Special broadcast of “Russia of the Future” with Alexei Navalny

[music]

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

Though today isn't Thursday, it's Friday.

This is a special edition of the program *Russia of the Future*.

But still, here we are in the studio.

And it's still me, Alexei Navalny, or...

the man who tried to ruin summer

for Muscovites, as I introduced myself yesterday.

In a rather strange broadcast from

the corridor. Thank you very much to everyone who

watched yesterday's first stream, thank you so much.

Huge thanks to the guys from Navalny Live who managed

Still, it's a shame you can't see this studio.

You didn't see how, five minutes before going live, everyone

was running around in a panic, because, well, everything

could fall apart or break down at any

second.

Piece by piece, we put together some

bits and pieces of equipment so we could do

today's broadcast, because they

took absolutely everything out of this studio. I'll

tell you a bit more. Today we're

raising money again during this broadcast.

Please note the link below the screen.

There's a link to Streamlabs there. By the way, you

are amazing — the last stream raised more than

700,000 rubles (about US$7,000–8,000), with another 200-something thousand

coming in live on air, and then more offline

as people kept donating, so thank you very much.

Today we're raising money for

restoring our operations.

And I want to start by saying that despite the fact

that the result of our work will only become

known and clear on Sunday

evening, right now I want to thank you

all — everyone who really drove this whole

Smart Voting effort. The army of Smart Voting

was, in fact, born

out of these broadcasts, and

the idea matured here, it was discussed here with

you. That's actually very important.

That's why yesterday

the police staged that raid. I saw

a lot of comments:

"My God, why did they do that?

Was it really just to disrupt

the program?" Well, damn,

they know how to count. While we

— while some of us sit on the couch and

think, "Oh my God, nothing will work,

my vote changes nothing," they sat down with

a calculator, did the math, and saw that

with the low turnout expected in Moscow,

St. Petersburg, Khabarovsk,

Irkutsk — anywhere — every vote matters.

You know, if I do a broadcast and it gets

400,000 views, and fifty

thousand people go vote in Moscow,

plus another 20,000

in St. Petersburg, and however many in other cities,

and given all those small margins, those tiny gaps

between United Russia candidates

and the runners-up, Smart Voting

is supposed to work precisely there. That's why

to the wonderful army of Smart Voting, I

say once again: I salute you.

Thank you for promoting this idea, and

I just want to remind you once again

how strong you are, how much power you have,

and how much they are afraid of you. Enormous

thanks to our video production team,

and of course to our investigations department,

which, when I was locked up and after

the first episode aired, declared that we would, damn it,

respond to all of this by releasing

one investigation a day. They nearly

killed themselves — both the video production team and the

investigations department — but they did it.

Do we have the graphic? Let's take a look. These are the

many different videos we released, but what you're seeing

here are only the investigations. Each one of

them is a full-fledged investigation

based on documents. You

wonderful people watched them and helped

spread them. In fact, a lot of

Smart Voting was built on exactly that.

We showed

what the current authorities are really like. Of course, you

already knew that, but still, having additional

concrete illustrations — from some

completely deranged Stebenkova-type figure to

an outright housing-scam type like Anna

Orlova — and around that we built Smart

Voting. So to all the guys in video

production and investigations,

a huge, huge thank you — to everyone, really.

Our tech people are constantly under attack;

they're constantly trying to break Smart Voting,

constantly stealing servers.

It's pretty complicated work. What we need now is

one final effort, one last push.

They are terrified of us, absolutely terrified

that Smart

Voting will work. I mean, honestly,

who the hell knows whether it will or not — but it should.

By all the math we've seen, it should work.

It should work. Of course, they can

stage unprecedented

election fraud, and apparently they're preparing for that,

because it will work, and then we'll

see what comes of it. But if

each of us doesn't get lazy, goes out and votes,

and tells our neighbors about it, then it

should work. Now, about yesterday — let me

tell you about that strange raid.

I missed the previous one, all the fun — I

was stuck in a special detention center (a facility for administrative detainees), and yesterday there was a rather

funny situation. I came out of

the office and was walking here to Navalny Live because we

needed to discuss some kind of

changes to the script. I walk past the elevator,

and there's a man coming toward me in ordinary clothes — jeans,

a jacket, and on his head this kind of

balaclava. Totally civilian-looking.

He's walking straight toward me. I look at him and

it didn't even occur to me what was actually

going on. I thought: some crazy guy,

a lunatic maybe — doesn't look right at all.

I came down with what felt like a respiratory illness, and he was sort of...

they thought I was just passing by.

Then a second one, and then of course a whole

crowd of these guys, fully decked out in

masks, body armor, some with assault rifles,

others with pistols, running off in different directions,

blocking off all the rooms. Honestly,

I wandered around here like an idiot for several hours

because, well, at that moment I still

of course my phone died, and I couldn't

tell anyone anything, I couldn't

let anyone know.

I tried not to go near the doors

because if the guys saw it was me,

I'd come up and they'd open them. Though, by that point,

since near every door there was

a whole bunch of these

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" standing there, of course they didn't open up. So I

just barged into some

office and said, "Right, give me a power bank."

People, seeing all these masks and this whole show,

were pretty sympathetic and immediately

gave me a power bank, so I got back online

and sent a few messages, did a short

broadcast on Twitter, and so on. But actually,

the cynical thing is, they

stood around for quite a while, about half an hour,

whispering among themselves before sawing open

the door here.

At the Anti-Corruption Foundation,

they only went in there several hours later.

entered.

Well, I was arguing with them—not exactly arguing, but I

insisted.

And I told them pretty bluntly,

"Have you completely lost it? Have you gotten totally out of hand?"

Like, "Why did you come to seize our new equipment again,

to take away our cameras again?

Ha-ha-ha, right, so they came, and I said,

"We'll just keep buying new cameras, ha-ha."

You know, this oddly good-natured conversation, while

these people had come to commit a crime,

a serious crime, but they were like,

"We understand." Basically the conversation went like this:

"The bosses sent us so that

everything could be taken from you again. Yes, we understand

that this is all basically pointless and nobody needs it,

we ourselves don't exactly love United Russia (the ruling Russian political party), either,

but, well, we're still going to take everything from you now,

we're going to rob you all," and they absolutely

didn't hide the fact that the goal

was precisely that: to paralyze this

interaction between us. What infuriates them is that we

somehow manage to organize ourselves,

that collective action is happening, and that really

gets in their way. So probably the video

about Biryukov, which really

took off—I’ll talk about it a bit more later—was

also some additional

trigger. But I myself wasn't entirely sure

that this was the main reason until

I saw the result of this search: they carried out

absolutely everything. I mean, we had things like

this thing behind me here—

it's a heavy wooden contraption, not exactly

something you can easily carry off—but things like screens,

teleprompters, tripods, cables,

lighting—just everything, they simply hauled it all out.

Interestingly, the first thing they naturally

do is tape over the cameras.

It looks very interesting from the inside,

always. Let's take a look.

Actually, I wasn't of any interest to them at all,

and it was funny to watch how

especially at the first stage they were

pretending not to notice me at all.

I’d move a little closer, and they'd turn away like that. I

thought they were going to detain me, but there was actually no

order to detain me. And so

the whole idea was to take absolutely everything

and just clear everything out from everywhere. Let's

look—a short 40-second tour

right after the search. There used to be

five surveillance monitors here—they took them all.

Downstairs, they took the computer too.

This one they didn't touch here; the second computer they also

took, along with two monitors.

The computer itself as well.

Moving on: in the studio there's nothing left. The very expensive

Kino Flo lights are gone, the backdrop too, and for some reason

they took some things and left others; apparently they

were trying to start something up.

The host's monitor is gone, two auxiliary

monitors are gone, and the camera—

which was rented, by the way—was taken too.

It's no longer here.

