PART I
ON THE VERGE OF DEATH
1
Dying didn’t really hurt. If I hadn’t been breathing my last breath, I would never have stretched out on the floor next to the plane’s toilet. As you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly clean.
I was flying from Moscow to Tomsk, in Siberia, and I felt very good. Within two weeks there would be regional elections in several Siberian cities, and my colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FAC) and I were very determined to inflict a defeat on the United Russia party, which was in government. This would send an important message that Vladimir Putin, even after twenty years in power, was not omnipotent, nor did he even particularly like that part of Russia – despite the fact that a large number of people in that region saw commentators praising the nation’s leader on television twenty and four hours a day.
For several years I had been barred from running for office. The State did not recognize the political party I led and recently refused to register it, for the ninth time in eight years. Somehow, we were never able to “fill out the forms correctly”. On those very rare occasions when any or all of our candidates managed to register their name on the ballots, the most far-fetched pretexts were found to deny them eligibility. The challenge faced by our network – which at its peak had eight regional delegations, being one of the largest in the country and being under constant attack from the State – therefore required a schizophrenic capacity to win elections from which we were banned.
In our authoritarian country, where for more than two decades the Government made it its priority to instill in the electorate a belief that they were powerless and could not change anything, it was not easy to convince people to leave their homes to go and vote. On the other hand, however, their income had been declining for seven consecutive years. If even a third of those who were fed up with the regime could be brought to the voting booth, none of Putin’s candidates would have a chance. But how do you get people to vote? By persuasion? Offering rewards? We chose the option of making people really angry.
In recent years, my colleagues and I had been filming an endless soap opera about corruption in Russia. Recently, almost every episode had reached between three and five million views on YouTube. Given the realities in Russia, from the beginning we turned our backs on the cautious journalistic approach with endless qualifiers – “alleged”, “possible”, “supposed” – that is so beloved by legal advisors. We call the thief “thief”, corruption “corruption”. If someone had a huge property, we not only indicated its existence, but filmed it with drones and showed the property in all its magnificence. And we learn its value by comparing it with the modest income officially declared by its bureaucrat owner.
You can theorize all you want about corruption, but I preferred a more direct approach – like studying the wedding photographs of the president’s press secretary and, when he kisses his bride, focusing on the spectacular clock that lurks beneath. the sleeve of your shirt. We obtained certification from a Swiss supplier that the watch cost $620,000, and exposed this to the citizens of our country, where one person in five lives below the poverty line – $160 a month, which could more fairly be described as the threshold of indigence. Having sufficiently irritated our viewers with the brazenness of the corrupt officials, we then pointed out to them a site where is the list of those who should vote for in their region if they do not want to continue supporting the luxurious life of their bureaucrats.
It worked.
Source: expresso.pt
