Press Release, 29.10.2020

Photo: Grigory Yavlinsky, Yabloko founder and Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of the Party

On the morning of October 29, leaders and activists of the Yabloko party laid flowers to the Solovetsky stone – the memorial to the victims of political reprisals – in Lubyanka Square in Moscow, honouring the memory of the victims of political reprisals.

On October 29, this is the place where the Returning the Names action is traditionally held – Muscovites recite the names of those executed during Stalin’s Great Terror. This year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the action has been taking place on the Internet.

Photo: Kirill Goncharov, a member of the Yabloko Federal Bureau (second from left), Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov and Yabloko Deputy Chairman Ivan Bolshakov

“We come to the Solovetsky stone in Moscow, to the Solovetsky stone in St. Petersburg and to the memorials to the victims of political reprisals all over the country in order to honour the memory of the victims of those terrible times,” Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov says. “Many people remember their relatives and friends who died from the Moloch of totalitarianism. We remember that almost 4 million people died – those who were shot, died in camps and prisons, during transfers to colonies and in places of resettlement from cold, hunger, torture and disease. And now we see how slowly, day after day, the propaganda of the principles of Bolshevism, authoritarianism and the vanity of human rights in Russia is being carried out again. It is our responsibility to stop this process. ”

“In total, in the period from 1917 to 1953 due to the civil war, collectivization of farmers and continuous mass terror, Russia lost, according to historians, at least 26 million people (and this is in addition to the losses in the Second World War). It is even difficult to imagine anything comparable in scale to this national tragedy… Nevertheless, the modern Russian government refuses to give any historical assessments of what has happened to the country over the past hundred years. However, without understanding the events of the past and their proper assessment as a factor determining today’s life, it is impossible to correct anything in it today.

To be able to correct it, one needs to understand: the Bolshevik system, which led the people to the greatest tragedy in their history, has not vanished. This system in an updated, hybrid, while somewhat softened form represents a reality today. And we live in it… Today, the successors of the Bolsheviks are in power in Russia, and their policies are nothing more than modern Bolshevism,” Grigory Yavlinsky wrote in 2017 in his article The Great Terror and Modern Bolshevism.

On 30 October, the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Reprisals in Russia, a delegation of the Yabloko Party will come to Karelia to visit the Sandarmokh memorial cemetery in the Medvezhyegorsk region of the Republic of Karelia. The mourning ceremony will be attended by Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov, Deputy Chairman of the party Ivan Bolshakov, deputies of the Legislative Assembly of Karelia from Yabloko Emilia Slabunova and Ivan Gusev, and others.

The place of mass executions and burials was discovered in Sandarmokh in 1997 by the Karelian historian Yury Dmitriyev. It was for preserving the memory of the victims of Stalin’s reprisals, exposing the names of the executioners and creating a memorial in the place of mass burial, that the authorities staged a fraudulent and dirty criminal case against Yury Dmitriyev and sentenced him this year to 13 years in prison.