Grant Shea

“At the time it was de rigueur among Putin's economic operators to represent themselves as 'effective managers.' In practice, however, it was limited to the facts that they dressed in bespoke Brioni suits, bought up the priciest offices in Russia, and modeled themselves on Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, only it was the state's money they managed rather than their own. Beneath the veneer of effective management was the same bunch of crooks who, given the slightest opportunity to steal, would do so. They were effective only in being able to devise fifteen different ways of cooking the books of a government contract in less than a minute, inventing a dozen fake commercial deals to make everything look proper, and briskly spiriting the loot away to their offshore company.

The top dogs in all these state corporations were totally corrupt, and most of the regular staff were even more outraged by that than I was. It was from whistleblowers that I obtained the information that provided the basis of my first high-profile anti-corruption investigation.

In 2007, VTB began purchasing oil drilling rigs in China and then leasing them to Russian oil producers. The cost of a Chinese drilling rig was $10 million. VTB Leasing, however, paid 50 percent more than that through an intermediary offshore company registered in Cyprus. It seemed an entirely pointless arrangement. What did Cyprus have to do with anything, and why was an intermediary needed? Surprisingly, it turned out that this offshore company was controlled by VTB's top executives, and the price difference went straight into their pockets. They purchased not five, note ten, but thirty of these drilling rigs. It would have been impossible to find customers for so many.

This deal was supposed to remain secret, like dozens of others, but on this occasion things worked out differently. I not only wrote about the business but traveled to Yamal, where, in the middle of a field, I found the orphaned rigs still in gigantic containers and covered in snow. In the summer they rusted in a swamp.

This investigation was very straightforward. You didn't need a degree in economics or to be an expert on oil production to work out what was wrong. I wrote hundreds of complaints, went to court, and even won. In those days that was still possible. I urged all the minority shareholders of VTB to file complaints together with me and demand documents. They did. This lasted for years, with statements to the police, rejections, appeals, lawsuits in Russia and Cyprus. It was a particular pleasure to question Kostin personally on the topic of drilling rights at shareholder meetings. He tried to find excuses, but with a marked lack of success.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

“If you are a Russian bureaucrat, you are required to obey every order, even if it is illegal, and with each passing year this comes to seem more natural. When the Kirovles case was brought against me, Belykh, who knew perfectly well the charges had been fabricated, kept his mouth firmly shut. That was one of the reasons the case was able to proceed to trial.

It is fundamental to Putin's power, however, that the rules can change and at any moment be used against you. Seven years later I turned on the television and was stunned. Nikita was shown being arrested in a Moscow restaurant in the act of accepting a bribe. He got eight years in a strict regime facility and, as I write this, is still in prison.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

“The second important principle was 'normality.' The Kremlin has been trying for years to marginalize our movement and drive it underground, to turn us into a modern equivalent of the Soviet dissidents. I have great respect for those dissidents, who were heroes. But in 2012, no one in their right mind wanted to become a heroic dissident-it's dangerous and it's scary. Everyone just wanted to be normal. And that's exactly what we were-normal people with a normal office life.

Although we were essentially an organization for revolution, with each person taking great risks, from the outside we looked like a bunch of Moscow hipsters. We had a spacious open plan office and a coffee machine, and we played Secret Santa. WE had Twitter and Instagram accounts. Our staff was young, everyone was friends with everyone else, we went on hikes together and threw parties (though in later years I began to notice a curious tendency for everything that was the most fun to begin after I had gone home). The only way we were different from a fancy start-up was that we were battling Putin. Of course that brought with it predictable downers, like having our office bugged.

Although that was disagreeable, it was not particularly scary. Over time, however, the downers became more numerous. the pressure grew year by year, and by 2019 arrests and searches had become part of our daily lives. Our hipster office remained just as hipsterish, only now the riot police sawed through the door with a chain saw, burst in with semiautomatic weapons, made everyone lie on the floor. During one of these raids, fifty members of the staff were relieved of their computers and phones, and all our equipment, documents, and personal belongings were taken. If you managed to hide your phone behind the baseboard molding and your computer in the ceiling tiles-well done. But most often everything was confiscated. The tactic was clear enough: We needed money to replace the equipment, and we would have to ask for donations. The Kremlin was hoping it would gradually become more difficult to raise funds, but after each attack on us we saw a surge in contributions.

What the Anti-Corruption Foundation does is obvious from the name. We are hybrids, somewhere between journalists, lawyers, and political activists. We come across a story involving corruption, examine the documents, collect evidence, and publish it. In the first years, we did so as posts on my blog; later, as videos on YouTube. The most important thing we do, then, is spread the story so millions hear about it.

The number of independent media outlets was falling rapidly, censorship was everywhere, and no major newspaper, let alone television network, was going to publicize our work. What do you do in a situation like that? You tell the story yourself and ask others to help. Post a link on your blog, write something on social media, send the video to your friends, and if nothing else is helping, print out a leaflet and put it up in elevators. 'This is our mayor: His official salary is around $2,000 a month. and here is his apartment in Miami, which is worth $5 million.'

At the end of every investigation I made an appeal: 'Guys we've done our bit. Here's a great, important story, but without your help no one is going to know about it. Send links to your friends. Join your regional group on VKontakte and leave a comment there too. Send it to your grandmother and your parents.' The result was that donors not only gave us money but effectively started working for us themselves and became an important part of our organization.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

“Transneft is the world's largest pipeline company and moves oil all over Russia. Needless to say, it is state owned. In the mid-2000s it undertook the huge project of constructing an oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Any construction project of that size is guaranteed first and foremost to involve a whole lot of embezzlement. Even if it gets completed, such a mega-project will not be finished on time; it will be done shoddily and against regulations; and a large chunk of the budget will be misappropriated. And that is exactly what happened. This was obvious to everyone, including the government, and in 2008 Transneft was audited by the Accounts Chamber, a special auditing department of the state. Scandalously, the results were kept secret at the request of Transneft itself.

I went to great lengths to get my hands on this secret report and finally succeeded. I was appalled. The report's 150 pages drily laid out, with numbers and analysis, the fact that everything that could have been plundered had been. Construction costs had been inflated many times over, fly-by-night offshore companies had been selected as contractors, tenders and bidding had been conducted with wholly incredible irregularities, and the documentation relating to them had been destroyed in order to conceal what had been going on. The report was not the theorizing of experts or posts in a blog on the internet but rather an official report by the Accounts Chamber. The total amount embezzled in the course of the pipeline project was some $4 billion, "1,100 rubles stolen from every adult in Russia,' as I wrote in LiveJournal at the time.

It was a huge scandal. The head of the state corporation at the time was, and to the present day still is, Nikolai Tokarev, an ex-KGB officer and a very close buddy of Putin's who had shared an office with him at the Soviet KGB residency in Dresden. Tokarev, an extremely private person, eventually spoke out. He accused me of being an opportunist and claimed I was "licked by Madeleine Albright's National Democratic Institute." And she, he claimed, virulently hated Russia. I ridiculed their understanding of the world, which had changed not a jot since the days of their youth and the Cold War.

Almost immediately after publication of my investigation, an examination of the Kirovles case began in Kirov Region. It was in fact a reexamination, because I had already been investigated when I was working as Belykh's adviser. The police had unearthed nothing illegal then, and the episode was quickly forgotten. This now was evidently an attempt to prevent my returning to Russia, which was an option I did not for a moment contemplate. For several months I had been some homesick that I was devouring sorrel borscht in my dreams. The four of us packed our bags and flew back to Moscow. A new phase of my life had begun: every time I returned home, I wondered whether I would be arrested at the border.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir