Excerpt from the chapter "My conscience - Alexey Navalny"
The finest hour of the campaign was approaching.
Then it seemed that this was just the first major rally, a great start to a large campaign.
There was no feeling that this would be the first and last breakthrough of the entire campaign.
Volkov was concerned about only one question - the maximum coverage of the Internet that day.
A plan was devised with continuous live coverage from the regions.
The regions of the Far East and Siberia should have provided at least some kind of picture that would motivate residents of the central and western parts of Russia to take to the streets of their cities, saturate both well-known places of meetings with the public, and create them spontaneously.
At some point, just before March 26, Volkov was naturally possessed by some manic passion and belief in a possible coup: they say, the regions will rise first, which will become an unprecedented phenomenon and will make an explosive impression on large cities in the European part of Russia.
Who Volkov represented himself at that time is unknown, but he did not succeed in becoming the new Trotsky.
March 26 was remembered only by the huge number of people detained in Moscow itself.
The very people who went to the rally for the first time, not assuming that this was not an entertainment event "with ducks", as they were told from the blue screens of "Navalny LIVE".
The live broadcast was organized from the FBK premises.
Almost the entire staff of the headquarters had time to visit it: many remained to "help" so as not to simply go to Tverskaya.
Volkov's preoccupation with the ideas of an imminent revolution alarmed many who could witness it with their own eyes.
In the premises of the FBK, a gathering of the "group of Alexei Navalny" was appointed, with which he was supposed to move to Tverskaya.
Stern and unfamiliar guys from Saratov were responsible for the security cover in this group. "..."
****
The day of March 26, 2017 began with arrests.
Rather, they immediately fell like a horn of plenty.
The legal headquarters, which started its work at nine in the morning, was impressed.
It became clear that the day would be incredibly difficult.
The OVD-Info line recorded many arrests in remote regions.
People very much asked for help, regional security officials in some places committed atrocities, treating the detainees as criminal recidivists, apparently because of their inexperience in arresting political activists.
Navalny's team did not care at all about the possible protection of people in the regions.
If in Moscow Zhdanov "mastered" only six lawyers, then in the regions there was a complete disaster.
There were reports of detentions, arrests, searches, premises in the bullpen, confused parents called and asked about their children, many swore.
Somewhere local activists simply disappeared, and they could not be found, then it turned out that they were being interrogated.
Lawyers from the joint headquarters helped everyone on the phone as best they could, but people asked to send them at least someone to defend them, and in few places they managed to do it.
“...” The people whom Navalny encouraged to take part in uncoordinated actions ended up being helped by human rights activists who did not really like him.
I remember the call of one angry mother from Nizhny Tagil, who swore at Navalny.
She said that he had put her child in danger, and now the child was detained, sitting in the juvenile department and did not know what would happen next.
In the characteristic dialect of this woman, genuine rage was felt, if she were next to Navalny at that moment, and the latter would feel bad.
The case of this woman clearly showed: the common people, a meek toiler, or rather his children, joined in the protest.
For the first time in 100 years, there has been a new attempt to drag the common man into the millstones of politics.
Only if 100 years ago they were adults, now, for the most part, ordinary teenagers and yesterday's schoolchildren turned out to be ordinary protestors.
Events in Moscow developed with lightning speed.
The group with Navalny was able to successfully start from the Fund and safely went to Tverskaya.
Many were amazed that they did not try to detain him earlier or on the way to Tverskaya, in the metro.
Navalny managed to be in the heart of the porridge that he brewed.
Kashi, which will rob many of their freedom, will make whole families miserable.
But he hardly thought about it, going to the center of Moscow.
Some special concentration of his face spoke of something else: he was afraid only for himself.
The police began to detain Navalny in one of the lanes near Tverskaya, apparently, thus hoping to do everything quickly and without much resonance.
It turned out the other way around, as our police often do.
The paddy wagon with difficulty squeezed into a narrow alley full of heated people and parked cars.
The chants began.
The police did not stand on ceremony, clubs whistled in the air.
People began to move cars so that the paddy wagon could not pass.
In some places, lying, wrestling, pushing were observed, as a result, Navalny ended up in a paddy wagon, with a couple more unknown then people.
Lyaskin and the force cover group, crumpled but free, moved on.
So absurd for Navalny and tragic for some of those present, who later received criminal sentences, ended his epic on March 26.
Nobody was surprised.
And so it had to happen.
Only one person continued to fly in revolutionary dreams - Leonid Volkov, sitting at the broadcast from the FBK office.
By 17:00 it became clear that an absolute record in Russia for administrative detentions would be set.
People were detained everywhere.
The human resources of the legal headquarters began to run out, about 25 human rights defenders were already involved in various police departments.
