Election Day, Skripal, Ballot Stuffing in St. Petersburg

[music]

Hello everyone. It's 8:18 p.m. in Moscow, and we're live in the studio.

Alexei Navalny, or a political prankster,

as Ella Pamfilova called me.

An absolutely brilliant name, and

Pamfilova is hereby awarded the traveling

banner for the best nickname for

me: “political prankster.” That's really

great. And Ella Pamfilova has also

shown herself to be quite a prankster too, because

this week she also called me

her “little son.” A delegation from

our boycott headquarters had just gone to see her.

She called them her “grandkids,” so we

will talk about that in more detail today,

but

Ella Pamfilova is clearly having a lot of fun.

The first thing I wanted to say

—because the first minute gets the most viewers

and the most listeners—is this: if you've signed up

to be an election observer, you're amazing, well done.

Guys, please go to the headquarters and

pick up your assignment, because, as

usually happens in every election, all of you

will come for your paperwork at the last

minute, and there will be enormous chaos at headquarters.

Everything will be very difficult, and you'll all

be angry and saying, “Why is there a line?

Why are there so many people? Why is it such a mess?” Please—if you've signed up,

go now. You have to understand, this involves many, many

thousands of people across many regions, and it's

quite difficult for us to manage all of this.

But we're doing it, so don't wait—

go tomorrow and get your assignment,

get your polling station. Today we're

raising money to send people—it sounds

funny, but today we're raising money to

send people to Chechnya. I think Leonid Volkov joked

about it well: for the first time, we're

investing money in Chechnya voluntarily.

We have several brave

people—53 of them.

They want to go and observe

the elections in Chechnya. We need

803,000 rubles for

their tickets,

food, and transportation once they're there. We've already

raised almost all of it—300,000 rubles remain

for us to collect today. Whoever

makes the biggest donation

will get this cool T-shirt from

our tour. Please send

money for Chechnya. So then,

this is the last live broadcast before the so-

called elections, and everyone keeps

asking me about the 18th: “Say something about

the election, about the 18th.” But I want to

start with the 19th, because

on the 19th—you know what will happen on the 19th.

In fact, already on the 18th at 10 p.m.

they will announce to you that Putin has become

president and received

something like 73 or 74 percent—more than 70 percent.

What matters on the 19th is that you do not worry,

do not torment yourself, and do not suffer, because that

is exactly what they want from you.

That is what this entire procedure was designed for—

not so that Putin would get his

percentages. I mean, this re-election—

he was always going to get them. That was guaranteed.

For the Kremlin, far more important

is your suffering, because on March 19 the entire

internet will be filled with posts saying, “Oh my God,

everything is lost, we have to emigrate, oh my God,

what a terrible Russian people.”

These are my favorite copypastas: “We live in a

nightmare, the Russian people are awful.

Look at these people—they're poor, and they're going

to vote.” It will all be flooded

with videos showing people like that

at polling stations. They'll ask them,

“What's your salary?” They'll say, “16,000 rubles.” “And who are

you voting for?” “For Putin, of course.”

And there will be these videos, and once again everyone will

suffer.

“It's impossible to live like this,” they'll say.

They'll show humiliating footage of how

grandmothers in the regions are given free or

almost free food, how they crowd and shove there, and

I don't know, they'll be feeding people pancakes—

our authorities' favorite pastime.

And they'll say, “We're voting for Putin,” and

all of this is staged in order to

show you that you are not representatives

of the opposition, not of ordinary people—you are in an

absolute minority. “Here are your candidates,”

they'll tell you on the 19th on every talk show.

Peskov will say it, a cheerful Putin will

say it too: “Well, your position

is radical,

opposed to everything, and the Russian

people have shown it its place. That one got

half a percent,

and this one got 2 percent.” And all of this is done

so that you will suffer. Don't

suffer. You are not part of all this. On the 19th

you should proudly

—even mockingly—look at all those

talk shows where they'll be talking about

how the opposition got 3 percent, and

say: “I was not part of any of this.

Together with a huge number of people, I did not

recognize this procedure. I was not

a participant in it, and I will continue

to fight you.”

I will continue to fight you,

disgusting, vile government, because

I did not recognize you. I did not go to this

polling station. I did not recognize this game of yours and

this procedure of yours as a normal

vote. I believe elections can

be real. I demand normal

elections, and I will keep fighting for them. And you, with

this little trick of yours,

with your system and your deception, have not convinced

me in the slightest.” That is what we should be saying

to each other on the 19th, because that

is how it really is, in any major

In the city, no less than thirty percent

of people already want to vote right now

for the opposition, according to any sociological

polls. But their task is to convince us that

we are two percent, one percent. We must not

fall for that. Today, for us,

today it is very easy, and we are also receiving

questions. One of them asks: why wasn't I

put in detention earlier? We thought

you would be in detention during the chosen

period, like a wolf.

On air, please... my dear, I don't know.

My court hearing was postponed many times,

but honestly, I did not think that

they would lock me up for the election itself, because

then the headlines would read: Putin

was re-elected,

while an opposition politician was sitting in

prison at the same time. I think they avoid that.

They are simply waiting for a moment when they can

lock me up during a less

newsworthy period. But anyway,

today it is much easier for us to have a dialogue, a

discussion about a boycott, about participation in the election,

about various strategies, because, you see,

I have a cup here that says

I told you so

as they joke in American TV shows.

Today is the time to take a nice sip from

a cup with the words "I told you so" on it.

Because I did tell you so. Two months ago,

three months ago, four months ago,

when various candidates were appearing and

saying, "We are real candidates,"

all of them claimed that this was just my personal

position, that some guy, out of his own personal

interest, was calling on everyone

not to vote. But you are wrong, because

we are candidates, and we will go into these

dishonest elections. You may call us

puppets, but we will use these elections

as a platform. We will say the most important things.

We will be the cool guys, we will

unite everyone around us, we will

hold rallies, we will say

important forbidden words, and people will hear

our forbidden words. Well then,

let's listen to, for example, a typical, typical

statement by a candidate. They all said

things like this on air. Let's listen.

Here we have

some thirty or forty-three seconds.

Because for a long time and consistently

Russia's leadership has pursued a course that

is leading Russia into a dead end, leading the country

down a path to nowhere. The danger with each

passing year is sharply increasing, and now

we are at yet another crossroads, and there is

one special feature: this is a moment when one can

still manage to say something relatively loudly

to you personally, to your children, to your

loved ones.

You see, he has been brought back to the studio. I am no longer

alone; the candidates are here with me, these very

candidates, so that I will not

argue without them being present. I have them here.

Here, the one with the tie, obviously...

Let's say this one is Ksenia Sobchak.

