The organizing committee is no longer needed

After the rally on Pushkin Square, Alexei Navalny found himself in the fountain with Sergei Udaltsov. This did not look like a conscious step, but Navalny decided not to retreat and supported his colleagues in the coalition “For Fair Elections.”

In an interview with Lenta.ru , Navalny explained why a “remake of Chistye Prudy” was impossible on that day, and predicted that the mobile phone would destroy the Putin regime.

"Lenta.ru": The rally on March 5 on Pushkinskaya was already very different from the December ones in terms of atmosphere.

Alexey Navalny: He shouldn’t have looked like that. What happened at Pushka should, in principle, repeat what happened on December 5 at Chistye Prudy. We understood that there would be huge falsifications, that we would have heaps of angry observers, that all these people would want to immediately come somewhere. And I was one of those who insisted that there should be a rally on the 5th. Many did not agree with this, but somehow decided to carry it out. Only I was categorically against it being Pushkinskaya Square. It's a strange situation there. Everyone said a hundred times that we would still go to Lubyanka, we held several votes, but for some reason we agreed on Pushkinskaya. For a weekday, I think there were a lot of people there.

Udaltsov actually tried to set up a tent there?

There was no tent. He promised that there would be a tent, but he came without it. That evening it was already clear that no remake of Chistye Prudy was working out. There are some unprecedented military forces in the Tverskaya area, everything is fenced off, and it’s impossible to go anywhere. And then Udaltsov suggested: since there is nowhere to go, let’s stay. Almost everyone who spoke left. Udaltsov is standing, everyone around is shouting: “Navalny, come on!” Well, I did, I’m standing knee-deep in the snow, surrounded by riot police. So it goes.

If rallies similar to those in December take place in May, will the organizing committee remain?

I would say there is a consensus that the organizing committee is no longer needed. In its original form it is definitely not needed. For some this is an important tool. They want to be the faces of rallies, go to negotiations at the mayor’s office, because this is an important thing for them. I have no desire to go there and coordinate anything there. There were too many compromise agreements that few people liked.

In general, I didn’t have the feeling that we would stand still until March, hold a rally, and the government would change. Many people probably had this feeling after the first rally, when Medvedev made his proposals for political reform. They completely canceled everything that they had been building there for ten years, their bullshit. This reform is a hoax, of course, but it became clear that they were scared. But after Sakharov, it became clear that the authorities would regroup and somehow protect themselves. Someone wrote the right article that maybe we relaxed after December 10 and 24, but they, on the contrary, pulled themselves together and worked specifically all this time. They did all these Nizhny Tagils, kicked out the senseless Surkov and took the much more effective Volodin , who showed that frontal propaganda works better. They pulled themselves together and built a defense system. In principle, we could not answer them, because the organizers of the rallies adhere to different political views.

We need to do what we did before, only taking into account the new political realities and bring it all to some new qualitative levels. And after Putin really gained his percentage... I'm sure he didn't win any of the first rounds, but overall their "if not Putin, then the war" thing worked. Need to work. Our opposition has never worked; people only hold press conferences. No one understands what they do between press conferences. We need to create real working structures that do something and talk about it.

Where we are campaigning, it is clear that both Putin and United Russia are sagging . Where there is no work, they have a real 60 percent. Therefore, the task is, on the one hand, to maintain some kind of street activity, but also to carry out meaningful long-term work. Time works for us, technology works for us. The mobile phone will, in fact, destroy the Putin regime. But here you need to work very hard.

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Dreamers.

History of protest: from Chistye Prudy to New Arbat