Patriot Alexei Navalny Quotes

We must do what they fear--tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most power weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.

The hero of one of my favite books, Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, says, "Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.

When corruption is the very foundation of a regime, those who battle it are extremists.

We must do what they fear -- tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.

A serious political leader cannot simply decide to turn his back on a huge number of his fellow citizens because he personally dislikes their views.

All schooboys had been to the stores and had noticed the long queues, and knew that the most used word in the Soviet lexicon was "shortage.

The politics of an authoritarian country are structured in a very primitive way: you are either for the regime or against it. All other political options have been completely obliterated.

What are AJkraine's borders with Russia? The same as Russia's with Ukraine, which we internationally recognized and defined in 1991. There's nothing to discuss here. Almost all borders in the world are more or less accidental and cause someone discontent. But in the twenty-first century, we can't start ward just to redraw them. Otherwise, the world will sink into chaos.

If you have a criminal conviction, you are barred from running for office.

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When corruption is the very foundation of a regime, those who battle it are extremists

We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.

Life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can only be achieved if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay. And the day will come when speaking the truth and advocating for justice will be commonplace and not dangerous in Russia.

Summoning a demon would be a violation of the prison regulations

I can't see why feminists don't demand that The Taming of the Shrew be cancelled and expelled from libraries. It's diabolical, even for those times.

The politics of an authoritarian country are structured in a very primitive way: you are either for the regime or against it. All other political options have been completely obliterated.

In October 1987 the national channel began airing Vzglyad (Viewpoint), which came to mean everything to me. I don’t think there has been anything else in my life that so greatly influenced

Needless to say, anybondy traveling abroad - a boon wholly beyond the reach of 99.9 percent of Soviet citizens - was under a moral obligation to acquire foreign-manufactured gifts for everyone.

People who, like me back then, turned a blind eye to the lawlessness, the lies, and the hypocrisy and saw it all as a case of the ends justifying the means and as necessary backing for a particular team.

Because of Putin, hundreds now, and in the future tens of thousands, of Ukrainians and Russian citizens will die. Yes, he will stop Ukraine from developing, he will drag it into the swamp, but Russia too will pay a high price.

I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life — either the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime,” Navalny wrote in his diary in March 2022. “I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here.

And there we were, breaking lances and talking ourselves hoarse about reforms when there was nothing there. Zilch. Yeltsin’s entourage were a bunch of crooks, some of whom called themselves patriotic statesmen while a similar bunch called themselves reformers. The reformers did more thieving but looked more presentable.

In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest

Instead, as I have since seen on a less dramatic scale many times, the first official reaction is invariably to lie. There is no practical benefit to the officials doing so; it is simply a rule: In an awkward situation, lie. Play down the damage, deny everything, bluff. It can all be sorted out later, but right now, at the moment of crisis, officials have no option but to lie, because the imagined idiot population is not yet ready for the truth.

I’d like to wake up not in this kennel, but to breakfast with my family, kisses on the cheek from my children, unwrapping gifts and saying “wow, this is exactly what I was hoping for.” But life is constructed such that progress and a better future are achievable only if a certain number of people are prepared to pay for their right to hold beliefs. The more of those people there are, the less each will pay. The day will surely come when speaking the truth and standing up for justice will be something ordinary in Russia and completely free from danger. Until that day comes, I see my situation not as a heavy burden or a yoke, but simply as the work I need to do.

So there I was now, sitting on a bunk in a prison cell. The prison regulations were written on the surrounding walls, only they were not the usual sorts of rules but words from the songs of Krovostok, a famous Russian rap group. The guards were ordering me to read out the rules, that is, the lyrics, again and again, a thousand times. It was torture, and in the dream I was irate. Much later, after I had recovered my wits, I mentioned this in an interview, and the guys from Krovostok sent me a response on Twitter: ‘Lyosh, sorry for the bad trip.

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.

In the past, the first step in preparing a political event had been to send out a press release, which absolutely had to be sent by fax. If there was no release, your event would not be taken seriously. I hated faxes and had a well-founded suspicion that the only people using them were in Yabloko. as time passed, I came to know many journalists. They were young guys like me, and it was difficult to imagine them sitting all day by the fax machine waiting for treasured pieces of paper to crawl out of it. One day, I thought, 'Why don't I just use LiveJournal?' At that time it was the most popular platform for blogs, and that was where all the journalists clustered. I only needed to write, 'I'm organizing a demonstration, why not come and join us?' After the event I could write, 'Here are a couple of photos, if any one is interested.' Nowadays no one finds that original, but at the time it seemed almost revolutionary. I enjoyed blogging, but had no idea it would become my principal occupation for years to come. The Russian internet in those days was a delight. It still is. One of the reasons is that it didn't develop gradually, as it did in America, but simply appeared at a particular moment. It was fairly fast and accessible from the outset, and the number of users increased rapidly. All young, educated, enterprising people started learning how to use it. What was even more delightful was that the presidential administration did not take it seriously. They put their money into television and wrote off the internet, which saved it at the time. In China, the moment the internet appeared, the government started putting a firewall in place to keep it under control. Our government thought it was just an incomprehensible little backwater where freaks liked to hang out and saw no need to target it. no one in the Kremlin realized that the internet mirrored real life: you could post a message asking for leaflets to be distributed, and people would go to an actual street and actually hand them out. Rather than a backwater, it was infrastructure. It took me time to discover how everything on it worked. What were people interested in? What were they not interested in? How could you get them involved? I soon realized that the first rule was to put in an appearance regularly. I wrote every day, sometimes several times. Later, I did the same with my YouTube channel. It was impossible to upload a new video every day, but I tried to put out two or three a week. My advice to all would-be bloggers is, if you want your blog to take off, post (or make videos) frequently. And then ask that your posts be shared. I ended every post I thought was important with that request. It was crucial. Interaction is also vital. Comment on your friends' posts. Join discussions. Show you are taking an interest in reactions, and always be ready to enter a dialogue. I made up my mind that my blog on LiveJournal would be the largest uncensored news outlet in Russia. By 2012, my blog was one of the most widely read in the country. I always posted about things I found interesting and that I was most sure of. And one thing I really was sure of was that the Putin regime was founded on corruption.m mPerhaps that had to do with my being a lawyer.

The word "nationalism" sounds scary. It is a favorite topic for all foreign journalists, because the word evokes in the minds of many Westerners images of aggressive skinheads. Most nationalists were not that type. They call themselves "European nationalists" and were, in the main, people who, just like the liberals, had been deprived of any representation in parliament and any chance of getting it since they were banned from participating in elections. I felt sure that a broad coalition was needed to fight Putin. Those nationalists held annual rallies in Moscow, Russian Marches, which were allowed only on the city's outskirts, but even there several thousand people would gather. They were mercilessly dispersed by the police, and it was there that the first mass arrests occurred, not at demonstrations of the liberals or democrats. I decided that if I, with my democratic values, supported the right of free assembly, I needed to be consistent and support other people's right to do the same. I helped them organize their rallies and several times attended them myself. On the internet you can find photographs of me standing in front of a black, white, and yellow flag, which is often used as background decoration for my interviews when I am being asked, "Are you a nationalist?" There were some disagreeable people at the Russian Marches, and some who were repugnant, but 80 percent of those participating were ordinary people with conservative, if sometimes exotic, sometimes narrow-minded, views. The human mind, however, is designed in such a way that when assessing groups, it will focus on the radical members, because they seem more interesting. The media wholeheartedly exploit this quirk, so every march would generate photographs showing hooligans, and these my interviewers delight in showing me as they ask with a knowing smile if I have no objection to participating in demonstrations with these people.... The gist of my political strategy is that I am not afraid of people and am open to dialogue with everyone. I can talk to the right, and they will listen to me. I can talk to the left, and they too will listen. I can also talk to democrats, because I am one myself. A serious political leader cannot simply decide to turn his back on a huge number of his fellow citizens because he personally dislikes their views. That is why we must create a situation where everybody is able to participate on an equal footing in fair and free elections, competing with each other. In any normal, developed political system, I would not be a member of the nationalists' party. But I consider attempts to discredit the nationalist movement as a whole counterproductive. Without question, those who organize pogroms should be called to account, but people need to be given the opportunity to demonstrate legally and express their opinions, however much you dislike them. These people exist, and even if you decide to ignore them, they won't go away. Neither will their supporters. In point of fact, if they are weakened, that will ultimately only strengthen Putin. Indeed, that is precisely what happened. While we were immersed in our petty squabbles, trying to decide whom to label as belonging to which faction, and whether it was appropriate for us to be photographed in their company, we suddenly found ourselves living in a country where people were being thrown in prison for no reason or even murdered. The politics of an authoritarian country are structured in a very primitive way: you are either for the regime or against it. All other political options have been completely obliterated.

I constantly cause bafflement when discussing Russian political parties with my Western audiences, who are used to operating within a clearly defined political spectrum: right, left, social democrat, liberal. Those categories do not apply in Russia. Our Communists are not "left-wing" in the classic sense: they do not support minorities and do not campaign with any vigor to get the minimum wage raised. Russian Communists are far more conservative than even the American right. Legalization of guns and the ban on abortion are hotly debated in the Western world, but are of much less concern to Russian voters. Our first priority needs to be making sure we have free speech and fair elections and that human rights are observed.

The more popular our project became, the more it worried the Kremlin. At first they simply ignored us, but after a while began actively attacking. Pro-Kremlin journalists wrote that we were 'providing a mass platform for the wrong kinds of people' and 'creating the wrong sorts of trends.' Then the regime started overtly hindering our activities and trying in every way possible to discredit them. The debates were held offline, which made us vulnerable. The regime started putting pressure on the owners of the premises where we held them. There were 'inspections,' visits from the police, threats to cut off their electricity, anything to stop them from allowing us to hire their rooms. The regime began sending gangs of troublemakers regularly. A dozen people would turn up, begin yelling, throw things around, and start a fight, and the venue would turn down our next attempt to book it. The main aim was to marginalize us, to show that ours were 'not political debates at all,' but just a bunch of drunks getting together and starting a fight. See how disgusting they are, there's one with blood running down his face. I mention the blood because it was my face it was running down. A group of drunken young guys turned up at one of our debates, shouting insults, chanting 'Sieg Heil,' and snatching the microphone from those who wanted to ask questions. I tried form the stage to calm down the ruckus, but a fight broke out, with one of the invaders attacking me outside. I had a gun with me for self-defense that fired rubber bullets. I first shot in the air and then in the direction of my assailant. This made little impression on him, and he hurled himself at me. We were both taken away by the police but not charged. turns out my attacker was the son of some FSB higher-up and Daddy didn't want a fuss. I must admit that the Kremlin's tactics worked. We were faced with the purely logistical problem that no club wanted anything more to do with us, and even if they did, we could not guarantee the safety of our audience. The disruptions became predictable and overshadowed the meaningful part of the debates. The project would have to be abandoned. This taught me a useful lesson, and was a significant moment in my political career. I saw how much could be achieved without money and without the 'protection' of the Kremlin, indeed, in spite of the Kremlin. What I needed was a group of supporters to work with me, and I found that group through the internet. I have often heard it said that my rapid adoption of the internet provided unique political flair, that I was a visionary prophesying the dawning of a new era. That is very flattering, of course, but far off the mark. I took to the internet because there was no alternative; television and the newspapers were censored, and rallies were banned.