These are our candidates, and they were saying

the right things. They were saying them, but

what was said was that this was a relatively free

time when one could get a platform and

say important,

the most important things. All right, candidates, move aside.

My notes, so I can see what I want

to tell you next, and so I understand that, well,

this whole argument, in fact,

is the same thing they told me when

they said, "Alexei, you're going into an election you also cannot

win." And I said, no, I

will say important things. We will have more

after this campaign. I will hit them hard, I will

shake them up, I will make life harder for them, I will wage

a real struggle and draw people into this

struggle. But then what exactly

am I dissatisfied with, if everyone else will do

the same thing? That I am the coolest? Well then,

let's review it.

Time has passed. Did that very period pass, the one that, as

was said, was relatively

calm, when one could say whatever

one wanted? And we see that it really

was calm for everyone except Grudinin (Pavel Grudinin, Communist presidential candidate);

everyone was invited onto shows, no one was

breaking up rallies, there was not a single arrest in

campaign headquarters, not a single seizure of printed materials,

nothing at all. A complete, absolute carte blanche for

all the candidates. And I was sitting there

thinking: well, this may be bad for me,

it will be awkward for me to campaign for a boycott

because they are knocking the ground out from under

my argument. But if these guys come out and

say, for example, something about

Kirill Shamalov (widely reported as Putin's former son-in-law) and President

Putin, who made him the youngest

Russian billionaire, that would be great.

They would be on TV and say it about him, and

millions of Russian

pensioners would learn about it. And just recently another

Rotenberg from the Rotenberg family

of Putin's friends became a billionaire, and

he made his fortune from that very

Platon toll system (Russia's truck road-toll system); he robbed truck drivers

blind and became a billionaire. And somehow

the candidates should have said this

so that all the truck drivers would

applaud them and then go vote for them.

I kept waiting for them to say something like that, but

it did not happen at all. For you,

I spent time today digging around

on YouTube and looking at which statements in the media

I looked at which statements by the candidates

got the loudest coverage, what

people actually heard when they climbed onto

that very platform. I had the highest

hopes for Grudinin (Pavel Grudinin),

I liked him then, and I still like him now,

and then I saw how they were going after him so aggressively.

How Grudinin was brazenly and

shamelessly smeared in that campaign—probably only I

in recent years, I can't

remember another person whom they

so utterly, just

brazenly and shamelessly dragged through the mud on

television. And I expected that Grudinin would

perform well. The more they did that to him,

the more this sharp-tongued man seemed to perform decently.

And the main, most quoted statement

by Mr. Grudinin was this. Let's

listen to his 31 seconds of fame in this

election: “Was Stalin a criminal? No. Do you admit

that Stalinist repressions happened? Before

Stalin, people were repressed too. Did Stalin

kill people? No. Did Stalin give orders and people were killed?

No.” For a man who

achieved for the country—do you know what

15 percent annual GDP growth means? At a time when

it was 6–7, while average global GDP growth

was 3.

This is a man who turned an absolutely

illiterate country into a country with the best

education.

Pavel Grudinin, Pasha,

why did you waste your chance, your

opportunity to talk to people, on this

nonsense—some Stalin? Who needs

a discussion of Stalin when everyone wants

a discussion of Putin? It’s no longer about Stalin, not

for Stalin, not against Stalin—you won't find

that in this election. You said it once,

fine, but it just went on endlessly.

There was this Stalin stuff at Grudinin’s rallies, when

we watched and literally before the

rally they played the song “Lenin Is So

Young, and Young October Lies Ahead” (a famous Soviet song). Why

did you do that, Pavel? Just say the

words you were saying before the election, not

this. Pavel Grudinin said nothing. So, despite

all the sympathy for him, what was the point of going into

the election now and supporting something unclear,

for unclear reasons, with unclear

words about Stalin? Our great

entrepreneur—who else did we have here?

Titov. Let him be our kind of

taxi-colored candidate.

Titov went into the election and declared that

he had collected 100,000 signatures.

He declared that all

businesspeople were behind him, and of course we expected

him to say something important. And the whole country noticed Titov

because of this

advertising campaign. Let’s watch 23 seconds of it.

These little ad spots

were repeated on television:

“Titov.”

“So what about Titov?”

“What?”

“Titov.”

Titov. So what? Look, we at least

expected it to be some kind of suspense ad,

where first it would grab attention. The whole

country laughed.

“So what about Titov?” And then in the final days he would

say: “Titov is for

this and that. Titov is against Putin.”

“Titov is against corporate raiding. Titov is

against the Platon toll system

of Rotenberg and the destruction of small business.”

So what did he say? Nothing. He said

nothing. He just once again showed—not even

showed, actually, but rather

fit the image created by propaganda:

the image of a pointless guy who

claims to be some kind of

democrat or whatever, so that the average

voter would think: well, these people,

the opposition types, all their stormy rhetoric

is just a bunch of strange people

spouting nonsense. And Ksenia

Anatolyevna Sobchak

kept saying above all: yes, I’m

running in this election, yes, I popped up

like a jack-in-the-box right beforehand, but

don’t think I’m like that—I’ll say all these

important things. And what did we hear from Ksenia Sobchak

in this election? There were

indeed two absolutely

memorable episodes involving Ksenia, and the first

of them was simply this wonderful,

magnificent water-splashing incident. We saw it;

let’s watch those

35 seconds again. The main thing, from the point

of view of ordinary people—and this is important to understand now—

I’m not talking about what you noticed,

people interested in the news, who

constantly watch YouTube and get

their news from the internet, and so on. But for

the ordinary average voter who doesn’t

follow politicians very closely,

what stayed in their head were these 35 seconds:

“Vladimir—”

“You have no brains, that’s all.”

“Get out of here—”

And that’s it: black mud, a nasty woman,

and the better person in this whole scene—here I,

I hate to say it—but the better

person in this whole scene is Vladimir

Solovyov, standing there like this and

rejoicing. And Putin is rejoicing with him,

and everyone is rejoicing, because that was the

point: to show that they’re all horrible clowns.

Well, Ksenia also definitely had one more

wonderful episode by which she

was remembered by viewers, because her

problem is her biography.

She has said a lot of things; she has written a lot of

books of various kinds.

And probably during this election

campaign she should have tried to overcome

that image somehow. In particular, one of

her most famous statements, the one most

quoted

by her enemies, was her remark that

the entire Russian people are simply

a bunch of suckers. Suckers—I don’t know, maybe

even Zhirinovsky wouldn’t have said that.

And Ksenia—just look at her.

Brilliant.

She spoke so brilliantly about it again—this is at

44 seconds, let's watch. Sobchak: Russia is

the ideal testing ground for observing suckers

among its residents.

You are all suckers, Russian people who

envy me—that is, hate her.

