Russian political activist a thorn in Putin’s side
Russia’s main opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, talks to Christian Esch and Christian Neef about President Vladimir Putin’s plans for the country and the new generation of political activists
RUSSIA’S best-known opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, 40, called for nationwide protests against corruption last month and tens of thousands took to the streets.
He was detained for 15 days and released on April 10.
The next day Der Spiegel interviewed him at the offices of his Anti-corruption Foundation in Moscow.
He has called for further national protests on June 12.
You’ve just been released from jail. What was it like?
You have to imagine jail like a dirty dormitory where you don’t do anything except sleep and read. We were four people to a cell.one of them had a fight with a neighbour, another had insulted a police officer. No other political prisoners in the cell. They are carefully separated from one another, even during yard exercise.
Did you talk to the other
prisoners about politics?
For days. All of them had heard of me, all of them wanted to talk. Even the police officers with whom I sat in the bus after my arrest had seen my film about Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. They asked what everyone always asks: Why I haven’t been killed, and why I haven’t been put in prison yet.
A huge number of young people took part in the protests. Many people thought this generation was apolitical.
That didn’t surprise me at all. First, I had seen earlier on Vkontakte, a kind of Russian Facebook, how young the people were who wanted to come to the demonstrations. And second, it was clear to me that the political pressure on high school and college students was having the opposite effect. In Bryansk, secondary students were warned not to take part in the protests. A discussion about it with a school director was recorded and watched millions of times. Since the 1990s, Russia has lacked the kind of student movement that existed in Eastern and Western Europe. The last time there was a movement like that here was during the Czarist era.
Why did these young people take to the streets?
Poverty! That, at least, is an important factor. The living standard here has been deteriorating for the past five years. You don’t notice that in Moscow so much.in Tomsk, I asked young people how many of them earn less than 20 000 rubles (R4 687) a month. All of us, they answered. And that is in a university city that used to live off oil! People often say that I represent people who earn a lot of money. Of course, a person who is well-educated and affluent is more likely to support me than Vladimir Putin. But that doesn’t mean that the others are against me. What distinguishes these
protesters from those who
demonstrated against the fraudulent 2011 parliamentary election?
The main difference is geographical: now demonstrations are taking place in locations where they never did before, in Dagestan, in Tatarstan and in Bashkiria.social media, which has become our last remaining way of communicating with one another and of articulating our criticism, has a younger audience, that is all.
Your film about Medvedev’s alleged wealth was viewed on Youtube 18 million times. He has described it as
“nonsense” and compared
it to a “compote” stewed together with various and
sundry accusations.
What a pathetic response. He waited one month and all he could come up with was the word “compote”!
Will the allegations have
consequences for Medvedev?
His political prospects have now been damaged. He supposedly got drunk for a week right afterwards and he looked like it, too.
Medvedev has not sued you, but billionaire Alisher Usmanov, whom you accuse of having given Medvedev a residence valued at 5 billion rubles, now intends to.
Usmanov is not doing so of his own accord. Obviously, someone asked him to sue me.
Officially, the Kremlin acts as though it is fighting corruption, with five governors having been arrested, the
fifth just recently.
The governors are being arrested to steal some of my thunder. Besides, Putin needs to terrorise his own elite. He is more afraid of those in his own surroundings than any protests; there are people there who are at least as critical as I am because they see up close that the system doesn’t work. He wants to silence them.
Will Putin run again in the
2018 election?
Of course! Putin wants to be the tsar of this new Russian empire he is rebuilding. I think he is obsessed with the idea.
Will you be allowed to run?
We want to force them to register me, like we did during the 2013 Moscow mayoral race. Back then we threatened a boycott. And then the Kremlin decided it was better to let me participate – he’ll get 8-9% of the votes at most.
Instead you won 27% of the votes, and it almost led to a
run-off.