Corruption had always annoyed me, but I recognized that it was because of Putin and his system of governing that it had become so normalized in recent years. The whole country knew that, and I wanted to do something about it. To do so, though, I needed to become a fully qualified party in the battle against corruption. In one corner there would be Putin's corrupt oligarchs and bureaucrats and in the other there would be me. But what claim did I have to be the opposition? I wasn't a prosecutor, so how could I legally go after them? I had by then graduated from the Financial Academy with a degree in finance and credit and had a fair idea of how stock markets and exchanges worked. It dawned on me that there were state-owned companies where corruption was particularly blatant, and I could buy shares in them on the stock market. By making even a small investment, I would have the power as a shareholder to request documents from the company, file complaints, go to court, and attend annual meetings. For $5,000 or so I bought shares in several companies, including Rosneft, Russia's largest oil company; Gazprom, the largest gas company; and Transneft, which transports oil. These were gigantic, wealthy, state-controlled corporations it would be scary to tangle with. If you did you would probably get a visit from some toughs sent to beat you up for asking awkward questions. No one (including the companies) could imagine that some blogger without powerful friends would risk taking them on. If he did, he must surely have powerful forces backing him. Actually, I had no one backing me. I just knew my way around finance, and I also knew my rights. At that time newspapers regularly published articles about embezzlement in state-owned companies. Thanks to my shareholdings, I was now directly affected by this reporting. I wrote something like this in a letter: Dear Gazprom, I've been reading an article in such and such newspaper and wonder what's going on here. Could you kindly give me, as a shareholder, an explanation? Even though my shareholding was vanishingly small, they were obliged to report back to me. When the answer came, I would read it carefully, and if the company's actions were against the interests of its shareholders, I would take them to court. As soon as I became party to a lawsuit, I could demand to be sent documents and minutes of meetings. When ?I received them, I made them publicly available on my LiveJournal blog. My battles with state-owned companies eventually attracted tens of thousands of followers. However, I was looking for allies, not just followers. I invited my subscribers to send complaints and sue these companies with me. For instance, in Vedomosti, I read a report that the government had bought a building in Moscow city center from Viktor Veskelberg, an oligarch, for several times its real value. It was obviously a corrupt deal. I prepared templates for complaints, and thousands of people submitted them along with me to the Investigative Committee and President Medvedev, who at the time was pretending to be vigorously fighting corruption. I repeated this technique many times. It was easy enough to disregard one person, but much more difficult to ignore thousands, especially if you knew that all the documents were going to be published on the internet. I attended shareholder meetings, which were usually held in a theater or somewhere similar. Invariably there was a stage on which representatives of the company sat and read their reports. Those in the audience were mostly ordinary shareholders who were suitably impressed by all the ceremony. The senior management on the stage, security officers everywhere, the presence of journalists-all of it ensured the audience remained reverently silent, in the midst of which I would stand up and say, "I have a question.

I firmly believe that all the best things on earth have been created by brave nerds. (I have on the wall of my office a photograph of the 1927 Solvay Conference on Physics. My heroes are those brave nerds who brought about a revolution and enabled the progress of all humankind. I find them so inspiring that I have hung a copy of that photo in the rooms of both my children.) But these nerds in Yabloko were cowardly, scared to experiment. The world changed and they stood still. There was a time when Yabloko was a faction in the State Duma, and the party could not imagine it ever being different. When they failed to get over that 5 percent threshold, they complained about abuse of power and falsification of results. They were indignant and claimed that victory had been stolen from them and that in fact they had received many more votes. It was true that the election results even then were being flagrantly rigged, but Yabloko had also done nothing to fight for votes. Gradually the y resigned themselves to the idea that they could never win. They believed they were little people facing a huge, hostile country were nerds were unpopular. They became afraid of their voters, and their fear was masked by exaggerated elitism with intellectual overtones. Needless to say, no one cared for that, and they began to lose what little support they had left. This was absolutely contrary to my idea of how to do politics. I believed it was essential to find a common language with everyone. I feel at home with my former classmates, almost all of whom are now in the armed forces or police, as well as when I am being held in a detention center with drug addicts and hooligans of every variety. One such hapless guy in the next bunk has been telling me how he ruined his life, and that his HIV treatment is very expensive and doesn't work. We are discussing the ins and outs of methadone therapy. The Russian people are good; it's our leaders who are appalling. I had no doubt that 30 percent of the Russian population subscribed to democratic views, so we had every chance of becoming, over time, the political majority. That is why, when I realized Yabloko was deliberately alienating its supporters, I got tired of being in a political minority. I was ultimately expelled from the party. The pretext was my "nationalism.

When I told the local Yablokites I wanted to join the party, they gave me suspicious looks and asked why I would want to do that. "You have a job, right? You are a real lawyer, right?" This pissed me off. Everything was chaotic and nobody was doing anything practical. I was keen to get things done, preferably right now. They told me that first I would need to go through a standard admission process: become a supporter, then a candidate for party membership, collect favorable references, and wait a year. Then they would accept me. Most people joined Yabloko because they admired its leader, Grigory Yavlinsky. I did not share the depth of those feelings. If during my enthusiasm for Yeltsin I could not stand Yavlinsky and saw him as someone who was taking votes away from Yeltsin, my attitude toward him now became more nuanced and I began to consider him a decent, honest politician. The former Communist Party bureaucrats who had surreptitiously sidled over from their Soviet offices into the offices of the Russian Federation were thieves, but he was a man with values. He stood up for his ideology and, overall, the Yabloko party acted consistently. It was nervous about doing anything decisive and preferred to conduct intellectual discussions, but at least its members believed what they were saying. I gradually detected that the unanimous admiration of Yavlinsky was so strong it sometimes tipped over into a leadership cult. The party leaders and he himself were unchallengeable, and the hierarchy within the party was strictly observed. Hence, they were wary of newcomers, in case someone daring came along and tried to take over the party! They looked askance at me because I didn't fit their image of a standard political activist. I took a shower in the mornings and I had a job. I must have been asked a hundred times why, when they had little or no money, I was staying with them. I still can't shake this off. People still suspect there's a catch. After all, if you have a good education and a good job, why would you be fighting against Putin? Why are you doing your investigations? Perhaps you're getting leaks from competing towers of the Kremlin, or perhaps you're a Kremlin stooge yourself. Or a stooge of the West. All my life people have been inventing conspiracy theories about me to somehow explain my interest in politics. If nowadays I find it amusing, back then it was annoying. The fact that Yabloko found me so baffling indicated they had no faith in their own strength. I went into politics to fight against people who are wrecking my country, are incapable of improving our lives, and act solely in their own interests. I intended to win. I found campaigns absorbing. After getting involved as an election observer, I noticed two things: first, my legal experience was going to come in very handy; and, second, I could see what was going on in the campaigns far better than the average party lawyer. The main motivation, though, was that this was real legal work. When I started my studies, this is exactly what I pictured working as a lawyer would be: a courtroom, a judge sternly calling everyone to order. I am defending my client, waving papers in the air, arguing, conclusively proving things, and at that moment I am only too aware that I'm fighting the bad guys. It may sound corny, but it's true: I wanted my efforts to make the world a better place. My company, building offices in Moscow, offered no such opportunities. I shuddered at the thought that my whole life might be spent helping certain people make an extra couple of million dollars. Slowly, I began distancing myself from corporate work. I didn't dump it right away, because even after I was admitted to Yabloko, I remained a volunteer for a long time and received no salary. When I did start receiving one, it was $300 a month, though I didn't always get paid...I had a family to support, so I continued working as a lawyer.

In Russia, if you are involved in politics, and if you do not support the regime, you can be arrested at any moment. Your house can be searched, your belongings confiscated. The police will take your children's phones and your wife's laptop. During one search they were all for making off with our television. But not once have I heard a word of reproach from Yulia. In fact, of the two of us, she holds even more radical views. She has always immersed herself in politics. She hates the people who have seized power in our country, probably even more than I do. And that motivates me to do what I do.

In 1999, when Vladimir Putin came to power, many thought he was wonderful. He was young, he didn't drink like Yeltsin, and he seemed to be saying all the right things. That strengthened the hope that everything would at last be put right. This talk really annoyed me. I didn't like the idea of Putin as "successor"; I wanted a genuine presidential election, with competing candidates. If we imagine that Putin was a Communist who campaigned and won fairly, I would have been very upset, but I would have accepted the result. Now, though, Putin was being foisted on Russia as payment for his loyalty and willingness to provide legal immunity to the former president and his family. I knew that I couldn't believe a word Putin said. his appointment made me determined to resist. I didn't want someone of that kind to be the leader of my country. My feelings were very strong. I wanted to register my presence as far removed from Putin as possible, on the opposite side of the political arena, so that later, when I was a grandfather, I would be able to tell my grandchildren, "I was against it from the outset!" All that remained was to decide which party to join. The Communists still had the largest organization and were the obvious choice for someone who wanted to make it clear they were opposed to Yeltsin's successor, but for me the merest hint of the Soviet past was like a red cape to a bull. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia seemed to be in opposition, but I did not trust its leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, to stand up to the new regime. In the democratic wing, there were the Union of Right Forces (URF) and Yabloko. The former included some well-known officials like Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemstov (both of whom seemed to me then to be Young Community League types). Yabloko, which bore more resemblance to a bunch of amiable nerds, was the only genuinely democratic party, overtly opposed to Putin, and that seemed preferable. My decision must have seemed odd to some people, and I might have hesitated longer, but I wanted my position to be absolutely clear: I would join the opposition. When there was talk that the electoral threshold to the Duma could be raised from 5 percent to 7 percent, and there were doubts as to whether a democratic party would be able to achieve the new minimum, that only increased my motivation. So I took myself off to Yabloko's headquarters in the center of Moscow. It was not at all how I had pictured the headquarters of a parliamentary party. It was a complete shambles.

This routine of "Come with me," "No," "Come," "No, I don't have to. Here is my lawyer," "No, come with me" is something I know so well I could repeat it in my sleep. What is important right now is to think strategically. I have a single-use mobile phone in my pocket (I feel it). Kira has the backpack with the laptop. I give the suitcase to Yulia; it is unlikely she will be detained too. That seems to be everything. I am ready. I say goodbye to Yulia, kissing her on the cheek. The standard dialogue has already reached the stage of "If you refuse to comply with the instructions of police officers, forcible action will be taken." There is no point in refusing to go with them and be dragged off by the arms and legs like at protest rallies. What if all they are planning to do is hand me a summons to appear in court? In fifteen minutes the whole confrontation would look pretty silly. I kiss Yulia again and go on my way, accompanied by an escort of police.... Everyone in Russia is familiar with the phrase "a theater performance for one spectator." It starts within a few seconds. Two characters in plain clothes turn on cameras, while a third (you call tell he is in charge from his jacket) produces some papers, goes over to the major, and begins solemnly intoning, "Comrade blah blah blah, I report that in the case of blah blah blah there is blah blah blah evidence, blah blah blah Navalny, blah blah blah search." Having absorbed this, the major turns to the border guard, who reports that based on a review of blah blah blah documents citizen Navalny has been identified. At this I start laughing at them. "Why are you behaving like lunatics? Who are you putting this shown on for? There's only me here; relax and speak normally," I say. They cannot relax, however, because of those two cameras filming the proceedings. Their superiors, who have scripted this performance, are invisibly present in their camera proxies. Nobody reacts to my words.

The ultimate military defeat may be delayed at the cost of the lives of hundreds of thousands more mobilized soldiers, but it is inevitable. The combination of aggressive warfare, corruption, inept generals, our weak economy, and the heroism and high motivation of the defending forces can result only in defeat.

Operation Stronghold is a plan for defending a police department from attack. It was evidently developed for dealing with terrorist attacks and other such emergencies but in practice is now used whenever the authorities want to keep lawyers, human rights activists, journalists, or anybody else out of a police precinct. If you later complain your lawyer was not allowed to see you, the Ministry of the Interior routinely replies, "At this time training exercises were underway, and Operation Stronghold was being rehearsed. Only officers and staff of the police department were admitted to or allowed to leave the site." They practice Operation Stronghold whenever I'm arrested.

