The Anti-Corruption Fund * by Alexey Navalny received the accrual of a foreign agent, and at the same time, another news feed scattered across social networks and the media. It's funny that just the other day, Ukrainian blogger Anatoly Shary said that he did not find confirmation of FBK's foreign financing, but it turned out that he was just looking poorly.
I think that Aleksey should be satisfied, because he successfully completed the next level of the game “Among his strangers, a stranger among his own,” into which he turned his political career. If you remember, Navalny began his opposition work with the greenmail, a well-known way to paralyze the work of this or that structure with endless requests. That is, not from repairing or creating something constructive, but from trying to break someone else's work. In public politics, it happens: you don’t represent anything, then you powder your brains to the voters and find yourself in an office where you can still not imagine anything.
Now Alexey is an official foreigner. This means that there, outside the borders of our homeland, he will be met by slightly warmer palms of adherents of democracy and freedom of speech. Employees of American institutions specializing in Eastern Europe will smile at him even wider, and his daughter will graduate with honors from Stanford and write more than one column in freedom-loving American newspapers.
America's voice came immediately. Former US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy and Human Rights David Kramer called FBK's work stunning and demands that this decision be condemned at the broadest international level. Rachel Danber, deputy director of the Russian and Central Asian programs of the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, is surprised that she has not been granted status before, however, and she turns a blind eye to foreign money and considers this a political pressure on the fund.
FBK General Director Ivan Zhdanov and spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh deny receiving money from abroad, but the Ministry of Justice has already published foreign sources of financing, so this is more an inertia of indignation than a thorough refutation of the facts. If the owner of an American company is a native of Russia, then money came from Spain from a certain Roberto Fabio Monda Cardenas. If the Spaniard has the right to finance any NPO, the FBK has the right to take this money and use it for the same appeals to go for uncoordinated shares, then why the Ministry of Justice is not entitled to assign the status to a foreign agent working in Russia?
An unsystematic policy is doomed to be a policy without principles.
Lenin did not shun German money, and now Navalny is ready to be friends even with the devil, if only once again to destroy to the ground, and then ...
Of course, one could proudly refuse Spanish and American money (tell me more about bitcoins), but this is the status of a foreign agent, which causes inconvenience in work, and in Europe, beloved by Alexei, it’s just status, honor and respect.
Of course, until FBK decides to fight corruption in the Old World or the USA. Then the smiles will instantly disappear there, and the justice authorities will immediately give Navalny their own status as a foreign agent, and it suddenly turns out that dust can be swallowed indefinitely in the most free corners of the globe. It turns out that studying at an American university is very difficult and expensive, and emigration is uncomfortable. Recall at least Makhno.
I have no doubt that this will not happen. Aleksey Navalny’s whole life will pass in a desperate struggle against everything bad, naive people will still sit here for him, he will continue to publish investigations ordered and paid by third parties, and then he will write the memoirs “My Struggle”, which will be published by YMCA-Press .
In the yard 2019 year. Everything is going according to plan, isn't it, Alexey?
* The Anti-Corruption Fund is included in the register of NGOs performing the functions of a foreign agent, by decision of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation of 09.10.2019.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.