Caterina Innocente: Are you often asked why you want to protect Khimki forest, and what you are getting out of it?

Evgenya Chirikova: Yes, I’m asked this all the time. Why do I protect it? Because it’s only natural! The unnatural thing is to not protect it! Love of one’s country gives a person strength. My country is a part of me, and so is the environment I’m surrounded by. How could I possibly destroy a part of myself? The view from my window depends on me and on those close to me. I am trying to accomplish all this so that the things surrounding me can depend on me and not on the people to whom this issue seems distant and foreign, people who are indifferent to the view from my window. I want to give my children something more than a road to the supermarket. This land and this nature are a part of my cultural inheritance, a part of my history. My country’s history has already been trampled upon, so let me at least pass nature onto my children! The memories have already been crushed.

C.I.: Historic memory?

Yes. For example, I don’t even know the history of my own family to the extent that I should. In my family there were White Army guardsmen who were shot. This was concealed so we wouldn’t be affected by the repressions. The result is that I cannot track my roots very far, and in this lies a tragedy: I cannot tell my children about our family tree. It turns out that the connection to our land is the only thing I have left. And to nature that surrounds me. In order to have harmony in my life and my family, we have to, we must, protect nature. For me this is not simply a question of health and the environment. It’s a question of cultural inheritance.

C.I.: How would you describe the most common attitude of Russians towards their own country?

E.C.: First of all, most Russians have a very specific attitude toward themselves, one that is quite wrong and insecure. And this is why our attitude towards our country is also incorrect. We don’t love our smaller homeland, meaning the place we were born, grew up and now live. We allow it to be spoiled, to be built up with structures we don’t like, to have its nature destroyed. This is very bad. And this all happens because ingrained in the Russian mentality is a deep insecurity. It is absolutely clear that we consider ourselves lesser people in comparison to Europeans and Americans. This is why our consciousness is periodically skewed.

C.I.: In what way does it become skewed?

E.C.: For example, in our attitude towards other people. Like towards people of the Caucasus region. Nationalism, it’s there because of our insecurities. This is a big tragedy for Russia. I am convinced that Russia is a multinational state. As soon as we realize that Russians are not lesser to Europeans and Americans, our insecurities will crumble, and we will finally understand that our country’s strength is in the different mentalities of our different nationalities. The people of the Caucasus have one mentality, Russians – another, the Chukchi – a third, and this isn’t bad! It’s so great that we are all so different. The fact that the Caucasus is different from you is not a reason to fight [attack?] it. Only a solid, strong nation understands this.

C.I.: How do you envision Russia’s near future? How do you see the country today?

E.C.: Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] doesn’t let strong opponents anywhere near him. So Russians have a fabricated illusion that they are surrounded by a scorched desert with only one savior who can save the nation. It’s a shame that the highest seat of power in Russia is occupied by a person whose only goal is personal enrichment. This system (since it is comprised of more than one person) has created a clan that has snatched up power and now serves its personal interests using the resources of our wealthy country. Take, for example, the oil “we” are selling: there was a time when its sale supported our whole military-industrial complex, which made half the world tremble. Today this money is used to travel and entertain abroad and to send children to foreign schools. This is another sad tendency: government officials don’t tie their fate and the fate of their children to that of the country, and with all their strength, they try to get American or British citizenship.

To address the central issue of your question, my short term prognosis is this: the resource economics will grow stronger, and corruption will continue and prosper. I see how the officials — Putin and Sarkozy — are uniting, how the French people are given the chance to rob our country by colonization: they are building offshore schemes for which funds from this project will be removed from our country.

C.I.: In your work there is an example of this: you were able to prove that the French company Vinci built a financial scheme through which a network of companies will be sent money from the Moscow-Saint Petersburg highway project to fund offshore construction.

E.C.: Yes, we founded this together with Bankwatch. The majority of these structures are owned by individuals who are unknown to the public. One of the offshore structures on Cyprus belongs to the oligarch Arkady Rotenburg, a close friend of Putin’s. I would like to remind you that it was Putin who broke federal law (number 172) when he designated the land on which Khimki forest stands for the Moscow-Saint Petersburg highway.

