pamfilova can do absolutely nothing

about it.

So the question arises: what have they been doing all

these 20 years? Why the hell do we need all this?

Why do we need a Central Election

commission

if, say, they want to rig the electoral

process at the very end of the election process

the police simply carry out the ballots and

a United Russia victory is declared, but

why am I saying all this? Because it is absolutely

astonishing how they responded to Pamfilova

United Russia, honestly, guys, completely

has no shame at all—they’re even insolent. The head

of United Russia, in general,

the head of the Legislative Assembly in

St. Petersburg plainly stated

when Ella Pamfilova said that

Makarov and United Russia were interfering in

the electoral process, he said: I’m not just

interfering—I represent United Russia

and the goal of my party is to win,

hold, and use power. And here

the only phrase missing is “to seize it

at any cost.” Just brilliant: to win,

to seize, to use power, and for

that purpose, please, they use

the police, they use some kind of

thugs ("titushki," hired provocateurs), they use falsification,

they use ballot stuffing, and he says this outright

to Ella Pamfilova: it’s a mess, and nothing

can be done about it. In fact, I

once again just want to draw attention

and repeat that I am sure the people in

the Kremlin don’t like this either, because

their concept with Ella Pamfilova

their concept was a little bit of

falsification with a pretty ribbon on top

the fabrication of the electoral process

still takes place during the

election campaign: they don’t allow

a candidate to run, then they lie about opposition figures

all the time in the media, they give some kind of

coverage through outlets under their control, and so on, but

the vote count is supposed to proceed in a way that

doesn’t provoke major scandals

Nevertheless, in St. Petersburg this is a major

scandal. United Russia says there: this is how we’ll

do it, this is how we’ll keep doing it, and we

don’t care about Ella Pamfilova. And I want to remind you

guys, that this time we

beat United Russia in several

regions, we beat them in Moscow too, we

beat them in St. Petersburg; in Moscow they

took a little bite out of our victory, while in

St. Petersburg they took a significant part

of our victory. But next year we will have

16 gubernatorial elections and 11

elections to regional legislative assemblies, including in

major regions—the Novosibirsk Region

where there will also be city council elections, their

legislative assemblies, the Chelyabinsk

Region—and United Russia must suffer

United Russia—we simply have to

crush them for this brazen behavior of theirs

for the way they speak to us like this, we

have to crush them, and keep doing it

Let’s just look at those victories

of United Russia that they

secure thanks to the fact that they

have seized power and use power, as

the speaker of the Legislative Assembly stated,

Makarov. Or better yet, what happened on

this issue

happened in Perm, where there is a

Legislative Assembly, and there deputies

from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) in the Legislative Assembly

said: let’s pass a law under which

public-sector employees on a full-time rate cannot

be paid less than 20,000 rubles (about 20 thousand rubles)

20,000 rubles is not a very large salary, and

in theory, one would assume

that United Russia would say: absolutely,

no problem—after all, if we look at Rosstat

Rosstat says that right now we have

an average salary of

32,000 rubles. You see, that’s the official

data on the average for Perm residents

therefore, if you are demanding 20,000

there’s no problem—everyone already gets that

But let’s look at how the discussion

of the bill went. It was proposed

to supplement Article 144 of the Labor Code

with a provision according to which the salary

of a medical worker,

an educational worker, a worker

in culture, cannot be lower than double

the subsistence minimum. Our

faction proposes to do what

both the trade unions and the Confederation of Labor

of Russia are talking about

namely, to tie the May decrees

of the president to the salary for a full-time position

of a public-sector employee. Therefore, colleagues, we urge you

to support our social initiative

Thank you. Dear colleagues, there are many

issues across the territories, and one of the main

problems people keep raising is

the issue of salaries for public-sector workers in

Perm Krai. This is not only a Perm issue, but one

across all of Russia

in educational institutions, culture, and

a number of other sectors, officially and in reality

the pay is very low. My personal opinion is that it

should be supported

A good initiative,

from the deputies

Dear colleagues, I would like to add that

the faction

of United Russia does not support this

resolution. Thank you. That settled it—no support

So when I say we need to crush United

Russia, this is exactly what needs to be shown: United

Russia voted against guaranteeing

a salary of at least

20,000 rubles, while United Russia

talks about everyone’s salary being 32,000

rubles. They are officially lying. We

simply have to destroy this

disgusting lying party. I think after that

whether these words count as extremism

or not, nevertheless I will repeat them

United Russia as a structure must be

must be destroyed because it is a party of crooks

and thieves.

