Press Release, 20.11.2024

Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

The participants of the event, members and supporters of the party shared their vision of the causes and consequences of what was happening, talked about the feelings that they first experienced on 24 February, 2022, and continue to experience to this day.

The meeting began with a speech by the Chairman of the Yabloko party Nikolai Rybakov. He said that one of the specifics of the current situation was the impossibility of openly talk about what was happening, which could be overcome, among other things, by the allegorical and figurative language of art, an example of which in the field of the Russian cultural tradition could be the paintings of the Russian battle artist Vasily Vereshchagin. “In the history of mankind, we are not the first to find ourselves in such a situation,” Rybakov noted.

This was followed by the screening of the film “Pogostye” (“Burial Grounds”), which was directed by Alexander Userdin in June 2023. The film tells about the tragic battles on the Volkhov Front near the village of Pogostye near Leningrad in the fall of 1941 – winter of 1942 in the words by art historian Nikolai Nikulin, a participant in the Second World War. One can read Nikulin’s book “Memories of the War” on the Yabloko party website.

“Perhaps no country in the world has experienced as many human-destroying events over the past century as ours,” Rybakov noted.

The Yabloko Chairman said that the film shown to viewers was part of a large project currently being worked on.

Viktor Kogan-Yasny, Advisor to the Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of the party, in turn, spoke about the similarities and differences between 1,000 days of hostilities and other wars in the history of our country.

According to Kogan-Yasny, the current conflict has not given rise to any new culture, but placed geopolitical schemes above the humanitarian dimension of armed confrontation and exposed, in all its acuteness, the problem of collective responsibility for the events.

A special role in it was played not only by decision-makers on both sides, but also by the whole class of publicists and political scientists, who for a long time had been stubbornly ignoring the impending threat and then began accusing each other of Nazism.

During the meeting, Deputy Chairman of Yabloko Maxim Kruglov expressed his surprise at the lack of need among most people to make a moral choice in the current situation and the actual oblivion in public discourse of such seemingly generally accepted values ​​of Christian civilisation as the absolute value of human life and non-violent resistance to evil. Like many other participants in the meeting, Kruglov concluded his speech by reading his own verse:

… The siren howls, the dog barks

The whole world is shrinking and burning out.

A rocket is flying, flying around the world.

They launched it, and summer exploded…

A sign of the time, noted another speaker – Deputy Chairman of the Moscow branch of Yabloko Kirill Goncharov, – is that “earlier we invited journalists, and waited for publications, but in 2024 we ask not to cover the events taking place here in order to ensure the safety of the participants”. At the same time, he noted the importance of the work carried out by Yabloko, the essence of which is to provide citizens with the opportunity to communicate and find like-minded people. Therefore, according to Goncharov, the meeting in Yabloko had also a “therapeutic effect”.

Grigory Grishin, a candidate of philological sciences and politician, said that in a situation where we found ourselves between the fires of two propagandas one of the ways to avoid their harmful effects was reflection, as well as books and dialogue, which works of art helped to establish.

The play by Ukrainian playwright Natalia Vorozhbit, “Sasha, Take Out the Trash,” written in 2014 and originally planned to be shown that evening, tells through the fate of the main protagonist about the drama of an entire generation of men whose youth coincided with the collapse of the USSR that destroyed their lives and the economic crisis that accompanied it, and whose maturity coincided with a new round of violence initiated by the state. The video of the play, in which Alexander Userdin, a Yabloko member, plays the role of Sasha, can be found on the Kultura.rf portal.

Journalist and member of the Yabloko party Yuri Shein spoke about the generation of participants in the Second World War through the eyes of a child. He noted that the toast “as long as there is no war” during feasts and parties was a common ritual until the 1970s. Then a generation grew up that did not see the war with their own eyes and knew about it only from the words of their fathers and grandfathers, from works of art, books and films.

The prose by Konstantin Simonov, Grigory Baklanov, Yuri Bondarev and other writers who participated in the war was devoted to a greater extent to man and his moral choice, rather than to battles and fights. There was no need to write about the horrors of war, because no explanations were needed then that it was absolute evil. This is what the writers who fought in the war thought.

According to Yuri Shein, perhaps this was why those who did not experience the horrors of war themselves did not develop a clear understanding that “war is evil”.

The participants in the meeting in Yabloko decided that preventing dehumanisation was the task that everyone had to face.