There is about to be a hearing to authorize your arrest." "But we're in a police station." "Yes. We were allowed into the building just now and told there is going to be an off-site session of the Khimki court." "This can't be happening," I say. "The head of the Khimki police department is applying for you to be placed under arrest for a month." "Well, who are they?" I ask, indicating the people in the chairs. "These are 'the public,' I have no idea how they got in." I notice "the public" are all glum middle-aged men who avoid my gaze. "You have to be joking." What is happening is impossible even by the standards of Putin's courts. I was formally put on the wanted list for failing to register with the criminal division while undergoing treatment in Germany after being poisoned. I was required to report there twice a month under a sentence that had already been declared unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights. In theory the Simonovsky District Court, which has jurisdiction over my place of residence, can decide whether to turn my suspended sentence into a custodial one on the grounds of my failure to attend. It has done just that more than once in the past after I was detained for participating in protest rallies. The argument was that this too was a violation of the conditions of my suspended sentence, which required me to "behave well and not break the law." Hearings of this kind are needed for intimidation, and to remind me that I can be thrown in jail at any given moment. Until now, they have invariably concluded with a warning: "Okay, we're not going to jail you this time, but this is your last warning." At least those proceedings had the formal appearance of a court session. There were summonses, dates of hearings, opposing sides. The criminal division would demand I be jailed and say how terrible I was. We would dispute that. But what was this? A law court in a police station? And anyway, what did the head of the Khimki police precinct have to do with me, and what right did he have to demand I be held under arrest for a month?"... I leave my cell in a police station for a meeting with my lawyer, only to find I am in a court, complete with its own fake public and fake journalists. When the judge comes in, I yell at her, "Are all of you out of your minds? What's going on? Who are these people, and how come they knew about this trial before I did?" "These are journalists and members of the public, and this is an open trial." At this moment, beautifully timed, we hear people in the street chanting, "Free Navalny!" and "Let us in!" "Right now there are members of the public down there. Let them into the trial," I say. "Everybody who wished to attend has been admitted," I'm told. "You can hear yourself, they are shouting 'Let us in!'" "People have been standing there for several hours, and no one is being allowed in," Olga says. "I waited there myself for three hours and was admitted only a few minutes ago. And I found out that there was to be a trial three minutes before it started." "Everybody who wished to attend has been admitted," the judge repeats. "You have said this is an open trial. I demand you admit the journalists. There are dozens of them." "The trial is open. Applications were received from the press service of the Ministry of the Interior and from . . ." -she names two pro-Kremlin publications. "Nobody else expressed a wish to attend the trial." "Nobody else knew anything about the trial!" I say. "Our trial is open. Any media organization could submit an application, but they did not wish to," the judge says.

There was a lesson to be learned here: few things are more deserving of incineration with a flamethrower than a bunch of drunken lawyers who know that loopholes in the law will enable them to get away with being smart-asses and lording it over ordinary people who do not know the law but have right on their side.

That is why, reflecting on that nauseating possible future, I am so grateful to Gorbachev for having done away with it. Not that meant to. He goofed, and that is precisely what I have to thank him for...He overlooked the fact that inviting everyone into the garden would not lead to deferential discussion with an elite, full of allusive hints and skirting around contentious matters. On the contrary, realizing that they now could speak out without getting beaten up, the denizens of the basement would climb up to the roof en masse and state bluntly that they had no water to drink and nothing to eat. The weight of their words, the reverberation of their stamping boots, and the indignation in their hearts would make everything come tumbling down. I didn't regret that in the slightest. After all, what had I lost? Russia, my country, was still there. I still had my language, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Moscow and Kazan and Rostov. The army was still there, and the state. Even the bureaucrats were still where they had been. Kiev, Tallinn, and Riga did not vanish into thin air. Everything was as it had been. You could go to those cities if you wanted to. What had changed was that now you had a choice, you had freedom. What remains of that freedom in Putin's Russia today, which is trying to pretend it is the U.S.S.R., is in fact much more than there was then. You can now choose your profession, where you want to live, and your lifestyle. You no longer have to tie yourself in knots in a competition to see who can be the more two-faced in order to be allowed a trip abroad. You can just buy a ticket and go. At this point someone almost always says, "Only nowadays you have to have enough money," and then reminisces about the social guarantees and equality in the U.S.S.R. In reality there was nothing of the sort. The social gulf between a collective farm worker and a member of the regional Communist Party committee was no less than the gulf we have now between an oligarch and one of today's many average workers. Housing and cars were, by an order of magnitude, less accessible than they are today. Sure, many people received accommodation for free, but to get it they had to wait twenty years. Of course, there is a huge difference in the ceilings for luxury and wealth then and now. In the U.S.S.R. the ceiling was on the first floor of a dacha in the "writers' village" outside Moscow. Now there is no ceiling; it has disappeared unimaginably far away, bursting through the roofs of French chalets and skyscrapers on the edge of Central Park in New York. That, of course, is annoying But it does not alter the indisputable fact that although the mass of the population might indeed have been moved by grim tectonics, as Tolstoy would have it, it was nevertheless Gorbachev who started patching something up, but in the end hammered a nail in the wrong way and everything fell down. On its ruins, everyone was given the chance to live a decent life without the perpetual lying and hypocrisy. If, of course, they wanted it.

The criticisms made of Gorbachev-that he was indecisive, spineless, lily-livered, half-hearted, evasive-were all true. Just as it was true that he earned them all in his opposition to the radical democrats, whom I idolized at the time. The camp of those who hated Gorbachev was divided between those who did not like the reforms and those who did not like the fact that he was introducing them too slowly. The latter, to whom I belonged, hated him much more fervently: we had a goal we could see elsewhere-complete freedom of speech, capitalism, and democracy-and that made us active critics hammering away. We also deprived Gorbachev of support from the only section of society he could count on. So when, in his own good time, having missed every opportunity, he ceased to be afraid and ran for office (before that, he had been elected only by collegial bodies like congresses and supreme soviets whose subordinate status removed the risk of losing), he gained a derisory 0.51 percent of the vote. The older I grew, the more intolerant I became of Gorbachev, but now I view him positively, if only because he proved completely incorruptible. In that he was unique. Everyone who had power during the transition from socialism to capitalism tried to grab as big a slice of the pie as they could. The Communist leaders of the central Asian republics of the U.S.S.R. became owners of entire countries and promptly turned them into totalitarian states. Ministers scooped up whole industries for which they had responsibility. Directors of factories found ingenious ways of becoming their owners. Nimble-footed members of the Young Communist League, whose resonant voices had vowed their preparedness to give their lives for the party, now employed their influence and connections to become oligarchs. When Gorbachev stepped down as president, he took nothing with him, though there had been colossal opportunities for him to get rich. No one would have blinked an eye if a couple of major factories had somehow been transferred to offshore companies under the guise of "joint ventures." He could have helped himself to state property abroad. It would have been so easy to siphon party money into personal accounts. He did none of that. People can argue as much as they like that it was because he did not have the opportunity, but the fact remains that he made no attempt to do so. In my view, that was because he was a different kind of person. Not avaricious.

We have spent several months undertaking a huge research project on Putin's palace in Gelendzhik on the Black Sea, which we use to give a detailed insight into how he finances his family, his amusements, his hobbies, and his mistresses. . . . The project was codenamed Psycho because, when we first looked at the plans of the site, with all its theaters, golden eagles, and sofas that cost as much as an apartment, our constant refrain was, "This man is sick. He is obsessed with luxury." We agreed that we would release the video the day after I returned to Russia, and today it has become obvious we are running out of time. There is an immense amount of computer graphics. Vast diagrams detailing corrupt linkages cannot be omitted, because otherwise our accusations will appear mere hearsay. But these are a turnoff for the average viewer. It is our eternal quandary: how to strike a balance between entertainment and boring journalistic and legal matters. . . . You can make a good product but then mess everything up by failing to promote it properly. That's a lesson about new media I learned long ago. . . . I need to write a stack of emails, because I very well may get jailed and I'll be kicking myself if I don't get them done. Past experience suggests the biggest problems arise from things you haven't thought about-internet access to your bank, authorizations and passwords for the various applications and devices you use every day. Knowing that your family is okay accounts for 99 percent of your peace of mind in prison. I don't want to be there worrying that my wife can't withdraw money from my account because of an idiotic bank requirement that I have to give written permission from my email address. A hundred newspapers around the world can report that I'm arrested and in jail, but the bank manager will still respond, "Sorry, there is nothing we can do to help. He must send us an email, or use our very convenient phone application.

I finish writing the emails and send them. I check that Yulia has access to the banking apps-a fairly pointless exercise because all my accounts have been frozen for months by lawsuits filed by "Putin's chef," Yevgeny Prigozhin, a man who, in the days of the U.S.S.R., was convicted of aggravated robbery but has now become, thanks to his friendship with Putin, "a successful entrepreneur" with a monopoly on the food supply to the day cares and schools of Moscow. We are running out of time. One more meeting is scheduled. I call Leonid Volkov, our chief of staff, Maria, and Kira. Yulia joins us. We briefly discuss the plan of action for each possible scenario: we get home without hindrance; I am arrested at the airport and jailed; I am detained, then released, and the Kremlin waits for the indignation to subside and then has me arrested; nothing happens, but I am arrested in a couple of weeks on a different charge, and so on. These scenarios are approaches the Kremlin has already used on us. In the twenty-first century you are confronted not just by the machinery of a repressive state but by the PR machinery of that state. Public opinion is what matters to all the players. The same action performed in subtly different ways can either leave people unmoved or enrage them and bring them out onto the streets to demonstrate. Everything has to be taken into account, including what day of the week it is and the weather.

The "government of reformers," as is now obvious, operated a policy of over-the-top corrupt protectionism that would turn any real conservative green with envy. Huge duties were imposed under the pretext of protecting domestic manufacturers. Then they were canceled, before being reintroduced. Customs policy could change by anyone bringing a suitcase of cash to the government. Needless to say, every decision to impose high duties was accompanied by ways of making it possible to circumvent them, exceptions for special cases. Ultimately, the most straightforward and effective idea came to dominate: redesignating goods subject to a high rate of duty as belonging to a different category, which attracted a low rate.

Mikhailova anticipates they might detain me after I have passed through the turnstile, that is, after formally crossing the border. I would then be taken away quickly. So she will go through first, then I, then Yulia. these are important issues we need to discuss if we are to be prepared for every eventuality, but I do not actually believe I will face any threats on the day of arrival. I have long ago given up trying to analyze and predict the behavior of Putin and the Kremlin. There is just too much irrationality in it. Putin has been in power for more than twenty years, and like that of any other leader in history who has stuck around that long, his head is filled with messianic obsessions, all that "No Putin, No Russia" stuff, openly proclaimed from the rostrum of the State Duma. The real balance of power between the sundry groups in the Kremlin is also unknown, no matter what the political analysts choose to write. So it is futile to try calculating what "they" might do next, and we have to do what we think is right. We have, however, a general understanding of how the media and public opinion function. More or less all we know about Putin's technique for ruling is that he conducts endless opinion polls and takes account of the results in his planning. Arresting me at the airport would not be in his interests. Of all the scenarios for isolating me, this is the one most favorable for me. In the first place, the European Court has already ruled on the Yves Rocher case, recognizing that I am innocent. I make that point during our discussion: "Are you trying to tell me they will arrest me on a charge that has already been ruled against by the European Court of Human Rights? You must be joking." Arresting me for "failing to observe the conditions of a suspended sentence" would be too cynical, even by the standards of the Kremlin. First they try to poison me, and then, when I am in a coma and in intensive care, they announce, "Oh, look, he has failed to register with the police. Let's imprison him on that county." If they try it, they will immediately lose the battle for the first bastion of public opinion, the journalists who follow closely how the situation is developing. My period of probation in a case they brought in 2014 ended, after numerous extensions, on December 30, 2020, eighteen days ago. So it is no longer possible to revoke my suspended sentence. Obviously, no such trifling matter as the law will ever deter a Russian judge, for whom the only thing that matters is the telephone call in which his boss gives him his orders. But why make everything difficult, why attract attention, and, most important, why whip up sympathy for me with blatantly illegal harassment? At his most recent press conference Putin referred to me dismissively with a phrase that had clearly been though through and characterizes his latest tactic: "Who cares about him?" So would it not make the best sense to operate within that framework and ignore my return? Reduce a big deal to a puff of smoke? Instead of providing journalists with the anticipated great shots of me being arrested, let them have a video of me coming out of the airport with my luggage, unsure what to do with myself while waiting for a taxi? Then, after a couple of weeks, when the fuss is over, call me in for questioning on the latest fabricated criminal charge. A couple of months after that, impose house arrest. Three months or so after that, move me to a prison with a short sentence, then renew it. Then just keep me there. Everyone will have gotten used to it by then. Why would anyone protest when I'd been in prison for ages? No, Putin is nuts, but he's not going to be crazy enough to create a major incident by arresting me at the airport.