C.I.: Why are you so interested in this particular forest?

E.C.: For several reasons. The forest is relatively close to Moscow; realtors estimate its value at about 8,000 dollars for 100 acres. At the same time, government officials estimated it to be worth 4,000 rubles per acre. This is a big difference. This whole forest doesn’t factor in to the urban development plans of Moscow – there’s only the infrastructure next to the new highway. If this highway is built through the forest, the forest will die within the first couple of years because of the harmful human impact, and then the entire 1,500 hectares can be used for commercial development.

Another reason centers around the exploitation of the toll road. The French company Vinci will earn profit from this illegal project and share it with the oligarch who is close to Putin, the one who lobbied for this detrimental and illegal project in the first place. Public opinion polls done by the Levada Center showed that 76 percent of the population is against the destruction of the Khimki forest and support changing the project. It was the Vinci company that spoke ​​at a government meeting on December 14, 2010, demanding that the highway through the woods not be modified. If that had happened, Vinci was going to demand compensation from the Russians, which is strange considering that the project is financed by Russian taxpayer money.

Not only this – coming back to the question about the future – the situation with judges not ruling according to law will become more dire. It’s not the army that will become stronger, but the government agencies with which the country suppresses the inconvenient moods of its own citizens.

C.I.: So, a “tightening of the screws?”

E.C.: This type of crackdown can’t even be called a “tightening of the screws.” I would say it’s a sign of our country falling apart.

C.I.: Do you think there’s a risk of the country closing its borders?

E.C.: No, the borders won’t be closed – the officials keep their money abroad. This is not the Soviet Union, which had an ideology that didn’t allow open borders. The situation has changed: now the officials have caught onto the glamour and insatiable hunger for consumption, which came from abroad. Our officials are slaves to this consumption: to keep consuming at this level, they have to steal from their own country. They spit on moral and other norms because they want to con-sume. But this lowly culture of the officials, in essence, mirrors what is happening to our people. Because we haven’t been cured from this glamour sickness, we don’t even notice and don’t pay attention to the fact that our resources are becoming non-existent, and that soon there will be nothing left for our children.

C.I.: What would you say is the most serious obstacle for the opposition in its fight against the regime?

E.C.: I see the following misfortune: members of the opposition do not agree with each other. This is a big problem. Actually, Russians in general, if you examine this on any level, are not able to come to an agreement and solve problems together. This is also Russia’s misfortune. It’s a grave misfortune that we don’t have a normal civil society--we haven’t learned to love one another, to protect, respect or cooperate with each other. And, frankly, it is because of this fragmentation that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is still in power.

C.I.: Not long ago the political commentator and Snob columnist Nikolai Klimenyuk wrote that the real opposition in Russia is comprised only of Nemtsov, Navalny and Chirikova.

E.C.: No, no, this is obviously not so. He is forgetting that there is also the National Bolshevik Party. There is also the Left. And the Right! Together they are pretty strong because today, the regime spits equally on leftists, right-wingers, environmentalists, and anti-corruption advocates.

C.I.: But these factions of the opposition that you just listed, they differ quite a bit. 

E.C.: Yes, the do.

C.I.: How can they unite? Is this realistic?

E.C.: Of course it’s realistic: anyone can unite against a common enemy.

C.I.: But this “coalition” would fall apart just as quickly as it came together.

E.C.: Yes, it would. That’s correct: such different currents cannot coexist for long. But at the same time, look at America: in America everyone is very different. But when you have a culture of cooperation and respect--because beating each other up only because you are a member of the right and I am a member of the left and we call each other marginal and fascist is a lowly culture of interaction. If things developed the ideal way, in the way we want them to, people would learn to respect each other, learn to understand who is the real enemy because this title would be applied to the people who steal the future of our children and our country’s resources, and we would work against this common enemy.

C.I.: Can you be more specific? Do you think such a union is possible in the near future?

E.C.: I’m afraid that in the near future, meaning in time for the upcoming elections, this is impossible. But it’s what we should strive for.