That's 90 percent—the people commonly called *bydlo* (a derogatory term for the crude, supposedly uncultured masses). This

trait, by the way, is supposedly characteristic specifically of Russians.

That's why I love Jews.

What amazes me is the well-honed, collective-farm-style

ability of our population

to shift blame from a sick head to a healthy one, and all this

So—take this book, read the book.

There is nothing—what was said regarding

the claim that I love Russians or

Jews—this quote from a 2005 interview

is false, and I state that plainly.

And I went to court over that interview.

Those are not my words about insults and

the rest. But if people—you yourself—

keep choosing the same government over and over, I don't

understand what that leads to—how else

Of course they call this a brilliant

decision. It's just a brilliant decision to go

to the elections,

declare that you are a representative of the opposition,

that you represent the anti-Putin opposition,

go onto a debate on federal

television and once again say that you are all

suckers.

Well, you yourselves keep choosing Putin again—this

will really please the audience, this is truly

the way to voters' hearts, so that everyone

sitting there—many people voted for Putin—

and we need to fight for them, we need to

reach those people,

persuade them, talk to them. A person is sitting

in front of the TV, and once again the opposition—

after all, they invited the opposition—says to him:

he has a whole lot of feelings and a whole lot of words

that he wants to say to this opposition, but

he no longer sorts it out; they told him, well, Sobchak

is the main opposition figure there. It was

a wonderful performance. But the most

legitimate one now, whom I—Grigory

which one will it be for...

Which one is the most modest and decent?

The blue one, this one. And he—did you

hear the right words about how I

would use the platform, and probably any

network featured the most exotic

or the most popular clip that he

showed—a 36-second clip about pandas

which, I don't even know whether I can

say on air what these pandas are doing, well

let me assume that they are playing

some kind of game. You know, like that game

what was it called, where people jump over each other

or over one another—that's probably it. Let's

watch these 36 seconds of what Grigory

wanted to say to Russia's voters.

What did he tell them?

We've been together for almost 12...

What personally bothers me is not even the situation

we are in, but the fact that every

day, here in our kitchens, we are assaulted

with information about how terrible our

government is. No, we don't like it either that

Serebrennikov is in jail while Vasilyeva is being

let off. It's just that if I could do

something other than what I do, I would go

and do it, instead of sitting in the kitchen blabbering.

[music]

Seriously? Sirikovich, pandas engaged in

let's say it honestly—engaged in

sex are telling us that we sit in our kitchens

and that we shouldn't be in those kitchens?

One would have wanted something else. Is this really the

shocking truth that

Russia wants to know,

that needs to be told,

that Russians need to hear—the truth that

is never shown on television? Is that it?

Well, I don't know. Then it seems to me that on

Russian TV talk shows they

show people who are having

sex with dogs, and in that sense panda sex

wouldn't really surprise anyone at all.

That is not forbidden

information. Shamalov, Putin's inner circle,

the Rotenbergs,

Putin's palaces—that is forbidden

information. Why didn't you say anything

about that, instead of showing us pandas?

And today, many of you have probably already

seen online this whole—this was

a kind of pyramid that

was obviously planned. Here

they splashed water around, here they

shed tears, here they showed pandas,

and at the top, of course, there had to be a fight.

And today these washed-up actors from a

third-rate theater

staged a fight. And let's watch 1

minute 5 seconds—but every second of

it is worth it, because every

second

of this footage convinces the average voter:

"On second thought, Putin is probably better. We're tired of this.

We may live poorly, but you can't entrust them

with the nuclear briefcase." One

minute and 5 seconds of top-tier

discussion in these debates. I wanted

to address Grudinin, Pavel Nikolayevich—well,

as soon as he saw me, he ran away. You

say everywhere, in every interview, that I

can—that I'm not about...

Yes, I say it happened to me, it happened to

my family. It's true—they evicted us from

our apartment. The important thing is, you are turning the election

into—how is it that already two people are speaking, two

people, and from them—let's add more

hours to it.

What is he even doing here? Let's bring in even more

surrogates, let's invite proxies, let's turn

this into something else entirely.

You can see for yourselves—just forget what they say.

[music]

Well, strictly speaking, I could have been standing there too.

And when I watched it, I kept thinking: listen,

"Alexei, why are you showing off?" After all,

you're criticizing the other candidates, but you could have

ended up in the same situation. You come there

with your little sheet of paper that says something about

some small-time show, say something about Rotenberg or whatever,

and denounce everyone on the list.

Some lunatic starts yelling at you, waving his arms,

"I'll break your jaw"—but what are you

supposed to do? Just shout over each other there?

Something is happening, but basically all of you

look like clowns. Well, I know what I

would have done in that situation, and it wouldn't have

stopped the other candidates from doing the same

thing. I would have tried to organize my own

debates—and nobody was stopping them from organizing

their own debates. If you think back at all

to the debates of the last couple of years, you'll most likely

remember my debates with

Chubais, my debates with Ksenia and Lebedev,

my debates with Strelkov—even though I wasn't

running for anything. Still, those debates

happened, and millions of people watched them, at least

on YouTube. So could these candidates really not

organize their own debates? Of course

they could. They just didn't want to, and to me

that's interesting, because their

task was what the Presidential Administration had told them to do:

it had all been planned out—they were supposed to

stand there, splash water around, and say

nothing. No one was stopping them from appearing

on talk shows, and even if there had been some ban on that,

for the Central Election Commission, that would have been a minor violation compared with

everything else that was happening in this

election campaign. It certainly wouldn't have been

a problem to go on Echo of Moscow,

to go on TV Rain—after all, couldn't they

come on the Navalny LIVE channel

and say, "We want to hold a debate—everyone together:

Yavlinsky, Tsvetkov, Grudinin, whoever else,

someone else too—we've organized it," and

millions of people would have watched that as well,

certainly no fewer than on the federal

channels. But they didn't want that.

They weren't interested in doing it. If I had found myself in

that situation, where there are no real

debates and everyone refuses

to debate me, doesn't want to come out and debate

one-on-one, I would have done what I did

before. I have the main proof

of why you shouldn't go to these elections and

shouldn't believe these people. This sound

that we're giving away today—let me remind you

that today we're raising money for

sending election observers to Chechnya. This is the list

of cities I visited just during the course of

the autumn tour. There are twenty-seven

cities here, and we were forbidden from holding these

rallies, and I spent 25 days in a

special detention center during that whole

tour, because if I hadn't been locked up,

there would have been quite a few

more cities here. But I traveled around them, and

it turned out that despite the fact that I had been

kept away from the elections for several months already,

I visited more cities than all

these candidates. I held large meetings—

not just more than all these

candidates; I was the only one who held

meetings outdoors, including when it was cold,

and I was also the only one who

held meetings with

more than a thousand participants—

again, outdoors. They were banned, they were broken up,

students were threatened with expulsion,

if they went there, and people were threatened

with losing their jobs. Every meeting came with

whole folders full of

claims that these were somehow unauthorized gatherings in the very

best cities—Samara, Saratov.