We are going to be met at the airport by several thousand people, as we can see from the reception group on Facebook. That means I'll have to make a speech. Not a long one, but an essential one. I want to thank everyone for their support-even though it will all end up as a chaotic crush, because there is no doubt that the last thing Putin wants to see is a beautiful picture of a jubilant throng greeting my triumphant return. I have had the experience many times. I enter the meeting area, and Kremlin activists immediately start pushing and shoving. Paid disrupters are artfully arranged to display absurd placards. The police standing nearby yell into a megaphone that everyone must disperse immediately. I usually pay no attention to any of it, look for something to climb up on, and deliver my speech, outshouting the police and their amplified sound. What have I not used as a makeshift rostrum, from a snow hill to a children's house with a slide in a playground?

Suddenly, from behind the frosted glass of an adjacent room, a colleague appears. He's senior in rank, a captain. The captain holds out his hand for the passport and then starts brusquely looking through it. Yulia gives me a wry smile, as if to say, here we go. "Alexei Anatolievich, please come with me," the captain says. The expression on our lawyer's face reflects what she is thinking about the failure of our cunning plan. She is standing literally centimeters away, but already on the far side of the barrier that symbolizes the state border. She tries to open it and come back in, but it is obviously locked and can only be opened by pressing a button in the border guard's cubicle. "Why do you want me to go with you?" I ask. "We need to establish certain details." "Well, what's the problem with establishing them here?" "You need to come with me." Do you take me for a complete fool? I think. If you've decided to arrest me, bring out your cops, of whom you doubtless have a squad at the ready. They want to avoid a photograph of the police taking me away. "I don't have to go anywhere with you," I say. "Here is my lawyer. I insist you establish your details or whatever it is in her presence." We bicker some more, and I can see the pain in the captain's eyes. He is under instructions to get me to walk through that adjacent door-with no photos of policemen-but he is clearly not going to be able to deliver. He mutters something into his handset, and six policemen magically appear. Olga begins attacking the barrier even more energetically, demanding to be let back in. Just in case, I move Yulia, who is standing between me and the police, behind my back. Heaven knows what they may have in mind. The altercation continues, now with a police major, and by now I am on autopilot. This routine of "Come with me," "No," "Come," "No, I don't have to. Here is my lawyer," "No, come with me" is something I know so well I could repeat it in my sleep. What is important right now is to think strategically. I have a single-use mobile phone in my pocket (I feel it). Kira has the backpack with the laptop. I give the suitcase to Yulia; it is unlikely she will be detained too. That seems to be everything. I am ready. I say goodbye to Yulia, kissing her on the cheek. The standard dialogue has already reached the stage of "If you refuse to comply with the instructions of police officers, forcible action will be taken." There is no point in refusing to go with them and be dragged off by the arms and legs like at protest rallies. What if all they are planning to do is hand me a summons to appear in court? In fifteen minutes the whole confrontation would look pretty silly. I kiss Yulia again and go on my way, accompanied by an escort of police.

Political developments in the former Soviet republics were set to benefit people of a nationalist persuasion. This was a completely natural state of affairs and typically occurs after the collapse of an empire. If you wanted your party to get more votes, you could gain electoral support by saying something along the lines of "Russian occupiers, get out of our land and go back to your Moscow." It was not that all local people turned out to hate Russians, just that the U.S.S.R. had for so long suppressed every manifestation of nationalism, trying to brainwash everybody with its hypocritical nonsense about the friendship of the peoples and how the fifteen republics were fifteen sisters. It was inevitable that the pendulum would swing in the opposite direction. Nationalism became all the rage. The years of having everything controlled from Moscow led to a wholesale rejection of anything that seemed like the legacy of empire. "We have finally broken free from the dictatorship of Russia, and anyone who lives in our country and looks to Russia is a fifth columnist and an enemy." That was the real geopolitical disaster, but it was only much later that everyone realized it. The new leaders, among whom Putin and his ilk were in the third or fourth tier, totally ignored the problem of Russians stranded outside the country. A huge number of conflicts could have been averted and lives saved if the government of the time had proposed even the most basic programs for the return of Russians to whatever was still Russian territory. Naturally, nobody would have been in any hurry to return there from the prosperous Baltic States, and in that respect other approaches would have been needed. But to the perplexed questions of those living in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and many other republics-Where do we belong now? What are we supposed to do?-there should have been some answer. It is extraordinary that even now, when the issue of "Russophobia" and the infringement of the rights of Russians has become practically the top priority on the Kremlin's agenda, everything remains on the level of barefaced, hypocritical demagoguery, behind which there is not the slightest constructive action. Somebody born into a Russian family outside Russia will be driven crazy negotiating their way through the bureaucratic machinery before obtaining citizenship of their own country. In 2008, I proposed a bill stipulating that anyone who had in their ancestry a Russian, or a representative of another of the indigenous peoples of Russia, would automatically be entitled to citizenship on presentation of any document confirming that national identity. It might be the birth certificate of a grandparent. There was nothing revolutionary about the suggestion. It was analogous to laws that exist in Germany and Israel. Neither that proposal nor dozens of similar ones were accepted. The current regime prefers endlessly to talk about oppressed Russians while doing nothing to help them.

In the 1990, there was a rock band in Russia called Bakhyt-Kompot, and they had a song that was musically terrible but an important expression of punk philosophy that articulated one of my own main preoccupations. The chorus went like this: "How come the Czechs have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it? How come the Poles have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it? How come the Germans have cracked it, but Russia hasn't hacked it?" All the countries of the Soviet bloc and the Baltic republics were managing to "crack it," but not us. We had the oil, the gas, the ores and timber, infrastructure of sorts, and industry. We had a lot of highly educated people but it didn't help. I'm not talking about "like in America"; it wasn't even like in Poland. According to current official statistics, 13 percent of people were living below the poverty line; in terms of the average wage, we had been overtaken by China, Lebanon, and Panama. Someday I believe it will all work out and everything will be fine, but we have to face the fact that from the early 1990s to the 2020s, the life of the nation has been wasted moronically, a time of degeneration and failing to keep up. There is good reason why people like me, and those five or ten years older, are called a cursed and lost generation. We are the people who should have been the main beneficiaries of market and political freedom. We could have adapted readily to a new world in a way that was beyond the ability of most earlier generations. Fifteen percent of us should have become entrepreneurs, "like in America." But Russia didn't crack it. No one doubts we are living better now than we were in 1990, but, excuse me, thirty years have passed. Even in North Korea people are living better now than they did then. Scientific and technological progress, whole new branches of the economy, communications, the internet, ATMs, computers . . . Those who claim the rise in living standards relative to the 1990s is due to the exertions and achievements of the Putin regime re like stock joke characters saying, "Thank heaven for Putin! Under his rule the speed of computers has increased a millionfold." The comparison should not be between us as we were in 1990 and us as we are now, but between how we are now and how we could have been if we had grown at just the average global growth rate. We would easily have achieved what we watched in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, and South Korea achieve. That is a comparison about which we can only feel sad. This is not some abstract exercise, but thirty years of our lives. And God knows how many more such lost and stolen years lie ahead. For as long as Putin's group is in power, we will count the missed opportunities and be noticing how other countries have overtaken us in per capita GDP, and how those we have always looked down as little better than beggars have overtaken us in terms of their national average income.

We must not repeat the same mistake. Putin will not last forever, and we have no way of knowing what the nature of his departure will be-voluntary, forced, or natural. But from our history we can imagine how great the temptation may be to overlook at first small, the more major, transgressions on the part of whomever we are backing. The new leader gives voice to our interests, you can imagine someone saying, our political outlook. In order, for example, not to let the populists come to power, he may tweak, tamper, and tinker a little. He may make use of the national television channel. But what of it? He'll be telling it how it is, he's our guy, after all, and he'll only get rid of people if they are really asking for it. That's why, as a reminder of mistakes in the past and a pointer for the future, I would very much like this sense of karmic retribution to be shared by as many people as possible. People who, like me back then, turned a blind eye to the lawlessness, the lies, and the hypocrisy and saw it all as a case of the ends justifying the means and as necessary backing for a particular team.

Here I am looking at that house on St. Bart's and feeling so bad that this is what the freedom of the citizens of Russia was sold for. It's time to stop using the Native Americans who sold Manhattan for $24 as the standard example of an unfair deal. Think instead about a popularly elected president who won his first election (fairly!) with 57 percent of the vote, only to barter everything for a house with a terrace in the Caribbean. A cool, objective look at the Yeltsin era confronts us with a dismal and disagreeable truth, one that explains Putin's rise to power: there never were any democrats in government in post-Soviet Russia, let alone freedom-championing liberals who opposed conservatives desperate to resuscitate the U.S.S.R. The whole lot of them-with rare exceptions...were an unholy horde of hypocritical thieves and lowlifes. They were aroused for a time by democratic rhetoric in order, within the framework of the political contest of the time, to be on the same side as the Kremlin, as the authorities. That was the only thing that mattered to them; along with, most important, the opportunities for self-enrichment. The whole bunch of them have always regarded power as a cash cow, and they still do. The feudal allocation of land for sustenance. Power equals money. Power equals opportunities. Power equals a comfortable life for you and your family, and everything you do while in power is aimed at retaining it. That is why all these functionaries were loyal members of the CPSU and never once inclined toward dissidence (none of the, including Yeltsin, who, despite the PR myth, never relinquished his seat in the ruling bureaucracy). Then, still ensconced in their old offices, they gravitated to the ideological niche of "capitalist democrats" and were agreeably surprised to find how much personal property they were allowed to accumulate under the new economic dispensations. "Elections," "freedom of speech," and ridiculous "human rights" were by no means an obligatory appendage to their Swiss bank accounts. They drifted toward a new stance as "patriotic conservatives deploring the collapse of our glorious U.S.S.R.," an entirely organic, stress-free metamorphosis. I do not believe in karma or predestination, but as I am writing this, I feel the fates are mocking me. I feel I am being made to pay for my blind support of Yeltsin despite his disregard for the law. I don't like the way Putin set out to kill me. But what was it I said when Yeltsin, who appointed Putin, was blasting away at the parliament with tanks? A reminder: I said, "It's long overdue. There should be no mercy for these irredeemable morons cluttering up the parliament." What about those privatization loans-for-shares auctions, when the nation's major natural resource enterprises were handed over for free to people appointed from above to be oligarchs? Those, after all, were not only fundamentally shameless and immoral but also completely illegal in purely formal terms. People who wanted to get in on the act and compete for the best bits of what remained of the U.S.S.R. were barred, using the same ridiculous pretexts as those used nowadays to sideline election candidates. And when they took the matter to the courts, they were smirked at in just the same way the prosecutors smirked in the trumped-up cases against me. My comrades are being squeezed out of the political field year after year. Not only are we prevented from taking office, but any connection with our organization, even just a monetary donation, is threatened with inspections or even criminal prosecution. And that has all been done by the very people whose right to bombard the parliament, to falsify elections "for the sake of reform," and to drive the Communists and nationalists out of politics "for the sake of the future" I so fervently defended.

