Statement by the Yabloko party, 1.05.2025

Photo by Kirill Braga, RIA Novosti

On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the Victory in World War II, the topic of renaming Volgograd to Stalingrad [commemorating the name of Joseph Stalin] is being proposed again. President Vladimir Putin, who had previously signed a decree on assigning the name Stalingrad to the Volgograd airport, made a statement about the possibility of renaming.

The Yabloko party considers any attempts at “restalinisation”, including in toponymy, to be absolutely unacceptable.

It was in Tsaritsyn (as Volgograd was historically called) in the summer and autumn of 1918 that Stalin, being the Extraordinary Food Commissar, organised the requisition of millions of poods of bread and other food products, which were forcibly sent to other provinces resulting in mass starvation. Stalin is also personally responsible for the political terror and extrajudicial executions in Tsaritsyn during this period.

Returning to Volgograd the name of the main organiser of mass repressions in our country, who personally approved the “execution lists” and created a long-term atmosphere of fear in the country, is an insult to the memory of millions of victims of this criminal policy.

If the authorities really want to remind us of the heroism of the city’s defenders during the World War II, they should stop building up car dealers’ centres at the foot of Mamayev Kurgan [monument], but publish in a large number of copies the book “In the Trenches of Stalingrad” by the front-line writer and participant in the Battle of Stalingrad Viktor Nekrasov – one of the best and most honest works about the great war.

Yabloko insists on the need for a state-legal assessment of the Bolshevik coup and the systematic de-Stalinisation of the country.

The memory of the war, the exploits and victims of the war is incompatible with the policy of glorifying the organiser of repressions and the culprit of the deaths of millions of people.

Nikolai Rybakov,
Yabloko Chairman