17
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Hi, this is Navalny. As you’re a subscriber to my channel, you’re the first person that I’m telling: I’m running for election to be president of Russia.” On December 13, 2016, around one million people received this email, along with a video, because they were signed up to one of the mailing lists of the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
It wasn’t a question for me as to whether or not I would run in the election. I was fighting to be the leader of this country, therefore I was duty bound to take part in the presidential election. I knew that people were waiting for me to make this decision, and I didn’t want to let them down.
I decided to make the announcement that I was running in this unusual way. There wouldn’t be a press conference.
By then I was already making videos regularly, even though we still didn’t have a studio. We recorded all of them in my office, using the wall as a background. This time, though, we wanted the video to look “presidential,” so we rented an office in one of the skyscrapers in the Moscow City area.[*1] We booked it under a false name because the recording had to be done in complete secrecy. That morning the crew turned up with a ton of equipment, but we managed to avoid any leaks.
Behind me there was an enormous window with a view of snowy Moscow, and on the table beside me were a few photographs of my wife and children. I’d brought a few ties with me so that I could choose one. They were different colors and different widths, and we decided to go for a wide blue one. It was only after the video was released that I realized I had underestimated how important this choice had been. “I totally support your decision to run, Alexei, but I’m afraid your tie is very old-fashioned” was typical of the indignant comments I received.
It took me hours to record this short video. I tried to do it both with a teleprompter and without, to make it look more natural. But all I achieved was to have the whole team gnash their teeth when I floundered and for the fiftieth time stumbled over a sentence. This video was very important for me, and I was nervous. What’s more, we had limited time to record it, because that evening I had to fly to Kirov.
The European Court of Human Rights had ruled that the sentence I had received in the Kirovles case was illegal. So the Russian Supreme Court had canceled it and called for a retrial. The first hearing of the new case was due to be held at the start of December. The courtroom looked like a poor remake of a very poor film. Everything was as it had been before: the same courtroom, the same accused, the same witnesses giving the same evidence, the same journalists; only the judge was different. And this time we flew there instead of taking the train. Once again I started to shuttle between Kirov and Moscow.
Late in the evening on December 12, I flew back to Moscow and went to a hotel. We were keeping this video secret, so we put it together with a very small team, which didn’t even include a professional editor. Once again, we’d reserved the room using a false name, and we even drew the curtains so that nobody could film what we were doing with a drone. My colleagues had already installed a huge computer, and we sat around it in semidarkness trying to understand the video-editing software.
The next day we sent the video out to my supporters, and an hour later I made a public statement that I was running for president. In the first day we collected more than 6 million rubles, which at the time was a record. All across the country thousands of people wanted to join our campaign.
They watched the video in the Kremlin, too. Immediately after I’d put my name forward, a group of FSB hoods started to follow me. They would continue to do so for three years, watching me and waiting for the order to kill me.
The Kirovles case, which was already moving quickly, now moved even faster. According to the law, a person who is charged with serious offenses is banned from running for office. The previous judgment in the case had been lifted, and the Yves Rocher case did not affect my taking part in the election. The authorities, though, keen to avoid the mistake they had made in 2013 in the election for the mayor of Moscow, needed a formal basis to stop me from running, which they could use if necessary.
On February 8, Pyotr Ofitserov and I were convicted in the same case for the second time. The point of the process was supposed to be “to reconsider” the verdict, but in any case we received the same sentences, five and four years, both suspended. The text of the new verdict was exactly the same as the old one, even down to the typing mistakes.
This didn’t stop me. For the last few years they had been introducing ever more repressive laws because of me; indeed, in one of the court cases someone even joked that “Navalny’s being tried under ‘a special code of Criminal Procedure.’ ” I understood perfectly that the decision as to whether I would be allowed to take part in the election would be made not in the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) but in the Kremlin. We had to create such pressure on the authorities that they would have to let me run. We had a year to achieve this: the election was due to take place in March 2018, and the official announcement of who the candidates were would be made in December 2017.
Just as in 2013, I entered the race without much funding and blacklisted by the media. But I had an excellent team behind me and hundreds of thousands of active supporters. This would enable us to collect money and break through the wall of censorship. Once again, Leonid Volkov was my campaign manager. We decided to carry out a tour of the regions, the likes of which had never been seen before. I would visit every large city in the country. I would also put out a weekly online show. My program, Navalny at 20:18, went out at 8:18 every Thursday evening, and very quickly became the most popular online stream in the country.