My priority was getting into university. The notion that that was essential was fundamental to Russian and Soviet education. It testified to class in a society that loudly proclaimed equality for all. If you were accepted, you were clever, had studied hard, and, most likely, came from a good family. If you didn't get in, you were obviously stupid. By the time I was to enroll, universities had begun to give their students a reprieve from the army for the duration of their studies. If you went into the military, you were really stupid. Soviet society, which hypocritically extolled the working-man, in reality drew a line making it clear that people with higher education were in the top tier and those without it were second class. This was done, most likely, to incentivize all members of society, whatever their origins, to try for higher education, which was not a bad idea. The road to success was inscribed on every wall and in every textbook: "Study, study, and again, study," as the great Lenin instructed us. "You aren't completely stupid, are you? If you want to climb the social ladder, to get to the top-study!" The positive hero in every Soviet film is a factory worker who goes to night school. In practice this didn't work out well. The long-term consequence was a catastrophic fall in the prestige of any profession associated with manual labor, even the most highly skilled. To be a PTUshnik, a student at a vocational school or college, became synonymous with being a dunce. It was nothing out of the ordinary for a teacher to tell a student, "You, Petrov, are a half-wit and fit only for vocational college." The implication was that after becoming a plumber, electrician, or factory worker, Petrov would join the army of losers and alcoholics with no prospects in life. This inevitably led to intense pressure on schoolchildren. Not going into higher education was shameful.

Neither Yeltsin nor the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus were to blame for its collapse. The Soviet Union was destroyed by the Communist Party and the KGB. The former, through the lies, hypocrisy, and incompetent management of its senile leaders, reduced the country to a state of economic crisis. The latter, in the person of its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, attempted a coup that was bungled as badly as everything else they had done in earlier years. Most researchers of the August putsch believe Chairman Kryuchkov was the main actor among the conspirators. At that time, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin, working in the Leningrad department of the KGB, was by no means making a fuss about geopolitical disasters but, in pursuit of money and new opportunities, cheerfully leaving the ranks of his organization in order to throw in his lot with the mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak, one of Yeltsin's main supporters. In other words, Putin was unquestionably one of those with a direct interest in the collapse of the U.S.S.R., helping it along and extracting maximum benefit from it. I don't want to exaggerate Putin's personal role or assert that he particularly betrayed his organization. He simply acted in his own interests. One day he was out catching dissidents on the streets of Leningrad who would be sent to prison for "anti-Soviet propaganda," and the next he was the bag carrier of one of the new regime's most radical supporters.

Of the entire gamut of reforms proposed by Gorbachev, glasnost really did work and rapidly changed everything. Unlike everything else, to achieve it, you didn't have to do anything; you had only not to do anything. You hade to not prohibit, not censor, not dismiss journalists for articles they wrote. Stories began appearing in the press that made you wonder how they ever got published. It soon became clear that writing the truth was actually profitable: you were not kicked out of your job, no "administrative conclusions" were drawn, you became wildly popular, and the circulations of publications you worked for went through the roof. The ideological dam had begun to crack, and although the Soviet leaders tried desperately to shore it up, they couldn't. The news that a program had been removed from the national television channel's schedule provoked instant fury, as if these very protesters had not been living a year previously in a country where censorship was total...From 1987 onward the U.S.S.R. moved rapidly toward winning the world championship for free speech. The realization that you no longer went to prison for anything you said so delighted everyone that people tried to make up for the preceding seventy years lost to censorship. In October 1987 the national channel began airing Vzglyad (Viewpoint), which came to mean everything to me....Young presenters, also unlike the standard officious old codgers, covered a wide variety of news stories and discussed them in the studio. From time to time this was interrupted by videos of bands like DDT, Alisa, Kino, and Nautilus Pompilius. Seeing rock musicians with their socially relevant and often anti-Soviet songs on national television was fantastic. This was no longer a crack in the dam of censorship, but more like seeing it under fire from heavy artillery....For four years, Vzglyad was unquestionably the most popular broadcast in the Soviet Union. Its journalists and presenters became superstars who determined the way television developed. Their subsequent fates have been strikingly different. Vladislav Listyev, the mainstay of Vzglyad, was shot dead in the entrance to his apartment complex. Artyom Borovik, who had become one of the top investigative journalists, died in an airplane accident in 2000; my daughter went to a school named after him. Alexander Lyubimov, the Vzglyad journalist I most adored, now roams the state-run television and radio studios as a diligent Putinite. In 2007, when Putin's censorship was in full bloom, he invited me on his talk show on a radio station run by the state-owned gas company Gazprom. He was as smart as ever, had the same intonations I remembered so well from my childhood, but now was pushing the official line and had a clear understanding of what could be said and what was banned. I looked at him and the whole time felt such an urge to say, "For heaven's sake, Alexander, I became who I am thanks to you and your colleagues. For some reason, you betrayed all that." After Vzglyad, Konstantin Ernst hosted Matador, a program about the movies, every broadcast of which I watched. He now heads Channel One of state television and is a major Putin propagandist. The most repulsive, deceitful reports, including the infamous lie about a little Russian boy allegedly crucified by Ukrainian soldiers in front of his mother, aired on his watch... It seems incredible to believe that most of these people, who were at the wellspring of free speech in Russia, did not just hold their tongues after giving in to the temptation of easy money, but brought the same energy and initiative of their early days to bear as active propagandists of the new regime, foaming at the mouth as they defended acts of injustice and corruption.

More often than not the "successful entrepreneurs" of the time were officials of the Communist Party or members of the Young Communist League, and this seemed to confirm the popular suspicion that there was corruption and that the source of their wealth was not so much enterprise and initiative as power and access to resources. On top of that, for the seventy years of its existence the Soviet Union had been inculcating contempt for wheeler-dealers and anyone else in pursuit of private profit. Someone working in commerce in those times could live reasonably well, but it was more prestigious to be a cosmonaut, in the military, or a professor. Then, suddenly cosmonauts were nobodies, just ordinary mortals who got rewarded for their pains with a three-room apartment and a black Volga car, and professors could barely make ends meet. At the same time, some obscure cooperative owner, and just about anyone selling something in the market-was a lord of the universe and had more money than any Hero of Labor ever received. It turned out that being poor was much more bearable when everybody else was, but it was intolerable once you could see your neighbor was far richer. We often hear talk about the envy Russian or Soviet people felt toward the first entrepreneurs, and that is what made the late 1980s such a hateful time. I believe, however, it was all caused by the inequality of opportunities. If Gorbachev could have made it easy for everyone to become an entrepreneur, if millions of people had taken that up, rather than just tens of thousands of the smartest, or wiliest, or those who found themselves well positioned, then everything could have been different. Instead, the setting up of cooperatives, and later of the first businesses, was made monstrously complicated and was totally under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy. If you wanted to start a business, you had to pay bribes or have contacts, or at least have the kind of charisma that could bring walls tumbling down. For long years this established the image of businesspeople as shifty, devious individuals who had got in on the act by less than legal means. In the army, the police, and the KGB, resentment at this decline in the status of officers was particularly acute. Something was going to have to change.

On August 21, the Soviet defense minister, Dmitry Yazov, gave the order for troops to be withdrawn from Moscow. The State Committee for the State of Emergency had lost, and along with it, the U.S.S.R. had, too. On returning from his dacha in Crimea, Gorbachev evidently expected to be greeted by rejoicing crowds as a liberated hero. People were happy to see him back, but only as further evidence that the putsch committee had been defeated. Gorbachev's expectation of consolidating his authority on a surge of support came to nothing. All the admiration and support was for Yeltsin and a new government, the people who had taken risks and acted resolutely. This was strengthened when testimony was produced suggesting that Gorbachev might have had a part in preparing the conspiracy, or at least knew of it in advance and, in his usual way, decided not to take sides either with the Soviet conservatives or with the Russian reformers but to wait and see who came out on top. Indecision is a cardinal sin in an era of change. In an instant, Gorbachev lost everything. Once again, as happens during revolutions, something mind-blowing had occurred. On Monday he was, if not the most popular of leaders, the universally acknowledged president of a vast nation, with power over the world's largest army and over the industry and agricultural enterprises of a territory covering one-sixth of the world's land area-and the power to start a nuclear war. Come Thursday, he was nobody. He still retained a personal limousine, his secretaries, and a special telephone, only now no one was calling him. Whatever might be documented in seemingly unchallengeable statutes protected by a constitution and an army of lawyers, the center of power had shifted to Yeltsin, transferred in some intangible manner. Nobody really understands exactly how it happened, but neither was anyone in any doubt that the transfer of power had taken place. On December 8, 1991, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republics, and Ukraine pulled of a spectacular ruse. Their leaders, Stanislav Shushkevich, Boris Yeltsin, and Leonid Kravchuk, met in a forest in Belarus, where they declared that, since their three republics had been the founders of the U.S.S.R., they had the right to dissolve it, which they would proceed to do. In its place they established the Union of Independent States. From their point of view, the trick made good sense: the presidents of the republics wanted to put Gorbachev and all his officials out of contention and to seize unfettered power for themselves. That is what was behind their action, and to implement it they needed formally to put an end to the indestructible U.S.S.R. Nowadays, people go on about what a mistake that action-the Belovezha Accords-was. One of those publicly lamenting it is Vladimir Putin. With great intensity and passion, he claims the accords was "a major geopolitical disaster." Well, it didn't seem like that to me at the time (and I'm not claiming to be a repository of objective truth, just relaying what my feelings were). It was just one more item on the television news-well, perhaps an item that rated a bit more discussion that usual, but there was no sense of portentousness. If those who gathered in the woods executed a crafty and, to be honest, rather deceitful and devious legalistic maneuver, they were only confirming something that was already obvious, namely that the U.S.S.R. no longer existed as a real country.

[T]he Afghan war was the folly of the crowd of senile old men who were in charge in the late U.S.S.R. And they were, literally, senile. By 1979 the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee resembled our very own Geriatric Park. According to official figures, over the ten years of the war, we lost 15,000 people. According to a study of officers of the General Staff, the total was 26,000. Nobody has any idea how many Afghans were killed; the estimates vary from 600,000 to 2 million. The overwhelming majority were civilians. More than 5 million people became refugees. The war sucked huge financial resources out of a U.S.S.R. that was rapidly becoming impoverished. At the same time it undermined morale both in the army and in the country at large. General Secretary Brezhnev and his generals who dreamed all this up wanted to play geopolitical games in pursuit of superiority over the United States, but in the end they only inflicted a mortal wound on their own nation. The Afghan war was momentous not only for us but for the rest of the world as well. We are experiencing its direct consequences to this day. To a significant extent, current Islamic extremism grew out of it. Responding to the criminal stupidity of the Soviet leaders, the U.S. government behaved no less stupidly by doing its utmost to turn a war of the Afghan mujahideen against the U.S.S.R. into an Islamic jihad. Back then, in the 1980s, volunteers from all over the Middle East flocked to the region, and the war changed from being a confrontation between socialism and capitalism, as the Soviet Union insisted it was, into a holy war against infidels. Only the notion that people who had taken up arms in defense of their religion could be switched off by a political decision, that you could say, "Okay, guys, that's enough. We've won, let's all go home," was disastrously mistaken. It was not enough for people who had risen up under the green banners of Islam simply to drive out the Soviet troops. The slogans that had inspired them were something they really believed in. Having driven out the U.S.S.R., they demanded the transformation of Afghanistan into a country governed under sharia law. Osama bin Laden, to whom the Americans had donated money and weapons, was already mutating into their enemy, because the two sides' aims were diverging. The United States was losing interest and no longer wished to finance jihad. For a religious fanatic, however, those who are not with us are against us. It was in Afghanistan, where they had gone to wage a holy war, that the leaders of the Islamic State like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became who they were. That war is continuing even today.

