| On the eve of Yabloko’s July Congress, the
party has witnessed an inflow of fresh blood. What is drawing people to
Yabloko today? Vitaly Popov talked to the Director of the Centre for Strategic
Research and well-known political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky.
Question: Andrei: You joined Yabloko in February 2004. What led
you to take this step?
 Piontkovsky:
I tend to avoid parties and have never joined one before. I have always
sympathized with Yabloko as a party which has defended on the most consistent
basis the values of democratic freedoms, human dignity and social justice.
At the same time this has not stopped me criticizing politicians from
Yabloko, when I felt that they held the wrong position.
After the December parliamentary elections it seemed only natural and
essential to support Yabloko, which had possibly experienced the worst
situation in its 10-year history. This has nothing to do with the party’s
failure to overcome the five-per cent barrier. Everybody realized that
it had been deprived of representation owing to wide-ranging falsification
during the vote-counting of the last few hours.
The snowballing controversy over the end of liberalism in Russia, with
Yabloko fraudulently held responsible for the reforms in 1990s which it
had in actual fact opposed ever since its conception with consistent liberal
views. The so-called “reformers” created a system based on
the highest possible degree of social inequality and economic inefficiency
and a power base that could in no way be supported through democratic
methods. This has led them to the idea of a Russian Pinochet who would
continue the economic reforms in Russia with an iron hand.
Question: Is this idea being implemented in our country
today?
Piontkovsky: Without a doubt. What reforms are being
proposed today? Neither Yeltsin or any of his 1990 reformers would have
dared such a thing. The total elimination of the remnants of a free education
and health service. One hundred per cent payment for housing. The mandatory
increase in the pension age to 65 in a country where the average life
expectancy of men comes to 58. This is a completely fanatically form of
extreme economic liberalism and naturally a rejection of political liberalism
and political freedoms. Developments today in the country represent the
triumph of the most cynical, the greediest and most socially irresponsible
bureaucracy.
Question: Can Yabloko become the centre of gravity for all
democratic forces in the country to rally them together into a political
coalition which opposes Russia’s slide towards a police state?
Piontkovsky: All of Yabloko’s history, its moral
and political position over the past 10 years of existence provides this
party with grounds for becoming the base for mass resistance to the approaching
police regime of a predatory bureaucracy. That is why I joined Yabloko.
| 