Traveling around the regions is not easy. Distances between cities are enormous, and transport links don’t exist. In order to fly from the Siberian city of Tomsk to the Siberian city of Omsk you have to go via Moscow. (Of course, I did manage to fly directly between these two cities once, but that was under special circumstances…) We traveled a lot on intercity and local trains, but most of all we hired minibuses. It was like being a musical group on tour: today you’re appearing in one city, tomorrow in another, and while we were traveling in the dark along roads that were in terrible condition, some of the team would catch up on sleep while the others were preparing for the next gig.
Actually, I’m painting too rosy a picture. Often there were two events in one day.
Every Thursday evening I would make the live broadcast on my YouTube channel, Navalny Live; then we’d set off early on Friday morning. We usually returned to Moscow on Monday.
In all we made two regional tours, the first one in the spring, the second in the autumn. In the spring we were opening our regional headquarters, campaign centers in eighty-two cities: we rented offices, and we hired coordinators and a couple of assistants who would organize the work of the volunteers in their city. These were similar to party cells, but we weren’t allowed to register as a political party.
“Navalny’s HQs” represented the most extensive and fastest-growing opposition network in the country, which clearly illustrated that the Kremlin had good reason to be scared of us. Even after the electoral campaign was over, HQs in forty of the biggest cities carried on working for a few years until I and my supporters were labeled “extremists.” Many of those working in the HQs became popular politicians in their regions. Liliya Chanysheva in Ufa and Ksenia Fadeyeva in Tomsk were among the most impressive coordinators and were great examples of exactly what real politicians should be: incredibly hardworking, genuinely devoted to their work, skillful organizers, and, most important, honest people. But they were noticed also by the Kremlin. At the time I write these lines, false criminal charges have been brought against both Liliya and Ksenia.
I met local volunteers, gave presentations, and answered questions. In what other ways would volunteers like to join my campaign? Politicians in Moscow love to speak about “the poor Russian people,” but it would be hard to find one who had been to Biysk. Let’s face it, most of them haven’t even gone as far as Izhevsk![*2] I don’t believe that you can claim to be the leader of a country that you don’t know thoroughly.
I announced that I would travel to every major city, and I did. I presented my program in all sorts of places, including a computer club, a hangar, and an open field. Before these meetings I shook the hand of everyone who came. Afterward, I had my picture taken with them. In the largest cities there were lots of volunteers. For example, a thousand people turned up in Perm in an incredible demonstration of support, even though it took place indoors. The photo session at the end went on for three hours. By the end of the campaign I could have launched a course on how to run a selfie-taking conveyor.
In the autumn, as I said, I went on a second tour of the regions. This time it wasn’t to open HQs but to meet the voters. These were rallies. Some of my colleagues went on ahead to set up the stage and the sound equipment. My presentation included a speech, followed by a question-and-answer session.
People think that it’s easy for me to stand up and speak. I guess I do give that impression: I speak loudly, and I wave my hands about a lot. In reality, it’s not like that. It didn’t even help that at these regional meetings I would often be repeating the same things I’d said before.
But the Q&A was a totally different matter. While you’re giving your presentation, it’s very difficult to judge reactions, but once the questions start, you know exactly where you stand. A dialogue develops. You understand what the issues are that concern the locals most of all. I would prepare for every presentation and my colleagues would give me notes on what the local problems were, but it was only when I engaged in genuine discussions that I felt relaxed.
Some people had come simply to gawk: A politician has come all the way here from Moscow! And it’s not even someone we know from television, but through the internet; what’s more, it’s someone who’s virtually banned—well, that makes it even more interesting! Someone might ask me a particularly tricky question. Someone else was there because he or she was a longtime supporter. Occasionally local deputies from the United Russia party came, who would try to argue with me by shouting out something. As you know, I especially love these people. I would call them onto the stage and start a debate with them in front of everyone. Usually by the end of our discussion even the most severe and skeptical in the crowd had warmed to me.
Even though these meetings were all different—in some places I felt my audience was on my side, while in others I had to try to win them over—I quickly grasped that there were certain subjects which were guaranteed icebreakers. One of these was the debts owed to Russia by other countries, which Putin was prepared to write off. My promise that if I were to become president I would stop writing off these debts was met with instant approval. Another topic (indeed, the biggest hit of all) would start with my asking, “What’s the average wage in your region?” Most often I would hear “12,000 rubles” or “15,000 rubles.” “But do you know,” I would then say, “what the Federal State Statistics Service says is your average wage? Forty-five thousand rubles. Does that sound real to you?” This would always lead to an explosion of laughter, followed by furious shouts. There wasn’t a single city where the “official” wage figure wasn’t at least twice what the real figure was.
