Press Release, 30.10.2024

Photo: Nikolai Rybakov at the Butovo shooting ground range, Moscow, 30 October, 2024 / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

This week, Russia pays tribute to the victims of political repression. According to the Memorial Society, 4.5-4.8 million people were convicted for political reasons, of which 1.1 million were shot during the Stalinist terror in 1930s-1940s. Stalinism is not a distant history for our country. This is, in many ways, the essence of the current system of power. According to human rights organisations, there are currently 774 political prisoners in Russia.

The task of the Russian state is to assess the violent seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the crimes of the Stalinist regime. It is the duty of society to keep the memory of the broken lives of millions of repressed people and their families.

Yabloko in Moscow and Russia’s regions organised or joined memorial events – laying flowers,

reading the names of the victims, prayers, and lectures on the history of political repression.

“Everything that we are doing in Yabloko today – we are doing not even to preserve, but to return respect for the individual. Today we came to those most important places in our country where they destroyed the belief that the most important thing was human life. This was done, unfortunately, quite successfully,” Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov commented on the Yabloko’s all-Russian action.

“Because everything that is happening now has in many ways its foundation in places like the Butovo Shooting Ground and the Kommunarka Shooting Ground. There are such tragic places all over the country, where people were killed, eliminated, razed to the ground. Let’s do everything to return the belief that there is nothing more important than human life,” Rybakov noted.

Here we publish more photos and videos of memorial events with the participation of Yabloko.

In Moscow, the Yabloko delegation visited two execution grounds – the Butovo and the Kommunarka shooting grounds. Party members and civil activists laid flowers at the memorials and listened to lectures by experts on the history of Stalin’s repressions.

In St. Petersburg, Yabloko laid flowers at the Solovetsky Stone in Troitskaya Square and then visited the Levashovo Memorial Cemetery.

“When in the fall of 1991 this day became a state memorial date, when it was officially recognised that the state was doing things incompatible with humanism, law, and respect for human life, it seemed to us that political repression would remain in the past forever. Today we see that this is not so.

We have political prisoners again, there emerged new forms of political repression against those who have their own opinion, who do not agree with the state position. Therefore, it is very important to keep the memory of what our country has gone through, so that these times and such a tragedy do not happen again,” Alexander Shishlov, Coordinator of the Yabloko Political Committee and deputy of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, said.

In Arkhangelsk, Astrakhan, Vladivostok, Vologda, Gorno-Altaisk, Yekaterinburg, Ivanovo, Kazan, Kemerovo, Kirov, Krasnoyarsk, Kurgan, the Leningrad region, the Moscow region, Omsk, Orenburg, Penza, Perm, Petrozavodsk, Pskov, Ryazan, Saratov, Stavropol, Tambov, Tver, Ulyanovsk, Ufa, Cheboksary, and Chelyabinsk, members and supporters of Yabloko laid flowers at monuments to victims of political repression, and also visited other memorial sites associated with the crimes of the Stalinist regime against citizens – secret prisons, execution rooms, shooting grounds, and burial sites. Round tables and lectures devoted to the history of political repressions in the regions were held in Gorno-Altaisk, Irkutsk, Tver, Tomsk, Ufa, and Chita.

In Kirov and Kostroma, Yabloko took part in prayer services in memory of innocent victims.

In Voronezh, party activists cleaned up the burial site of victims of the Great Terror in the village of Dubrovka.

In Rostov, Yabloko made a video lecture about the city’s houses on which plaques of the public project The Last Address, with names of the victims who lived in these houses, could be placed.

In all cities, the names of victims of Stalin’s repressions were read out.

On 29 October, the Chairman of the party’s Political Committee Grigory Yavlinsky laid flowers at the Solovetsky Stone in Moscow and read out the names of those repressed for the Returning of the Names project.

Grigory Yavlinsky also calls for not leaving the current political prisoners alone:

“The absolute majority of them received imprisonment terms only for saying what they thought. We must all remember these people every day, we must support them and try to help them in every way – write them letters, send them packages, and speak about them publicly at every opportunity.”

During the week, the party offices in different Russian regions also held actions of support for the current political prisoners. Hundreds of postcards and letters with words of support and hope that the tragedy for our society will end soon will be sent to pretrial detention centres and prisons to those who are deprived of freedom for their words and beliefs.

Yabloko expresses gratitude to everyone who took part in the events in memory of the victims of political repression.