MG: I want to say once again, I am delighted with this stand by our citizens. And if they again try to intimidate us, they will fail. I am sure of that. Look at how many thousands of people came to Bolotnaya Square!
DM: The mood of the public has changed, don’t you think? The sense of glumness has gone.
MG: Yes, the mood has changed. People are coming out of their despondency. Our time has not been wasted! We have been kicked about for Perestroika, they have tried to break us, called us every name under the sun, but now the link is being re-established with everything we began so altruistically, for which we took such risks. Freedom, personal honesty – the things we wanted.
We did not by any means succeed at everything; we did not see Perestroika through to the end, but today I’m amazed by the main…
DM: The fact that the ‘freedom gene’ can be found in Russian people? It was inserted, and here it has reappeared a generation later?
MG: Absolutely! And that’s that. Now they can’t blame everything on the backwardness of a people who ‘cannot be left to decide anything for themselves, do not know what is good for them, are happy as they are as long as they have vodka…’. That is denigration of our people. I was very struck at Bolotnaya on 10 December by the fact that when these 100,000 people left, they took their rubbish with them. They left the square clean! There were provocateurs attempting to stir up trouble, but they failed. People quickly put them in their place. By the way, that is something to bear in mind for the future! That mischief, possibly on a larger scale, may be repeated.
DM: Do you think there may be plain-clothes troublemakers on Saturday, on 24 December?
MG: I think there may well be provocateurs, because civic activism is something a lot of people do not like.
DM: Will the trouble-making be instigated by the authorities or by the radicals?
MG: Tut-tut! How can you even think such a thing? The authorities provoke trouble? How can you be so ignorant, you, the editor of such a well-known newspaper, a well-informed citizen. You of all people should know that!
DM: Mikhail Sergeyevich, you were the first to say the results of these elections should be annulled. Do you stand by that?
MG: I am still staggered by what I saw and heard. That day and the following night I closely monitored everything that was going on. I heard everything that was being broadcast ‘from both corners’, and saw all that alchemy with the voting and vote-counting.
DM: We passed you a lot of documents too…
MG: That picture our press gave me really shocked me. Russian citizens had their right to vote stolen from them, and at just that moment, a wizard materializes. I refer to Churov, the chairman of the Electoral Commission.
DM: On the Internet he is being called the Churodey.[1]
MG: I can think of a few other names he could be called. He kept repeating, ‘We will be holding the very fairest of elections.’ He seems to have convinced himself of that and tried to get the public at large to believe it. I believe he managed to fool the president.
DM: You mean Churov was the hatchet that laid himself under Dmitry Medvedev’s compass and threw him off course?
MG: You ask such difficult questions!
DM: What is so difficult about it? Medvedev, whom I greatly respect, suddenly turned up in charge of United Russia, and it was United Russia that was having all those votes attributed to it.
MG: I do not believe he knew everything that was going on. He does not yet have enough experience for that. You need to go through a lot, get bumps and bruises, and even wounds, before you understand quite how all that gets done. What was it he said exactly?
DM: He congratulated United Russia on getting over the threshold to be admitted to the Duma.
MG: But in the press he said, ‘I have no comments or doubts about the elections.’ At that point, I think Dmitry Anatolievich did himself no good at all.
DM: I feel sad about that.
MG: So do I. He just needed more time. Now he is in a difficult situation. People are laughing at him. Well, he will just have to learn to put up with that too.
DM: But to come back to your call to annul the election results. Does that still stand? Or is it already unrealistic?
MG: It stands! Even our cleverest friends are saying, ‘No, it’s over, it’s not going to happen.’ But it is not over, because how could a Duma elected that way be allowed to sit for five years during such a historically difficult period? You have to tell the people the truth, because you cannot build a relationship on lies. Solzhenitsyn was absolutely right when he said, ‘You cannot build the future on lies.’ And the question we are facing is precisely about the future: what is going to happen in these coming five years?
DM: Are we or are we not going to build Russia’s future on a lie? Is that how you would formulate the question?
MG: Precisely.
DM: Medvedev has said he is satisfied with the election results. Putin has said the question of annulment is not even being considered, and that it is not decided at protest demonstrations or on the Internet. In that case, who was given the ultimatum from Bolotnaya Square to annul the elections?
MG: The state authorities.
DM: On Echo of Moscow radio and in Novaya Gazeta you said annulment of the election results should be initiated by the authorities, but they have refused. So where do we go from here?
MG: Frankly, I was looking for a way to hand the initiative to them, to let them do it themselves.
DM: But they have refused. The two weeks they were given by Bolotnaya Square have passed. Are you proposing to appeal to them again?
MG: I am not yet making any proposals. We have not reached that point. In the first place, those two weeks between 10 and 24 December have taught us many lessons.
DM: Like what?
MG: About Russia, about the regime, about society. Society is being renewed, it is changing!
DM: Can we take pride in it again?
MG: It has spoken!
DM: I was certainly proud of what I saw at Bolotnaya. What faces! I recognize them: those are our readers! I was so pleased.
MG: That is the first thing. We saw our own country, our own people. And again they were saying, ‘This is no way to live!’, with the people debarred from deciding the country’s future because they are supposedly completely hopeless.
DM: Well, evidently Stanislav Govorukhin thinks this is just the right way to live. He agreed to head the election campaign of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
MG: I can only express regret. I do not just respect him, I consider him a friend. He will have to sort all that out for himself.
DM: Still, what do you think people should do on 24 December? MG: I think the most important thing is to link this with the campaign for the presidency.