Disgusting, lying people, enemies of our

country. Therefore, in the next election

cycle, on the next Single Voting Day (Russia’s nationwide election day),

next September, we

must make every possible effort

to ensure that these people simply

simply, simply are not elected. We understand perfectly well

that they will still

rig the results, but we need to make it so

that it turns out like it did in Moscow. In Moscow,

there were 45 seats. Yes, we won, out of those 45 seats,

27, apparently, and they stole 7 from us, but

we need to make it so that we win all 45.

Then, well, if they can steal something,

let all of their seats

be obviously stolen.

And not one of them will be able to say,

“I really, fair and square, won

this election.” And they will lose when we

talk more often about cases like

this one—a truly astonishing case involving

a boiler house in Kamchatka Krai (a region in Russia’s Far East).

The minister of housing and utilities reported that in the village of

Sredniy Po [__], they had launched a new

boiler house. In other words, the man simply

came out and said, you know,

we launched a new boiler house—victory

for United Russia.

Glory to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, everything

is wonderful. And these guys didn’t even think

that the people in Sredniy Po [__] might actually

have some people there who immediately went

to look for this boiler house and put out this

great video. Let’s watch. September 24, 2019.

In the village of Sredniy Pakhat, a person

from the Ust-Bolsheretsky District

It’s been snowing since 6 a.m., as usual.

The population was not ready for this—well,

then again, neither was

the heat supply source. Here it is.

Although according to the documents, the regional authorities

report that this facility

has been operating steadily since September 20, just like

for the previous, basically, 20 years. Over all this

time, people have learned to perform the duties

of stokers, keeping their

apartments warm

using stove heating. That’s how it is.

It’s the 21st century, and in Sredniy Po [__],

that’s it, everyone, bye—I’m off to get firewood. And in the end,

there’s a sled and an axe. Good Lord, this is

something else—you hear that? Father is chopping,

and I haul it away. In the forest rang the axe

of the woodcutter.

It really is the 21st century, and this is Kamchatka—it’s very

cold there. But the point is, they simply

reported it straight to the top as if it had been launched.

And it doesn’t even occur to them that, well,

someone might just go there and film it—there is an abandoned

boiler house there, and for 20 years, as you saw,

grass has been growing inside it. But who cares—we’re the big shots,

we’re United Russia, we control

the TV, so we can lie. Then the governor

later—let’s watch, for 30 seconds—

said, “Oh, I didn’t know. If anyone really wants to,”

it’s hard not to mock him over this.

“Now we’ll punish the housing and utilities minister.”

But he said that for one reason only:

because there is YouTube, because there is

the internet, because a person simply

recorded it, went to this boiler house, filmed

these walls with grass growing through them, and

posted it online.

And how many such cases are there where

someone simply doesn’t post it? Let’s watch.

The governor really doesn’t want to be mocked

over this either, because I know for sure that the boiler house

in

Srednikh Pakhni—those walls you

showed there—belong to a facility that was closed

about twenty years ago. What did the minister mean?

I will definitely ask them

and then tell you. But he definitely hasn’t been there.

I think he’ll be there now, for sure. Quite a

curious little incident in Sredniy Pakhat.

We’ll send the minister there now. Instead of

lying at home in a jacuzzi, he’ll go there,

put on a quilted jacket and kirza boots (traditional Soviet-style leather boots), and

explain himself to the residents. But in fact,

the thing is, the minister needs to

be fired. We also need to find out what kind of

tariffs they are charging there. They have probably also

written off money for this boiler house, and

they must have some kind of fuel balance sheet for

the district. They are surely receiving federal subsidies

on the assumption that not only is it formally

operating, but that it is heating these Sredniy

Po [__] settlements.

And so on. But still, they were caught

on the internet, so they

turn it into some kind of curiosity, and such

hellish things are happening

not only in Kamchatka. Let’s

look at very wealthy Moscow. What caught my attention was

the story about the Blokhin Center. It is

a huge, gigantic oncology center,

and you would think—good Lord, in Moscow, with a budget of

two trillion rubles, oncology, where

all the money in the world and all the money in the

country seems to be poured—this absolutely gigantic building,

a leading center,

you would think everyone there should be

living in clover.

But there are doctors’ strikes, doctors’ outrage,

they are recording open letters,

saying that they have simply

had a change in management, and in came

people who are monstrous corrupt officials. Let’s

watch a 1-minute-20-second report

by the Doctors’ Alliance about what is happening at

the Blokhin Center. Over the last

year and a half, it has become harder and harder for us

to work.

