Press Release, 19.03.2017

Grigory Yavlinsky, YABLOKO presidential candidate, made a statement that if he is elected, the state should gratuitously transfer land to Russian citizens under construction of their own homes, as well as create a system of accounts where revenues from the exports of natural resources and dividends from state corporations would be transferred to some categories of citizens. Yavlinsky said that there could be no self-respect without property.

Yavlinsky made this statement speaking at YABLOKO’s Federal Council which took place on 19 March, 2017.

“We spoke about the citizens’ dignity and their right to be respected [by the authorities]. Do people want it? No doubt, they do. Respect for a person remains virtually the key national idea – unattainable, but infinitely necessary and desirable,” Grigory Yavlinsky noted.

According to Yalvinsky, “the necessary, but insufficient” condition so that people could return their self-respect should be endowing people with property. “A person must feel that he is not a dust in the wind. If a person does not own property, he is dependent, and there can not be any stability in such a country,” Grigory Yavlinsky said.

Yalvinsky promised to make people masters of their fates. He promised, if he were elected, to implement his programme “Land – Housing – Roads”,  which envisaged free allocation of 30-60 acres of land to every Russian citizen. According to the programme, the state should undertake construction of roads and communications to houses build of such plots of land and create infrastructure.

Grigory Yavlinsky noted the “huge geopolitical significance” of this project. Russia occupies 11 per cent of the total terrestrial land, but less than 1 per cent of the country’s territory is built up. The population density in Siberia is 1.6 people per square kilometer, and 1.2 people in the Far East, these figures have been declining every year. At the same time, there are 380,000 Chinese citizens per kilometer of the Russian-Chinese border, and over 100 million people live in the northern provinces of China adjacent to Russia. “Will we ever start building our own homeland or will we wait for something?” Yavlinsky asked.

In addition, Yavlinsky proposed create a system of personal accounts for some categories of citizens – “pensioners, every infant, disabled and students”. These accounts would accumulate, according to differentiated rules, funds from the exports of natural resources, dividends from state corporations, as well as means of the compensating property tax (i.e. compensation for fraudulent loans-for-shares auctions of the mid-1990s).

Grigory Yavlinsky also stressed that citizens should own shares of the country’s largest companies.

“This is the essence of the reform which will be conducted for the first time in the Russian history in the interests of Russian citizens, rather than abstract ideas of building socialism, capitalism or the seizure of Ukraine,” he noted.

“The purpose of my presidency is to give the country the opportunity to speak openly, think freely and make strategic decisions about its fate. Our people with their tragic and heroic history deserve the right to make their own decisions,” Grigory Yavlinsky concluded.