Putin Scary Quotes

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.

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.

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.