Despite the intense schedule, these visits brought huge rewards. People valued highly that a presidential candidate had come to speak to them and frequently put photos of our meetings on Instagram, thus widening my audience. I needed the votes of the older generation, and since I wasn’t allowed on TV, the only way to reach them was in person.
While I was traveling, a group of FSB poisoners traveled with me. But if they managed to go unnoticed, I had others after me who were much more obvious.
The Kremlin understood that despite our having no money or access to the media, we were running a successful campaign, so they decided to go on the attack. It became the norm in every city for stooges at the airport who had been hired by the presidential administration to throw eggs at me. This would frequently happen at the meetings, too. Having to scrape eggshell from my coat was not very pleasant. After this had happened a couple of times, I started taking a spare set of clothes with me. But these were just minor incidents. When I was meeting volunteers in the HQ in Volgograd, thirty Cossacks and local thugs attacked us. They tried to drag me out of the headquarters by my legs, while my supporters were pulling me back inside by my arms. It was similar to the way in which punishment used to be administered, when a person would be tied to two horses that were then urged to pull in different directions. It’s hard to forget what that feels like.
Local police forces also tried hard to hinder us. Our minibus was constantly being stopped by the traffic police under the pretense of “an anti-terrorist operation,” and tired, hungry, and angry as we were, we were forced to sit there for hours. Another widely used tactic in the battle to stop my meetings was to announce that there was a bomb scare in the building where the meeting was to take place. They would also threaten the owners of the buildings we’d hired so that the owners would refuse to let us use their premises. As a result I made my speeches from such exotic places as a children’s slide, a bench, and an enormous pile of snow.
In Barnaul, for example, we weren’t allowed into the building we’d hired because the person we’d rented it from was apparently scared by the size of the crowd. So we stood outside: I, my confused team, and hundreds of volunteers for the campaign. I had no intention of canceling the meeting. This was on March 20. They’d cleared the roads, but there were huge mounds of snow on the roadside. So I climbed up on one of these mounds and conducted my meeting with the volunteers from there.
It’s worth mentioning that this wasn’t just an ordinary presentation, but one where I delivered my speech with a bright green face. On my way to the meeting some guy came running up to me, as if he were one of my supporters, and as I happily put my hand out to him, he splashed something in my face. It stung my eyes so much that at first I thought, Acid! But it turned out to be the green antiseptic solution we call zelyonka. Apart from the fact that with such a face I looked like a cross between the Fantômas[*3] and Shrek, nothing terrible happened, and it caused a lot of amusement for everyone when I turned up looking like that. From Barnaul I went straight to Biysk, the neighboring city where my second meeting that day had been arranged. The selfies taken with me in these two cities became the most popular ones.
It took three days to wash off the zelyonka.
They tried other methods, too. One day our Moscow headquarters was overrun by a group of rather strange young women. Luckily, I wasn’t there that day. Picture the scene: People were sitting in the office quietly working away when a group of women burst in dressed in latex knickers and erotic police costumes, wielding batons, whips, and handcuffs. They behaved in a very vulgar way, pushing themselves up against the shocked staff and recording everything on a camera. What could you do with them? It would have been a little odd to phone the real police, and in any case that wouldn’t have helped. My colleagues managed to shepherd them out politely. Afterward, the videos the girls had recorded appeared on all the Kremlin-controlled media.
I wanted to know who had sent them. I asked the head of our investigative team, Maria Pevchikh, to find out who these girls were and where they’d come from. Finding them on social media was a piece of cake. The leader of this erotic group was a girl from Belarus named Nastya Rybka. She worked as an escort, but at the same time she wasn’t averse to taking money from the Kremlin’s political strategists. On her Instagram account, alongside her nude photos, she posted stories about how she had seduced an oligarch. She also posted photos of herself together with an oligarch—indeed, so many of them that it was clear they couldn’t have been fakes. The oligarch was Oleg Deripaska. His private life was of no interest to us, and we might have forgotten all about this discovery had it not been for the fact that in one of the videos, which had been filmed on a yacht where Nastya was vacationing with Deripaska, Maria noticed the current deputy prime minister, Sergei Prikhodko. He appeared in the shot for just a couple of seconds, and then there were a few seconds where his voice was heard, but our investigators were primed to recognize such people. Prikhodko was very influential in the field of international relations, having worked first as an adviser to Boris Yeltsin, then for Putin, and then having run Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential office. And here we have him sailing on a yacht with the oligarch Deripaska along with a dozen prostitutes. Such an example of corruption could have been taken straight out of a textbook. We made a video about this, which was watched by more than ten million.