Really, judging by the atmosphere, by

what was happening, it felt like, well,

you know,

a cheerful but genuinely absolutely illegal

raid—or rather, its illegality was somehow

legalized theft.

And that created, you might say, a certain

festive atmosphere, because once again they

simply stole some things. Sobol (Lyubov Sobol, Russian opposition politician) and

today it's hard even to understand here

what exactly was stolen. Today I was trying to find

my jacket, which had been hanging here, and I even

thought I'd have to

go on air in just a shirt without a jacket because

they'd stolen it—but in the end we found it. Still,

some initial review showed that

they simply stole small everyday items. If there's

Lyubov Sobol's tweet, let's

look at it. Things like employees' wages

were lying on the table,

and one of the police officers just slipped them

into his pocket. Just some

nice household items too—like last time, when

they stole our coffee grinder; Lyuba's speaker

was here too, and that—what do you call it—

a power strip, you know, for cables,

a nice little one—they just stole it,

literally.

They were walking around here like, well, since they'd already been told

to take everything out, then officially for the record

we'll remove it all—and unofficially, we'll just take whatever

isn't nailed down.

They took it and pocketed it, well...

You could say it's absolutely disgusting, of course.

And it's incredibly infuriating, and it really is

awkward for us to keep asking you

to help us

buy this equipment. I can see people

writing, yes, including my own supporters, asking, "What is going on there?

Are we really going to keep buying it for you endlessly

and paying for it, while they just keep on

stealing and getting away with it?" It's a rather

strange situation. But if we want

to engage in political activity in

Russia, then apparently, in the new reality, this

is unavoidable.

If it comes to that, then in the end we'll do it all from a phone.

We'll do all of this, we'll keep doing it.

After all, yesterday I went live from my phone.

They can't stop us. The main thing is that you

keep watching. But once again, I want to draw your

attention to the fact that all of this was done in order to

simply sabotage our Smart Voting campaign

so as to peel away at least a few

thousand people. They understand perfectly well how

every hundred people,

every couple of thousand people matter in this process, and

if one broadcast gets canceled, fine — on Friday I

went live, fewer people watched, but still

if suddenly a couple thousand people

and a few fewer people take part in Smart

Voting, that means an entire mandate

for United Russia. That means that in

St. Petersburg, in some municipality, then

United Russia candidates will win outright. That's why for us

every single vote matters. Go yourselves,

go yourselves and bring other people along. The next

topic that I naturally want to talk about is this:

So, now at last I have — I can see —

a screen where I can at least tell

what's going on. We have feedback now,

so write with the hashtag #RussiaOfTheFuture

on Twitter — now you can write,

because I can see your questions on

screen. There are 20,000 people watching live. We've

already raised 30,000 rubles (about $330 USD).

Good grief, they're asking me, "Alexei

Anatolyevich, what should we do if in

my region absolutely all the candidates are from

United Russia?" I don't know which region that is, but such

situations do happen. For example, in

St. Petersburg, I don't remember exactly,

in one or two municipalities there

they really did not allow absolutely

anyone in, and among the candidates there are only some

incumbent United Russia members

and people who are some kind of

employees of the municipal administrations — that is,

basically just the same United Russia people,

there's simply no one else. This is in those,

if I remember correctly, municipal

districts that

are controlled by the speaker of the Legislative Assembly

of St. Petersburg, Makarov. So, we

still recommend someone, you understand.

After all, some United Russia people set this up

so that they themselves would become deputies, and

they put up fake candidates. The task of Smart

Voting, even in such difficult

situations, is simply to make sure that

their scenario does not play out. We still — well,

maybe some not very good

guys will get in, although the lists are full

of excellent people — but in really

difficult situations, then the task is simply

to disrupt their scenario and show that

it is we who will make these people deputies,

and not someone else with a smug

expression on their face, as the

Investigative Committee says. People went out to

protests, people

asserted their rights, and therefore these

people must be imprisoned. Now, let's

take a look at a truly sad,

let's say, picture. These are the people — you can see

several names — who have already now

been sentenced to actual prison terms. Calling things

by their proper names, these are people against whom

there has been committed

a serious crime. I said this yesterday

in my strange live address from the

corridor,

but I'll repeat it because it's an important point.

Everyone is thinking, well, what are we going to do, how

should we relate to this? It's like this:

imagine someone stole something from you and

ran away, or your car was stolen, or you

can't find it, or someone

beat you up and disappeared for a while, but the police are

looking for him, and sooner or later they will find him, and sooner

or later he will be convicted. Therefore, in each of

these cases there is a documented

organized criminal group of those who

put them in prison. And these are most often fairly

young people, and we understand that they will, so to speak,

outlast Putin — rather, they

will outlast Putin, and one way or another

somehow

the situation will change and the regime will change, and for

these crimes the statutes of limitations will be abolished.

I understand very well that you cannot

give back to Sinitsa, Beglets, or Podkopaev

the time that they will have

spent behind bars.

But nevertheless, it seems to me that around

this there should be a real public

consensus and a political consensus that

for these fabricated cases we abolish the statute

of limitations, and everyone who did this will

go to prison.

Starting with that cop who

was saying, "They allegedly caused me

unbearable pain to a finger phalanx,

therefore I'm the victim." You fabricated the case;

you, together with your finger,

will go to prison for five years. Then, someday,

the prosecutor, the judge, the investigator — everyone there,

the entire investigative team — then

you understand, in a few years

some forensic medical expert will also be held accountable.

to scream, “Oh my God, I was forced, I…”

I was just a forensic medical expert,

I just signed

a piece of paper saying that as a result of this

kind of movement

and that somehow this helmet caused someone

to suffer absolutely insane, excruciating pain.

Let’s watch this video recording.

Because of it, a person was sent to prison

for three and a half years, three and a

half years. Obviously, everyone who

had anything to do with this is not

a criminal, and there was some kind of

forensic expert, there are people who

Let’s take a look. Here is what was written there,

specifically what the prosecutor read out

at this trial, in the case of Zhukov,

who was given three years: “Zhukov, with a very

self-satisfied expression on his face,

struck under the slogan…”

You just saw that. “Struck” — that’s what they call it.

And that Zhukov served, and where he served,

characterizes his actions. He supposedly knew perfectly well

the condition of the fighters, their sensations,

which he caused with his blow. You do not

need any special knowledge

to determine that Zhukov was self-satisfied.”

I don’t even understand where they got that from.

The prosecutor — he is supposed to,

at the very least, have a higher legal education.

He cannot use

phrases like, “You don’t need any knowledge to

determine that Zhukov was self-satisfied.”

The video is the cornerstone, and the man is sitting there,

the prosecutor is standing there reading all this, the judge,

the journalists — he showed this crap,

excuse my language, where the person there simply

sort of just does this to the helmet and says:

“The video is the cornerstone of my

evidence,” and he didn’t laugh, and the judge didn’t

laugh. Well, the public, naturally,

was outraged. They should go to prison for

what they did.

There should be a consensus on this, and it

should be part of the political platforms

of all decent people, at the very least.

It is part of my political

platform: until we send these

so-called

dangerous perverts to

the dock,

who, right before everyone’s eyes,

put an innocent person in prison,

nothing normal will ever exist in Russia

and no “Beautiful Russia of the Future” (a slogan for a democratic future Russia)

can be built. And this is not vengeance, not

revenge — this is precisely the rule of law.

This is what is called a state governed by law.

A state governed by law is a place where

people

who, like these prosecutors,

show a video where there is nothing, and then

send a person to prison for three years, end up

facing consequences, then go on trial, and then

are sent to prison.

That is the only way a state governed by law is built,

and absolutely no other way.

And look, there in the case materials

there is this image — simply

astonishing. You see, this is an investigative

experiment.