We did it, and I still did

more than anyone else. And yes, the point isn't even that I'm

somehow so great. If there had been normal

candidates, I wouldn't be sitting here in this T-shirt

because what's so special about it?

This is just ordinary work

for a candidate—and not even that much of it.

A normal candidate in a presidential

election should travel far more,

much, much more in a

huge country like Russia. But they didn't even

do that, because they are

nobodies. You see, these so-called

candidates didn't want to do anything. You

didn't want to unite people, you didn't

do anything. Fine—but if you were

humiliated and insulted and not allowed to say

anything, and you understand that you'll get

a very small percentage—withdraw.

The time has passed when you said everything

you wanted to say. You were given a platform,

you either said something, or you didn't—

you just stupidly splashed water around. Then let's

create a problem for Putin now. That

great big chief villain

who first lured you in, invited you to

the election, and then deceived you—especially

Grudinin. Grudinin, after all, had already started getting hammered on television.

So let's

create problems for them: let's withdraw from

the election, let's say, "Oh, is that how it is? Then to hell with

it—we do not recognize your

election, we're leaving it. We got

a platform, we used that platform, and now

goodbye."

We call on everyone not to take part in

Putin's re-election." Not one of them even

said anything close to that. And who among them

is really going to get some gigantic

percentage that they cherish? No one.

On the contrary, they're all suffering because

they'll get very few votes, and

everyone will laugh at them. But despite

their suffering, they are taking part in this

disgrace. Why? Because they're being paid for it.

They were either paid or ordered to do it, because

the task of all these head ducks and

little ducklings lined up behind the head duck

is to make sure that on the 19th you

feel miserable and think that nothing can be done,

that nothing can be achieved, that we are in

the minority.

Our task is different, and everything we are doing

today, we are doing so that on the 19th

we can move up one step. And we

will move up one step, because we have

prepared an unprecedented number of

observers under conditions of extreme pressure,

endless arrests. All the news about us

is constantly news about arrests,

and honestly, I’m sick of it myself—you must be too—but it just keeps

being the same thing. I come to you

and say: people were arrested here, and

today, what was it, eight people

were arrested in different places, maybe even more.

Right now, searches are being carried out somewhere,

right now there are raids on campaign offices. It’s all

basically the same thing over and over. But in this

situation, what we are doing for

us, the 19th is

a wonderful day, when we know that

more people—we cannot count them

exactly, of course—but compared with

2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, far

more people have consciously and

clearly said: no, I’m not taking part in all

this filth. We do not recognize this government, we

will not participate in it. And now I

am appealing to everyone with a call, in the

remaining couple of days, to work for this.

People are just built in such a way that they make

decisions at the last moment. But this

previous broadcast, that kind of broadcast,

was watched by 800,000 people over the course of

a week. Fine—by Sunday this

broadcast will be watched by, I don’t know, 200,000

people. Two hundred thousand people is

a huge force. If each of you

spends a few minutes

to campaign at least online,

it will be tremendous. So let’s just

look at the numbers. If we have those

internet reach figures ready—if not,

I’ll just say them from memory: we have

internet penetration in Russia of 80

percent; 64 percent of people use the internet

daily; 54 percent of people get their news

online; people on social

media every day—about half, 59, 49, and

6... So, 200,000 people—fine, 200

thousand people.

Subtract from that my opponents—say,

100,000 or 150,000 people. Your post on

VK, Facebook, Twitter,

somewhere on a local forum—anywhere—

a couple of emails—all this work leads to

reach in the millions, many millions.

So please, today, tomorrow,

Saturday and Sunday morning, call on people

to boycott, urge them not to go, because

we have to move up one step higher.

After these elections, they do not

register us, they do not let us in, but we are

an organized political force, larger

than all the others. We understand that this

will be a long struggle against people who

have grabbed billions and

want—I don’t know—to die and take those

billions with them into the next world, or

pass them on to their children. They are building in Russia

an absolute monarchy, but we will never

agree to that. And we, as an organized

political force, must become

bigger.

We must become better, and we will. We

can either sort of rise to this

step, or we can rise to this

step. Let each of us spend

a few minutes so that we can move

after all

one step higher. Let me answer

your questions—your questions on

Twitter. Here’s one: “Alexei,

how would you comment on today’s

meeting with Ella Pamfilova (head of Russia’s Central Election Commission)?” I

will speak about this in more detail. “Did it meet

your expectations?” Well, do you think I

expected Ella Pamfilova to suddenly

say, “Yes, yes, guys, I admit it,

you falsified the election, and

the elections were rigged, and I surrender and

am resigning”? Of course we did not expect anything like

that. But overall I am satisfied, because

we obtained certain guarantees on

the issues most sensitive for us.

For example, sending observers to Chechnya (a republic in southern Russia).

Pamfilova did not state outright that she

guarantees their safety, but some

words on the subject were said. We will pass on

the list, and in any case we are sending those

observers there, and it turns out

that, in a way,

that is very important. Timur Tukhvalin

asks me: “Alexei, what do you think

about Sobchak and

Gudkov creating the Party of Change?” I don’t have many thoughts yet, because

this news came literally right before

the start of the broadcast.

I simply haven’t been following

Gudkov’s activities very closely lately,

for objective reasons. But I was surprised

when I saw this news,

because the last thing I knew about Gudkov

was that he was actively backing Yavlinsky (Grigory Yavlinsky, liberal politician).

He supported his nomination when I

was calling on everyone to support me, before I had even

been barred from the election. Gudkov

said that

—and I think he said this on Kartus’s broadcast—

he had done a lot, but that he could not

support Navalny because he had given

his word to Yavlinsky and would support

only Yavlinsky. He included me in his own

list

to the State Duma in 2016

Lutkov was on the Yabloko party list, and I will remain loyal

to it until the end, I mean, there’s a kind of

assertion like in *Eugene Onegin*: “But I am given to another, and”