With the arrival of the new team from the Rogachev Institute,

it has become practically impossible to work.

Right now I can see the system collapsing.

So, when we had just...

arrived, I had just been admitted to

graduate school, and this situation happened:

starting September 25, he is being removed from

his position — Georgy Damirovich Zavinchivatel Lenin.

For me, this is

personally a catastrophe, because I came here

specifically to study under him.

No, he wasn't just the head

of this department.

He was like a parent. This concerns our

children, and those who will be treated here in the future.

You can't just throw away specialists

like that. I believe that with the arrival of a

new department head, I probably won't be able to work in

this department. The same

can be said about many of my

colleagues. We will defend our rights, the rights

of our children, and the rights of our doctors.

I simply went there to study with Damirovich.

If he leaves, I will leave this team too.

The department staff have already written resignation

letters. We will submit them if the authorities do not

stop the process of dismissing our

department head. Why did I decide to talk about

this situation? Because although it may seem like

you look at it and it's not clear that this is any kind of

labor dispute — just a few

doctors wrote statements — I thought about the fact that, imagine,

if this is happening, well,

if we imagine some kind of

the richest place in

medicine that could possibly exist

within our country, it is apparently

oncology — the largest cancer

center in the richest city — and there

doctors are being fired, laid off, and they

say that an entire department

will resign. And this is all the doing of United

Russia (the ruling political party), and this needs to be talked about. And it was very,

very striking to watch how United

Russia, which still in the

Moscow City Duma

stole the majority, seized the majority,

has become so uncomfortable in the new

Moscow City Duma, where the majority is no longer held by

the opposition deputies. They still, in general,

cannot pass a single

decision, but already you can see how much more

vivid and interesting life there is there. For a full

three minutes, I'll show you a BBC video.

It's simply wonderful, and once again I want

to say a huge thank-you to everyone who

came out and took part in the voting.

Thanks to you, guys, finally we

can watch with interest how the struggle is unfolding

inside the Moscow City Duma.

There is a real political process there

now, and it happened thanks to us,

thanks to the fact that we took part in

the voting and won these elections.

Three minutes of suffering for United Russia members in the Moscow City Duma.

Electronic group, prepare for

voting. Attention, voting is now underway.

[music]

[applause]

There is an exhumation of corpses in the minds

of our citizens, and not only in Moscow but

throughout Russia as a whole. United Russia

is dead. So wouldn't it have been simpler for you, in the

elections, to run under your own party banner

instead of building this whole charade now? No one

was hiding their affiliation with the party

United Russia.

I wasn't hiding it. I will prove that United

Russia

defends the interests of the Russian state.

You understand? And it stands here for family values too,

which is very important to me, because

I have parents — both a mother and a father.

A faction is formed by deputies

elected from party lists. Single-mandate deputies

may join already existing

factions, but they cannot

form their own.

This matters if we're going to engage in this kind of

legal ping-pong. Then let me reveal a small

secret: even without these

amendments, we can create a United Russia

faction. You don't need to be some kind of legal genius for that.

You know, I actually agree with Kirill.

As Kirill rightly said,

whether this document is adopted or not

will change nothing. We are United Russia members — it's written

on our foreheads. We are United Russia members, and we do not

deny it. And I can't shake the feeling

that I'm in a circus. Frankly, I expected

something a little better. We will gather

in secret if you forbid us to gather

within the walls of the Moscow City

Duma. We'll find a way — we'll create an underground regional committee

of United Russia.

[music]

The percentage for United Russia remains

a crucial practice. Right now the public

has sent 19 deputies in.

...and the largest party.

Time and again, the issue here is connected with those

repressions that have fallen

today on certain participants in mass

protests.

Investigations are at the core of this conclusion.

The unification of citizens through the first 100...

We can see that we are jumping around, it's true.

Those protesting wanted a different Duma, I think.

And our goal, as the Moscow City

Duma in its current convocation,

can only be one: you must

restore order. Our voters

in the legislation — and dissolve yourselves

so that you can be elected again, representing

the real interests of Muscovites.

[music]

There may be only one question: to be or not to be.

[music]

Thirty thousand people are watching us

live. I hope all of you

enjoyed this spectacle, because...

It was really cool. I was in the Moscow City Duma (the city parliament).

And I spoke there when I

ran in the 2013 election

for mayor of Moscow.