Some experts wrote this up,

an investigator from the investigative team sat there,

some random guy,

living off us, receiving from us

through our taxes, instead of investigating

murders or serious crimes,

please turn the picture back — the main thing is,

the Investigative Directorate, yes, he

photographed how this was happening,

what kind of “blow” this was, with a self-satisfied

expression, this “blow” being delivered, and then

and there was also

a special expert examination that said

that this leads to the strap

holding the helmet causing unpleasant

sensations to the person wearing the helmet, and they

seriously included all of this

in the case. The fact that they included all this is excellent,

because it will simply become the evidentiary basis

for putting these people behind bars.

As for releasing these people, several people

were released.

In fact, with regard to five

defendants in the Moscow Case (the prosecutions over the 2019 Moscow protests), the investigation

was dropped — a whole bunch of them.

Vasilyev, Daniil Konon, Valery Kostenyuk,

they were released and the cases against them were dropped.

Why? Because at first they were saying,

“We’ll throw them all in prison, these are mass

riots, they’ll all do time.” Why?

There is a very simple and clear explanation

for why they were released. Let’s look.

On this question, we have a Levada Center poll

from Levada Center. Here it is. This is already

a nationwide poll, a nationwide

poll, and despite all the propaganda,

despite everything that had been said

on television, people were asked, “How

do you feel about the protests in Moscow?” And they

said positively — while 45 percent said

they were neutral. And then they were

asked about the actions of the security forces,

and a plurality, 41 percent,

said that the police

used unjustified violence. And now

let’s look at another part: what

prompted people to come out to these protest

rallies? Remember, they were pushing

the theme of foreign interference,

the State Duma commission, and so on. But across all of

Russia — neither young nor old, neither

rural nor urban, neither educated nor uneducated people —

they failed to convince anyone of

this nonsense. People say that in

first place was dissatisfaction with the state of affairs

in the country, dissatisfaction with the authorities’ policies,

dissatisfaction with the fact that there was no debate.

Independent candidates were not allowed in because of this.

That is why.

For exactly that reason, five people from this whole

case

were released, because, as I have said many times,

Putin governs according to opinion polls.

For him, it is fundamentally important to imprison

several people. That is his personal,

individual decision. But he sees that

this "mass riots" trial

is damaging his approval ratings.

Lock them all up, and you lose another five

or ten percent. So our task is

to make sure that those he has already

imprisoned, those already behind bars, or those whom

they are planning to imprison, also

bring his ratings down. Information work

matters. It seems to us that everyone already knows that

Sinitsa was jailed over a tweet, or that

Kirill Zhukov was imprisoned, but

in reality, only a fairly small number of people know this.

We

must make sure that

the whole country knows about it, and the whole country

hates this government, so that it

compares, you understand, this Zhukov and

all the others like him,

and that poor fugitive, good Lord,

Kirill Kotov, who was sentenced for 45

to four years, so that people compare that,

for example, with the prosecutor from Perm (a Russian city in the Urals).

In those very same days, the verdict was announced in the prosecutor's case.

The prosecutor from Perm

stole money—investigators charged him, and he

admitted it. It is a proven fact

that he stole 100 million rubles (about US$1.5 million).

And do you know what he was sentenced to? A fine

of 80,000 rubles (about US$1,200), and he was immediately amnestied. So who

is more dangerous for the country: a prosecutor who

steals tens and hundreds of millions, or

a person who simply came to stand in a picket protest?

Anyone—do you understand? There is no other way.

Tell this to anyone at all. You just need

to explain it properly and draw

the right conclusions.

Dear citizen, you saw what happened,

so please hate this

government, and please always vote

against it. Then people will hate it a little more,

and they will vote against it.

That is what we must do.

Besides all that, of course,

what we need first and foremost are mass protests,

because that is the only thing the authorities fear.

Political work and elections are necessary for us too.

Right now,

smart voting is our direct

responsibility. We must get people elected

to the Moscow City Duma, to St. Petersburg municipal councils,

to the Irkutsk legislative assembly, to the Khabarovsk

city and regional bodies—we must get in everyone

who can become deputies. Maybe not all of

them, but some of them will definitely say:

"I demand that they be released," or at least someone will definitely

sign some letter, at the very least.

All these people whom we help elect

as deputies will know that they owe it

to you, and they will know exactly what your

mood is, and therefore they will, broadly speaking,

listen to your—to our—

opinion. We must do everything, but each of

us, at a minimum, must do this

information work. I want to speak in more detail about two people.

One of them is Kotov.

Yesterday, on the day of the verdicts, the TV Rain channel (an independent Russian broadcaster)

reported on it. Everyone understood that they were really going to sentence him,

but

how can you imprison a person for

four pickets? He took part, moreover, in

human rights pickets.

He came out to a rally in defense of Golunov (Ivan Golunov, a Russian investigative journalist),

one that I attended too, where I was detained. He

also went to protests over the Network case, fabricated by the FSB (Russia's security service),

and stood near the court in the New Greatness case.

Those bastards really

decided to make an example of Kotov

simply to frighten all of us. Because what

is Putin doing? He is trying to scare you,

to scare us, simply so that

we will not dare

to do anything. That is why they simply

really chose Kotov as

it has now become clear, as can be seen from this

video recording released

several hours before the verdict. They themselves

claimed in the charges that

at the last picket he was shouting,

unfurling a placard. Let's look

at a fragment of this video, where you can see that

it is silent footage from a

city surveillance camera. At the request of

Kotov's lawyer, it was provided, and you can see there

that he simply comes out of the metro and walks along.

His placard is rolled up. Then

the police run up to him. Let's look: here

he comes out of the Kitay-Gorod metro station

looks around and walks toward

the Monument to the Heroes of Plevna. He is alone,

not chanting anything, but that was

enough for them soon to wrench his

arms behind his back and detain him. This video was

provided to the lawyer by the Department

of Information Technologies of the Moscow city government.

Moscow.

But in court they did not even bother

to examine it. The witness testimony directly

contradicts it. A prosecution witness in

court was a police van driver. What stood out to him most about Kotov

was that at the police station

he explained to detainees how

to file complaints about unlawful actions

by police officers. The grounds for opening

the criminal case, according to the investigators,

was his detention at an unauthorized

rally on August 10. That was his third

administrative offense within 180 days.

In other words, you can see that this was from the outset

a fabricated case. They simply chose him.

Some guys said, "This one here—"

"we’ll frame this guy and put him behind bars," and that’s exactly what they

did. In other words, they simply

decided to keep him under surveillance, so they charged him

over one picket, then charged him again at

a second picket, and then at the third he was just walking along

when they grabbed him, made him disappear, and lied in the

police report. The court refused to consider

this video, even though, as was said, this video

came from the Moscow Department of Information

Resources. They simply framed him and

sentenced him to four years. When even, I don’t know,

the very last grandmother in any

region knows what happened,

that’s when they’ll start letting them out and

stop imprisoning new people, because

that grandmother can see what’s going on,

she sees the absolute, complete

injustice, she sees corruption with her own eyes,

she sees that there are actual criminals in their

village that nobody is dealing with,

while Kotov was sent away for four

years.

So we shouldn’t underestimate

information work. We shouldn’t think

that everyone already knows all this about

those who’ve been imprisoned. No, nobody knows a damn thing.

What people know is only that there were

some arrests and that something seemed to be happening in Moscow,

and on the whole they’re more inclined to support it from afar.

We’ve just seen that ourselves, but

these hellish, hellish details—

nobody knows them, and they need to be told.

As for Zhukov, I’ve never personally met

Yegor Zhukov, but I’m very glad that he was

released to house arrest, and it’s very

painful, in a way, that others there—Alexei

Minyaylo, for example—still haven’t been released. But I feel I have to defend him personally,

because

Yegor Zhukov kept dedicating his YouTube videos

to me endlessly, you see. You look at

the ruling, and it says that Zhukov,

"motivated by feelings of political hatred

and hostility toward the existing order in Russia,"

decided to involve an unlimited

number of people in his extremist

activities aimed at destabilizing

the socio-political situation.