At Anti-Seliger we were able to come together to one site and just talk. I understand that this was not some sort of united action, it was just a meeting, a discussion, a dialog. But we were able to assemble people with incredibly different political views. And they all sat on one lawn and there were no mutilations or deaths. Everyone stayed within the norms of acceptable conduct. I think this means a healthy dialog between various political movements is in the making. I really want to continue this tendency. I think that the topic of the environment, of protecting nature, is above everything – right, left, blue, red…we all breathe. The environment, in my opinion, is the topic that can unite all different kinds of people.

C.I.: Your position on these social issues is deep and thought-out, which, I would say, is atypical for most Russians. Would you agree? How was your active and progressive worldview formed?

E.C.: I have to say that I was not an involved citizen for the first 30 years. I thought, like all ordinary Russians do (you are correct here), that if I can never influence politics in my country, why should I be interested in politics at all? I wasn’t interested in the fall of the Soviet Union, in what is happening in the Caucasus, in our war with Chechnya, in anything. To reiterate, I was absolutely convinced that because I could never influence these events, it was senseless to be interested in them.

But then when I saw that where I lived, where I planned to walk with my baby stroller, they were planning to build a Moscow-Saint Petersburg highway, and I understood that one of the big officials – specifically Governor [Boris] Gromov – made the decision about construction without any concern for my opinion, then something changed in my relationship to politics. I understood that I didn’t want it to be this way. I didn’t want others to make decisions for me on how I lived my life.

C.I.: How quickly did this change in your consciousness actually happen?

E.C.: Practically overnight, as if I suddenly woke up. Since I run my own business (a small engineering company), I have a solid understanding of taxation. It was very difficult for us to make payments: taxes are very high in Russia, and if you pay them honestly, you are left with no profits. Our taxes are like in Switzerland, but the government service – like in Rwanda. So we worked solely for a salary, and all the profit went into paying taxes. I became very upset that a government official, who lives on my taxes, used my money to take away something so dear to me. I was so outraged that I began taking active measures.

C.I.: What conclusions have you drawn from your experiences interacting with authorities?

E.C.: Five years of reflecting on what is happening to this country led me to understand that on their own, our authorities are neither bad nor good, but are simply what we allow them to be. It’s the same way in personal relationships: your partner is neither good nor bad, and you influence his behavior by your own actions, in many respects. It’s the same way with the authorities. If you allow them to bully and mock you, they will continue to do so. But if you don’t allow them to do so, they will stop. We have completely spoiled our authorities with our amorphousness and vegetatative state. And because we’re not interested in the least in what it is happening even on the attainable, local level, on the level where actions begin to directly affect us and our families. Our apathy has no limits. Do you remember the saying “if you don’t do politics, they start to do you?” Our politics treat us in whatever manner they want. And this takes monstrous forms.

C.I.: Why do you believe there is such a large passive population in Russia?

E.C.: There are many, which also include historical reasons. Practically all active people, who tried to assert themselves and do something constructive for Russia, ended up either emigrating, in prisons and camps, or were simply killed. This was not only under [Joseph] Stalin and the communists. This was under Peter the Great, Ivan Grozny – it has always been this way.

C.I.: What (and how) can the opposition do against Putin’s propaganda machine? It has to be beat somehow.

E.C.: I think that we should take measures which are compatible specifically with our people. It’s stupid to expect that we will one day take to the streets like in Egypt or Libya. I’m actually afraid of this scenario because I don’t believe in revolutions – they don’t bring happiness to the people. I believe only in evolutionary transformations, which change people’s mentalities. Only changes in mentality transfer into long-term positive changes. To work on peoples’ consciousness, it’s important to seek out and to find methods which are applicable to people at that moment. I really like what Alexei Navalny does. He found such a good way to get people people, a way which, on one hand, helps them fight, and on the other, doesn’t require them to lift their butts off of the couch. You can sit in front of the computer in the comfort of your own home, and simply by clicking boxes on the internet, you fight swindlers and thieves. And it’s not scary – you are not going out on the street, you are not fighting an OMON [Russia’s Special Purpose Police Unit]. I really like Navalny’s approach; it’s the right one. We are also seeking methods to combat “vegetation.” We are trying to turn the Russian "vegetables" into the active citizens.