I think I got almost 30 percent. I

drafted a bill on transparency

in housing and utility tariffs and sent it to the Moscow

City Duma. I said, guys, I

represent 30 percent of the population

of the city of Moscow, so please consider

my bill, at least put it

on the agenda for consideration. I went there,

but they had all gathered there, all of them curious

to look at me. But it was one of those situations

where, you know, everyone is staring at you and you’re

like some kind of bug under glass.

And they were all United Russia members (the Kremlin-backed ruling party), every last one of them. There were two

or three non-United Russia deputies who were so cowed

they kept quieter than quiet, except

for a few rare exceptions.

Zubrilin and Shuvalova were active back then, but overall

it was total domination,

total domination by United Russia, which

wouldn’t even let anyone have their microphone turned on.

There was nothing you could do with them, and

now, in fact, they’re the ones speaking up.

The deputies are saying, “What, you’re going to forbid us

from forming a faction?” The thing is, a faction

can only be created by a party, and a party has to have nominated

the candidates. So you can create

a faction if your candidates got elected.

The Communists nominated candidates, so they can create

a faction. A Just Russia nominated candidates,

so it can have a faction. Yabloko can too.

But United Russia? No, it can’t, because

it didn’t participate directly — all of its people ran

as independents. So now everyone said, well,

then there won’t be any faction. Of course, they

pushed it all through anyway.

With all kinds of dirty tricks and rigging. But it was

great to watch when United Russia people stand there

and say, “We’re the underground now,” and they

already look like hunted animals. The deputies are no longer

keeping quiet, because now there are already 20

opposition deputies, and at the very first

session they were discussing political

prisoners.

They’re putting United Russia on the spot, and that’s great, and

we need to keep doing it. I urge

you to push Smart Voting (Navalny’s tactical voting strategy) even more actively

next year. It will be

harder,

because after all we don’t have

capital-city conditions in the regions, yes, but even so,

we simply have to kick United Russia out

from everywhere. We have every reason

to do it, every opportunity to do it.

I’ve spent almost an hour talking before getting

to Greta Thunberg. Everyone

hates Greta Thunberg. To my great

surprise, I discovered that everyone in

Russia hates Greta Thunberg.

Conservatives and liberals, the right and the left,

those who support the authorities and those who

seem to oppose them — they hate Greta Thunberg even more.

They hate Greta Thunberg. Good Lord, if only

there were this many critical remarks,

attacks, and these kinds of fairly

aggressive discussions — if there were that much of it, probably,

about Solzhenitsyn or about

Putin, either one of them would be

horrified to death just from being

constantly brought up.

The libertarians, wonderful people who

are organizing the rally on the 29th,

which we’ll all attend — they’re really

great. But when they see Greta

Thunberg, they practically can’t sleep,

they can’t think calmly, they just

go on about it all day long.

Yulia Latynina, a wonderful columnist,

look, she had a great headline:

“Little Pioneer Girl: the use of children

for ideological battles is

a classic hallmark of totalitarian

ideologies.” It’s a very simple, very

interesting point, but it still seems to me

that the discussion is a little unhealthy. I

completely understand, by the way, why

older people — and it’s awful that I even have

to say this about myself now — why people

of the older generation react this way to Greta Thunberg,

because we remember what

it was like in the Soviet Union. If you’re

under 40, then names like Samantha

Smith and Katya Lycheva probably mean

nothing to you. But we remember very well

when there were exactly the same kind of

little pioneers, like Greta Thunberg,

and they were doing the very same thing. They

traveled around, met with

foreign delegations, fought for peace

throughout the world. Let’s

watch 42 seconds of it.

Katya Lycheva, whose name every

young Pioneer in the Soviet Union knew, including

Pioneer Alexei Navalny himself. Forty-two seconds.

[music]

You didn’t even need to see much — it was all such a fake, and

all those newspapers like *Pionerskaya Pravda* (a Soviet children’s newspaper), all that stuff

they forced on us in school information sessions — we

were made to know all about it. And children write letters

to Ronald Reagan, and then Katya Lycheva

and everyone had to write letters, and so on

and so forth. It was all such

monstrous hypocrisy that anyone

from the Soviet Union who sees

a little girl saying something

about politics immediately tenses up.

That is unquestionably already part of our

cultural and historical code,

and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Still, let’s take a look at who

Greta Thunberg actually is, because the thing that

personally irritates me most is

when people say that she’s some kind of

manufactured product, that someone is behind her, or

that some powerful PR people invented her.