So then there’s Zhukov, and a whole list of videos, and

when you watch those videos,

the only person who could possibly

see political hatred and

hostility there is me. In fact, the only reason I found out about

Yegor Zhukov’s existence was that

some time ago, some people

started rushing around everywhere, including here on air,

writing about the hashtag #FlowersFor

Police. So, he’s a YouTuber, and he

had this sort of idea. Apparently he

had read a book that was popular in 2004,

by the American political scientist Gene

Sharp,

which describes various methods

of political struggle. It’s a fairly

naive book, we understand that, but it was

very popular. Ilya Yashin was very

taken with it at one time

and even published it. But it’s full of all sorts of nonsense,

including things like: let’s hold various

actions, let’s give flowers to the police, or

let’s, I don’t know, stage a sit-in

strike,

or let’s simply

smile at police officers or frown at them—like, one hundred

and twenty-three ways to defeat tyranny—and

there are all these funny little things written there.

And Zhukov was trying to promote all that,

organizing flash mobs of that kind.

I asked: let’s take Zhukov’s so-called extremist

video and watch it, let’s do something with it—

don’t scold me, you can’t cut anything out there.

He may scold me, but to say that this is

extremism—this definitely is not

extremism, it definitely is not

something for which this person should

spend even a single day under house

arrest.

This is a pure, textbook case of a political

prisoner. Let’s watch a little of

Zhukov.

And the protest is being drained from both sides—by all

of you who are too scared to come out to rallies, and by the so-called

opposition leaders.

The action on Pushkinskaya Square took place—

Navalny brings people into the streets

hoping they’ll come up with something on their own,

that things will somehow sort themselves out, but without giving

people any plan of action, you’re

setting them up, because having enough drive

to come out is not enough—what comes next? The strength

of real protest lies in self-organization and

in changing leaders. If one leader proves

to be weak, you thank him for all

his заслуги (services/achievements) and even give him the right to reclaim

leadership when he becomes useful again,

but while he is weak, someone else takes

his place.

The strength of real protest lies in

leadership rotation, and so on. The man is

just saying perfectly ordinary

political-analysis stuff—call it theory, field analysis,

whatever you like.

And what’s happening with Zhukov? They should

release him.

Their case against him has fallen apart completely,

absolutely. I mean, it’s obvious there were no

mass riots, and he wasn’t leading

anything, so now they’re simply

trying to pin

an extremism charge on him because they have

nothing else. But they can’t just release him,

they simply can’t, because everyone

is demanding it, everyone is outraged—they can’t show

weakness. And of course I

join the demand: freedom for

Yegor Zhukov. I will keep demanding it because

leave my dear Zhukov alone, the one who keeps

talking about me endlessly on YouTube—that’s all.

what’s happening isn’t really about YouTube at all

it’s happening on a completely different plane

and of course the Investigative Committee (Russia’s main federal investigative authority) is absolutely

fabricating the case, and if they think that by

keeping him under house arrest

that somehow makes their actions look softer, maybe

but in the future that absolutely won’t be the case. I

spent a year under house arrest, and

it’s pretty awful stuff, basically

a deprivation of liberty. All the people who

wrote this crap—not only did they

write it,

this nonsense about there supposedly being some kind of

extremist videos, they also attached those

videos, in which absolutely no one will find anything

extremist. In the future, they’ve

guaranteed themselves a place on the defendants’ bench

Ellа Panfilova—the heroic Ella

Panfilova. Let’s answer the question now.

We’ve got 29,000 people watching—thank you

very much for watching, I’m glad that you’ve

found me on a Friday. We’ve already raised 98

thousand rubles (about 98,000 RUB). Let me remind you that today we’re

raising money to restore the work of

our operation—to restore, well, basically

our studio downstairs was destroyed. Below is the Stream

Labs link, you can send

all sorts of things, leave likes, and various other

little things. So, Code Da Vinci asks who

to vote for in St. Petersburg

why we didn’t do Smart Voting for

the gubernatorial races—at least to get Beglov out

of the governor’s office. Dear Code Da Vinci,

come on now, I’ve already been saying this

until I’m blue in the face: anyone but Beglov

Go to the St. Petersburg page for the gubernatorial

election, because they have a second round everywhere

wherever those elections are held—in Sakhalin,

Astrakhan Oblast, Volgograd

Oblast, in all the regions, in Bashkortostan

the concept is one thing:

vote for anyone except the incumbent, man

because that means a second round. It doesn’t matter who

you vote for—it’s still a vote

for a second round. And all the rest of Smart

Voting is meant to handle exactly those

cases where you need to vote for one specific

person in particular. If you just

vote for anyone, you might end up voting

for a United Russia candidate. Under no circumstances

should you do that. That’s why there’s a separate site for you

for St. Petersburg—we have to do everything

separately because in St. Petersburg there live

the kind of people who’d say, “What, you lumped us in

together with Muscovites on one website?”

No, we wouldn’t agree to that, so for

St. Petersburg and the people of St. Petersburg—ah yes,

forgive me, the most cultured and special

Russians—we made a cultured

separate, special website. Go there,

enter your address, and you’ll find out who

to vote for. In St. Petersburg we

did our best, and we more or less

managed to bring together all

the teams in St. Petersburg, which is very

difficult. There are the United Democrats,

the Yabloko people, others who dropped out of the election

By the way, among the united

democrats, the Yabloko people, there’s our large

team, there’s the regional штаб (campaign HQ), and so on and

so forth. Different groups have different

positions in different

municipalities. We made a main

list that more or less works for everyone

so go there, look it up, and

go vote. It’s complicated there because

it’s not just one name—each person has to

vote for five names. Don’t

hope you’ll guess them, don’t count on it, and

you simply need to get those names,

write them down, print them out from our website.

By the way, at the beginning of the broadcast I should have

said that we’ve got a cool new

option. Right now, if you go to the Smart Voting website

and enter

well, for example, type in our address here

on Avtozavodskaya, you’ll see that

you can generate a special flyer

We can show the flyer—this is what it

looks like. There’s a button; if you scroll

down the site a little, you’ll see on the left-hand side

“Download flyer.” Click it, and in PDF

format you’ll get a black-and-white flyer

that you can print on your home

printer. For your

specific local address, it’ll be tailored accordingly

Print it out and hang it up,

please, in your apartment building entrance—that would be

super, mega helpful for Smart Voting

The same goes for St. Petersburg and other

places with multi-member districts

Put up the flyer, vote for those names,

cast your ballot,

kick out the United Russia people, and help good people

That’s how you help, dear Code Da Vinci.

We want to get Beglov out—every one of us does

and I really want to remove him from the governor’s office

very badly. I’ll say more about that in a moment, but first I

want to start by talking about the heroic Ella

Panfilova, because this is

a genuinely great story

Not that I especially want to

be snide or mock her, or

completely rule out the possibility that some

criminal may indeed have gotten into Panfilova’s house

some kind of criminal, that is,

or villain, and tried to rob her. But frankly speaking,

based simply on what we’ve been

told, all of this looks very much like

a pretty obvious stunt. So, they’ve

failed, stolen plenty,

and Ella Panfilova is falsifying the elections

right now, so they simply need to distract

attention with some story. Remember my

favorite, Viktor Zolotov (head of Russia’s National Guard), when we

released an investigation about how he

was stealing carrots and potatoes—what did he do?

He immediately

heroically entered into negotiations

with some terrorist, remember, there was that case on

Vasilyevsky Island, where the head of the National Guard personally

went to the terrorist—they showed all of this on TV

he supposedly dared to go in to that terrorist himself

did something in there, talked him into it, and

so on. But then—where was the terrorist, where was the trial?