“I will be faithful to him forever,” so basically

my people backed off from Gudkov and didn’t urge

him to do anything, because he said so many

times that he was definitely for Yavlinsky

and quite recently he even spoke at some

party congress of his, and then bam — together with

Sobchak

he launches some new party. That’s very

strange. I mean, Dmitry seems to like

moving from party to party. He was in

A Just Russia, together with

Fetisov, then in the Green Party platform

that was later renamed. Then he seemed to be friendly with

Nechaev, then fell out with him, then

was friendly with Yabloko and said that with

Yabloko it was forever. And now Sobchak — I don’t know, it somehow doesn’t

seem right to me. Again, I don’t want

to go into detail or criticize too much there,

but at the very least this should have been done after

the election, because three days before

the vote, to suddenly, excuse me, hit

Grigory Yavlinsky over the head like that

is probably not very good. I mean, it should

have been done not as a blow to the head, but

by saying these elections are a sham, say

three months ago, four months ago

— we had agreed, circumstances were different, before

that we had agreed publicly, and said: I will not

support you

but to do this two months before — that’s not very

good. Overall, as for this party,

when I saw it, my first reaction was:

a party of children

a party of the nomenklatura’s children (the Soviet/Russian political elite): Sobchak’s daughter

and Gudkov’s son are making a party. Well, I would not

under any circumstances create my own party

with Ksenia Sobchak. She is, after all, a person

with the highest negative rating in the country, and

as we’ve seen, she keeps making

all kinds of exotic statements, like

some version of “you’re all suckers.” Great — the leader of the party

of change has declared that all of you

Russians are suckers because you vote for

Putin, and it seems to me that the only

suckers in this situation will be those who

vote for such a party of change. But

I repeat, I’m not ready right now to comment

in detail, because this is

surprising news that I only just learned

about the day before. Alex Ledenev

asks me: Putin is preparing a victory

rally on the evening of the 18th — what

are we preparing? On the 18th, guys, we are preparing

election monitoring. I’m talking about that now.

If I start preparing a rally now, that would

simply be a gift to Putin — he’ll clap his

hands and get the opportunity. They’re already

arresting our observers,

they’ll just lock everyone up altogether

in all the regions and disrupt our monitoring.

That’s what’s very important: we do not recognize these

elections, but we are monitoring them in order

to get the real turnout figures.

We already know — who among you believes that in Mordovia

99 percent turn out to vote? Who believes

that in Chechnya turnout is 99 percent? Who believes that in

Kemerovo Region or Krasnodar Krai

turnout is over 80 percent? All of this is

obviously nonsense. It’s just that before, no one

could catch them red-handed because there wasn’t

a large organized system of

monitoring. We built one for the first time, and what really

especially irritates me is when

our dear ducks keep saying

that your boycott position is a position of

sitting on the couch doing nothing, just sitting on the couch.

Look at what is happening in our

headquarters, and what is happening in the candidates’ headquarters.

We are the only ones here running around like

mad, organizing monitoring. We have

huge lines for issuing

observer credentials. All of this is difficult for us; we

formally aren’t even allowed to do it. That is,

we also have to persuade candidates

who are hesitating — and the Yabloko people in

Tyumen, for example, today we have a whole, whole

problem there.

They suddenly withdrew the observer credentials for

monitoring, but I still hope they won’t

deceive us and will return those

credentials. I’ve recorded so many videos just about

monitoring — who even knows how many — and no one

watches them anymore. A video for observers in

the North Caucasus, a video for those kinds of

observers, all sorts of videos, a video about mailing

things, a video about that — all day long our entire

headquarters is dealing with monitoring. We’re

demanding a meeting with Pamfilova about this, and she

comes to that meeting. We are doing this.

The only impression is that in the end

no one else there needs any monitoring at all

except us, and we are the ones doing it here. But we

are doing it because we have that

opportunity, we have people. Once again I

urge you, guys, to come and

get your observer credentials as

soon as possible. I see GIFs popping up in the feed.

Let me remind you that today we’re raffling off this

T-shirt in order to pay for sending

observers to Chechnya, and

today we had a meeting with Pamfilova.

And it was very important for us, because

we understand that there will be falsifications,

and they will be aimed specifically at voter turnout.

There are many reasons for that,

both direct and indirect indicators.

Recently there was an interview

with Pamfilova on Echo of Moscow, and there was a question about

the number of voters in Russia — 109

million. And she said, well, no, not 109, we’re

counting now, probably 107 — or maybe not 107.

Three days before the election, they’re sitting there with

plus or minus 2 million voters — they don’t even know.

I know how many voters there are, because they

are preparing these fraud schemes, and we will

be getting ready to catch them, because this is

very important, and

right now, at this point, we have registered

63,100 observers, but we understand

that of course not all of them will show up; that always

happens. People register, and then some of them

don’t come. I hope more people

will turn out, but we still expect that no

fewer than 25,000 people will

be working at polling stations. Of these 63

thousand people, about 18 percent

are minors. We think that’s

good, because we will be giving

them video-monitoring duties, and one of the

positive—one of the positive outcomes of the meeting

positive results of the meeting

with Panfilova was that she said

that tomorrow, finally, they would disclose the

polling stations where video surveillance will be in place. This is

very important, and we are organizing mobile

groups for difficult regions. We will try

in these so-called regions of

electoral anomalies to achieve

coverage at at least 20

percent of polling stations. That’s a lot; no one

has done that before. They will be

fighting us, because, well, you understand

the authorities in Kemerovo Region

used to have 86 percent there.

It’s obvious that about 30 percent of that

turnout was fabricated. And if we organize

observation everywhere, without any kind of

interference, turnout drops by 30

percent. They can’t allow

that. They will openly

fight us. Well, we’ll see on the 18th

how they fight. Let’s take a look.

Today we have a short—there is a short

video from the meeting with Panfilova,

where she is speaking with Ivan Zhdanov, and well,

I was asked about

the positive results. Well, one positive

result was that she

said that Sobyanin’s famous letter

where he so strongly backed Putin—if

Panfilova said directly that it was

a violation of the law. Let’s listen to a few

seconds of that. As for what is connected with

extremism—yes, under the law, therefore he does not

have the right to do that. If he—I

think that’s not very good, although

legally there may be nothing to object to, as far as I

know. At first glance, since this is

his personal website, in his free time outside work,

and so on and so forth. But in my

view, you are talking about

So, the current results of our, our

contest to raffle off a T-shirt:

these are all people who donated 5,000 rubles each. Those are the

largest donations so far: Citizen

of Russia, Novoe NATO, Avizo—5,000 rubles each. They

are in the running for this T-shirt right here.

Let me remind you, we are raising this money in order

to send observers to Chechnya, but overall

the meeting—

getting back to the meeting with Ella Panfilova,

it is best characterized

by its ending, because there was this

discussion.

She pretended not to know anything about the

violations, not to understand at all why

activists had been arrested. She said, “Give me the

documents, we’ll look into it.” We understand that

she is not actually going to look into it, but in the end

she had a kind of catharsis. She was

talking and talking, and then—just like with Putin—

the answer to any question or complaint was:

guess what? Ukraine.

Let’s watch this short clip.

Why did I come? Why am I here?