If a person says all this,

the first sign is, if you see or read

that

that some hidden forces are supposedly behind it,

some PR people,

or some other forces, or whatever else — that's just

well, saying it's all PR, that there are PR people behind it, practically

always means nonsense. This 14-year-old girl

may well have had help from her parents,

apparently with their approval, I don't know.

I mean, there must have been some moment when she

came to her mother and said, “Mom, Mom, I don't

want to go to school, I want to work on

environmental issues.” Maybe her mother

said,

“Greta, all right, don't go to school on Fridays,”

“go stand outside parliament there with

a picket sign.” In that sense,

you could say her mother was behind Greta, but

certainly not some shadowy forces. And the girl went and

stood there on Fridays with a protest sign.

Naturally, newspapers started writing about it.

If in Russia, in Moscow, some girl

or boy started going out on Fridays and

standing there with a sign like that — well, first of all,

that girl or boy would constantly be

taken away by the police, so for that reason alone

everyone would write about it. But it would absolutely

be noticed. Then other schoolchildren noticed it,

and then others joined them, well, because

it really is an important issue. After all, that's

a wealthy country. It's us here who live in

a rather wild, backward society

where, in terms of Maslow's hierarchy,

we're still trying to satisfy our basic needs.

As we saw in the report from Perm (a city in Russia), people want a salary

of at least 20,000 rubles a month (about 20,000 RUB), and only then

can they think about the environment — or so it seems to us,

although that's completely wrong.

But there it's a wealthy, developed society. They

saw that one girl was going out,

then a second girl joined, then a third, and then

it became, “Hey, look, there are lots of these kids,” and

let's look at a video of what the demonstration of these children

who are coming out now

to defend the environment looks like. You see,

this movement is worldwide. In that

sense, nobody is behind it. I think this footage is from

New York. In other words, in all

European countries, in all developed

countries, and now even in not entirely

developed countries, these children are coming out and they

are speaking out for the environment, and they are speaking out

against global warming. It's a perfectly

natural movement, behind which

there is nobody pulling the strings — behind it there is simply

children's desire to participate

more actively in politics, along with

media interest, because they make stories about it.

Because it's an interesting thing, and

people watch it: some like it, some

are outraged by it. Naturally, people discuss

whether children should be in school or whether they should spend

Fridays going to rallies, and to what extent

this harms the educational process.

This topic gets clicks, this topic gets likes.

People write about it all over the internet. More

children read about it online, and they

go to the rallies. Especially since, for example,

there were demonstrations in New York where

they explicitly told everyone that if you go to

the demonstration on Friday, we will not

count it as attendance — it will be treated as an unexcused absence,

but people went anyway, and everyone went.

And for some reason, out of this — out of this

rather naive but, it seems to me, correct

movement — a big movement grew.

And then everyone latched onto her and

started hating her.

Especially in Russia, and we can see that here

libertarians are clearly getting nervous and

upset. Not only libertarians, but also

many people who, in principle,

challenge this whole idea that

human interference with nature

leads to global warming. And it's very

interesting: Vera Kichanova (a Russian public figure), a well-known

figure in the libertarian movement, she

put together a selection of tweets — let's

show them.

And she drew my attention to them — she published

headlines like these,

historical headlines from the past

many years, all predicting that

very soon, very soon, very soon — in 1969,

they were telling us that soon

everything would be flooded and we'd all die, and

it just keeps going like that.

What else do we have there? You see, here's another one:

sea levels are rising — 20 years ago,

sorry, I can't quite see it from here — it says

that by the year 2000 we'd all be underwater

and drown. What next? Show us *The Guardian*,

which writes that climate change will

destroy us all in less than 20 years.

Britain will become Siberia, and people argue about

this. Is it really considered

a well-founded scientific hypothesis that it is specifically

human influence that leads to

sharp global warming?

But as for me, I think this should be treated

like this: well, I am not

a specialist in climate, nor in

geography,

or in those fields of knowledge that

require expert assessment. So what do I

do in this situation? Still,

I rely on the scientific consensus.

It can be criticized, it should

be criticized; there are different hypotheses. But at

the present moment, the scientific consensus

is that human influence

on the environment is undeniable, and

it is negative — that's the first point. Second,

warming is in fact proceeding very

rapidly now. Yes, over the course of

the Earth's history there have been warming periods and

cooling periods, but as far as we can see,

We are now going through the most abrupt warming period.

Much more abruptly,

than it ever happened before, back when this occurred

under the influence of, I don't know, simply

natural causes, volcanic

activity, and so on and so on and so forth.

