<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Navalny at a rally on December 24, on the cover of Esquire Russia, and leaving jail on December 21.    He branded United Russia &amp;quot;the party of crooks and thieves&amp;quot; and spent two weeks in jail for protesting the December 4 parliamentary elections. On December 25, the day after a second massive protest in Moscow and just days after his release, Alexei Navalny \u2014 blogger, political activist, and self-described &amp;quot;network hamster&amp;quot; \u2014 sat down with the editor of Esquire Russia to talk about his role in the recent protests, the state of national unrest, and the chances of a future without Putin. ESQUIRE: The primary cause of the current protests across Russia were the federal parliamentary elections on December 4. What do you remember most about voting day? ALEXEI NAVALNY: Everybody was nervous and worried, myself probably more than others, because I initiated a campaign against United Russia, the ruling party, under the slogan &amp;quot;Party of Crooks and Thieves.&amp;quot; The slogan appeared by accident \u2014 during a radio show, the host asked me how I felt about United Russia, and I said, &amp;quot;Very bad. United Russia is a party of crooks and thieves.&amp;quot; Later, I announced a poll on my blog \u2014 &amp;quot;Do you consider United Russia to be the Party of Crooks and Thieves?&amp;quot; \u2014 and 97 percent of 40,000 people said &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; and away we go. From the very beginning, it was clear that the election was going to be unjust, but I really wanted to know if one could do any significant damage to United Russia by means of a campaign launched on the Internet. That&amp;#039;s what we did, and our main message was: vote for anyone except the Party of Crooks and Thieves. It seemed way more effective than simply boycotting the election \u2014 just another strategy propagated by the opposition \u2014 because it was in the interest of all the small parties that took part in the vote to join us. Election day came, and some very weird and encouraging news started to come via Twitter: United Russia only got 30 percent of the vote in Vladivostok. (Ed Note: Due to the time difference, the vote there ended seven hours prior to the voting in Moscow.) At first, I didn&amp;#039;t believe it was real \u2014 until people started to upload scans of the voting protocols on the Web. And then it became clear that something was going very wrong for United Russia. It rolled across the country: failure in Irkutsk, failure in the Urals. We were rubbing our hands: Wait till they get to Moscow and St. Petersburg, major oppositional centers! That would be our victory. But then the Moscow results come in, and we saw 70 percent for United Russia on door-to-door voting stations. The fraud was obvious. Immediately you got these YouTube videos that actually showed this fraud. And that&amp;#039;s when people just fell into rage. ESQ: This anger resulted into a rally the next day, December 5, in Moscow. How did you get involved? AN: Initially, I wasn&amp;#039;t going to go to that rally, even though the organizers called me. But the day after the election, it was obvious that everyone must go, everyone must do something. I knew it probably would end bad \u2014 when I left home I even put on a second pair of pants, the one eventually I served time in for the next 15 days. But nobody could ever imagine how many people were going to come. I got involved in political activism in 2000, and I was used to 500 people or so people showing up at rallies \u2014 my own record was gathering 3,000 to 4,000 for a march. When I came out of the subway on Chistoprudny Boulevard, it was dark, and all you could see was people. I barely made my way to the stage.  ESQ: In front of 10,000 people, you got on stage and made a speech, which was most notable for the phrase: &amp;quot;They call us little hamsters from the social networks. Yes, I am a little network hamster! And I&amp;#039;ll gnaw through the throats of these cads!&amp;quot; \u2014 by cads meaning the regime. Where did all this aggression come from? AN: The overall mood at the rally was aggressive. Later, in prison, I understood why. Of the 70 detainees who were arrested after the rally, 80 percent were observers at the elections. They were expelled from their voting stations, they witnessed ballot stuffing and all kinds of fraud, and they came to the rally not to support any oppositional party, association, or person \u2014 they came because they were filled with very personal, furious rage. It was clear that we couldn&amp;#039;t just stand there for a while and leave \u2014 we needed some act of civil disobedience that said: we exist. So some people decided to go to the Central Election Commission building, which was about a mile away. The first couple of cordons were pretty easy to pass \u2014 internal troops, silly little soldiers with their silly shields: you push him, and he either falls down or steps aside. But then came the OMON, special-purpose police units. Those guys are pretty big and well trained, they stand in two rows, and they know how to hit you \u2014 first a real tricky one with a knee, then with their helmet. I got one right on my nose. If you want to break a cordon like that, you must have tenfold the people, which we actually had, but we were too spread-out. So we didn&amp;#039;t get to the CEC building \u2014 they just squeezed us in and packed into buses. ESQ: You got 15 days of arrest for &amp;quot;disobedience to the police.