There was no trial of any terrorist, nothing of the sort happened

it was a completely, entirely made-up

load of nonsense meant to slightly improve

someone's image. It's very similar: we

first see this story about Ella

Pamfilova being attacked with a stun gun, and all

these little propaganda hacks—and honestly,

those police-linked channels that put out this kind of

leaked kompromat—very clearly

described it: Ella Pamfilova supposedly took

a hit, and he

apparently knocked her out, and then others wrote

with explicit police-style details: Ella

Pamfilova supposedly threw a chair at him

she rushed into the fight, he hit her several times

with a stun gun, but after all that

she then calmly went to bed

They should have written that after that she

calmly lit a cigar, and then, like,

and then there should have been shots of her standing there while

behind her a fire was raging and cars were exploding, and

of course, what a great person

praise be to Pamfilova, she defeated

some male intruder,

an attacker with a stun gun. Then

it turned out the stun gun didn't work

that he had sort of, supposedly, been hitting her

with the stun gun, but not with an electric

discharge—just with the device itself, meaning he

was poking her with a non-functioning stun gun

But then what about those precise descriptions saying she was

completely knocked out, that sparks were flying, everything was crackling?

that she was throwing a chair at him—and that

these were absolutely official statements from those

very same official propaganda

media outlets. Then Pamfilova gives another

comment and says that

either he really was hitting her with a stun gun

and there seemed to be sparks flying

but she wasn't actually hit by electricity itself

not directly, that is

They started describing the criminal as tall, flexible,

well-trained, and so on. Well, obviously

of course a tall, flexible, well-trained

young man with a stun gun

showed up, and Ella Pamfilova drove him off. I mean,

first he somehow got into a guarded

residential compound, then into a guarded dacha

then Pamfilova threw a chair at him with a cry of

"Russians don't surrender! Smart Voting will prevail!"

or rather, "Smart Voting won't be stopped," and then

the man escaped again—somehow he got out

they said he squeezed through, or

through a mosquito screen, through some kind of

mosquito net, through that mosquito screen

he squeezed through and ran off somewhere again, and again

neither the guards nor anyone else noticed him, nothing

happened. So, Ella Pamfilova,

you lie so often, so brazenly, and so

simply

that these statements are just ridiculous

about how independent candidates

deliberately submitted invalid signatures in order

to create a scandal

an absolutely vile, living embodiment of

a hypocritical old auntie, so excuse me

please, but your story looks

a bit, frankly speaking, far-fetched

I suspect you're unlikely to distract attention from

the falsifications that

are obviously being prepared right now in

St. Petersburg and Moscow and all

the other cities. So let's not believe

Pamfilova—let's believe only in ourselves

If only one

thousand people watch Smart Voting, we can raise 13,000

rubles

Right, people are already correcting me, a whole bunch are scolding me

from the regions, because the leaflets for

Smart Voting aren't just for Moscow

and my apologies

please—well then, in Moscow

let's print them out there, and

distribute them. Unfortunately, we haven't, we haven't

been able to implement many of the technical

possibilities. Well, guys, partly

because half your people are constantly

under arrest, all the equipment gets seized

the servers get hauled away, so let's just say

our IT team

are people who are basically pushing a boulder uphill

and on top of that boulder there's also Ella

Pamfilova, and on top of that someone's shooting at them from behind and

hitting them with an actual stun gun

so, well, we've managed to do some things

and some things, unfortunately, we couldn't do

What needs to happen on Sunday?

On Sunday, in fact, we'll find out

our capacity for collective action

On Sunday we'll see to what extent people

really are—to what extent you and I, I

assume that if you're watching this

program, you've also managed to take

a calculator and count it up and understand that we

need to vote collectively—we'll understand

how much we've managed to persuade everyone

else to do the same, because

everyone has their own cockroaches in their head

On the one hand, there are lots of studies

showing that people decide everything at

the last moment. That's exactly why today

and tomorrow are critically important, in that sense,

days for making an effort, because people don't know

what to do with elections—they decide everything at

the last moment. At the last moment

they decide whether to go or not, and at the last

moment they decide whom to vote for, so

everything you do in terms of campaigning is

incredibly important. They'll see your

leaflet in the entryway, and that may well be

the reason why they vote for

the right person, so we need to

do it differently

there are wounds in politically active circles, but

there are a lot of people who are hard to convince

because they have these

firm convictions. I'm glad that a great many

really very smart people supported

Smart Voting—that's why they're smart

people. Sergei Guriev—let's watch this

one second. One of the smartest people

I've ever known and met in my life

we asked him to support it, and he was completely

fine with it—he recorded it right away, because

it's the right thing to do. Let's watch

Guriev.

What is this government most afraid of? This

government is afraid of coordination. This government

is afraid that the people who

oppose it will realize that they

are in fact the majority.

Why? So that people think they are few in number,

so that the authorities can convince each person: maybe

you're unhappy about something, but there are no others

like you. That is why any way of

coordinating and expressing your

dissatisfaction with the authorities is truly

a blow, because today's government in

Russia is structured that way, and in that sense Smart

Voting is the most powerful

approach to how one can resist

the authorities. With Smart Voting, you can

focus your efforts on a single

candidate.

You need to choose the candidate for whom

you will vote and say: we are dissatisfied, and

therefore we are voting for this

candidate. That is exactly what the authorities fear in

such a regime.

Guriev—you hear him? A really very smart

guy. He speaks very thoughtfully, very

academically, in that sense. Well, not

everyone likes that; not everyone is able to follow

the train of thought when someone speaks so calmly

and carefully. Here, meanwhile, Gleb Pyanykh has arrived

—the one people have asked me about a million times,

how much I paid him because he very

actively supported Smart Voting. This is

that famous NTV correspondent

known for scandals and investigations

who recorded an awesome video. I can't show it in full,

but I can play 40 seconds of it. September 8:

you go to the polls. Smart

Voting. And even if you live in a

cottage on Novorizhskoye Highway (an upscale area outside Moscow),

make the effort on Sunday, September 8.

Get up, get in the car, spend

half an hour driving to the place where you are

officially registered in Moscow, vote, and

come back. This is very important. And don't say

that the majority is inert, passive, and won't

get off the couch, even in Moscow. Guys,

right now a minority of votes decides things. To

unseat a candidate from the United

Russia party, you need very few votes

in each district of Moscow. On this subject, you

can find the details on the Smart Voting website.

Now, these are very different people, but they understand

elementary things. That is, there is still a fairly

large number of people whom

we still need to keep

persuading, and on the final day they

generally fall into two groups. These are

the following kinds of people.

The boycott people—more or less, they're understandable.

It's a consistent position: basically, I

do not recognize any elections and don't want to hear

about any elections at all. Whether

Navalny is taking part, or Yashin, or anyone else—

let them participate, I do not recognize these

elections. In Russia, they cannot truly exist,

so I won't go.

Most often, this kind of stance, this kind of position,

is held by our political

émigrés of various kinds, and well, obviously, Garry

Kasparov is one example. It's a consistent

position—he has been saying this for many years.

I more or less agree with that, but then there are

two other things. First, regarding

spoiling the ballot—I no longer

know how to fight this.

My God, it's just unbelievably stupid. I

don't know—honestly, it's better not to go vote

than to spoil the ballot.

You are being given something, a tool with which you

can have an impact, and then we're told: well, you

should write 'Down with autocracy' on the ballot,

and then what will happen? Or write something

else on the ballot, something clever like that.

There was a great example of this just

on Twitter—let me show you.

A dialogue between some person and Khodorkovsky.

So this person lives in the district where Yashin

—in central Moscow, where that damned

Kasamara is running

from United Russia. Yashin supported

the Communist candidate there; he was removed.

