Press Release, 23.12.2019

The Volgograd branch of Yabloko demanded that the Volgograd Mayor’s Office and the Public Prosecutor’s Office check whether the Communist Party had the right to install a bust of Joseph Stalin in Volgograd. Yabloko’s Dmitry Lyubitenko posted a petition on the Internet demanding that the monument be dismantled.

Galina Boldyreva, Chair of the Volgograd branch of Yabloko, said that she had forwarded applications to the Volgograd administration and the Public Prosecutor’s Office with a request to check the legally of installation of the bust of Stalin in Volgograd.

“Most likely, they will answer us that the monument was erected legally if the territory is private and belongs to the communists. The funny thing is that the Communists deny private property, but when it comes to putting a bust on Stalin, they say that this is their private property, and they have the right,” she stressed.

Dmitry Lyubitenko, member of Yabloko’s regional branch, posted a petition on the change.org web-site “Opening a Stalin Monument is an insult to the memory of millions of victims of Stalin’s reprisals”. “The erection of a monument to Stalin is a direct justification of Stalin’s crimes and a direct insult to the memory of millions of victims of Stalin’s reprisals,” runs the petition. The petition addressed to Vladimir Putin contains a demand to dismantle the monument.

It should be noted that the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg introduced the legislative initiative “On the prohibition of perpetuating the memory of Stalin and amending certain legislative acts of the Russian Federation”. “The purpose of the law is to stop the attempts to whitewash the tyrant, which have become more frequent recently,” said Boris Vishnevsky, head of the Yabloko faction in the St.Petersburg Legislative Assembly and Deputy Chairman of the party.

The law proposes to legally prohibit installation, at a budgetary expense, of monuments to Stalin and memorial plaques with his image or mention, assignment of the dictator’s name to different objects, as well as publication of books and films praising Stalin.

The Yabloko faction in the St. Petersburg parliament has been drafting the law for three years. At the first stage of development, the law was sent to the National Assembly of Ingushetia. On February 22, 2017, the Ingushetian parliament decided to ban the perpetuation of the memory of Joseph Stalin in the region.

The St. Petersburg parliament was planning to consider the Yabloko bill on March 6, 2019, however, deputies from United Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the LDPR excluded consideration of the Yabloko legislative initiative from the agenda of the plenary meeting.  Olga Khodunova, head of the Communist Party faction, proposed not to consider the bill.