&amp;quot; How did those two weeks go? AN: I can&amp;#039;t say it was a resort, but I do not regret what I did, and I don&amp;#039;t regret I spent those 15 days in custody. At first, I was the only &amp;quot;political&amp;quot; in the cell \u2014 the rest were quite the usual suspects: guys who got into a drunk fight with a policeman, guys who beat their wives. Funnily enough, one of them, quite the alcoholic, actually recognized me and said, &amp;quot;Listen, aren&amp;#039;t you the guy from that debate on state purchase contracts at the Higher School of Economics?&amp;quot; A day later, all the other people who were detained after the rally were brought to the prison, and at one point, of the 18 people in the cell, 16 were &amp;quot;political.&amp;quot; We&amp;#039;d been cut off from any media, so nobody knew anything about the riots in Triumfalnaya Square the next day. (Over 600 people were arrested. \u2014Ed.) Then came the rumors: Something big was going to happen on Bolotnaya Square, tens of thousands of people registering for the event on Facebook and &amp;quot;Vkontakte.&amp;quot; (The largest Russian social network, about 140 million overall users and 25 million daily users. \u2014 Ed.) At first I didn&amp;#039;t think much of it: Yeah, okay, it&amp;#039;s easy to put a &amp;quot;Like&amp;quot; on Facebook, and when I write something in my blog, thousands of people can comment and &amp;quot;Like&amp;quot; it, but that doesn&amp;#039;t mean they are ready to come to a rally. But when we got a radio in our cell, it was obvious that everything was serious. Up to the very end, no one believed that 50,000 people would actually come to Bolotnaya. Come on, we&amp;#039;re all adults, we know how rallies work, plus the cold and everything \u2014 10,000 people tops. So we didn&amp;#039;t even listen to the broadcast that closely. Until it became clear that there was a human sea in Bolotnaya Sqaure. ESQ: Why do you think you were arrested? AN: I do not know. Sometimes it seems that there&amp;#039;s a little crazy screenwriter sitting in the Kremlin, and occasionally, out of nowhere, he decides to enhance one politician or another. In fact, my detention has done me good: People who weren&amp;#039;t too fond of me before now feel sorry for me. The really bad, scary, and absurd thing is happening to Sergei Udaltsov, leader of the Left Front (A socialist opposition party in Russia. \u2014Ed.) The guy was arrested on election day during a small rally, and spent the entire month of December in prison! He went on a hunger strike and could&amp;#039;ve literally died. Now he&amp;#039;s in the hospital, but has to serve another 10 days after he checks out. Everyone&amp;#039;s like, What the fuck is going on?! I am sure it&amp;#039;s because the system is so messed up \u2014 he just got onto some list of extremists so they keep arresting him over and over. But if, God forbid, anything bad happens to Udaltsov now, there&amp;#039;s going to be violence. ESQ: What&amp;#039;s really going on with these protests? AN: It is clear that the present Duma does not represent the citizens of Russia. It is illegitimate. And the same goes for presidential elections, which are scheduled for March 4 and will be just as illegitimate. We need party reform and free procedure for party registration. Then, in six months or even a year, we can have a truly fair vote. There should be a political compromise, and our demands are so simple \u2014 free elections \u2014 that at the moment the negotiations are public. The authorities are trying to handle the situation in a fairly traditional way: They try to cheat, then they say they&amp;#039;ll liberalize the party legislation, but it won&amp;#039;t happen until 2013. That means we have to go out on the street again and again \u2014 100,000 people, a million. Until we have our free and fair elections. ESQ: Despite your popularity, there&amp;#039;s been a feeling at different rallies that this movement doesn&amp;#039;t really need a leader.  