Now Yashin supports Yandiyev, an absolutely

normal, decent person. Look, he

wrote a great post saying that if he

gets elected, he will invite Yashin, invite

all the independent candidates

who were not registered, and will submit their

initiatives. In other words, he directly told us:

'Guys,

elect me, and I will basically be a deputy

for those who were not allowed to run.' And the person

asks Khodorkovsky: so what am I

supposed to do? I don't want to vote

for Kasamara. And the answer—the brilliant answer—was:

'Well then, write Yashin's name on the ballot, at least you won't

be ashamed.' Because if you have even

a gram of brains, you understand that spoiling

the ballot, writing Yashin's name on it, or whatever else

you might write there, is the same as voting for

Kasamara too. If you do not vote for

Yandiyev, then you increase the chances

of the United Russia candidate, Kika Kasamara. So, in

support of Yashin, go and vote for Yandiyev.

Besides, everything is already going great for her right now.

All across Moscow, fake messages are being sent out,

supposedly from trade unions, all over the city.

People are receiving them even though they never signed up for anything.

A text message comes to your phone, supposedly from a trade union,

saying that some union is backing Lunna Voykova or someone like that,

and if you go to the website they send you,

the one they sent—let's take a look,

it actually looks very much like Smart Voting,

like a voting site. We can show how it works.

Here's how it works now: if you go there,

you enter an address—say, Krasnoselsky District,

where Yashin happens to live—we entered it and searched,

and it tells you to support Samara. There you go.

So, using public money,

and illegally using personal data,

because someone had to get your phone number,

they're making mobile operators

send out texts to everyone telling them whom to support—

Samara.

No, damn it, let's also go and spoil

our ballots and help her win. But we have

Smart Voting. That's why, in fact,

we came up with Smart Voting

because you don't need to do stupid

things. If you don't like the elections, then

it's better not to go. But if you

want to influence things somehow, then come

and vote smart, because if you want to

help,

United Russia, you can stay home—they

need low turnout.

By staying home and boycotting, in these

elections you're helping them. But damn it, to be

so foolish as to go to the polling station and then

spoil your ballot—why even bother?

Why go at all? You could have saved those 25

minutes of your time, stayed home, and

helped United Russia just the same. Another

very irritating thing is

the endless argument about communists.

God, it's so tiresome.

Just take the Smart Voting list in

Moscow and look at the people on it.

I'll show you Zhukovsky.

Chertanovo Central, Chertanovo North,

Chertanovo South, Chertanovo...

Central Chertanovo, South Chertanovo.

Here is a candidate from the Communist

Party of the Russian Federation.

Register.

Let's see what he says. Friends,

hello everyone, I'm Vladislav Zhukovsky,

an economist, and I'm running as a candidate

against United Russia, against the party

of crooks and thieves, against all these cynics,

for the Moscow City Duma in the 31st

electoral district—this is Chertanovo

South and Chertanovo Central.

I am deeply convinced that we, the people of Russia,

are fed up by now.

Fed up with predatory, anti-social

reforms. We do not like the pension

reform, the garbage reform. We are tired of the fact that

they keep raising taxes—they raised VAT,

raised gasoline prices, utility prices, prices

for major building repairs, and keep expanding paid parking all the way to

the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road). We are tired of how they constantly

reach into our pockets, try to steal

our choice, and jail opposition supporters and peaceful

residents in central Moscow, hauling them into police vans,

and arresting them. This is all lawlessness. We

must deliver a crushing blow to

the party of 'Eat Russia' (a mocking nickname for United Russia) on September 8, 2019.

Register on the Smart Voting website

and together let's send

all this rotten core into the trash can.

I believe victory will be ours.

It's called: spot the five differences. He says

exactly the same thing I do, and I say exactly

the same thing he does: freedom

for political prisoners. We don't like

the increase in the retirement age. We don't

like corruption. We don't like the fact

that instead of a social state, we have been

given some strange, incomprehensible

oligarchic capitalism where everything

belongs to Putin and some kind of clique of crooks.

A wonderful deputy—I want exactly

that kind of deputy.

That's why I'm saying: please, let's

Central Chertanovo, Central...

Chertanovo South—go and vote.

But no, people say, he's a communist, right? He

has CPRF written next to his name. Why? Because

if you're from the CPRF, you don't have to collect signatures.

There are ideological communists there, and there are

some who may be less ideological, but

most of the people on the CPRF list are decent enough.

There are more system-loyal ones there, and there are people

who are forced to obey the rules more,

and there are people who can obey them less,

but the overwhelming

majority of them are, first of all, fairly

young people—they're younger than I am,

and second, they simply share our ideas.

Third,

yes, they also serve an additional, super-useful

function: through them, we strike at the crooks and thieves.

Metyelsky, the leader of United Russia in Moscow,

could lose now. Polls

published by TV Rain show that he's terribly afraid.

The entire district

—Metrogorodok, Golyanovo, Izmailovo—

is plastered with what? Let's see. It's plastered

with fake Smart Voting leaflets.

The communist candidate there is

Savostyanov, and they are specially

—you see?—putting up paired leaflets saying that I

am from the mayor's team, while Smart Voting is backing

some nobody named Ostrikov,

apparently from Communists of Russia,

that is, a technical spoiler candidate.

It's disgusting. Why is he doing this? He

wants to split the Smart Voting

vote because he's afraid of losing.

And this is Metyelsky, who last time

won by a margin of about 40, I think.

percent, or 50 percent, and now

they’re publishing polls saying the guy is

hanging by a thread, just barely

his victory is hanging by a hair, and we need to come out

and cut that hair.

And Savostyanov from the Communists, who is

running there, will cut it off. We need him.

Aside from all that, even if he

says some things that are right,

he may also say certain things

that not all of us agree with,

but he will cut that hair. In Mitino,

United Russia’s monopoly in that specific

district will collapse, so...

our investigations department is absolutely

going all out.

And they specifically asked me

to urge, with all possible force, residents of

Metrogorodok, Golyanovo, and Izmailovo: come on,

let’s take down this Mitino billionaire with

some houses in Austria who openly does

business here and still somehow has the nerve

to sue us. Let’s throw

him out of office. The only way to do that

is with Smart Voting. Run to your polling station,

drag all your neighbors there by the scruff of the neck,

to vote for Savostyanov. The same goes

for many other districts: Sokol,

Airport, Besedina can win there

with just a few more votes.

Konkovo, Tyoply Stan, there it’s Vasilyev.

Last time he fell just a little short.

He was just a few percent behind; he came in second

with 23 percent of the vote. He just needs

a little boost and he’ll get through, and so on and

so forth. Everything will be decided by a small

number of votes. Everything will be

determined by whether you can be bothered or not,

by whether you bring your mom or

your dad, your daughter, or whether you don’t.

If you don’t slack off and go vote, it will be

a completely different story.

Something will change dramatically. Maybe

there will be fraud, maybe there won’t be.

Maybe there will be some, maybe they’ll be

massive, maybe not massive, but

something will change very

significantly. I’m urging you, in these last two

days, let’s really push ourselves.

And not only that—of course I keep talking about

Moscow, but of course in St. Petersburg too,

it really is anyone but Beglov.

It’s impossible to tolerate this crook any longer.

33,000 people are watching; we’ve raised 170,000

rubles. Thank you very much. 33,000

people are watching us, which means about 5,000 people

from St. Petersburg alone.

Based on how many people watch the live

broadcast, I can predict that the stream

will be watched by around 500,000 people, of

whom, I think, 50,000 will be

from St. Petersburg. If each of you takes

three people with you, you’ll elect all the

decent deputies and force Beglov into

a second round. The guy is clearly, of course,

preparing for all kinds of fraud.

That’s exactly why election monitoring in

St. Petersburg is super important, and

there are polls.

