Grigory Yavlinsky’s Facebook page, 18.02.2020

Konstantin Aranovsky, Judge of the Constitutional Court, called the USSR an illegitimate state, and the Soviet state bodies “illegal party-state power bodies”, which cannot be regarded as “legal predecessors of constitutional state power”.

This is an accurate and true definition.

The current political system of Russia in historical terms originates from the tragic events of 1917-1920: a coup d’etat, criminal seizure of power and a bloody civil war. The Russian people never elected either Bolsheviks or Stalin as their rulers in free elections. The Bolsheviks usurped power, dismissed the Constituent Assembly elected in general direct and equal elections, suppressed the resistance by force and maintained control over the country with the help of terror elevated to the rank of state policy.

The full version of Grigory Yavlinsky’s interview to the Nastoyascheye Vremya channel on the conditional legitimacy of the current government and Yabloko’s alternative amendments to the Constitution

The refusal to recognise this fact and the attempt to build a supposedly post-Soviet Russia based on a sense of continuity and incorporating the lies of the previous 75 years make it impossible to qualitatively move forward in state building, the economy, or in determining the role and place of Russia in the world. This is one of the main reasons for the endless state lies, lawlessness and violence in our country, lack of mass-scale entrepreneurship and an independent court, contempt for private property, law and lawfulness.

A comprehensive assessment of the Soviet period and the crimes of Bolshevism (the Red Terror, forced collectivization of farmers with tragic consequences, mass repressions, Khatyn and much more) is necessary at the legal, state and public level. It is necessary to adopt a constitutional act, which, along with an assessment of the events of 1917, should contain a recognition of the illegality of the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly which led to the national tragedy, an assessment of decades of state terror and political repression, a statement on the absolute unacceptability of the use of terror, lies and violence in the state policies of modern Russia.

It is also important to clearly and unequivocally determine the scope of the succession by the modern Russian state. Modern Russia is the successor of the Russian state until the October Revolution of 1917, all the true achievements of the Russian people over the past hundred years, and also maintains the vector of historical continuity with the thousand-year history of Russia in its natural movement towards democratic legitimacy.

(For more details, see Lies and Legitimacy, April 2011, and The Great Terror and Modern Bolshevism, August 2017).