Everyone was in the most severe tension.
Frolova and Sergey Sharov-Delone managed to get new defenders somewhere.
The telephone line was torn from calls, and at some point it simply "fell".
Obviously, it was someone's sabotage.
It was a pity for the guys from OVD-Info, they were at the limit of their strength and wanted to help literally everyone.
Around the same time, Maxim Katz began to spread information about his joint headquarters with Open Russia.
This became a serious cause for concern on the part of the members of the Foundation, who were saddened by this circumstance more than a thousand detainees and the trouble with protection in the regions.
An excerpt from the chapter "Cold Summer of the 17th"
After June 12, the volunteers already developed a persistent distrust of the Moscow election headquarters.
We were thoroughly preparing for this day: we worked with the volunteers for a whole week, psychologically preparing them for the "drain" of the agreed site on June 12, knowing that most likely the result would be the transfer of the site from the Sakharov Avenue agreed by the authorities to the unauthorized Tverskaya.
Three groups were staffed: a security, navigation and distribution of propaganda material.
In total, about 100 people were involved in the process, primarily active volunteers who had not previously taken part in Alexei Navalny's campaigns.
These were activists of the new wave who had just discovered opposition politics.
It was they who ended up being deceived.
All their efforts, all the preparation, all the trainings they did - it was all in vain.
It was such a dust in the eyes, an attempt to show some kind of external work against the background of the deepest stagnation of the campaign.
But people felt false.
Many, not being stupid, were extremely disappointed and no longer took any part in the campaign initiatives.
They can certainly be understood.
Leonid Volkov was informed that it would be necessary to think over in detail the tactics of leaving Sakharov Avenue or to prepare people to disrupt the action in advance.
But he believed that that rather dubious story with the refusals of contractors with rather simple technical requirements should have had a positive effect on the public.
First of all, to that part of the “true believers” who no longer saw any political and ideological guidelines, except for Navalny, and did not want to understand the nuances of the campaign at all.
It was they who "ate" the story about the inevitability of transferring the action from Sakharov Avenue.
Those who tried to figure out the problem had many questions, the answers to which they did not receive.
Young people did come to the headquarters, wondering: was it really worth moving from Sakharov to Tverskaya Street?
Why was it necessary to fit into a very dubious history, disrupting the festivities for the reenactors?
Incidentally, this approach was outraged not only by the reenactors themselves, but also by the supporters.
They rightly believed that if we are going to build a "beautiful Russia of the future" and talk about it every day, then we cannot do this with those who have been preparing for their festival for about a year.
And we, in fact, ruined everything for them.
In dealing with the young people who came to the headquarters, the leadership of the campaign demanded to adhere to a tough position, which was that there was no other way out but to transfer.
Society was then played off.
People who came to Tverskaya without political goals, all those who participated in this festival of reenactors, faced activists who came to put forward their political demands.
Many of them did it in a rather unfriendly manner.
This was the same new wave of supporters, ready for more radical protest actions, for the sake of which Navalny decided to act.
But in the end he miscalculated.
The internal sociology of the Moscow headquarters showed that the main active of the supporters did not come out to Tverskaya, everyone was disoriented.
People from Sakharov Avenue left disappointed, and few went from there to Tverskaya.
They never received timely notification after the decision to postpone was made on the evening of June 11.
All information was transmitted to the federal headquarters.
Volkov and Navalny knew very well what opinion about the transfer was formed among supporters, primarily among the moderates and those who, remembering the protests on March 26, did not want to be detained.
Now everyone understood that the tale of the legality of rallies and the absence of consequences had vanished.
The new generation, faced with objective reality, did not want to take any more risks.
Navalny, on the other hand, making a strategic decision to deliberately sabotage Sakharov Avenue, did not rely on sociology or intelligible consultations with people who work “on the ground”.
He relied on his intuition, which, as a policy, had let him down more than once, the last time it was in March.
However, following his interests, Navalny acquired enough clients on March 26, who could now be accompanied to the ECHR.
In short, the carry-over maneuver was strange.
Many then wondered: what caused this transfer, was it really impossible to find a compromise with oneself?
It was also possible to install a simpler screen or put a more compact stage.
Supporters believed that the main thing was to talk and get together without arrest, demonstrating their strength, completely clogging Sakharov Avenue.
People, it seems, did not understand that at that moment they themselves had much more confidence in their own capabilities than Navalny, who saw a sad picture from the regions: a drop in the volume of campaigning, a low increase in volunteers and their low involvement.
Hence the fear that even those radicals who were ready to leave after the failure of March 26 would not come to Sakharov.
* The Anti-Corruption Foundation is included in the register of NPOs performing the functions of a foreign agent, by decision of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation dated 09.10.2019.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.