Leonid Volkov: Protests on the streets of Russia
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2021
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is the most resilient opponent Vladimir Putin has ever faced. Navalny survived assassination by Novichok, returned to Russia and is now in a prison cell. Stephen Sackur speaks to Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov. The opposition movement has supporters willing to take to the streets in anti-Putin protests in Russian towns and cities; but do they have a strategy capable of forcing Putin out of power?
(Photo: Leonid Volkov appears via video link on Hardtalk)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:04.6 | My guest today is involved in a political struggle which carries with it a very obvious personal risk. |
| 0:12.0 | Leonid Volkov is chief of staff and a key advisor to the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. |
| 0:23.6 | Last year, Mr. Navalny survived an assassination attempt involving nerve agent, and after emergency medical treatment in Germany, |
| 0:29.5 | he returned to Russia in January. He was immediately arrested and jailed. Mr. Volkov and other |
| 0:36.4 | allies of Mr. Navalny responded by encouraging supporters |
| 0:40.3 | across Russia to take to the streets in protest. On January the 23rd, demonstrations took place in more |
| 0:47.3 | than 100 towns and cities across the country. Heavy-handed policing saw more than 3,000 people, |
| 0:56.7 | including Mr. Navalny's wife, arrested. |
| 1:03.4 | All of this suggests the battle lines are being drawn up for a significant political confrontation. |
| 1:11.6 | Mr. Navalny is proving to be the most formidable opponent Vladimir Putin has faced in his two decades in power. |
| 1:17.8 | But does the opposition have a viable strategy for turning anger on the streets into a movement capable of loosening Putin's grip on power? |
| 1:21.4 | Leonid Volkov in Lithuania. Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:24.8 | We need to begin, I think, by establishing what kind of contact you have with Alexei Navalny right now. Do you have any means of contacting him? |
| 1:35.1 | Now the only way to contact him is that his lawyers, not even the relatives, but the lawyers are allowed to visit him two, three times a week, |
| 1:45.8 | and they don't enjoy privacy during those visits. |
| 1:49.4 | So it's like supervised contacts, but still we managed at least to pass some basic information |
| 1:55.5 | about what's going on. |
| 1:56.9 | But to tell us that Alex is now orchestrating the protest from his cell is a little bit too much. |
| 2:03.7 | He actually isn't able to do it. |
| 2:06.4 | But his political structure, the structure he has built that I'm now managing is capable of, at least for some time, of keeping pace of running forward along with the directions. |
| 2:22.2 | We discussed with him when he left Berlin for Moscow a week ago. |
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