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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.
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