Which brings me to the main reason I found learning uninteresting. All those professors, and indeed the universities of that time, had nothing to teach you. The science faculties were different, because the laws of physics do not change if there is a new president of Russia or a general secretary of the Communist Party at the helm. For those teaching law and economics, however, their world had collapsed, more than once. The laws and the very nature of the national economy were constantly shifting, and these were yesterday's teachers of Marxism-Leninism and preachers of scientific atheism. Even those furthest removed from day-to-day politics-the teachers of Roman law, say-had spent their lives telling lies and being hypocritical. Every phenomenon had to be explained in terms of class struggle. Even those attempting to work in pure science were obliged to include dozens of pages of ideological nonsense in their dissertations. In the mid-1990s, all these educated, pleasant, amiable people found themselves on the scrap heap. It did not take me long to understand that a good lawyer was not someone who knew everything but someone who knew what he needed to read and where to find it. That certainly works for the Romano-Germanic legal system, although everything is more complicated in the Anglo-Saxon system based on precedent. It is even more the case in countries that are just starting to build a new legal system, as Russia was at the time. I enjoyed and enjoy being a lawyer. I set myself to reading primary sources and was miffed when I felt I had a better understanding of many topics than my teachers. I was driven out of lecture halls as if repelled by a strong centrifugal force. Outside was a world undergoing transformation, and if it was not always a pretty sight, it held promise. It was intolerable to be obliged to list to the views on economics of these recent acolytes of Marxism-Leninism or, even worse, their views on "geopolitics." It was at that time I noticed the frequent use of that word was the infallible marker of a fool, and that criterion has never failed me.

I suddenly realized I was in the humiliating predicament of being a smaller boy who was having money taken from him by a bully. This was wholly unexpected. Reading about such situations, I would smile superciliously and think that nothing of that kind could ever happen to me, because I would immediately fight back. It is, after all, better to take a beating once than to be humiliated repeatedly. Unfortunately, I had never read that such a relationship might begin with a con, a seemingly amicable request. For the next six months this boy (Crane was his nickname) poisoned my existence. I had to avoid him, otherwise every meeting turned into an excruciating dialogue with poking and threats. I was desperate and didn't know what to do. In my class I was the biggest and strongest, but Crane was taller and older and brazen and self-assured, which is, of course, the most important asset in the art of street confrontation. I had no older brother I could turn to, not even an older pupil I was friendly with. Complaining to my parents would shame me; besides, I already knew the advice they would give. "Well, just give him a good punch and he'll back off." It is all very well for adults to advise you to throw a punch. All bullying seems to them mere childish nonsense, although its emotional and psychological intensity is a hundred times greater than any problems they might be facing.... "What's that there, is your lip swollen? Let me see," he said, pretending to be in a conciliatory mood. At that I did the most daring thing in my life. Nowadays I get asked in nearly every interview where I get my courage. I genuinely believe my work in the past twenty years has not called for bravery; it is more a matter of having made a conscious choice. It certainly does not require even 1 percent of the courage I needed at that moment. I am sure it is a feeling familiar to many people: from sheer rage, desperation, and, paradoxically, above all, fear, you gain the courage to take the most resolute and reckless action. Yelling at him every swear word I knew, I punched him in the face several times as hard as I could, landing about half the blows. Completely taken by surprise, he fell over and looked up at me in bewilderment, lying on his back and half covering himself with his hands, evidently expecting me to start kicking him. I looked down no less bewildered. The fit of rage had passed, the adrenaline was draining away, and with every millisecond I came closer to the famous predicament of Schrodinger's cat: Crane might now get up and I would be dead or not. At that moment I leaned a rule in life: it is easier to perform a bold action than to live with its consequences. I ran away as fast as I could and looked back: Crane was running after me. After a couple of minutes I had a stitch in my side, but I ignored it, aware that if I stopped, everything would be much worse. I got away, but the next three days or so were scary, I feared getting beaten up at school in front of my friends or, even worse, in front of girls. To my great surprise, though, when I came face-to-face several times with my nemesis at school, he just glared at me menacingly. This gradually mutated into his very deliberately seeming not to notice me, while I, similarly, did not seem to notice him. I am still not sure why he didn't try to take revenge. Perhaps the answer is to be found in economic theory: A free agent wanders through the market taking money from younger pupils, each of whom is intimidated. By my outburst of insanity, I raised the price of harassment in my torturer's eyes and he made the rational decision to move on to others who were less psychotic. So I was, you might say, saved by the invisible hand of the market...The second possible explanation is that I wisely did not blab about the incident, sharing it only with a couple of close friends. Crane realized I was not trying to sabotage his reputation as bully in chief...

Now that we have tons of autobiographical testimony and interviews and archive documents and, most important, now that we can see with our own eyes the "reformers of the 190s" transmogrified into Putin's lickspittles, propagandists, oligarchs, and bureaucrats, and all of them extremely rich, we should be honest, repudiating hypocrisy and any attempt to justify ourselves for our wasted years. We should admit that there never were any democrats in power in Russia, in the sense of people with a genuinely liberal, democratic outlook. And the main narrative of our recent past, the confrontation between "democrats" and Soviet conservatives, never happened either. "What do you mean, never happened? I was part of it!" Even I want to protest in response to such a radical, or naive, or wicked assertion. But it is only too obvious that it never happened, at least not in the way those involved in the events portray it. There was an objective historical process. There was the U.S.S.R., ideologically, economically, and morally bankrupt. There was a conflict between elites, in which one faction, in order to sweep away senile dotards, tricked itself out in more popular colors, those of "democrats and supporters of a market economy." With that slogan it seized power. Well, isn't that just the way of the world? Are you going to accept that one section of the elite came up with new slogans and won, or are you going to go around with a liberalometer checking everybody's ideological purity to find out who most believed in what they were saying and who was less than sincere? Actually, a device of that description would have been very helpful, and the lack of one is exactly why nothing worked out "like in America" or, for that matter, in the Czech Republic. In the countries of the Soviet bloc, those opposing the conservatives, socialists, dodderers, idiots, and saboteurs had as their leaders (or just playing a crucial role) people of the stature of Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. They had stood their ground in the face of oppression and persecution, and over many years had shown in action a genuine commitment to the words they proclaimed from the podium. In Russia everything was different. The chief "radical democrat" was Boris Yeltisn. I was born in 1976, at which time Yeltisn was the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional committee of the CPSU. That is, he was the governor of the largest industrial region in the Urals with powers that were far in excess of today's governors. There he behaved like a typical Soviet petty tyrant, and just as in the mid-1970s he would climb into his official black car, live in his officially provided apartment, and acquire his official elite dacha, so until his death that is the lifestyle he and his family took for granted. He belonged body and soul to the Soviet party establishment, and what little he knew about the life of the "common people" he gleaned from his chauffeurs and servants.

To this day, huge numbers of people are convinced that Yeltsin excoriated the party bosses, published critical reports, and suffered for his beliefs. None of that happened. Those bosses, in the course of their internal intrigues, first appointed him head of the Moscow regional committee of the CPSU, that is, mayor of Moscow, and then, when they began to fall out with him, transferred him to the position of head of the State Construction Committee, that is, minister of construction. Some fall from grace! He did not even have to settle for a lower class of limousine, and remained firmly in the milieu of treacherous officialdom. His family remained the same, too, with exactly the same values, or rather, the same complete absence of values and only a craving for personal luxury and wealth. That was to prove crucial when the family was transformed into "the Family." Yeltsin was devoid of genuine ideological motivation and driven only by a lust for power. He was an extremely talented individual, a truly intuitive politician who sensed the popular mood and knew how to exploit it. He was prepared to act decisively and boldly on occasion, but always in the interests of himself and his own power rather than of the people or the nation. I am writing this vehement denunciation of Yeltisn, partially because I regret having been a blind admirer of his and of that part of Russian society which, only too ready to support everything he did, paved the way for the lawlessness we live with today.

I was not really sure what my father did in the army. His job seemed mainly to involve two activities: One was rushing to his station to signal an alert drill daily at 9:00 p.m...The other activity was catching runaway soldiers...I could not get the adults to explain why anyone wanted to run away. Where were they going? There were soldiers everywhere. They were used as a general workforce, sweeping the streets, driving cars, hauling stuff around. Others were always marching somewhere. Often they would waylay schoolkids near a store and ask them to go in to buy something. They were afraid to go in themselves because they might be spotted by a patrol on the lookout for soldiers absent from their unit without leave. The soldiers didn't look particularly happy, but neither did they seem so unhappy they might be thinking of running off into the forest. As I found out later, they were running away because of dedovshchina ("bullying"). Bullying of raw recruits by older soldiers reached such a level that in 1982 the minister of defense had to issue a secret order, "On Combating Nonregulation Relations," thereby recognizing it as a widespread practice. Hazing became a self-replicating system. You joined the army, got beaten up, your money was taken from you, and you were forced to scrub floors and do the laundry of the "older" soldiers, who joined the army just a year and a half before you. After all these humiliations, you just waited for your turn to beat up the rookies, because that was just the way it was, a necessary part of army life, something that transformed a civilian wimp into a real man. The system was often tacitly endorsed by officers, who saw it as a self-regulating system of training and discipline. For example, some rural idiot joins the army, fails to understand elementary commands, looks scruffy, and is generally hopeless. So then the staff sergeant punches him a couple of times in the middle of the chest ("in the soul"), which really huts (you cannot punch him in the face, because the marks would show), and he immediately comes to his senses and starts behaving like a seasoned soldier. Needless to say, such an idiotic practice did nothing to improve discipline, and fundamentally undermined respect for the army. Soldiers returning home after two years of national service luridly described the bullying to those yet to be conscripted. It closely resembled the revelations of people returning from prison. Mothers listened in horror and then had no wish to send their sons off to the army. Periodically, after yet another unfortunate young man, unable any longer to bear the hazing, committed suicide or shot his abusers, the army would launch another anti-bullying campaign, which never did any good. The practice is institutionalized and can only be combated by changing the institution, primarily by creating an army in which professional servicemen and servicewomen are paid a salary to defend the county. What is not needed is an army that depends on hapless youths taken from their families (for two years in the U.S.S.R., and nowadays for one) who are forced to spend their time in an institution that is a bizarre form of survival school. Curiously, the army takes a certain pride in this constant imbecility, as I began to notice as I grew older. It was regularly remarked that our soldiers and officers were so inured to carrying out ridiculous orders-for example, with my own eyes I saw soldiers painting grass green before inspection-that, under fire, they would perform miracles of discipline. Because they lived in such poverty and were so used to hardship, there could be no doubt that in the event of war the pampered Americans, with their luxurious barracks and individual apartments for officers, would be defeated.

Many years later, serving time in a special detention center after yet another arrest, I sat in my cell reading a collection of newly published materials from the archives. These were secret reports by the KGB branch of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic proudly documenting an extraordinary operation involving a journalist from Newsweek who had visited Ukraine sometime after the accident. Some twenty or so individuals had been involved in this operation, including members of special militia units and retired KGB agents. The KGB arranged it so that everybody the journalist interviewed was an intelligence officer, and all of them assured him the consequences of the accident were minimal and that the public was impressed and delighted by the efficient way the party and government had dealt with it. Vast resources had been brought to bear to deceive a single reporter because it was the appropriate thing to do. We could hardly allow enemy journalists to slander the Soviet reality by twisting the facts. Therefore, we would rather twist the facts a little ourselves. None of these tricks were any more effective than the infamous grocery stores in North Korea in which plastic produce is strategically placed so foreigners being driven from the airport can see that bananas and oranges are freely available. For years now the foreigners have been merrily snapping photos of these stores as a tourist sight. Hey, look over there! The famous fake fruit! Paradoxically, people in Washington, London, and Berlin knew more about what was really happening than those living in the contaminated zones. Our family did not know the whole truth, but we knew a whole lot more than most: when the party and government robustly denied the "contemptible insinuations of Washington's propaganda" about an explosion in Chernobyl, our relatives phoned and told us everyone in the region was aware there had been an explosion at the power station and that there were soldiers all over the place. Then the nightmare began. Soon, everybody within thirty kilometers of the power plant was being evacuated, and no matter how glowingly state television reported a well-coordinated operation, we already knew better. Our numerous relatives had been dispersed all over Ukraine, to wherever empty accommodations, like Pioneer camps, could be found. People were in despair. It was unbearable to be forced to abandon your farmstead, a home you had built with your own hands, especially since these people could be considered well-off by Soviet standards. We were the poor relatives compared to them, even though my father was in the army, which meant his pay was above average. We were just living a standard Soviet life in a military unit, with an apartment and a salary, while they, with their orchards and cows and private plots of land, were better provided for, at least in terms of food. Now they were leading their children to a bus and being driven away permanently to who knows where with only their identification papers and a minimal set of clothes. There were cows mooing and dogs barking, just like in films about the war. A couple of days later soldiers went around the villages shooting the dogs. A starving cow will just die, but dogs go feral, form packs, and might attack the few remaining people. What a monstrous shambles it all was, and it could not be concealed...A total of 116,000 people were evacuated. They needed new housing, new jobs, and compensation for the property they had abandoned. Even for a rich, developed country that would be a big ask. For the U.S.S.R., with its planned economy, it was a nightmare. New homes were needed; new cars were needed.