C.I.: What concrete methods do you use?

E.C.: We’ve tried flashmobs, meetings, strikes – all the conventional methods. Now we’re trying out civil forums. This method, on the one hand, allows people to meet in an informal setting (like in Anti-Seliger, where we were set up against a gorgeous natural backdrop), and on the other, to seriously think about our problems. People had a very good weekend at Anti-Seliger,. We came up with a very good cultural program, which was also very clever. People could listen to good rock music, we had Sam Klebanov come and also Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Serezha Mitrohin, Lena Panfilova came for political discourse…I also partook in that. We also had Zhenya Mironov come, though we didn’t invite him – he came on his own; we were very pleased. It was great, and we really liked this form of conversation. But I think that we also need to use the internet and the press (we have our own paper). We need to seek out new forms of communication with people, and not just say: “our people are so bad!” It is what it is, at least for the current moment.  

C.I.: What is your organization’s goal for 2012, after the “elections?”

E.C.: Our goal is to protect the nature in the north of Moscow: Khimki forest, Sheremetevsky forest, Zavidovo national park, Sonechnogorskiy forest... This goal is not just for one year or two years, since right now, all of Moscow’s protected forests are in danger of being exterminated. Our goal is to protect these forests.

C.I.: Understood. These are very extensive, grand goals. But how specifically will you achieve them?

E.C.: We will continue the type of work we’re doing now. We won’t give up. We will conduct our political campaigns and take all the necessary measures to keep the public engaged. If we hadn’t raised these issues, I doubt that they would have been of interest to anyone. Maybe only to a few individuals.

C.I.: Do you analyze the results of your political campaigns?

E.C.: Of course. We look at how the external environment reacts and draw our conclusions. If we are conducting a political campaign and then it turns out it isn’t working, we stop and look for new methods.

Now we are trying to identify groups within various Russian cities which are fighting for their rights, including environmental rights. But we don’t limit ourselves to the environment. We help each other assert our human rights, and I believe that combining the efforts of these diverse groups to help one another is a worthy aim. No one of us can win on our own. Despite the fact that our movement stands to protect Khimki forest, Khimki forest is a nominal concept. It is just a symbol for our struggle, a symbol of a small person’s struggle against the big authoritarian machine. We would also like to protect Baikal, to protect Sochi’s coastline. And the main aim is, of course, de-zombification of our country’s citizens. But this is a very long process.

Also, you know, I do realize that I won’t get to see the results of my labor, in my lifetime. God willing, my kids will. But it is certainly worth it, to keep trying, so that they can have a different life.

C.I.: The passionarii [passionarii are people who are enterprising, active, willing to risk everything and put their needs second to the achievement of a particular goal - ed.] are often accused of being psychologically dependent on the public's and mainstream media's attention. Last month, during the panel discussion at the Harriman Institute in New York City, your opponents presented these tough accusations against you. Here you are, a good-looking young woman, and you've become a media personality. Now everyone is interested in you. And so, your opponents claim, you are doing your activism for this media attention. Is there any truth to these accusations?

E.C.: My gentlemen opponents are simply unaware of the negative effects of this kind of popularity in Russia. After all, we’re not in America or English. We are in dear Russia, which is basically another planet. In Russia, this attention means that they have tried to take away my kids, then tried to run down my business, and people in uniform are always dragging my clients away for questioning, asking them what extremist services I am providing. And because of this, I am losing money. I basically now keep quiet about the fact that a crowd of the nashists supporters were always following me around in America. This isn’t the kind of attention I like. I have a beloved husband, kids, a mother, friends, a business, my necessary property…my life is so perfect that I don’t even have cellulite [laughs].

I have everything that a happy person needs. Everything except a prosperous country. I am obligated to deal with this if I don’t want to emigrate. And I don’t want to emigrate because this is my country and my language, and I love my country. I really like America, and Europe, and I’m obsessed with France…but I am Russian and I want to live in Russia. I want for things to go well in my country. I am obligated to work on these things myself, and yes, pay attention to the press, but not to look for myself, but to pay attention to the issues for which I am fighting.