I am doing everything I can. I believe that how

these elections go depends on how much

the country either strengthens itself. You and I may

be different, but I do not want

some uncle from the outside, forgive me, to

come meddling in and gut our country, like

our neighbors, excuse me, and I don’t want anyone

to decide for us.

Why are you bringing up Ukraine?

Is Ukraine arresting observers? Why

is our police confiscating

observer accreditation forms in Kemerovo for

observers? Ksenia

Pakhomova—she was sitting there in that video I

mentioned—came specially from Kemerovo

to raise this issue. The police

came and seized more than 1,000

observer forms from her. They are literally taking away the forms.

It’s happening in Kemerovo Region.

They want to defend themselves from us—Ukraine again?

I don’t want things to be the way Ukraine wants them.

How is that connected? What, is it thanks to

election fraud in Kemerovo Region

that the whole country is being held together?

Is the country being kept from falling apart by the 99

percent fabricated in Mordovia (a republic in Russia),

or the percentages fabricated in Chechnya? It’s all the same thing.

And we will see, I’m afraid—and unfortunately I’m sure of it—

on the 18th, we will see the same thing all over again.

First the falsifications, then talk about

how these falsifications were themselves fabricated

on foreign servers somewhere abroad, and

then there will be endless talk about

Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. So,

someone with the username “Plate of Rice” asks me:

in Saratov, there will be a lot of observers at polling stations,

so we are

ready. Well done, “Plate of Rice,” well done.

That’s very important, because in Saratov Region

—

in the last State Duma (Russia’s lower house of parliament) elections,

it became notorious because there, there

Volodin, the speaker of the

State Duma, won—and at several polling stations, at

many polling stations, there was an absolutely identical

result.

sixty-two point two percent, which could

happen only with a probability of about one

trillionth of a percent—but in Saratov

it happened. So of course, across the entire

Volga region—Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Saratov—we

really need to keep an eye on what

is happening there. There will be fraud, and the authorities

won’t be able to manage here—without these

manipulations, and

once again I urge you: go right now

and get your referral. Don’t wait until the last

seconds, because afterward it’ll be total chaos for

us, and the candidates are not really the kind

you can rely on. I, well, I

am worried that right now they’ll start, in the

final moments, on orders from the Kremlin,

taking away our referrals. In other words, we still

still have a workable situation, but for now, go

as quickly as possible and get this

referral. Let’s go over it, let’s

answer a question there, let’s talk about

Skripal. And Alexei

asks: Petrovich, for what reason

doesn’t the CEC say which polling stations will have

video surveillance installed? It would make things

harder for you to place observers, Petrovich.

That’s why they don’t say. But naturally, at

half of the polling stations there is video surveillance, and

we can ask our, uh, underage

supporters to simply watch throughout the day

all those video feeds.

At the other half there isn’t. Of course, it would be logical

for us to monitor by video where it exists, and at all

the rest deploy observers so that

this doesn’t happen. The CEC, right up

to the very last moment, dragged this whole thing out.

Pamfilova promised that tomorrow it would be

disclosed. I don’t know whether it will be disclosed or

not, but you see—they are afraid of monitoring.

Of course they’re afraid. Well, what is there

to say? People are being dragged to the polls

by force. The Kremlin itself doesn’t understand how this

will work, and we don’t understand either. Maybe for them

it will work perfectly, and they’ll drag by the

scruff of the neck something like 70 percent turnout at a polling station. There may

even be reports of that. Or maybe it will be

the opposite—a failure. No one really

understands this properly, and just in case they are preparing

a big button that will mean

dumping in many millions of votes. They are

now using so-called absentee certificates, but

not absentee slips—absentee

certificates, supposedly for people who declared

that they want to vote in

another place. Five million people—do you

believe that? That means 4 percent

of the country’s voters applied through

Gosuslugi (Russia’s online government services portal) and got some kind of slips. But I

don’t believe it—it’s rigging. Besides, in Moscow

there aren’t actually that many of them; altogether it’s only

something like, to Moscow and from

Moscow, about 400 thousand people signed up, I think.

But clearly, that is—well, out of

those five million, a million should

be in Moscow, because Moscow is the main

center

of migration. People from the regions come here; they

are officially registered somewhere back in Irkutsk, but

they live in Moscow, so they want to vote

in Moscow. But no—somewhere around the country

these five million voters are just floating around.

My guess is that this is something like

that button—to throw in 5 million votes.

And for them to throw them in like that, in order to

go ahead and press the button, they will need to

get rid of our observers.

Vladislav asks: do you think they will start looking for a reason in the next two days

in order to

lock you up? They already have a reason. They didn’t lock me up,

as you put it,

on January 28 specifically so that

later they could lock me up at any convenient

moment. But I don’t think they will do it

before the election or during the election. We will have, during it, at the office,

we will have at the office

everything on the 18th of March—a big, big

broadcast, our traditional one. We’ll

be interested to see whether there will also be the traditional

sort of traditional thing with

cutting wires, smashing in

and sawing out doors. It will be interesting

to watch. Honestly, my forecast

is that I won’t be arrested, because why

would they need that?

Why would they need those headlines? Skripal, of course,

is the most discussed—the most

discussed topic right now in the whole world, and in

Russia this topic is being discussed much

more than even the election, more than all

the other topics. And rightly so,

because this is something that will very strongly

affect everything that happens inside

the country and outside the country over the next few

years—literally several years, without any

doubt. Let’s once again, in broad terms, go over

what happened. This man was

an officer of the GRU (Russian military intelligence) for several

years, and at some point he began working for

British intelligence—that is,

he became a traitor. He was caught, exposed,

and sent to prison. He was given 13 years,

of which he served, I think, 7

or maybe 4 years—but in any case, he served quite a bit.

That is, generally speaking, they could have

killed him in prison if they had wanted to, but he spent

some amount of time there, and then he

was exchanged.

