What I’ve Learned: Alexei Navalny. Esquire Russia 2011 interview, resurrected and republished

As children, we all fought until we bled. Fighting someone until blood was drawn meant winning.

I barely noticed the war in Afghanistan. For those of us who lived in military towns, people who returned from Afghanistan were not returning from war, but rather from a trip abroad. We didn’t see the dead. We saw the ones bringing back Sharp double-deck boomboxes or, if they were senior officers, VCRs and flat-screen TVs. There was a boy in my class whose father served in Afghanistan as an advisor—we used to visit his apartment as if it were a museum.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was, and remains, my hero.

Kids of servicemen don’t have childhood friends. Because they are constantly on the move.

My nunchucks weren’t like everyone else’s. They weren’t just stool legs connected by a bathroom chain. Mine were advanced. After all, my mother worked in a woodworking factory.

At school, only the older kids could beat me up.

I saw my first roadblocks in the USSR. Back in 1986, we lived near Obninsk, a nuclear city. When the Chernobyl accident happened, men with dosimeters stood at the entrance to Obninsk, measuring radiation on car tires. They were catching those fleeing Chernobyl.

My father is from near Chernobyl, and every summer I spent time with my grandmother in the village of Zalesye, a couple of kilometers from the city. Had the accident happened in June, I would have been there. To prevent panic, all the collective farmers—our relatives included—were sent to dig potatoes in the radioactive dust. Only later were they resettled. It was a truly universal catastrophe, in which my family and I were victims. I was there last year. I went into my grandmother’s house. On the floor lay a coat my brothers had all worn, and photographs of me running around in that coat during the summer. Almost everything else had been looted, but no one needs things like that.

My most vivid childhood memory is the Uzh River, which flows into the Pripyat [in Chernobyl]: the high cliffs and the swallows’ nests. I keep trying to reach this swallow, sticking my hand in, but I can’t quite get it.

I like hunting, but I’m more of a theoretical hunter. In my entire life, I’ve only killed a black grouse and a woodcock. My wife still hasn’t forgiven me for that woodcock. When I brought it home, she said, “Pluck it yourself.” But we were just leaving for vacation, so we tossed the woodcock in the freezer. While we were away, the power went out. Long story short, we had to throw out the refrigerator

What I liked most was sitting in a blind. You blend into a haystack, sit, and wait for the grouse. You sit for an hour, two hours, and it still doesn’t fly by. You can’t move, you can’t breathe loudly, your legs go numb. But you sit in absolute silence and think about something pleasant.

Real hunters, the ones I’ve met, beat anyone from Greenpeace by a mile. I've never met anyone more green or more focused on the environment. They’re just obsessed with the idea of “population growth” because the hunt depends on it. But I’m talking about real hunters. Those who shoot mountain sheep from helicopters are thugs. They pretend to be someone between a maharaja and a Russian imperial officer.

Hunting has become an essential attribute of power. It’s the perfect way to resolve issues and cut deals while no one is watching. Bureaucratic escapism.

With age, I was surprised to realize that I had begun to like our disgusting weather—the weather in central Russia.

Emigration is a matter of responsibility. Some believe they owe it to their children to leave, so they can have a better life. But I think my responsibility is to make my children want to stay here.

For some reason, I like the idea of one of my kids becoming an architect.

My daughter tells everyone her dad fights crooks. Even at school, she shouts that Putin is a crook. My wife scolds her. She thinks it creates problems for us. But my daughter likes the idea that her dad is a fighter. I don’t think she’s capable of understanding right now whether dad is Robin Hood or not. But she’s nine; to her, dad can’t be fighting against something good by definition.

I don’t think toy guns make children violent. Kids love to play war. If a child has a toy nuclear bomb, it’s unlikely they’ll want to use a real one when they grow up.

I put my kids in the corner. But the most effective punishment is forbidding TV.

My best friend is my wife. I often tell her, “Lying on the couch and eating isn’t the same if you aren’t there to see it.” That’s the most popular Simpsons quote in our family.

My children love The Simpsons and Futurama. I think cartoons and TV help develop vocabulary. And to understand American politics, it’s much more useful to watch South Park than a US news channel.

My blog exists only because there is censorship in the media.

Some say I work for Sechin and trash Gazprom at his behest. Radical nationalists say that I work for the Jews: like, the Jews found a blue-eyed guy and put him out front. When I went to study at Yale, the popular theory was that I worked for the Americans. And the head of Transneft, Tokarev, even said I carry out orders from McCain. I really can’t understand that one: why McCain? Why not Sarah Palin?

There are so many mills in Russia. No matter what you do, you’re always grist for someone’s mill.

There isn’t that much stealing in Russia. For every ruble stolen, five are pissed away.