AN: Yes, I agree, and I understand perfectly well that these people don&amp;#039;t need a leader. And they will never create one single party. It&amp;#039;s not why they came. The unifying goal is completely different \u2014 they need fair elections. And it&amp;#039;s great! And I&amp;#039;m not the leader of everybody out there \u2014 they just boo me a little less and clap me a little louder. ESQ: Your popularity is primarily related to Internet activities. How did you become a blogger? AN: For a long time, I worked in the &amp;quot;Yabloko&amp;quot; party. (One of the main democratic oppositional parties in Russia. \u2014Ed.) I was responsible for political events, and my goal was to attract journalistic attention to them. At some point, I realized that the media that asked me for political commentary usually had a smaller audience than my own personal blog. So I focused on that and started to blog about corruption, publishing documents and exposing crooks and thieves. Of course, there is television, which pretty much doesn&amp;#039;t notice or mention me, but I developed an attitude: They ignore me, I ignore them. People who really want my information will read my blog anyway. The only reason my blog exists is censorship in the media, and if there wasn&amp;#039;t any, lots and lots of ordinary journalists would write about the stuff I write about, and my blog just wouldn&amp;#039;t be interesting to anyone. That&amp;#039;s generally one of the major differences of Russian blogs from European and American ones. ESQ: How much do you think the Internet influenced the December protests? AN: I think about 40 percent of people came to protest mainly because of the Internet. The past year, year and a half was very important in this respect: broadband became cheaper, mobile Internet spread dramatically. And this quantity transformed to quality. The Internet has become a true information infrastructure in big cities \u2014 and can now even challenge TV. Social networks gave us some very much needed infrastructure, and different services are useful in very different ways. LiveJournal (The main blogging platform in Russia. \u2014Ed.) was good for informational, more detailed posts. Facebook has more multimedia features \u2014 likes, links, posters, videos, events, where you can see if your friends are going to this and that rally or not. Smartphones and Twitter hook people up to news 24/7. And for some things even I, a 35-year-old, am too old \u2014 for instance, I made a big mistake when I didn&amp;#039;t run the campaign against crooks and thieves in Vkontakte: I simply don&amp;#039;t understand how this social network works, unlike my employees at &amp;quot;Rospil.&amp;quot; (A noncommercial anti-corruption project founded by Navalny this year that raised over $250,000 from Internet users. \u2014Ed.) But the people didn&amp;#039;t go out on the streets because of Facebook or LiveJournal \u2014 it&amp;#039;s because they were angry. If it wasn&amp;#039;t for this informational infrastructure, they&amp;#039;d go anyway, but it would be harder for them to coordinate their efforts, and because of that the protest would probably break out in a more aggressive way. Now, since everything is easier to organize, the protests are more peaceful. ESQ: Why do you think the protest movement is so vast? Nothing of the kind happened in Russia since the early 1990s. AN: A variety of reasons. First of all, everybody is really tired of Putin. We&amp;#039;ve had bold election fraud before \u2014 for instance, during the Moscow City Duma campaign in 2009. But at that moment the protest came down to a struggle between the parties, and virtually no one came out on the street. This time everybody joined forces against Vladimir Putin&amp;#039;s United Russia. That was the essence of my &amp;quot;Crooks and Thieves&amp;quot; campaign \u2014 to go and vote for any party except the &amp;quot;Party of Crooks and Thieves&amp;quot;. And then there was the Putin-Medvedev switch in September \u2014 when it was official that Medvedev wasn&amp;#039;t running for a second term and Putin was going to be president again. After that, a lot of middle class people \u2014 thinking but cautious people who were loyal to Medvedev, who hoped for modernization and evolutionary change within the system \u2014 these people turned away from the regime. Remember: The worst enemy is always a former ally. One of the most popular bloggers in Russia \u2014 Rustem Adagamov \u2014 kept saying he didn&amp;#039;t believe in revolution from outside the regime and that we needed a peaceful transition of power to Medvedev. Now he is one of the most aggressive critics of the system. And the same thing happened, for example, to &amp;quot;Vedomosti&amp;quot; (One of the two most influential business newspapers in Russia, published with The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. \u2014Ed.) All these people felt that the door was slammed right in their face \u2014 or rather that the door actually didn&amp;#039;t lead anywhere, there was always a wall behind it. The protest movement grew drastically \u2014 and these are people who have the capacities to spread information, go out on the street, and do something. -- FROM THE ESQUIRE ARCHIVE: C.J. Chivers on Putin&amp;#039;s Power PLUS: Follow The Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce on RSS and on Twitter "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a12220/alexei-navalny-interview-6628420/>