Press Release, 29.08.2018

The leaders of Yabloko went to the Russian regions to support Yabloko candidates in the 9 September elections.

The party Chair Emilia Slabunova visited Yekaterinburg, the Urals, to support party candidates in the city parliament (the City Duma). Yabloko put forward a strong team of united democratic coalition in the elections to the City Duma of Yekaterinburg.

Acting deputy of the City Duma Konstantin Kiselyov tops the list of Yabloko candidates. The second is another acting City Duma deputy Dmitry Golovin, the third is Irina Skachkova,  deputy head of the Yabloko party branch in the region and human rights activist.

The party leader’s day began with a visit to the Memorial of Victims of Political Reprisals. The sculpture “Masks of Sorrow. Europe – Asia” was created by Ernst Neizvestny (who was born in Yekaterinburg) at the request of the Urals branch of the Memorial human rights society. Almost 21,000 people who were shot in Sverdlovsk (that was the name of Yekaterinburg in the Soviet period) in 1937 – 1938 were buried in this place.

Photo from left to right: Konstantin Kiselyov, Irina Skachkova, Emilia Slabunova and Dmitry Golovin

The topic of Stalin’s reprisals turned out to be very personal for Emilia Slabunova and Konstantin Kiselyov.

“My wife’s great-grandfather is buried her,” says the leader of Yabloko’s list in the City Duma Konstantin Kiselyov. “And from my side the grandfather was repressed, he had three daughters, he alone was raising them. They wanted to send them to an orphanage [when he was imprisoned], but their great-aunt came and raised them.”

Yabloko Chair Emilia Slabunova also shared part of her family history. Her grandfather miraculously managed to escape from reprisals. “They just told him that they would be de-kulakised,” Emilia Slabunova said. “And he my grandmother had seven children and old parents dependent on them. The only sign of wealth was a skinny horse. They managed to escape on it at night. So they managed to avoid de-kulakisation and not get into the camps.”

In different years, from 3 to 9 per cent of Gulag prisoners were prisoners in the camps of the Sverdlovsk region. “This is a huge number of broken human destinies, family stories,” says Emilia Slabunova. “It is important to keep a memory of this, to prevent the recurrence of such things.”

According to Slabunova, persecution of the Memorial human rights society in different Russian regions suggests that creation of obstacles to the activities of human rights organisations becomes a state policy. The team of candidates from the Yabloko party considers it important to create proper conditions for functioning of all public organisations, human rights in the first place, Slabunova stressed.

According to Dmitry Golovin, the second top candidate on the party list, he decided to participate in elections to prevent the recurrence of the terrible pages of our history. “Recently I often hear that people do not want to participate in elections, because these are not elections,” he said.  “But the alternative is like this: let us change the power not in elections, but we will again drag Russia to a brighter future along a corridor which is slippery from blood. That is why we have to participate in elections. Precisely so that the bloody nightmare of the past does not happen again.”

On the eve of the new academic year Emily Slabunova, who is Honored Teacher of Russia, together with the candidates of Yabloko, conducted an inspection of School No 185. The poor condition of the institution is obvious: plaster falls off, there are cracks on the facade – the school needs serious repairs. And this is not a sole such case in Yekaterinburg.

Photo: Konstantin Kiselyov and Emilia Slabunova near School No 185

More than 100 school buildings out of 164 schools of Yekaterinburg are in buildings with a 70 per cent of higher wear rate, and every fourth schoolchild in Yekaterinburg (37,000 children) studies on the second shift. So 37,000 families are worried about how their child left home for school when parents are already at work, and returned late in the evening. Additional education for children also becomes hardly possible, because children return too late from schools to attend sports and music clubs, Emilia Slabunova noted.

To eliminate the second shift, it is necessary to build about 30 schools in the city, and about 50 schools need to be repaired – all of this requires 75 billion roubles. Certainly, the local budget can not cope with this, even with the aid from the regional budget, Slabunova notes. Therefore, it is necessary to raise this issue before the federal government, to demand the allocation of money. On 1 June on the Children’s Day, the politician sent a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the need to channel additional oil and gas revenues for the elimination of third and second shifts in Russian schools.

The state has money, and only political will is needed to solve such problems, Emilia Slabunova believes. The bearers of this political will in Yekaterinburg are candidates from Yabloko, they are ready to defend the interests of 37,000 families whose children are on the second shift and dozens of thousands of children who are studying in dilapidating schools.

“Having such political control and political lobby in the City Duma of Yekaterinburg [if Yabloko gets into the City Duma], the city’s families can be sure that the interests of their children will be protected,” the Yabloko leader said.

Another point of the route of Emilia Slabunova was “Yabloko’s cube” – the point of campaigning and distribution of the party leaflets by metro station Geologicheskaya. Here the politician discussed the problems of the city with the activists of the party and local residents.

Despite the fact that Yekaterinburg is a modern European prosperous city that is among the 600 cities that create 60 per cent of the world’s GDP, it is ranked only 71st in terms of quality of life among the 250 largest cities of the country. According to Emilia Slabunova, this is the case, because most of taxes collected in the city goes to budgets of other levels. Everything earned by Yekaterinburg residents should remain in the city to improve the environment, build schools and kindergartens, eliminate emergency housing, Slabunova notes.

“It is important that the authorities should hear the city’s residents,” says Yabloko’s Chair. “Abolishing elections of mayors, the government fences off from the citizens. Our candidates are ready to work with people, and do everything to defend their interests. It is very important that in the City Duma there are people like Konstantin Kiselyov, Dmitry Golovin and Irina Skachkova. This will be a new page in the history of the city.”

The Sverdlovsk region branch of Yabloko nominated a list of the united democratic coalition in the elections to the Yekaterinburg City Duma. There are 57 candidates in the list, the maximum possible number of people.

In addition to the top three candidates, representatives of a number of public organisations and parties have joined the list: Dmitriy Okatyev (Yabloko), Dmitry Trinov (the University Solidarity Union), Sergei Loskutov (the Green Front environmental movement), Mikhail Komlev (public activist) , Elena Pariy (Yabloko), Anna Pastukhova (the Ekaterinburg branch of the Memorial human rights society), Galina Bastrygina (PARNAS), Marat Davletshin (Yabloko), Yuri Lesnikov (public activist) and others.