And most importantly, Greta

Thunberg—they say she's just talking about

the environment.

What she says is that the people who

are generally in power right now

are preoccupied with

money-related concerns, and basically they

treat environmentalists and talk about

the environmental movement, talk about

the planet's destruction, as some kind of

background noise that can simply be

ignored. She gave that speech, and

in that speech she simply

on the one hand, was supported by

a great many people, while on the other

hand, she provoked a very

negative, aggressive reaction,

especially in Russia. Why did I decide to

talk about this? Because these

few seconds—she spoke for five minutes,

and I'll show 45 seconds of it—really

sent people in Russia into a rage. Let's

take a look at Greta, whom everyone

in Russia seems to hate so much. Here she is.

And tiny

and where are King School and poisonous salutes

ocean

people from all the view

9 more games

mating with the empty words get an

advance

And immediately everyone says:

"This aggressive girl is talking nonsense.

Just look at her face, she clearly has

obvious mental abnormalities, obvious

disorders." The worst and, it seems to me,

most shameful part of this

discussion is that people say,

"Look, the girl has autism—how can we

possibly listen to her?" This is actually

a very bad sign about our country, where

people basically think that if a person has

some kind of illness, then they shouldn't

be listened to at all. "Look, he's in a

wheelchair—why should we listen to him?"

"Oh, look, she has cerebral palsy.

How can anyone possibly take

his words seriously when his hand is

twitching?" In fact, a huge number of our

fellow citizens basically think this way. They've been told a hundred times that a person with cerebral palsy

—they've been told this over and over—

is no different from everyone else

in terms of intellectual ability. But still:

"Well, he's sitting there, something is

twitching, so yes, we shouldn't listen to him

at all." "And she has the face of an autistic person,

right?" I mean, how long are we going to

keep dragging supposedly crazy people

into public life?" Guys, this is genuinely

a sign of deep backwardness,

a total lack of understanding of medicine,

psychology—of anything, really. All these

people say, yes, Greta has medical conditions,

she has some kind of

form of autism, some psychological

disorder probably, and her

aggressive way of speaking is connected to that.

Don't forget, she's 16, and this is an

enormous amount of stress, of course, for

a child, and that's why she chose this

kind of manner of communication, this way

of speaking. But even despite the fact that she has

some deviations from what might be called

standard health,

she is perfectly capable of reasoning about these issues.

She can talk about them. And yes, her whole

campaign—I do read quite a lot of

criticism of it too—has certain elements that are, well,

fairly hypocritical. In particular, Greta

didn't fly to the U.S.; she

sailed there on a yacht because, well,

airplanes leave a carbon footprint and

harm nature, whereas arriving by yacht is

supposedly very eco-friendly. Well,

naturally, people immediately did the math and

saw that this yacht

and its charter—the cost of the trip—

came to $40,000, and in that

sense it looks rather strange when

someone comes to a podium and says, "You

only think about money," when they arrived

on a yacht and their journey cost

$40,000. The crew members

flew in and out by plane. So

there is certainly some larger

campaign behind it, and some of it has

already all

grown—it has become much bigger than

just a girl with a placard, and probably

the idea with this boat

was not the best one. But the main thing

I want to say is: what exactly has Greta

done that is so bad and terrible? We may not

believe in global warming, we may not

believe that global warming

is caused by anthropogenic factors, caused

by human activity, but still, what's so bad

about what she's doing? Just

go to any

river or any stream in Russia and what

will you see there? A huge number of

plastic bottles lying around,

floating in the water. We already have entire parts of

the world's oceans that are simply

clogged with plastic bottles. 23

seconds. A disgusting sight.

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Well,

and in general, the statements Greta

Thunberg makes are not at all

naive. She is genuinely saying that

the entire global political

The establishment basically thinks it's the best of all,

the smartest in the world, the coolest, and everything else

is just nonsense, so we

don't have to listen to some random people. And I

noticed that, actually, guys,

when it comes to Russia, it's like

with the case of Ivan Golunov (a Russian investigative journalist): here

all of us, in a way, are Greta Thunberg.

Because our authorities treat us

exactly the way many of those

conservative or right-wing conservative

Facebook commentators write: some stupid,

dim little girl is saying all sorts of naive

things. Remember, for example,

what officials say

about why there has to be a landfill. They say,

well, some kind of [ __ ] are speaking up here

against the landfill. They can't possibly

calculate it, they can't

figure out how important this is, how this is

the only possible

way to deal with waste from

Moscow: to set up a giant landfill on

the highway. Trust us, we're the reasonable people here,

and you're just dim little girls, so with you

it's impossible to have a serious conversation

about this at all.