In the brief fragment of audio of the conversation between Deripaska and Prikhodko, we could hear them discussing relations between Russia and the United States. Specifically, they were talking about the then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, Victoria Nuland. Shortly before we published our video, Americans read about how the head of Donald Trump’s campaign headquarters, Paul Manafort, had received millions of dollars from Deripaska in return for telling him what was going on in Trump’s campaign. This proved to be one of the pieces of evidence that showed Russian interference in the U.S. elections. At the time I had been somewhat skeptical about this. These were just stories; Deripaska hardly had anything to do with Putin. Suddenly I understood how it worked: there’s an official from Putin’s government sitting on a yacht and carefully listening to everything. So thanks to these girls putting on their ridiculous show in our office, we now had virtually a Russian Watergate! However, I should point out that unlike the real Watergate scandal there were no consequences for those who took part in this affair.
In any case, despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, their plan didn’t work. Such attacks on us only helped to raise our profile and brought us even more support.
—
Moscow, April 27, 2017. I’m leaving the office and—BANG!—I can’t see anything; my eyes are burning with an unbearable pain. My first thought was, This time, it’s definitely acid. I’ll look like a monster until the end of my days. But when I took my hand from my face, I saw that it was green. Phew, it was only zelyonka again.
I was completely blinded in one eye. At first I tried to wash my face. After the incident in Barnaul, I had become a specialist in how to wash away zelyonka. We made a point of keeping micellar water and formic acid (the best compound for this) in the office. Alas, now it didn’t do the trick. My right eye was bright green, looked frightening, and hurt even more. We called a doctor who put a bandage on me and said I should immediately go to a hospital. But it was Thursday. I had my program to broadcast, and if the Kremlin thought that they could stop me in this way, they were wrong.
My clothes were covered in zelyonka. I changed into a sweatshirt and sat down in front of the camera with a green face and a swollen eye that I couldn’t open.
Tens of thousands of viewers watched my program live that evening, and in total it was seen by two million people. I hoped my eye would gradually get better, but it didn’t. The following day the doctors told me that it was unlikely that I would be able to save the sight in it. The zelyonka had been deliberately mixed with some sort of poison, and my cornea had been burned.
For a few days I had to remain in a room with the curtains closed, because the light was too strong for my eyes. I presented the following Thursday’s program with a black bandage over one eye, looking like a pirate. I’d been warned that the strong studio lights might finish off my eye completely. It would be possible to have an operation in Spain, where they had equipment that they didn’t have in Moscow, but I couldn’t leave Russia. For six years I had been refused a passport for traveling abroad.
The attack with the zelyonka had been filmed on CCTV, and the faces of those responsible were clearly visible. By the next day we knew that they were a group of provocateurs sent by the Kremlin. I reported the crime, but, of course, no criminal case was opened. Even though the names and even the addresses of those who had attacked me were all over the internet in an instant, the police said that it would be “impossible” to discover who the perpetrators were.
However, on this occasion the Kremlin understood that they had gone too far. I think the combination of the inaction of the police and the indignation of my supporters had an impact. They realized that this attack was not going to stop me and that my support was growing. Within a day, as if someone had waved a magic wand, they issued me my long-awaited passport. I had an operation in Barcelona, where doctors managed to save my sight.
Other attempts were made to interfere with my campaign. You must admit, it’s not easy to conduct one when the candidate is in a detention center: Over the course of that year I spent two months under arrest (the Kremlin liked this so much that the following year I spent three months there). The first time they put me in prison during the presidential campaign was after the demonstrations around the film Don’t You Dare Call Him “Dimon.” Let me explain.