Take a look at a really excellent article in

*Proekt*, where they write that the Presidential Administration

at the beginning of the summer—one of the reasons

why they stirred up all this chaos and started removing

candidates—was that Beglov’s rating was below 50

percent. They deliberately organized

polling stations outside St. Petersburg, in Pskov Region and

Leningrad Region,

in order to dump seven

percent of the vote there, assuming that those

seven percent of votes

would be enough to push him over 50

percent.

So we need to

Because I specifically, and our

investigations department specifically, sat there

digging through all this, doing the dirty work,

cross-checking all these watches in order to

make a video. It will be in the description of this

video; you can download it. Please

forward it to absolutely everyone. It’s very

simple, on a very simple subject. There’s

a video about Beglov that I recorded,

and one about his deputy, who de facto runs

St. Petersburg on his behalf;

Lyubov Sobol recorded that one—you can find her on

social media. Let’s watch my video:

1 minute 58 seconds, just

proof of why Beglov is a crook and a thief.

In less than one minute, I’ll prove to you

that Alexander Beglov, who wants to become

governor of St. Petersburg, is a thief and

takes bribes, and to do that I won’t need

anything except photographs of Alexander

Beglov, because here I see him wearing

a watch worth 1.3 million rubles,

here on his wrist there’s one worth 2 million

rubles, and in this photo our mustached

state official is wearing a watch worth 6 million

rubles. And finally, here the United Russia politician

Alexander Beglov is simply carrying on his

wrist

the price of an apartment: a Patek Philippe

Nautilus worth 10 million rubles. Altogether,

that’s more than 19 million. This man

has spent that much on watches alone. He’s been a government official his whole

life, worked as an official all his life, and his whole

family are officials too. Where did he get that kind of

money? Either he bought these watches, in which case he’s

a thief stealing tens of millions, or they were given to him,

in which case he takes bribes. Either way, it means stealing

tens of millions. So be sure to

come to the election and vote for

anyone but Beglov on September 8.

Smart Voting.

I re-recorded this several times to

fit it into exactly one minute so that it would

fit on Instagram.

There’s nothing easier than, in the description of this

Download the video and simply send it on WhatsApp

to five people you know, and ask them

to forward it on. This will be such an

effective little campaign. If you live in

St. Petersburg—even if you don’t live there,

send it anyway. Let everyone know. But

if you live in St. Petersburg,

send it to five people you know. Very little

can work as effectively against

Beglov, the enemy. This little video, or

just a video about him—just forward it.

Explain to people who are wavering that they must not

vote for him. He is simply

awful. Not only is he a crook, he is also

a fool. And a stupid man with a stolen

dissertation cannot lead

St. Petersburg, and he must face

organized resistance

from the people of St. Petersburg, because if

there is no resistance, he will

do whatever he wants—he’ll wreck everything you have.

Absolutely everything. They are in decay, and it

will simply destroy everything.

And they will run the city as if

it were some kind of barracks, or a barn, or

a shed. This happened quite recently, and

it will keep happening if we allow this

man to win in the first round.

No one knows what will happen in the second round, but in

any case, a second round would be interesting.

So vote for anyone except Beglov.

The master of Russia.

I’ll say a couple of words about the video on Pyotr

Biryukov. It really landed well—his

video was excellent. I had been saving it for the end. We had many

different ideas about how this

marathon should end.

You ended it today with my video

about Bunina, who stole yet another

billion. But my last video, which I

recorded on Thursday, was about

Biryukov, and it really took off.

I called it “The Master of Russia,” and I

really think he is a typical

example of the kind of person for whom

today’s Russia exists. For 20 years, Putin built a system in which

people like him feel completely

comfortable and totally unpunished.

They are called “strong managers,”

even though in 21st-century Moscow

they shut off hot water—not for a month, but for about 15

days—and utility rates keep

going up.

But these people are irreplaceable.

A relic of the Soviet Union sits there, seemingly

some kind of drab little bureaucrat.

And yet he is a billionaire, and the whole family owns

all sorts of apartments—good Lord—

apartments of 300 or 400 square meters (about 3,230 or 4,305 sq ft),

and in the most elite residential

complexes. I can’t even imagine what

an apartment of 300 or 400 square meters looks like inside,

but they just buy them in batches.

I can’t resist the pleasure

of showing it to you anyway. I think you’ve all

seen it, but I myself will gladly

watch these 1 minute and 43 seconds again—this

flyover of

an amazing, fantastical country estate

that is also a symbol of this

untouchable, thieving

collective-farm type in power.

He grabbed these billions and built all this.

Let’s take a look: Pyotr

Biryukov’s super-dacha from a height of several hundred

meters.

The total area is more than 10 hectares (about 25 acres). Everything

is registered in the children’s names. Before us is a literal

farm: on the left are aviaries with birds, a little

farther on there are some other animals. We fly a bit

farther ahead and find a real pond. In it

something is swimming. We look closer and see

geese and ducks everywhere. We fly past birdhouses

and farther on we see stables, and next to them

a dirt paddock for walking horses. But

where is the manor house itself? In fact,

there are several. One is farther off to the left;

its area is 1,800 square meters (about 19,375 sq ft).

Another house has an area of 1,500 square meters (about 16,145 sq ft).

We estimate the value of this

grand farming estate with

luxury houses at 1 billion rubles.

Maybach—two of them; Toyota Land

Cruiser—two; Mercedes-Benz—two;

Porsche Cayenne, Range Rover, G-Wagen;

two BMW X6s—for a total of 92 million rubles.

Daughter Irina:

Toyota Land Cruiser, Range Rover, BMW 750.

Son’s wife Ekaterina:

Mercedes-Benz CL 63 AMG, worth 1 million rubles.

Grandson Nikita: Lexus and Mercedes-Benz,

worth 14 million rubles. Brother’s wife Nina

Fyodorovna:

Mercedes-Benz S500 and BMW 740Li.

15 million rubles. Niece Anzhelika:

Lexus 570, Lexus, Toyota Land Cruiser, BMW X6, and

in total, we found 22 cars belonging to the Biryukov family,

worth 176 million rubles.

We counted apartments and offices owned by the official’s family

Biryukov worth 4.3 billion rubles,

cars worth 176 million rubles,

and a dacha worth 1 billion. Altogether that comes to 5.5

billion rubles. It’s astonishing that

they live so openly like this. You know, those

Soviet underground millionaires

comically portrayed in films like

*Beware of the Car* (a classic Soviet comedy), and so on—or

the millionaire Koreiko from *The Little Golden Calf* by Ilf and Petrov

—not *The Twelve Chairs*, but *The Little Golden Calf*—by Ilf and

Petrov.

It’s like he has a chest of money hidden somewhere at home,

but tries to live the life

of an ordinary person and spends nothing,

because otherwise you’d be noticed by the OBKhSS (the Soviet anti-theft and anti-speculation police),

or something like that. But in Putin’s Russia

you just directly register everything in your

family’s name—Mercedes, Range Rover,

and so on. Everyone can see it, obviously.

that behind every deputy mayor of Moscow there

someone is somehow keeping an eye on them there

there are your people there—subordinates, friends,

former classmates, whoever you like—no need to come by

chance.

They look at all this—even a million geese,

tethered cows—and everyone understands

that Pyotr the Butcher will, of course, steal—God

forbid—and nothing happens to him.

For decades, nothing happens to him.

One detail that struck me

11 seconds. We already have a children’s slide here,

after we released this, one of

our staff members was watching and said, look,

that slide right there somehow caught our

video operator Anya’s attention—she had been digging

through public procurement records recently because she wanted

to check how much a children’s slide costs

the one installed in her

courtyard, and she saw an exactly identical slide

like the one standing there. She comes in and

says: “Oh, did you see that he has a slide

from a children’s playground set,”

worth 3.5 million rubles (about $35,000–$40,000). 1

second. We want to draw your attention to

one detail: look at this slide for

Deputy Mayor Biryukov’s heirs.

