Resolution by the 22nd Yabloko Congress adopted on 10.12.2023, published on 26.01.2024

Photo by Yevgeny Odinokov, RIA Novosti

The Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko is worried and draws attention to the campaign unfolding in Russia to justify the Great Terror and its inspirer, Joseph Stalin. Against the background of the ongoing loss of human lives in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the liquidation of democratic institutions and the growing repressiveness of the state, this campaign increasingly threatens the rights and freedoms of Russians. The political and criminal practices from the darkest times in our history are once again returning to the daily life of the country. We are witnessing the return of the basic principles of the Stalinist state: “man is nothing, just dust underfoot”, “repressive authorities do not make mistakes”, which leads to the impossibility of defence against repression.

One of the reasons for this situation is that the state and legal assessment of the October coup of 1917 and the subsequent policies of the communist period still have not been given.

The only achievement in this field is related to perpetuating the memory of victims of political repression. However, today this fragile achievement is being revised, and the memory of the innocent victims of Bolshevik atrocities is being consistently eradicated.

The activities of the international [human rights] society Memorial – the main non-governmental organisation that, since the 1980s, has successfully been involved in preserving the memory of the victims of Stalin’s repressions and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this – have been outlawed and banned, and its employees are being persecuted. Andrei Shalayev, the founder of the “Immortal Barracks” project, dedicated to the memory of those repressed, was forced to leave Russia due to persecution.

The authorities of the Volgograd region are not abandoning attempts to rename Volgograd to Stalingrad, despite the results of numerous public opinion polls, according to which the overwhelming majority of citizens do not support the return of the name of the executioner to the city.

The unique museum of the history of political repressions “Perm-36”, created by volunteers on the site of a former political prisoners camp, came under state control and was virtually destroyed.

There is a looming threat of destruction of the burial sites of victims of political repression in the Karelian area Sandarmokh. In order to erase the memory of the Great Terror, the Russian Military Historical Society is promoting mythical versions of Soviet prisoners of war allegedly shot by the Finns in Sandarmokh. Yury Dmitriyev, who discovered the burial places of victims of repression there, was sentenced to 15 years in a maximum security colony.

Monuments to victims of state terror have been disappearing from the streets of the country. Signs with the names of the repressed are being removed from the walls of houses where they lived in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In Vorkuta, Vladimir, Tomsk, Irkutsk and Sverdlovsk regions, Yakutia, Perm Territory and St. Petersburg, monuments to repressed Poles and Lithuanians were destroyed or dismantled.

At the same time, monuments to Stalin have appeared in recent years in the Kirov, Pskov and Tver regions. In the Tver region, a bust of the dictator was installed right on the territory of the Mednoye memorial complex – at the burial site of victims of wars and repressions. There are at least 110 monuments to Stalin in Russia at present, of which only 15 remain from Soviet times, and 95 were erected in recent years. A copy of the monument to the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky, which once stood on Lubyanka square in front of the KGB building, appeared on the territory of the headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence Service in the Yasenevo district [in Moscow].

The monumental perpetuation of tyrants is often accompanied by violations of the legislation on the procedure for installing monuments, but neither the authorities nor law enforcement agencies see any problems in this.

People holding high government positions directly justify the repression and call for dealing with “internal enemies” and “isolating or destroying twenty per cent” of Russians. The number of political prisoners grows. The expression “Stalin’s terms” is returning to widespread use. Courts are again sentencing dissidents to decades in prison.

Educational and cultural policy is becoming increasingly ideologised and militarised, and mass denunciation is encouraged. Increasingly more Russians, including cultural figures, who dare to express disagreement with the actions of the authorities are declared foreign agents, lose their jobs, their names and sometimes even images are removed from works of art and theater posters in the worst Stalinist traditions, and performances of musical groups are disrupted by the police. Thus, state censorship did not allow the release of the feature films “Captain Volkonogov Fled” and “For You and Me,” which touch on the theme of repression, and did not issue a distribution certificate for Alexander Sokurov’s film “The Fairy Tale,” who portrayed, among the heroes, Stalin and other totalitarian leaders of the regimes of the 20th century.

There has been published a new school history textbook manipulating historical facts and political assessments. Schoolchildren and students are told about the “enemies” of Russia within the framework of the so-called [lessons] “Conversations About the Important” and “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood”. Basic military training has returned to general education, and children are now being prepared for war instead of being helped to find their way in life.

The Yabloko party calls to stop the Stalinization that is sweeping the country, stop rewriting history and desecrating the memory of millions of victims of repression.

The Yabloko party reiterates the need to condemn at the state level the crimes of Lenin and Stalin against the Russian people, carry out deep and comprehensive de-Stalinisation making it one of the cornerstones of state policy. Otherwise, we will all be doomed to follow a spiral of violence that spares no one, including the initiators of repression and the executors of orders.

Nikolai Rybakov,

Yabloko Chairman