On March 26, 2017, Moscow was waking up to surprising news coming from the east of the country. Thousands of people were demonstrating in the streets of Vladivostok, then Khabarovsk, then Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg, eventually in more than a hundred cities. They were carrying colored sneakers and inflatable yellow ducks. Tens of thousands were out in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Including me. True, my protest didn’t last long, maybe five minutes or so, maybe even less. I’d wished my son, Zakhar, a happy birthday, left home, and managed to reach Pushkin Square when almost immediately I was grabbed and shoved into a paddy wagon. It wasn’t easy for it to drive away. A wall of protesters surrounded the police bus and blocked the road.
This was the first time that mass demonstrations had taken place because of an investigation into corruption. We’d broadcast the film on March 2, 2017. It exposed the illegal practices of Dmitry Medvedev—Putin’s longtime friend and colleague since their days working in the mayor’s office in St. Petersburg and prime minister at the time of the film. Until 2008, Medvedev had been the head of the government; then he and Putin had swapped places. By doing this, Putin avoided violating the constitution, which prohibited his serving a third consecutive term, but at the same time he didn’t give up power. It was an unsophisticated trick. Following the four years of Medvedev’s presidential term, they carried out a castling move (as in chess) and swapped back again.
Everyone mocked Medvedev when he was president. He pretended to be a liberal, embracing all the new technology, newspapers, and the internet. He opened accounts on Twitter and Instagram, something that was like flying to the moon for Russian officials. (Putin doesn’t use social media and doesn’t know how to use a computer. He describes the internet as a CIA plot.) The only “achievement” that remained in place after Medvedev’s four years in power was that the militia had been renamed the police.
Medvedev seemed harmless and incongruous. He was stuck with the nicknames Pitiful and Dimon (an informal and somewhat derogatory version of his first name). In an interview his press officer demanded in all seriousness that on the internet people not call Medvedev “Dimon,” insisting that her boss was a serious and solid figure.
Therefore, on principle, we named our investigation “Don’t Call Him ‘Dimon.’ ” It turned out that Medvedev wasn’t simply a fool but massively corrupt. He used a network of charitable foundations to take money from the oligarchs and to register his luxury homes. We traveled secretly to each one of them, launched our drone from under cover, then showed in detail how Medvedev was living. We discovered that he had an enormous estate on the River Volga in the historic town of Plyos. In the middle of a large pond on this estate he’d had a little duck house built. I don’t know why our audience seized upon this detail, but from then on a little duck became the symbol of both this investigation and all the anti-corruption protests.
The sneakers became another symbol. We were able to nail down the whole of Medvedev’s corrupt system thanks to them. In 2014 a group of hackers broke into the prime minister’s inbox and published the emails they found there. We examined them in detail, and it turned out that Medvedev was absolutely obsessed with sneakers. He ordered them by the dozen and had them delivered to the address of the managing director of some charitable foundations. Those orders were how we were able to demonstrate the first link of those foundations to Medvedev, and everything else followed the discovery: the chalet in Krasnaya Polyana, the estate in the Kursk Region, and the vineyards in Tuscany and Anapa.
Medvedev registered to one of his charitable foundations an enormous house in Rublyovka, the most expensive neighborhood just outside Moscow, where officials and oligarchs live. One of them, Alisher Usmanov, presented this house to Medvedev’s foundation. Following our investigation, Usmanov himself unexpectedly became involved in the discussion. He recorded one of the strangest videos I’ve ever seen. He called it “I Spit on You, Alexei Navalny!” Sitting on his famous $600-million yacht, Dilbar, one of the richest people on the planet declared that, unlike me, he was “living in happiness” and called me “a loser” and “a twit.”
Medvedev himself reacted no less strangely to our investigation of him. While on a visit to the meat-processing factory Tambov Bacon, he gave an impromptu press conference where he described our investigation as “nonsense, murk, and fruit compote,” but he didn’t explain where all of the country houses, vineyards, or charitable foundations had come from. He went on to accuse me not only of investigating corruption for my personal benefit but of “shamelessly trying to get people to vote” for me as president. Considering that by then I’d been waging an active electoral campaign for nearly four months, this wasn’t exactly a shocking revelation.
On March 26, when demonstrations were taking place all over the country, my colleagues were streaming them from our office. People were sending us photographs and videos from the streets, and we were showing them all live. At the very peak of the broadcast, with 150,000 viewers, we had the power cut in the office. Next, police with dogs burst in, arresting the staff who were there and seizing all of our equipment—computers, cameras, lights, and microphones. Naturally, none of it was ever returned to us. As I said earlier, this was a deliberate Kremlin tactic to try to ruin us. Thirteen members of staff who were engaged in the broadcast were taken to detention cells.