Remember Sibay, a city in Bashkortostan (a republic in Russia), where there's

a pit, and gas comes out of that pit, and

that gas is poisoning everything.

Remember when the oligarch Kozitsyn came there,

the man whose company all this belongs to,

and just look at how he

spoke to the local residents in exactly

that same way. That's how many people are now trying

to treat Greta Thunberg.

To compensate

for the harm to health, so that this harm

to health would be officially established, you understand? Everyone

has to go through this, and everyone is suffering. We ourselves want

to go on living. The main question is: when will this

stop? The quarry's operation should

be suspended simply because we

want to live. We don't want to live like this. You had such an

emotional speech that in it

you asked a question and immediately answered it.

So, what exactly

am I supposed to do? What,

shut it down? I want to understand. That's why I

feel it, while they're saying it isn't there.

Why are there dashes in the report? Good luck with that. It's like

great, we're talking about seventh-grade chemistry here.

Is it possible to reduce the harm to me so that

I have to move to another city?

With your family, like any citizen of our

country, you have the right to go to court.

Prove your rights in court.

If the court makes such a decision, we will

answer before you in court as the defendant.

Look, it's exactly the same thing.

Here you have a 16-year-old girl now

saying naive things in an aggressive tone, and

everyone says, what kind of

nonsense is she talking? She doesn't understand anything, and anyway all this

hasn't been proven. Enough with this whole

naive act—they staged this as a PR campaign,

they dragged her in, and there she is saying

some obvious things. Get with it, for

God's sake—we're the people in ties here,

and we understand much better how all this

works. And then some similar

guy in a tie shows up, and some

Bashkir woman comes out and clearly

says some naive things: we here

want to live a little longer, we want

to have our health. And they say, well, you—

you barely even speak Russian here,

you can't even talk properly, you don't understand seventh-grade chemistry,

but if you want, go to court, and in court

you'll lose, because then some other

naive woman comes out, kind of like Greta

Thunberg, and says: you're telling us that

there's no pollution, but I live here, I can feel it.

It's exactly the same thing.

For years, these people have been proving to us

consistently that they are

so incredibly smart, and that only this way can things

develop. Why is it that in Russia there are still

huge quantities being sold of

plastic tableware, idiotic plastic

bottles?

In developed countries they've been gone for a long time.

Because we have manufacturers of this

PET packaging who make these bottles, and

you can prove absolutely anything to them,

but they're the ones paying salaries

to United Russia people, to some FSB officers,

to prosecutors—they have some kind of lobby in

the environmental authorities, and they tell us,

well, guys, sure, yes, you can see

in the picture that everywhere there are

plastic bottles lying around,

but there's just no other way. You simply don't

understand, you don't know how

the economy works at all, you don't understand how

beverage bottling works, how life works—you don't

understand a damn thing. You're just some kind of

dim people with autism wandering around

out there, and they don't know some secret

truth, so we have to

laugh at you and tell you to go to hell.

In Krasnoyarsk there is a 'black sky' regime

that I've spoken about repeatedly on this

program. It's a situation in which

all these factories are belching smoke and over the city there hangs

a cloud; you have to shut all the windows, children

don't go to school, and it's best not to go

outside because the air is

poisonous.

And people come out to protest, they

are outraged, but every time

the governor comes, the owners of these

factories come, the local crooks come who

don't want to install treatment facilities

because they need the money for a yacht, and they

very convincingly,

with arguments, with charts, with a

seventh-grade chemistry textbook, prove that this is how it has to be.

It cannot be otherwise; that’s how it should be.

You all here think Greta Thunberg is a bit dim-witted.

Thunberg. And we understand that the “black sky” regime

in the city of Krasnoyarsk

is a good and proper thing. If you

go out in solo pickets (one-person protests), then you’re

just some dim-witted, naive people standing on

the tracks in a city where everything has basically

ground to a halt, some Karabash (a heavily polluted industrial town in Russia). These

photos of red and yellow puddles have been seen by

everyone in our country, and, well, there

there isn’t even any environmental

movement left there anymore—they’ve lost everyone. But everyone who was

outraged by it is treated as if they too must be

some kind of lunatics. What are they even demanding there?

They just don’t understand how enterprises are structured,

they simply don’t understand

the technological process at our

wonderful factory that produces

nickel, so that Vladimir

Potanin or Mikhail Prokhorov can buy themselves

yet another

basketball team or another yacht.

