So, about foreign agents

Ok, the number of phone calls from the media suggests it's time to speak out. So, about foreign agents.

I’m afraid of seriously upsetting the authors of the bill, but personally I don’t give a damn about it. I have been called all sorts of names so many times in my life (including by corrupt officials whom we brought to light) that “foreign agent” will be on this list only a comma somewhere after “Xena, Mistress of Evil.” When the legislator (and, as I understand it, we are talking only about “when” and not about “if”) deems it necessary to stamp “fighter against sawing” on my forehead, and stamp “spy” on my passport, well, I’ll hand over my passport and I will go on, whistling “Kalinka”, to do what I believe in.

I just feel incredibly sad for my young colleagues who conduct research, defend victims of corruption in courts, monitor the transparency of procurement, do everything they can to reduce corruption in our country, in our Russia, and instead of saying “thank you” they are insulted and insulted. They call you bad names. Because we, the TI-Russia Center, have never done anything in our lives that is not for the benefit of the Motherland, not for the benefit of us all and our future, we have never done and will not do anything at anyone’s orders, anything that we do not believe in . We just work this way and cannot do otherwise. I will probably need to convene a large meeting of our Board and our team, and if for someone being called an “agent of black forces” turns out to be an excessive offense, I personally will understand and will not be the least bit offended if someone leaves. Because it is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo personally people who this man. And you have to get used to this.

Excessive reporting will not scare us: we are constantly reporting to someone - we undergo an annual audit, send reports to the tax office, to the Ministry of Justice, to our Board, to the international TI (oh, if only you saw our internal reporting forms in TI: in comparison with them, all our local forms are just childish babble! For example, for many years on our website every year we post declarations of conflicts of interest of members of our Board. Do you know many of our state and other bodies that also do this?), and, in the end. , we report to those donors: both external and internal. We are for transparency, and reporting gives us pleasure. ;-)

Can we live without foreign funding? We can. We'll just do less. The same thing, but less. And who will be worse off from this, and who will experience happiness and complete freedom - decide for yourself.

Why is this law needed? As for me, it has nothing to do with any transparency or any right. It seems to me that the problems here are purely psychological: just as parents of children who pee at night sometimes turn a blind eye to their own mistakes and problems and blame everything on Babayka, who lives under the bathtub, whom the child is afraid of for some reason, so we have people in power , who are so afraid to admit that the real reason for the winter-spring public protests are their own actions, their own mistakes, that they are looking for their own personal Babayka, and for some reason we, public organizations, turn out to be them. In fact, such problems need to be solved (by going to a psychotherapist, I can suggest a couple of very good ones - crossed out) by analyzing what exactly the state, the authorities in the country are doing wrong and urgently correcting this matter, but, apparently, this is “not their way” - scary.

In short, all this is sad. While verbally declaring the fight for the image of Russia and the fight for its interests, the authors of the bill are solving some specific, momentary problems, in fact creating that same “negative image” for our country, slowing down the development of civil society, without which (Putin said the other day !) we will not have any sustainable long-term development. And who then is the saboteur and “conqueror of darkness” here? :-)

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