The Soviet Union was amazingly effective at producing propaganda and telling lies, but what was needed here was the ability to build houses in a hurry, and that it was something it could barely do and certainly couldn't do well.... The question most puzzling even to my ten-year-old self was why the authorities were lying like this when everybody around me knew the truth. What kind of pathetic attempt at deception was this? If you are going to lie, you should at least be expecting to benefit from it in some way. You claim to be sick and you don't have to go to school; that at least makes sense. But what was the point of these lies? Describing the way the Soviet Union worked, Vasily Shukshin, a Russian writer, memorably said, "Lies, lies, lies . . . Lies as redemption, lies as atonement for guilt, lies as a goal achieved, lies as a career, as prosperity, as medals, as an apartment . . . Lies! The whole of Russia was covered with lies, like a scab." An excellent description of the situation. If the Chernobyl disaster had never happened, I would probably have heard less talk of politics. It would certainly have been less personal, and my political views would have been slightly different. But things happened as they did, and many years later, when I was a grown man, I watched the newly appointed acting president of Russia, forty-seven-year-old Vladimir Putin, on television, far from sharing any enthusiasm about the country's new "energetic leader," I kept thinking, He never stops lying, just as it was in my childhood.

I have found it helpful to make a distinction between my country and the state, something that was passed on to me from my parents. My family and a deep love of our country and was exceedingly patriotic. Nobody, however, had any time for the state, which was regarded as a kind of annoying mistake-one we ourselves had made, but a mistake nevertheless. There was never any talk about whether we ought to emigrate, and I can imagine no circumstances in which there might have been. How could you emigrate when your country is here, when the language you speak is here, and Russians are the world's most wonderful people? A good people with a bad state.

While you are a child or young adult, everything seems fine, and politicians often exploit this law of life to obscure our image of the future by presenting a false picture of the past. It is important, though, for us to behave like human beings rather than like goldfish, whose memory is famously said to be limited to the past three second.

Nostalgia for the U.S.S.R. is an important feature of Russia today, and a political factor not to be underestimated. Long before Donald Trump's clarion call to "Make America Great Again," Vladimir Putin had uttered the unofficial slogan of his reign, "We shall be as respected and feared as the U.S.S.R." This rhetoric was employed from the first steps he took on coming to power. I thought it laughable and was sure it wouldn't work, but I was wrong. It is a banal thought, but the human brain really is designed in a way that means you return in memory only to what was good in the past. Those who feel nostalgic for the U.S.S.R. are in reality nostalgic for their youth-a time when everything was still in the future, when you played volleyball on the beach in the company of friends, and in the evening drank wine, grilled kebabs, and had no worries about crime, unemployment, or uncertain prospects for the future. Even such archetypally Soviet absurdities as being sent to "dig up potatoes," compulsory work in the fields to which schoolchildren, students, and the workers of city enterprises were dispatched in the later years of the U.S.S.R., are remembered as merely a distraction, pretty awful but fun. At the time, having to dig up frozen ground, "helping the collective farm workers save the harvest," irritated everybody and only demonstrated the total failure of the Soviet agricultural system. But who remembers the rubber boots that pinched, the dirt under your fingernails, and the sense of the utter pointlessness of the labor, when it is all eclipsed by a picture in your head of a female classmate smiling dazzlingly at you from the neighboring plot.

The standard and completely moronic response of the Soviet-and subsequently of the Russian-authorities to any crisis is to decide that it is in the interests of the population that they should be lied to endlessly. Otherwise, the reasoning goes, people are sure to run out of their homes, rush around in a state of anarchy, set buildings on fire, and kill each other! The truth of the matter is that nothing of that sort has ever happened. In most crises the population is prepared to behave in a rational and disciplined manner, especially if the situation were to be explained to them and they were told what needed to be done. Instead, as I have since seen on a less dramatic scale many times, the first official reaction is invariably to lie. There is no practical benefit to the officials doing so; it is simply a rule: In an awkward situation, lie. Play down the damage, deny everything, bluff. It can all be sorted out later, but right now, at the moment of crisis, officials have no option but to lie, because the imagined idiot population is not yet ready for the truth. In the Chernobyl affair, it is pointless to look for even a scintilla of rationality. God forbid the people should have been told to stay indoors for a week and not go outside unless absolutely necessary. In Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine with a population in the millions, a May Day parade was held just five days after the explosion, for the same propaganda purposes-to pretend that all was well. We know now how these decisions were made. The leaders of the Communist Party, sitting in their offices, wanted foremost to ensure that neither the Soviet people nor-horror of horrors-foreigners should know anything about the atomic disaster. The health of tens of thousands of people was sacrificed in the cause of a grand cover-up that was ridiculous, because the radioactive fallout was so extensive it was registered by laboratories all over the globe.

All Soviet people loved to criticize the authorities, but were afraid of the all-powerful KGB (which, in army towns, was referred to as osobisty, "special agents"). The main worry was telephone tapping. It was clearly not credible that the KGB could have sufficient staff to eavesdrop on the conversations in every apartment. Nevertheless, when friends came to visit my father and, after a few vodkas in the kitchen, started berating the authorities, my mother would put the telephone under a cushion. It seemed odd, and when I asked why she was doing it, she brushed the question aside by saying there was no knowing what might get said and who might hear it. I found that extraordinary. Here were grown-ups talking about completely ordinary matters, like the impossibility of finding Bulgarian ketchup in the shops and having to get in the queue for meat at five o'clock in the morning. I could not see what there was to be afraid of. All schoolboys had been to the stores and had noticed the long queues, and knew that the most used word in the Soviet lexicon was "shortage." That meant there must be people not allowing you to say what was obviously true. Moreover, they were apparently employing other people to listen in to the phone in your home to the extent that we needed to use a cushion to protect ourselves. What an irony that my first memory of the use of that cushion dates to 1984.

I can't stand the word "mentality," which I think is a completely artificial concept, but it is plainly true that some kind of Russian national character exists, and this bravado about enduring privation, which could so easily be avoided, is a significant aspect of it. We suffer appalling conditions, criticize and gripe about the authorities, yet simultaneously manage to take pride in being able to survive in these horrid conditions, and consider it a great competitive advantage in a hypothetical confrontation between nations. Well, yes, we say, the Japanese do make good cars, but just let them try to assemble a functioning car form the spare parts of three others and some rusty scrap metal the way our neighbor Vasily managed to. I notice the same thing in myself when I go abroad and compare the activities of opposition politicians in Russia and Europe. I can find myself on the verge of saying, "I wonder how you would get on as a politician if, after every meeting in an electoral campaign, you were placed under arrest for a month." It is as if I were priding myself on living in an environment so grim, and where politics is so very real, that I absolutely have to go to prison. You don't need to be a great psychologist to recognize what is a the root of this: Russians yearn for a normal life, fully aware that we have invented all our existing problems for our ourselves. We can't admit to being fools, though, so we look for something to boast about, where in fact there is nothing to be proud of. There were political discussions in our home regularly, and the overall attitude toward the authorities was critical. That seemed to be true of other families I knew, which might appear strange, because all military officers were obliged to be members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and propaganda in the army and control of its ideological loyalty were top state priorities. These directives had exactly the opposite effect of what was intended. The title of "political worker" (an officer responsible for ideological work) was always tinged with irony. They were laughed at behind their backs, because everybody knew their sole professional duty was to tell lies. The mind-boggling discrepancy between what political workers said and the reality of life was obvious, even to a child when these geezers turned up at school to tell us about the wonders of the Soviet system. One who had served in Cuba described the wiles of the Americans and how marvelous life had become in the "Island of Freedom" after the victory of the revolution, but all the children wanted to know was whether it was true you could just walk into a shop there and buy Coca-Cola and how their parents could best draw the lucky straw and get to work anywhere as long as it was abroad.

Gorbachev's greatest problem, which ultimately became a problem for the U.S.S.R., was his irresolution and the half-heartedness of his actions. He wanted to be a reformer but was deeply anxious about the consequences of real reform. He would herald great changes, only then to try to avert them. He partly opened the door to freedom, but when everybody tried to rush through, he jammed his foot against it and then pushed with all his weight to stop the door from opening any further. The trouble was that what people wanted was a fully open door, not a chink they could peep through. My mother and I would binge-watch the new broadcasts that broke through the old censorship rules and were aired thanks to Gorbachev's glasnost. We were outraged by any hint that he, with the help of Leonid Kravchenko, his loathsome head of the Soviet State Committee for TV and Radio Broadcasting, was trying to rein in freedom of speech and clutch at the remnants of censorship. Appreciation of his having allowed freedom of speech was instantly overshadowed a hundredfold by indignation that he was not allowing it in full. I well remember the angry outbursts in our family: For heaven's sake, fire your wretched Kravchenko. Can't you see that's what the whole country wants and that it will back you? Gorbachev's affection for his wife, which today is seen as sweet, was met with daggers drawn by a patriarchal and backward Soviet society. "He's henpecked. Trailing along after his wife again." That too caused a fall in his popularity.

The second important principle was 'normality.' The Kremlin has been trying for years to marginalize our movement and drive it underground, to turn us into a modern equivalent of the Soviet dissidents. I have great respect for those dissidents, who were heroes. But in 2012, no one in their right mind wanted to become a heroic dissident-it's dangerous and it's scary. Everyone just wanted to be normal. And that's exactly what we were-normal people with a normal office life. Although we were essentially an organization for revolution, with each person taking great risks, from the outside we looked like a bunch of Moscow hipsters. We had a spacious open plan office and a coffee machine, and we played Secret Santa. WE had Twitter and Instagram accounts. Our staff was young, everyone was friends with everyone else, we went on hikes together and threw parties (though in later years I began to notice a curious tendency for everything that was the most fun to begin after I had gone home). The only way we were different from a fancy start-up was that we were battling Putin. Of course that brought with it predictable downers, like having our office bugged. Although that was disagreeable, it was not particularly scary. Over time, however, the downers became more numerous. the pressure grew year by year, and by 2019 arrests and searches had become part of our daily lives. Our hipster office remained just as hipsterish, only now the riot police sawed through the door with a chain saw, burst in with semiautomatic weapons, made everyone lie on the floor. During one of these raids, fifty members of the staff were relieved of their computers and phones, and all our equipment, documents, and personal belongings were taken. If you managed to hide your phone behind the baseboard molding and your computer in the ceiling tiles-well done. But most often everything was confiscated. The tactic was clear enough: We needed money to replace the equipment, and we would have to ask for donations. The Kremlin was hoping it would gradually become more difficult to raise funds, but after each attack on us we saw a surge in contributions. What the Anti-Corruption Foundation does is obvious from the name. We are hybrids, somewhere between journalists, lawyers, and political activists. We come across a story involving corruption, examine the documents, collect evidence, and publish it. In the first years, we did so as posts on my blog; later, as videos on YouTube. The most important thing we do, then, is spread the story so millions hear about it. The number of independent media outlets was falling rapidly, censorship was everywhere, and no major newspaper, let alone television network, was going to publicize our work. What do you do in a situation like that? You tell the story yourself and ask others to help. Post a link on your blog, write something on social media, send the video to your friends, and if nothing else is helping, print out a leaflet and put it up in elevators. 'This is our mayor: His official salary is around $2,000 a month. and here is his apartment in Miami, which is worth $5 million.' At the end of every investigation I made an appeal: 'Guys we've done our bit. Here's a great, important story, but without your help no one is going to know about it. Send links to your friends. Join your regional group on VKontakte and leave a comment there too. Send it to your grandmother and your parents.' The result was that donors not only gave us money but effectively started working for us themselves and became an important part of our organization.