Our investigation destroyed Medvedev’s political career and became a turning point for the whole opposition movement. Ten days after the film was broadcast, I issued an appeal for people to come out into the streets and demand answers. Many people were skeptical. They reckoned that it would be impossible to hold mass demonstrations across the whole of Russia; such events would happen only in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But the demonstrations on March 26 took place in more than a hundred cities. This illustrated that the only thing that could bring together citizens with the most varied political views was the fight against corruption. Some of these protests were organized by our HQs, others by volunteers on the ground. Eighty percent of those who took part were young people who had never gone to demonstrations before.
I’m very proud of what we achieved. We helped a whole new generation become interested in politics. They show initiative, are capable of organizing themselves, are seriously dissatisfied with what is happening in the country, and are prepared to go out on the streets for their beliefs.
The presidential campaign surpassed everything that we had done previously. Hundreds of people worked on it each day, and hundreds of thousands supported us, helped, donated money, shared our investigations, and took part in demonstrations.
My official nomination as a presidential candidate took place on December 24, 2017. According to the law, if you are self-nominated, you must have the support of no fewer than five hundred voters. In Moscow, Putin’s candidacy was put forward by a group of officials, athletes, and actors. We decided to submit my nomination from the twenty largest cities all at once. We realized that if we held just a single meeting, it would be broken up. So anyone who wished to could participate in the nomination process in each city, though in Moscow we invited volunteers who had taken part in our campaign. Had we invited just anyone to take part, there would have been so many involved that we wouldn’t have been able to complete the process in one day.
Right until the end we didn’t know where in Moscow the nomination process would take place. As usual, we had problems with the venues. At first, landlords would happily agree to our using their premises and tell me that they supported me, but the next day they would call me and say, “Oh, sorry, it’s not going to be possible.” Eventually, we would decide on a radical solution. Since everyone was turning down our request for a venue, we’d construct one ourselves. We rented a huge marquee and erected it on the beach in the park at Serebryany Bor. At the last minute we sent out an invitation to our volunteers.
Just as I arrived there that morning, the first gatherings were taking place in the far east of the country. Every meeting went ahead, despite the interference of the police, who deemed the gatherings unsanctioned. Across the country fifteen thousand people took part.
We’d had a year of campaigning—traveling around the country, meetings, getting our message across—and now I had seven hundred people in front of me. The Anti-Corruption Foundation’s lawyer, Ivan Zhdanov, announced, “I’m calling on you to vote for the proposal that Alexei Navalny be nominated as a candidate for the post of president of Russia. Who’s in favor?” Instantly, everyone raised their hand. Such a moment is breathtaking. You’re overwhelmed with gratitude and a sense of responsibility, for those who’ve been working with you all this time, for those who are in the audience and have voted for you, and for all those who support you across the whole country. I was proud to be the candidate for all of these brave and honest people.
Standing on the stage with my wife, my children, and my closest colleagues, I gave a speech in which I said that we were taking part in the election to win, because we represented the largest opposition force in the country. But if my registration was denied I would call for a boycott of the election.
At nine o’clock that evening we delivered the nomination documents. The next day I was invited to a meeting, an indication that the Central Electoral Commission had already reached a decision. The head of the CEC, Ella Pamfilova, was there surrounded by her staff. She arrogantly announced that I had been barred from taking part in the election because of the sentence in the Kirovles case. By this time the case had been passed to the European Court of Human Rights for the second time, and a verdict was due any day. “I worked hard in a plant for twelve years in Soviet times, while you earn your money by illegally collecting donations and misleading young people,” Pamfilova said to me. These words, which could cause only bewilderment, preempted two criminal cases against me: “involving minors in illegal activity” (according to the authorities that was what the participation of young people in my meetings was), and “raising funds to finance extremism” (they labeled my presidential campaign “extremism”). Even when I’m sitting in jail, as I am now, that second accusation could land me thirty years.
As I had promised, after that meeting I called for “a voters’ strike”—not just to boycott the elections, but to publicize it and register as election observers. We succeeded in getting thirty-three thousand of them. The Kremlin had to rig both the turnout and the results before their eyes; afterward, the internet was flooded with video clips of this taking place.
Even though I wasn’t allowed to participate in the election, this campaign let us take our movement to a new level. The network of headquarters that we’d established became a permanent working structure for the opposition, a new form, capable of bringing people out onto the streets in any city, to take part in elections, and to win them.