It’s a children’s “helicopter” play complex, and

it costs almost 3.5 million

rubles. Now, of course, we can

reasonably assume that Biryukov did not

buy it, and since these slides are being

installed somewhere in Moscow, he simply stole a slide

that was supposed to be standing in some courtyard

and put it at his dacha (country house).

Or maybe he bought it. In any case, there’s

so much money and so many opportunities there that

you can arrange anything however you want. But how can one

not be sick of tolerating this? How one wishes to have

it on everyone’s lips and minds.

I wish I had a couple of deputies who, when

Biryukov comes to report, wouldn’t

hold back and would say to him: “Pyotr the Butcher, we

want to ask you about your geese, about

your children’s slide, about your apartment.”

At least ask the question—not even to mention

writing formal parliamentary inquiries, let alone

demanding

an official review, not to mention

a vote of no confidence in him. Among those

backed by Smart Voting,

we support 45 candidates.

Thirty-five of them would do it if we elected

all 40 or 45 people on the list tomorrow.

Of those backed by Smart Voting, 35 people—I have no

doubt about them. There may be some

well, I don’t know, compromisers, or people

who, you know, won’t want to stick their necks out.

But 35 of them—30, at least—would simply raise

a scandal and shout about it. Let’s

elect some of them through Smart

Voting. It will be very important. On the

last part of the program, one final thing:

I was under arrest, but even so I can see

that the issue of strikes in Russia is not

actually getting the attention it deserves.

I would simply like to

draw your attention to it, because it

perfectly reflects, in general,

the socio-economic process—the very

point at which we find ourselves, and Putin

finds himself as well, really. And the protests

in Moscow, and the attention to Smart Voting,

are tied to the same thing—with impoverishment,

the lack of any

prospects, and dissatisfaction with the work

of the authorities. As we just saw in the poll,

people believe that the reason there were

rallies in Moscow

was dissatisfaction with the authorities’ actions. And now

across the country, medical workers are going on strike.

And these are not just self-declared actions—they

have a rather interesting character.

Medical workers, especially surgeons

and trauma surgeons, are constantly being forced

to work overtime. In order

to earn their 50,000

or 70,000 rubles (about $500–$800), they have to not only

work as surgeons, but also

take shifts as trauma specialists, and work

half-time here, half-time there,

and another half-time somewhere else, just to survive.

And you grind away without days off for that job

for 70,000 rubles—like factory work at a machine. And now

one after another, they are declaring

strikes. Let’s watch. One minute—these are

medical workers from Perm. If anyone thinks that

the doctors’ strikes that began today in Russia

will stop, you are seriously

mistaken. And our trade union

is not merely calling for them to continue—we

announce today that a strike has begun

by members of our union

at City Hospital No. 6 in the city of

Perm. The strike will continue until

doctors’ wages are raised

and salaries increased,

and all overtime is paid at 100

percent. We support our

colleagues, the surgeons from Nizhny Tagil,

and other medical workers across Russia.

We call on our colleagues not to tolerate

such treatment, to join us, and

also to refuse overtime and secondary employment

on this scale. We

refuse all overtime work

and moonlighting because we are tired and

can’t go on like this any longer.

We appeal to all doctors, paramedics,

nurses, and other medical workers in our

country, and we urge all of you to support

your colleagues from Perm, Nizhny Tagil,

Pyatigorsk, the Vladimir region, and other

cities in Russia—and stop putting up with it.

Refuse overtime for pennies,

join together boldly, and put forward your

demands. Your job is to heal, and ours

is to defend your rights and represent your interests.

interests — why is this important? Because

this process is starting slowly, although

today I simply didn’t have time — the video, we

didn’t manage to process it and show it in this

program. This strike was announced

the day before yesterday.

and already today, medical workers also in

Perm

said that they are, so to speak, taking up

this challenge — that is, declaring

a strike. Before that, there was one in Nizhny Tagil

It’s starting slowly, very slowly, but

simply, when it’s 200,000 and then 500,000

people,

and there are 3.5 million medical workers in the country,

when people say, “We don’t want

to work for this money anymore,” then in terms of

political consequences, this may

be far more significant than any mass

protests. And in the end it may also merge with

mass protests, so this needs to be

watched very closely, and it absolutely must be

strongly supported, of course, because

when people demand higher

wages — justified wages — and

decent working conditions,

these are political, reasonable demands

that absolutely everyone should support.

As for the money we raised — there’s this

bar at the bottom, and from it you can see that we

raised 200,000 rubles (about $2,100). In fact,

we raised 200,000 rubles plus another 239,000

through Super Chat. You don’t see that amount,

but in fact we have already raised

400,000 rubles (about $4,200).

Thank you so much — this is a very substantial

sum, enough for us to

restore everything, reinstall what we need,

and get our streams back up and running,

to restore the work of Navalny Live. Thank you very much.

As long as you are with us, they can do whatever they want,

I want to end the 30:30 program with two

seconds of hellish, absolute hypocrisy.

And of course, who is our king of hypocrisy and lies

in this country? Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

He said that one must not

persecute the opposition, that if you

persecute the opposition and tighten

the screws, nothing good will come of it.

And at that point we were almost ready

to applaud, thinking, well yes, look at how

strange this is — because just a moment ago

you jailed a person for four pickets (single-person protests), you just

jailed some people there simply

for nothing, just because while they were there

someone did this with his hand,

toward a police helmet, and it was decided that this was about

Ukraine. Here are 32 seconds of sheer

peak hypocrisy from the current

authorities:

In Kyiv, they risk stepping on the same

rake they have stepped on before,

as the previous Ukrainian leadership did, represented by

the former president, ex-president

Mr. Poroshenko. If

the current authorities begin

persecuting the opposition, then nothing

good will come of it. They are not

running around the squares demanding

the impossible; they are working within the framework of

the Constitution of Ukraine, within the framework of

current law. And who are we, then?

What does any of this have to do with Ukraine? They

are worried about it, and Poroshenko did something wrong,

and now let’s all care about the Ukrainian

opposition — don’t tighten the screws.

Can you imagine? They are reflecting on this at the same

forum in Vladivostok — everyone needs to come

be dragged to Vladivostok and sit there again

discussing Ukraine: what’s happening there in Ukraine,

what’s going on with the Ukrainians — let’s talk about the Ukrainian

opposition. Meanwhile, the Russian opposition — you just

barred everyone from the elections, jailed

a whole bunch of people, and then he sits there and says,

“No, no need to tighten the screws.” We need

to remind them that we exist in this

country. They sit there talking

about Ukraine, and we will come and make sure

that in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Khabarovsk, and in

Irkutsk, and in Bashkortostan, they do not elect

United Russia candidates. Well, fine, maybe not

all of them won’t get elected,

but they will lose some number of

seats. This is very important. Until now,

for decades, they have always had

90 percent. We have no right to give them

the opportunity to preserve that after all

of this — after the jailings, after this

lawlessness, after this hypocrisy — to let them again

keep 90 percent. No. But at least

we must cut it down by however much we can — as much as

we can, we will. But to give them

90 percent again — I’m not ready for that, and I hope

you aren’t either. Many thanks to everyone who

watched, and many thanks to those who

sent us donations to support

our studio. Kod Da Vinchi writes to me:

“Sending greetings to the cat sitting in the window

behind you — he isn’t afraid of searches and

confiscations.” And we aren’t afraid of them either, and we will

keep working with you. As long as you are with us,

we are afraid of nothing. On Sunday, I

hope that each and every one of you, each of us, will do

everything possible to make your own

small contribution to this collective

action, to push back, and to fight

the monopoly of United Russia. See you

next Thursday. Thank you.