As a result, as far as I know, the people who are against my candidacy now have the upper hand in the Kremlin. They say: We already made that mistake once. For 17 years, elections in Russia have followed the same pattern: Nobody criticises Putin, nobody runs a real election campaign, the whole process takes place quietly over a period of two months. The Kremlin blocks every alternative to Putin. Your proposals aren’t particularly concrete. How
do you intend to finance
everything?
Russia spends enormous, senseless amounts of money on the army and police. We have one of the top rankings in the world when it comes to the number of police officers – but when it comes to the number of murders, we are also right at the top. Besides, almost 30% of the budget is secret. Nobody knows what happens to this money.during public tendering, 1500 billion rubles are stolen every year. The fight against corruption would free up a considerable sum.
Why did the protests of
There is no 2011-2012 fail? recipe for toppling the regime in a couple of months. That is a historical process that we cannot steer. About 1 500 people participated in my most successful protest in 2010. Today, a rally with fewer than 30000 people is considered a failure. Something has developed despite all the setbacks. But the most important reason for the failure was the violent crushing of the protests. If we compare the regime of 2012 with this one, it feels like we are talking about two different countries. We now live in a country with a thousand political prisoners, a country where each week there are new trials, where people are put in jail because they liked something on the Internet.
Some of the people who took part in the May 2012 protest on Bolotnaya Square are still incarcerated yet you still called for an unauthorised protest last month. Can you
justify that?
I am aware that I bear responsibility – for my brother, who is in jail, and for the prisoners from May 2012. It is not a pleasant thought. Nevertheless, newspapers reported about my brother on their front pages. If some blogger in a rural area is arrested today, then no journalists, lawyers or human rights activists visit them, because now there are too many cases like that. If we want to prevent that, we need to keep fighting for political change.
Many wonder why you are still able to walk free in a such a repressive system and even lead expensive
election campaigns. Who finances you?
We are open about everything. My Anti-corruption Foundation is well-funded by Russian standards, with an annual budget equivalent to €750000. But the average individual donation is only about €11.50.
Based on your income tax return, you have a solid personal income. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Russian government to pay you €50 000 in damages.
about
Where did the remaining €90
000 come from?
That’s income from my law firm. My licence to practice law was revoked, but a few clients have stuck with me. . But those who continue to retain me do so because they also support me.
Do you fear you are being
used?
Nobody uses me. But, of course, my work is used. If I attack Igor Sechin. the head of the state oil company and an opponent of Medvedev, then that helps someone else. And when I attack Medvedev, there are loads of people who think that’s great. Maybe Putin wanted to fire Medvedev a month ago, but how is he supposed to do that after my film? In an opaque system, everything can be used somehow. I can’t change that.
While you were in jail, Russia and the US embarked on a collision course over Syria. What do you think of
Putin’s Syria policy?
Russia should join the international coalition against Islamic State. It is absurd that we are intervening on the side of the Shia in a war between Sunnis and Shia even though almost all Russian Muslims are Sunnis. Putin is creating big problems for us in his attempt to help Bashar al-assad.
But it did look as though Putin had found a supporter of his Syria policies in Donald
Trump.
After Trump’s election victory, I explained in a video why there would be no friendship with Trump. The contradictions between the systems are too great. And Putin needs an enemy. He wants to be the leader of the anti-american, anti-european world.
In Angela Merkel, he at least has one opponent left. What should Russia’s approach to those EU sanctions
be?
We should fulfil the Minsk Protocol. The main reason for the sanctions is that Russia broke a taboo: it triggered a war in Europe. Crimea is a problem, but the most painful part of the sanctions is tied to the war in the Donbas. As soon as Russia takes real steps to prevent shots from being fired there, this part of the sanctions will be lifted.
You are the best-known face of the opposition; younger, fellow campaigners look up to you. Does this role sometimes go to your head?
I encourage my colleagues to run for office. But it has become difficult in this system to become a prominent opposition politician. I no longer have any rivals to have a debate with. I need competition. And the people will soon tire of me. They say: Navalny, It’s always just Navalny. We want to see someone new. – Der Spiegel