He continued living in the United Kingdom, working

for British intelligence. It is further known

that he gave some kind of training sessions for them,

lectured, did various things—so, in other words, he was

let’s put it this way: we do not understand what is happening

inside the GRU, and we are not supposed to understand, because

that is why it is a secret agency. But I think

that among some ordinary employees and

not-so-ordinary ones, there is a sufficient amount of

emotion and reason there to really

dislike Skripal very much.

and plan operations against him

of varying degrees of severity—well, intelligence services

there are intelligence services, and we understand that the people

who work there live

by somewhat different rules. Another matter is

that even when they live by different

rules, they probably should not

do things in this way, dispersing

weapons of mass destruction and poisoning

20 people. So, Skripal

was poisoned in exactly this way—poisoned

with some substance. They were found on

a bench in the English city of Salisbury

and the police officer who approached them also

ended up in a coma

another 21 people who were passing by

were affected. Naturally, all of England was

up in arms. Notice that when Putin

delivered his address and

talked about how Russia had terrifying missiles

and all that sort of thing, basically nobody cared

I even saw a roundup of British newspapers on the

day when Putin was threatening everyone with his

new missiles and fireballs, and all

the British newspapers were writing about the snowdrifts

in the streets and how difficult it was

for us Britons to get through those snowdrifts

to make our way through them. Nobody cared about

Putin's missiles. But when the Skripal

case happened, it was the exact

opposite—everyone went crazy

Naturally, everyone immediately blamed Russia. I

can say that as of today

there really is no

100 percent proof. At

the moment there is nothing except

opinions and statements from British, and no longer only

British, intelligence services

that would show or prove that

Russia was involved. But there is a certain

body of circumstantial, circumstantial

evidence, and there is some direct

evidence, and so of course the first

version that arose was

Russia's involvement. Personally, I repeat,

these are still only versions. I do not know

what happened. I also lean toward this

version, simply

on the basis of reasons that cannot

be denied. First, Skripal appears to have

indeed been poisoned with this agent,

Novichok, and although its formula is classified,

it is, broadly speaking,

known in the world, because the creators

of this Novichok agent left back in the 1990s

a Russian scientist, a Russian scientist

who had worked at a secret institute

first of all wrote a book; he was persecuted here for that

and he left for the United States. We do not

of course doubt that all Western

intelligence services, Western researchers, whoever

you like, know quite well what

this Novichok is, and that is precisely why they so

quickly established that Skripal had been

poisoned

with this gas, this very gas. Second,

this case is in fact an almost exact copy of

the so-called

Litvinenko case, and when

the poisoning of Litvinenko had just happened

everyone said exactly the same thing: well,

what would be the point for Russia in doing this? It is so

stupid, so obvious. But it turned out—I

believe that in the Litvinenko case there is

absolutely sufficient evidence

to be confident that this was done by

representatives of the Russian security services

and very stupid representatives at that

of the Russian security services, because he was

poisoned with a radioactive substance. While

it was being transported, they contaminated the entire airplane. Then

when they were mixing this

radioactive substance in the restroom

of a restaurant, the whole stall, all of it,

in that restroom, was contaminated, so it had to be

cleaned and decontaminated

It was the same story: one way or another,

more than 20

completely random people were exposed. One of

the attackers, one of these killers, by his own

handling of this polonium, himself

did not just avoid it—he himself came down with radiation sickness,

he himself suffered radiation sickness. You see,

Lugovoi, who later became a State Duma deputy (member of Russia's lower house of parliament), and

he is one of the most idiotic and

stupid deputies in the whole lot

the stupidity of the method reflects the stupidity

of this Lugovoi, which you can easily

trace from any political

statement he makes. That is,

it is like the film *Dumb and Dumber*

These people were assigned to carry out such a

demonstrative murder, and they

did it. They left behind a huge

number of traces by which they were

tracked—their movements and everything else. There is

a full body of evidence that

Russia was involved in this. And naturally,

you know, if it looks like a duck,

quacks like a duck, walks like a duck,

then it is most likely a duck. That is why

the British media

and the British intelligence services, at least at

this level, are now accusing

Russia of having done it, and

and it seems to me that the question of why this

was done—after all, it is not beneficial—is

completely the wrong way to frame the issue

It is beneficial to the current Putin regime

It is beneficial, and we can see how that

benefit is being realized right now

Turn on the TV and you will see: our

entire political agenda has once again

shifted to international affairs and to

discussion of what terrible enemies there are in the West

what awful bastards they are, how they have no

evidence, yet they are persecuting us

That is exactly what Putin needs, nothing more

He doesn’t need anything else; he doesn’t need it so that during

the election campaign and after the elections, we

would discuss anything here except

Russia’s problems—even his notorious nuclear

missile.

They do start discussing it, but only in a way

that says there is no missile at all. Experts

say there’s nobody left—they drove everyone out of

our supposedly super, mega institute; the salary is

16,000 rubles (about $270 at the time). Go on, tell us about the missile.

Take any topic at all, from agriculture

to housing and utilities, to law enforcement

agencies—discussing any of that is extremely

unprofitable for Putin. Why the hell would he want

that discussed? It’s much better if Maria

Zakharova is on Vladimir Solovyov’s talk show

shouting, “How dare they—those people—

we’ll hit them back ourselves right now, we won’t let

them get away with their damn ultimatums!” A person

can understand that—sure, somehow, yes, that sounds right.

And then: hold back a little, and tell them to go to hell

already.

with their ultimatums. So, well, basically,

that’s a normal reaction for a significant

number of the country’s citizens, especially those

who don’t know what happened—

they turned on the TV and were told that, well,

the British, and maybe the Ukrainians too,

bumped off some traitor over there themselves,

and now they’re accusing us, making

ultimatums at us—so to hell with them, that’s

why this is such a huge advantage, and this

is going to be a long-running series for years.

They’ll impose sanctions on us, and we

will make some indignant noises in response.

Literally just before the program began,

Donald Trump had already said that he, in

general, also supports this. He didn’t directly accuse

Russia the way

the UK, France, the EU countries,

and the U.S. State Department itself already did directly.

Trump still didn’t say outright there that Russia

was guilty, but he spoke in roughly the same

vein, so this will

once again be a wonderful song for many years, and

Vladimir Putin will be very happy.

And Theresa May, in particular, will make him

especially happy—Theresa May, who

as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom first

came out with some terribly tough

statements.

Let’s listen—one minute.

Her speech.

About those crafty Russians, where she said outright:

“Now we’re going to clear them all out,” and it even

seemed as if they really were about to start clearing out

various oligarchs, kicking them out of London,

and so on. One minute, one second—Theresa

May…

It is highly likely that…

[inaudible]

[inaudible]

You see, she’s practically saying right there:

“We’re going to hit back,” and the men in Parliament are telling

her

they support her, and it really looked like they were now

going to do something serious. But from our side,

it seems to me that the interest of a normal

Russian citizen—mine included—

lies in the British finally

coming down hard on Russian

oligarchs. I wrote about this: if

the British want to do something

that would really hurt Putin—three names:

Abramovich, Usmanov, Shuvalov. Let’s

kick them out too—that would be painful

for Putin’s regime. They even later asked

May what she thought about

Navalny’s proposal.

But overall, when it came to the deadline of the

ultimatum and all the rest of it,

it all turned into something rather

pathetic. And let’s look at what

actually happened—27 seconds. So what, on the

next day, did they say they would

do?

[inaudible]

[inaudible]

How terrible: 23 Russian

diplomats will be expelled; 23 British

diplomats will be expelled in exactly the same way the

next day.

