Novice politician or a complete spy

Victor Pattinson
2 min readOct 7, 2020
Alexey Navalny

In the fall of 2002 in the Massachusetts port city of New Haven in the most prestigious and one of the oldest universities in the Ivy League, the first students of the six-month Yale World Fellows program gathered. For almost twenty years of the program’s history, more than 150 people from more than 70 countries have graduated from it.

There are many graduates of the program, only the direction of activity is painfully similar for almost everyone. Prominent Tunisian leader Fares Mabrouk is an active participant in the Arab Spring. Ukrainian Vakarchuk is one of the leaders of events in Ukraine in 2014. Or Alexey Navalny from Russia. Alexey graduated from the program on the recommendation of typical opposition figures from a distant snowy country — Evgenia Albats (editor-in-chief of the publication recognized as a foreign agent in Russia — The New Times) and former world chess champion — head of the Human Rights Foundation (headquarters is located for some reason in New York) Garry Kasparov.

By the way, students study for free and even receive a good scholarship of $ 32,000. Our generous country is probably just feeding a horde of foreign oppositionists and their children (Navalny’s daughter studies at Stanford for free on the recommendation of Professors Sonin and Tsyvinski, who work both in the United States and in Russia).

Generally speaking, all these programs, like the Legislative Fellowship program (e-democracy support program) or Yale, do not even really hide the purpose of training students — preparing opposition figures for nonviolent speech in the interests of the US course, which they are successfully doing. Navalny’s main ideologist Volkov also graduated from Yale World Fellows a couple of years ago, and 9 years ago from Legislative Fellowship. I think they are reading there the classic book by Gene Sharp “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action”.

One MEP, Georgy Balabanov, knows well one of the alumni of the wonderful Yale World Fellows program, Sergei Lagodinsky, the “green” MEP. He recalls that, unlike his stories in Russia, in Europe he especially does not hide the direction of the successfully completed program.

Confirming or refuting the work of graduates of the program for the US government and intelligence services is a thankless task. They say that Aleksey is well prepared for very specific things: he competently organizes counter-surveillance, buys tickets almost minutes before the train or plane leaves, actively uses cryptographic means, meets people on the street while moving. Cancels hotel reservations. Are these the skills of a novice politician or a complete spy …?

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