On the 65th anniversary of the victory in the Second World
War the YABLOKO party commemorated the victims of the war
laying flowers to the Eternal Flame over the mass grave of
the largest military burial ground in Moscow – the Preobrazhensky
Cemetery. Such memory actions have been traditionally conducted
by YABLOKO at the Preobrazhenskoye cemetery for several years
already.
On behalf of the party the wreaths were laid by YABLOKO’s
leaders Sergei Mitrokhin and Grigory Yavlinsky, Political
Committee member Sergei Ivanenko, deputy Chair of the Moscow
YABLOKO Ivan Bolshakov and leader of the Moscow Region branch
of YABLOKO retired General Major Anton Goretsky and his deputy
Dmitry Ilyushin.
Party activists laid red carnations to the Eternal Flame
and commemorated the victims of the war in a minute of silence.
A short mourning rally took place by the monument to the
soldiers and officers of the Soviet Army who died in the war.
The special guests of the ceremony were representatives of
the Greens from Germany.
“We are bowing our heads to the victims,” said YABLOKO’s
leader Sergei Mitrokhin on opening of the mourning rally.
“The memory of these people will never become a distant history
which people can talk about with some indifference,” he added.
Alexei Arbatov, member of YABLOKO’s Political Committee and
head of the International Security Centre under the Russian
Academy of Sciences, said that despite volumes of books written
and many films made about the war, we still do not know even
a one thousands share of the truth. “All the truth about the
war should be told” Arbatov said. He also insisted that the
names of all the victims should be known, “it is a disgrace
for our state to measure the losses in the war in plus-minus
millions of people’s lives”.
Anton Goretsky also stressed the hard destiny of women during
the war – doctors and nurses at the war fields and those working
at factories and plants in the rear.
Ivan Bolshakov reiterated that the “war meant not only great
courage and heroism, but also great suffering and deaths of
millions of people”.
“We promise that no one and nothing will be forgotten. This
is our duty,” said Grigory Yavlinsky closing the rally.
By the entrance to the cemetery YABLOKO’s activists stationed
a field kitchen and invited the participants to try a real
soldiers’ meals, the same as given during the war, and to
commemorate the memory of the killed.
The survivors of the war sang the songs of that period. Also
a very touching moment was a waltz danced by an elderly lady
and a young army officer.