At the time it was de rigueur among Putin's economic operators to represent themselves as 'effective managers.' In practice, however, it was limited to the facts that they dressed in bespoke Brioni suits, bought up the priciest offices in Russia, and modeled themselves on Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, only it was the state's money they managed rather than their own. Beneath the veneer of effective management was the same bunch of crooks who, given the slightest opportunity to steal, would do so. They were effective only in being able to devise fifteen different ways of cooking the books of a government contract in less than a minute, inventing a dozen fake commercial deals to make everything look proper, and briskly spiriting the loot away to their offshore company. The top dogs in all these state corporations were totally corrupt, and most of the regular staff were even more outraged by that than I was. It was from whistleblowers that I obtained the information that provided the basis of my first high-profile anti-corruption investigation. In 2007, VTB began purchasing oil drilling rigs in China and then leasing them to Russian oil producers. The cost of a Chinese drilling rig was $10 million. VTB Leasing, however, paid 50 percent more than that through an intermediary offshore company registered in Cyprus. It seemed an entirely pointless arrangement. What did Cyprus have to do with anything, and why was an intermediary needed? Surprisingly, it turned out that this offshore company was controlled by VTB's top executives, and the price difference went straight into their pockets. They purchased not five, note ten, but thirty of these drilling rigs. It would have been impossible to find customers for so many. This deal was supposed to remain secret, like dozens of others, but on this occasion things worked out differently. I not only wrote about the business but traveled to Yamal, where, in the middle of a field, I found the orphaned rigs still in gigantic containers and covered in snow. In the summer they rusted in a swamp. This investigation was very straightforward. You didn't need a degree in economics or to be an expert on oil production to work out what was wrong. I wrote hundreds of complaints, went to court, and even won. In those days that was still possible. I urged all the minority shareholders of VTB to file complaints together with me and demand documents. They did. This lasted for years, with statements to the police, rejections, appeals, lawsuits in Russia and Cyprus. It was a particular pleasure to question Kostin personally on the topic of drilling rights at shareholder meetings. He tried to find excuses, but with a marked lack of success.

If you are a Russian bureaucrat, you are required to obey every order, even if it is illegal, and with each passing year this comes to seem more natural. When the Kirovles case was brought against me, Belykh, who knew perfectly well the charges had been fabricated, kept his mouth firmly shut. That was one of the reasons the case was able to proceed to trial. It is fundamental to Putin's power, however, that the rules can change and at any moment be used against you. Seven years later I turned on the television and was stunned. Nikita was shown being arrested in a Moscow restaurant in the act of accepting a bribe. He got eight years in a strict regime facility and, as I write this, is still in prison.

For any project you need two things: people and money. I had no qualms about people. All my experience suggested I was not going to be left as a lone lawyer working from an office in a basement. Money, though, was a problem, because you can't run an independent organization in an authoritarian state without a budget. In the past, politicians had asked rich people for money, oligarchs. By 2011, however, the oligarchs wouldn't come within cannonball range of me. And neither did I want to owe them any favors. So I put a post on my blog saying, "I know how to work, I know what to do, I will find and hire the necessary number of staff, but the financing has to come from you. Give me money. You need to donate a modest amount to a good, useful project, and that will save me from having to run around trying to cadge funds from oligarchs and businessmen." These micro-donations were the base that enabled me to become independent. And there was nothing the Kremlin could do about it. It was easy for them to arrest and intimidate one or two big donors, but what could they do against tens of thousands of people? Nowadays there seems nothing special about that approach; it is standard for a fundraising campaign. But in 2011, everyone thought I was out of my mind. What on earth was a micro-donation? How could you possibly raise money for investigations and legal work online, especially in Russia? In our country no one had ever done anything like it before. There were no models to follow, there was no habit of donating regularly, there was no financial infrastructure. And yet people began transferring money to me, ordinary readers of my LiveJournal blog. At first I collected the donations in my personal account and later published a bank statement and report on my blog. The average donation to RosPil was 400 rubles (at that time about $15), and in one month I collected almost 4 million rubles, more than the annual budget I had originally set.

Everyone thinks it costs a fortune to engage a highly qualified expert, but through my blog I discovered that people are glad to volunteer their services if they themselves are part of the process, know what is happening, and what benefit there will be if they donate their help. I explained every step I took. I put all my requests and all the replies to them online. People trusted me and responded, and I very soon realized that many of these volunteers were a hundred times better qualified than those in the offices I had previously worked in. In 2010, a LiveJournal user sent me some news. "The Ministry of Health has decided to create a social network for 'communication between medical workers and patients.'" They announced a competition to create the network, with an initial budget of 55 million rubles and a deadline of sixteen days for completion. I'm no IT expert, but I could see this was simply not feasible. It would be impossible to create any website, let alone a social network, in just a couple of weeks. The 'competition' was clearly a fraud, the contractor had no doubt been chosen long ago, and the website was probably already set up. They had just agreed to help themselves to the lion's share of 55 million rubles and split it among themselves. I lodged a complaint, and within a few days the Ministry of Health canceled the competition. After that, I was deluged on LiveJournal with references to similar fraudulent competitions. I put out my usual call on the blog for help from experts, this time to write a professional assessment on the basis of which I could draw up complaints. The project took off, but there were so many competitions I couldn't cope with them all. Volunteers helped me out, creating a new website where people could upload information about corrupt government procurement orders, and experts could post assessments of them. But we did not have enough volunteers, so I posted a message on the blog to say I was looking for a lawyer to join me in writing complaints. Again I was deluged with CVs.

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.

Transneft is the world's largest pipeline company and moves oil all over Russia. Needless to say, it is state owned. In the mid-2000s it undertook the huge project of constructing an oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Any construction project of that size is guaranteed first and foremost to involve a whole lot of embezzlement. Even if it gets completed, such a mega-project will not be finished on time; it will be done shoddily and against regulations; and a large chunk of the budget will be misappropriated. And that is exactly what happened. This was obvious to everyone, including the government, and in 2008 Transneft was audited by the Accounts Chamber, a special auditing department of the state. Scandalously, the results were kept secret at the request of Transneft itself. I went to great lengths to get my hands on this secret report and finally succeeded. I was appalled. The report's 150 pages drily laid out, with numbers and analysis, the fact that everything that could have been plundered had been. Construction costs had been inflated many times over, fly-by-night offshore companies had been selected as contractors, tenders and bidding had been conducted with wholly incredible irregularities, and the documentation relating to them had been destroyed in order to conceal what had been going on. The report was not the theorizing of experts or posts in a blog on the internet but rather an official report by the Accounts Chamber. The total amount embezzled in the course of the pipeline project was some $4 billion, "1,100 rubles stolen from every adult in Russia,' as I wrote in LiveJournal at the time. It was a huge scandal. The head of the state corporation at the time was, and to the present day still is, Nikolai Tokarev, an ex-KGB officer and a very close buddy of Putin's who had shared an office with him at the Soviet KGB residency in Dresden. Tokarev, an extremely private person, eventually spoke out. He accused me of being an opportunist and claimed I was "licked by Madeleine Albright's National Democratic Institute." And she, he claimed, virulently hated Russia. I ridiculed their understanding of the world, which had changed not a jot since the days of their youth and the Cold War. Almost immediately after publication of my investigation, an examination of the Kirovles case began in Kirov Region. It was in fact a reexamination, because I had already been investigated when I was working as Belykh's adviser. The police had unearthed nothing illegal then, and the episode was quickly forgotten. This now was evidently an attempt to prevent my returning to Russia, which was an option I did not for a moment contemplate. For several months I had been some homesick that I was devouring sorrel borscht in my dreams. The four of us packed our bags and flew back to Moscow. A new phase of my life had begun: every time I returned home, I wondered whether I would be arrested at the border.

A billionaire senior manager stood up and said, "We are giving this special award to Vladimir Leonidovich Bogdanov." Bogdanov, the CEO and a billionaire too, got to his feet, accepted the award, and began reading his report: We have extracted this quantity of oil. We have made that huge amount of profit. Eventually, the host of the event stood up and asked, "Are there any questions?" Three hundred fifty shareholders sitting in the auditorium remained silent. "Does anyone want to say anything?" Silence. I raised my hand and told him, "There is something I want to say." The look on the young host's face suggested a flying saucer had landed in the hall with little green men emerging from it. It was obvious that in all his working life he had never before encountered anyone who wanted to say anything. "Fine," he said eventually. "Please come forward." I went up onto the stage and said, "There is an oil-trading company called Gunvor. It is owned by Gennadiy Timchenko, a very close friend of Putin's, and you sell your oil through it. Why was it chosen? Was there a tender? If there was, which other companies took part? How much oil do you forward to Guvnor, and what are the terms? I am demanding these explanations because at present everything suggests that the company's profit is simply accruing to Gunvor, and because of this shareholders are not receiving the dividends due them." To judge by the expressions of those sitting on the stage, little green men not only had landed but were now firing their ray guns while tap-dancing. You could read in the eyes of those onstage that they were wondering where I had come from. "Had he been sent by the Kremlin? The FSB? How dare he publicly accuse them of corruption!" I spoke with extreme courtesy, peppering my speech with legal terms. I followed up my question about Gunvor by demanding to be told who the real owners of Surgutneftegas were. It was widely known that as of 2003 the company had been publicly identifying only ordinary shareholders in its reports, presenting an incredibly convoluted scheme of corporate ownership from which no one on the planet could deduce who actually owned this gigantic oil enterprise. While I was speaking, there was absolute silence in the auditorium, but as I went on, I could see people becoming animated, first of whom were the journalists. It was part of their job to sit through these incredibly dull meetings, but now, for the first time in living memory, something besides the predictable was happening and things seemed to be livening up. Next, the shareholders showed signs of life. At first they just stared at me in bafflement, trying to work out who I was, but then they realized I was just an ordinary person like the rest of them, except that I was not afraid to get up on the stage. When I finished, the audience applauded. That was a moment to treasure, a triumph and a mind-numbing moment when I knew that now I really was battling corruption. I started attending all the shareholder meetings. Before they began, the main topic of interest to the journalists was whether Navalny was there. Everyone loved watching a battle between David and Goliath. I would put up my hand, and start speaking, and the company management would look sour because there was nothing they could do to stop me. Of course, they did not answer any questions. They could hardly say, "You're right, Alexei. We're thieves just like Putin." Their response was, "Thank you for raising such an important issue. We will look into it." Of course, nobody in the hall expected them to say anything meaningful. Far more important was the fact that someone was asking questions.

Working in Kirov was on the whole an interesting but disillusioning experience. I gained a good understanding of how everything works. I learned that no modernization is possible in an authoritarian country, let alone any particular region of such a country. Young, active, ambitious people arrive wanting to fix everything and get things working, but they are sucked into the swamp of the system. It quickly became obvious that in a corrupt environment you yourself are forced to behave corruptly, even if all you want is to help people. For example, I remember we asked the minister of natural resources for money-not for us, but for our region. The minister said to Belykh, "You know, someone there offended one of my people regarding the timber he wanted. Please help sort this out." Belykh said to me, "Please help sort this out." That is, I was being asked to come up with some dodgy arrangement under which the minister's pal would be given extra timber, and in return the minister would allocate state funds to Kirov Region. I said I wanted nothing to do with it. This was the only way issues could be resolved. Every time you wanted to do something good, you had to do something bad (maybe not for your own benefit, but for someone else's). Before you know it, you find yourself engaging in corrupt behavior from morning to night. And if you are behaving corruptly for the benefit of someone else, why would it not be okay to do a little bit of the same for yourself? The system soon swallows you.