If you say this, then you’re some kind of

lefty, or some fool, or you’re

just a naive person. And apparently

you have no right at all and should not

say anything, because you’re

dim-witted and don’t know what’s in a 7th-grade chemistry textbook.

So I just want to say that

there is nothing bad in what

Greta Thunberg says. She may

look rather unusual, and she

speaks rather strangely, but she is not saying bad things.

She isn’t. And we see environmental problems

and witness them every day. Can you

drink tap water in Moscow? No. Can you

swim in the Moscow River within

the city limits? You can’t. Whereas in many European

cities, even within the limits of

major urban areas, the rivers have become fairly clean.

Back in the 1970s and ’80s,

they had the same kind of environmental

catastrophe, but they took measures,

they did, and the water became cleaner, the air became cleaner. But

here in Russia we still remain in the position of

mocking Greta Thunberg, at whom

everyone laughs and whom no one

supports—and supposedly that’s entirely correct.

Vladimir Milov told such aggressive critics:

yes, she should be criticized, and this whole

movement should also be assessed from a critical

point of view. But the main thing he said was:

what exactly are you defending?

If you are against Greta, then are you really

defending this fuel-oil-and-coal

reality that exists in Russia now?

Because the real Russia is precisely fuel oil

and coal. Our entire fuel

balance and our whole economy are

built simply on digging something out

of the ground and then burning it.

It burns with hellish soot.

That’s how we heat things, that’s how we

generate electricity, and so on, and so

on, and so on. In that sense, it seems to me

that the words of

Greta Thunberg are worth listening to, and so is

this movement. Yes, maybe it is somewhat

naive; yes, maybe the media and journalists

and so on

have gotten a bit too carried away with this

theme, turning it into a kind of spectacle:

“Look at these sweet children.” But in essence they

are talking about things that clearly

should occupy a much larger place in

the political agenda—certainly in Russia,

where what is happening is simply absurd. The country is

enormous; you’d think

there ought to be places here with

clean air. But our cities are

among the most polluted, and life expectancy here is

among the lowest. So if anywhere,

then in Russia of all places everyone should be

paying attention to this.

Not acting dumb and mocking Greta.

Not shouting that hydrocarbons are our everything.

But she provokes such an aggressive

reaction, and it seems to me completely unjustified. And now,

to wrap up our program: there is a naive

girl who says strange things,

speaks in a strange voice, and

reads from a sheet of paper in a somewhat theatrical

manner. And then there is a man who rules

the country—Vladimir Putin—and he is supposedly

not crazy at all. Yet at a government

meeting, the President of the Russian

Federation gave an instruction. I saw this news item

today on a news website:

President Vladimir Putin instructed

the Cabinet and regional authorities

to consider the possibility, the possibility

of expanding the range of goods sold in

newspaper kiosks by including

soft drinks and confectionery

products.

And this, damn it, is apparently a serious problem, you understand.

The president of the largest country in the

world, where in Krasnoyarsk there is a “black sky” regime,

where there are landfills, where people are being jailed, where in

Sibay (a city in Bashkortostan) some gas is coming out of an open pit mine and

people cannot breathe—

the president of that country says, well,

that girl Greta,

there’s something off with her, and we should, should

pay attention to her? She’s busy with some kind of

nonsense. Let’s deal with a real

problem instead: now we will devote our time

and the billions of rubles that go toward

keeping the state

apparatus running to the serious problem of the assortment

in newspaper kiosks. That is how our

country is устроена—insane.

It’s not Greta Thunberg who is crazy—Putin is crazy.

Peskov is crazy, talking about how

people should be shot for taking away

abandoned dogs,

paper cups, and all the rest of them as well.

Living among us are, well, not exactly insane people, but people

who need therapy, who still

vote for Putin and support United Russia (the pro-Kremlin ruling party),

so this therapy needs to be carried out.

We must not grow tired of fighting United Russia

and driving out

these very real, genuinely dangerous

maniacs. Unlike others, you can’t tell just by looking at them, but

it isn’t visible, yet they are dangerous

maniacs and psychopaths, and they must be

fought — including by fighting for people’s minds.

We’ll be confronting them at the rally on the 29th.

Please go to the website Otpuskay

and check where it will take place.

Register as well. On the 29th

at 3:00 p.m. on Sakharov Avenue

please be sure to come. Thank you very much

to everyone who watched my livestream. See you

next Thursday.

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