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There was another belief, no less persistent and harmful, that nobody in the public eye would ever openly donate money to political causes. They would be afraid of reprisals, so it was better not to ask. It was far more effective to secretly approach some businessman who would give you cash under the table, or to just go straight to the presidential administration. I was sure that was wrong, and decided to prove it.
In September 1011, I registered the Anti-Corruption Foundation as a nonprofit organization. All my individual projects now existed as parts of a single brand. I announced I would continue to raise money for the work of the ACF through crowdfunding, but this time I specifically called for famous people to become donors. After a few months I had sixteen public figures openly supporting me. Each one donated more than $10,000. They included the entrepreneur Boris Zimin; Sergei Guriev, an economist; Leonid Parfyonov, a journalist; and the writer Boris Akunin. Vladimir Ashurkoy, a financier, not only donated money but helped me enormously to get the whole thing organized. These sixteen brave people broke the very important social taboo that you should never fund a cause you believed in without prior permission.
I had been planning to raise about 9 million rubles in the first year of ACF's existence and achieved that with ease. In 2019, the year before I was poisoned, we collected more than 80 million rubles, receiving tens of thousands of small donations of 100-500 rubles from all over the country.
Our organization's underlying principle is transparency. That was important to me from the outset, for two reasons. First, because people would donate more readily if they knew what their money was being spent on, and second, because I wanted to be completely different from the state. The government is spending our taxes without any explanation. We have no influence over the budget's priorities, and do not even know exactly how the money is distributed. Russia has never seen a politician who was truly open in his approach. Even in the brief period in the 1990s when democrats were in power, it was considered normal to conceal your own resources and where they had come from.
I wanted to do things differently. I published the details of my personal income and where my organization's money came from. Everyone knew what my wife and children looked like. All those people who were sending me donations were also sending an unambiguous signal to the authorities: they chose to donate to me because they could see what I was doing and how I spent the money, while the government officials kept everything hidden and often stole it.
Despite the intimidation of donors, which began almost immediately-"Are you donating to Navalny? All transactions are recorded. Expect problems!"-thousands of people carried on sending us money. It always felt as if I were being sent a message: "We are ready to fight but need a leader; someone who is not afraid of the state and will not accept bribes. We believe that is the kind of person you are, which is why we are supporting you."
I never drew a salary from the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and under no circumstances did I ever use donations for personal purposes. I decided there would be an unassailable Great Wall of China between my earnings and the organization's budget. I did, after all, have a job as a lawyer, so even while heading the ACF, I continued providing legal services, even though it may be true that some of my clients employed me as a way of supporting me.
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