But 23 Russian oligarchs and Russian

officials will remain in London, living

quite happily. Plus—horror of horrors—the royal

family won’t come to the opening of the World Cup

and won’t watch the matches. You know, an even

stronger, more powerful

sanction would be this: when Prince Harry’s

children are born—wonderful little babies,

very cute—we should ban Russians from

showing photos of the young princes and

cooing over them. That would be an even

harsher sanction. So of course

the UK’s response, so far, looks

not very convincing. But again, so far all

that has been said, for the general public, for

us, is just accusations spoken aloud.

There are no documents, nothing else.

That’s why I think this will be a very

long story, very advantageous for Putin, and I

really do share the view that

this was in fact done by the Russian

special services, and they did it so demonstratively

because it was a signal to Rodchenkov,

for example—a signal to people like Rodchenkov.

The Russian elite, all that pro-Putin

Kremlin riffraff, are people who are always

ready to betray him. After all, this is a crowd of

crooks and thieves, and these crooks and thieves,

of course, in certain circumstances, they

dream of leaving, they dream of

taking their money with them, and it is critically important for Putin

to tell everyone: “Guys, I’ll find you and

poison you, kill you very publicly.

Don’t think that if you’ve entered a witness protection

program—which Skripal obviously

was in; he was on video with a regular…

an employee, Misha, with styles, five cabins, dow

the special services, and we poisoned him like this

demonstratively

leaving such obvious traces, so don't

think that we won't find you, this is, this is

the main goal, plus a secondary goal, is once again

to shift all discussion to the current

political problems, but I think that

if more

clear evidence of involvement by

Russia is made public, then of course the sanctions will be much

harsher. All we can do is

hope that these sanctions will not once again

be directed, by both the authorities and

the West, against the Russian people

through some kind of sectoral sanctions against

the economy, but first and foremost against that

disgusting gang of crooks sitting there

in London, who, generally speaking, to the

delight of Britain's residents, the people of Russia

should have driven out of there long ago. So, I'm already

going a little off script on air, but I have

urgent news: at our headquarters in

St. Petersburg, please show the photo,

ballots were planted, exactly the same way as

they were recently planted at our Kaliningrad headquarters.

You may know, maybe you followed what happened in Kaliningrad:

the following happened. The police came there

with a search warrant. One of the police officers

went into the bathroom and locked himself in for some

time, and then they announced that they were now going to

open a new case, that is, yet another

search under a new case. They immediately went to the

bathroom, and in the bathroom they found a stack of

ballots. And now exactly the same kind of

ballots have been found at our St. Petersburg

headquarters.

In St. Petersburg, where there are traditionally many

election falsifications, and where there are a great many

observers—well done, people of St. Petersburg—

and of course the local authorities want

to paralyze the observers' work. So

we see, we see yet another provocation. As I

understand it, our people simply managed

to discover these ballots earlier than they

expected, and in this way we prevented

this provocation. But we are expecting roughly

the same kind of response. As far as I can see

here in this photograph, there were

already check marks filled in everywhere,

check marks placed next to every

candidate. So now they are going to

accuse us, saying that all

of Navalny's observers need to be

thrown out because they are provocateurs.

It's an obvious strategy. We are ready for it. We

will resist it with all our strength. We

must remain calm. We must

fight against all of this. And now, in fact,

I apologize for such a long

on-air digression, but I wanted to say this

because there are so many questions: what are you

going to do next, what happens now, well,

how can it be that they won't register us and

we won't be able to engage in politics?

I wanted to say a few words about a country called

Slovakia, because what happened there

is politics, and it is an example of what

real politics actually is.

In Slovakia, the following happened: there was a

journalist who was investigating

the ties between members of the local establishment

and the Italian mafia. This journalist

and his girlfriend were found dead in

his home. He was murdered, shot dead. Some

killers came and killed him. In Slovakia,

a monstrous

scandal naturally erupted, because a journalist had been killed. In a

normal society, that should trigger a

huge scandal. And when the authorities

said, oh, how terrible, a journalist was killed, but

overall—because comments started appearing

along the lines of: it's his own fault,

this is some kind of, well,

Western plot, and so on—people engaged in

real politics. Because the basic

principle of politics is that people

take to the streets. And so in the streets of

Bratislava, as you can see, there was a huge

demonstration of 50,000 people.

For a country with a population of 450,000

people, that is truly an enormous

demonstration. It took place there, and now

it has culminated in this: today the prime minister

of that country resigned, and judging by

everything, there will be early parliamentary

elections there.

So I want to say to you, my dear friends,

maybe they won't let us register

parties, maybe they won't let us into

elections—well, of course they won't

register us or let us into elections

because they are afraid, because we have

a great many people, one way or another. After the 19th, after

March 18, in 2019,

in 2018, we must first and foremost

see ourselves

as active citizens, and we will

make use of

every possible opportunity

for political struggle, and above all

the most important of them: taking to the streets. In any country, in the

most democratic or the least

democratic, real change

happens when people, at the very

grassroots, simplest, most basic

level, express their dissatisfaction—simply

go out and stand by some building where the

government is and say: hello, I am unhappy

with what you are doing. And because of that, people resign,

and then people make

some changes. We will do this, we

will do everything else as well, because

there are many of us.

And this strike must lead to

there being even more people among us

who have realized their personal

responsibility for the fate of our country.

We’re wrapping up the results of our contest. We’re

raffling off this T-shirt.

And the money you donate will go

to Chechnya, to send observers to Chechnya.

Here are the results. Alexei

Karpov sent 10,000 rubles (about 100 euros).

Andrei Parshin contributed 12,345 rubles, and

"Only Victory 2018" sent us 14,156

rubles. Many thanks to everyone who

took part. It’s symbolic that "Only

Victory" won, but symbolically, in fact, everyone won

who donated any amount

of money and made it possible for us to send

several more observers to Chechnya. This

user will receive this

wonderful T-shirt. Please go

if you are an observer, and collect your

assignments. If you are not an observer,

spend the remaining couple of days campaigning

and talking to people. On March 18, we are boycotting

Putin’s re-election. On March 19, and

throughout the rest of March and all the rest

of the time, we really will devote ourselves to the fight for our

country against these disgusting

scoundrels who think it is their

personal property. See you

next Thursday. Bye-bye.

[music]

You know how it is in Marvel movies, when

the credits are already rolling, and then there’s some

extra funny scene. Ours isn’t

funny, it’s kind of silly. But well done, everyone.

They just sent in, literally in the last

second of the broadcast—Gerasimov, on the right, how much?

24,000 rubles. "Only Victory 2018"

well done—the T-shirt goes to the hero with

the 24,000-ruble donation. But everyone

did great. This is funny. Thanks so much, everyone.

Marvel-style post-credits scene. Bye, everyone.

See you on Thinking Thursday.

[music]