Right now, Russia is richer and more free than ever before in its history. The massive amount of money flooding the country gives us a chance for grandiose change, but it seems that chance will not be seized.

Russia’s main problem is that the state has turned into a mafia. I mean that in the Italian sense of the word: everyone is bound to everyone else. The only difference is that in Moscow, there is no single place where they all meet.

Revolution is inevitable. Simply because most people understand that this system is wrong. In any gathering of bureaucrats, most of the conversation is about who stole what, why nothing works, and how terrible everything is.

Change will start with an event that you can’t organize artificially. In Tunisia, it all started after a man set himself on fire in the square. Several months before that, a well-known Tunisian opposition figure came to visit us at Yale. “You’re so lucky in Russia,” he said. “You have free internet, Twitter. Here, all of that has been stifled along with the opposition.” He showed me videos of Tunisian protests: ten people in white T-shirts going to sit in a café. Thirty foreign journalists would visit the café, and then the police would arrest everyone. That was it! Last December [2010], they were planning to move to Paris to continue the struggle from there. Suddenly, a month later, he’s a minister. And this despite Tunisia having a consolidated elite, a population living better than its neighbors, and crooks who supported Ben Ali because they could live luxuriously on the French Riviera. And it all fell apart in a month. Just because some merchant burned himself to death in a small town.

Everyone is ready to live honestly. Look at Georgia. If 20 people at the very top start following the rules, they will force everyone else to follow them too.

I would forgive Putin a lot if he were the Russian Lee Kuan Yew. Yes, he would have established a totalitarian policy, but he also would have cracked down on the crooks. However, Putin cannot become a Russian Lee Kuan Yew. He cannot even become a Russian Lukashenka.

I would love to know how sincerely Putin believes in all this. How sincerely he believes that the system he has created will last. Especially when he saw the footage of Gaddafi’s execution. After all, he was a tough guy too.

I’m the leader of hipsters? Not sure about that. I’m more like a guy from Maryino who, incidentally, likes wearing a coat with sneakers. But I won’t wear hipster glasses, and I’ll happily drink beer in places where hipsters would wrinkle their noses and say, “Yuck.”

I have very long arms. Buying a jacket is a real pain.

The best vacation is to get away, hide, and speak to no one. But after a day or two, I start to miss people. 

I don’t like museums. I just like walking around.

I remember my first shawarma well. It was a mega shawarma. I was studying at the Peoples’ Friendship University, and there, in the 7th block of the dorms where the Lebanese lived, I tried it for the first time. In fact, I think I’ve eaten more shawarma than all of you combined.

Family legend has it that I know how to bake apple pie. In reality, I’ve only made it once. Many people find this process interesting: cooking something and then eating it. But I never understood the appeal.

I prefer to ignore the things I can’t control.

Until recently, I didn’t dream at all.

Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a UFO. But I would be very disappointed if there were no other life forms in the Universe besides us.

There are listening devices in our office, I’m 100% sure of that. All the companies I’ve sued have security services—huge groups of idle people. Former FSB colonels with nothing to do, always happy for a project to occupy them.

I’ve never received threats. No one even slashed my tires.

No matter how much I call all these people thieves and crooks, they are in no hurry to press charges. For the simple reason that they really are crooks, and they know it.

When I went to court with Gunvor, everyone told me that I would end up in prison. My wife even had a slip of paper with phone numbers to call in case something happened. But I don’t think you can ever be 100% prepared for prison.

I feel more connected to Magnitsky than Khodorkovsky. Because he was not an oligarch, and he was not a politician. He was a lawyer, an accountant, and an auditor who did not claim anything, but simply did what he thought was right. I’m digging into papers, and he was digging into papers. But then he was tortured in prison for those papers, and I felt partly to blame. At that moment, we all nodded and said, “Well, everyone does time; he’ll do his time too. He’ll sit for a bit and get out.” But he didn’t get out.

I’ve heard this question a million times in interviews with people: “What is the first thing you’ll do when you come to power?” But I don’t have an answer. I haven’t figured it out yet.

There’s a sticker on the back window of my car that says, “United Russia is a party of crooks and thieves.” It’s a great restraint. With that on your car, you can’t be rude on the road. Because everyone will say, “Oh, it’s that Navalny guy.”

People rarely recognize me on the subway.

I hate audiobooks because they’re slow. I read quickly; in the time it takes them to read one page, I could read three.

Putin definitely has a sense of humor. A person who manages to usurp power in a country of 140 million people must have high intellectual abilities, which necessarily come with a sense of humor.

I don’t have a clear answer as to why I’m still alive.

I hope that in the future, Russia will resemble a large, irrational, metaphysical Canada.

I have no idea who Guy Fawkes is.

Grouse tastes like regular chicken.

From Esquire Russia, issue No. 72, December 2011.