Decision by the Federal Political Committee of Yabloko No. 153, dated 15 April, 2022

Published on 21 April, 2022

Photo by Anatoly Zhdanov/Kommersant

The Political Committee of the Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko regards the events taking place since February 24 as the collapse of the post-Soviet Russian statehood.

What has happened resulted from the failure of post-Soviet modernisation. For 30 years, stable economic, political, and social institutions that are vital for a modern state, such as the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, transparent competitive elections providing the possibility of a change of power, inviolable private property, an economically independent media, have not been created.

The prerequisites for the failure of modernisation were created in the 1990s, when, due to gross errors in the reforms – hyperinflation allowed because of incompetence and the openly criminal privatisation of the Soviet state property through loans-for-shares auctions – the state and property merged and the corresponding economic, political and social system was created.

The emergence of an authoritarian unrestricted ruler did not happen by accident or a mistake. This was a conscious choice, predetermined by the logic of the system created due to the reforms of the 1990s.

The desire to preserve the results of the unfair and criminal division of property, the task of protecting the interests of the artificially created oligarchy and the foundations of the emerging corporate-mafia system led to the fact that instead of using the historical opportunity to modernise Russia, an authoritarian organisation of power was fixed, which seeks unlimited domination and ensuring its own irremovability.

Another key prerequisite for the catastrophe that has occurred was the refusal of official post-Soviet Russia from a clear state-public assessment of the October 1917 coup, Bolshevism, Stalinism, and the Soviet system. There are reasons to regard this not as a mistake, but as a conscious policy: over the course of 30 post-Soviet years, our country has consistently moved towards the concept of Russia as the heir to the USSR, reproducing the main features of the Bolshevik system.

A significant part of the Russian post-Soviet intelligentsia and intellectuals failed to realise the futility and danger of building a corporate-oligarchic state in Russia.

Since its foundation, Yabloko has represented and offered the Russians an alternative to this dead-end path.

However, our heavy responsibility to the people and the country is that we could not convince [people] of the unacceptability and extreme danger of this policy for our people and country, win a political victory and prevent the consolidation of a system based on the merger of property and power, and protected by police-authoritarian methods.

We affirm that the future of our country is connected with the realisation of the need for modernisation and creation of a modern European Russian state on fundamentally new modern foundations:

– through overcoming Bolshevism on a deeper level than simply changing the symbols;

– responsible dismantling of the merger of power and property;

– creation of new state institutions, the meaning and basis of which will be the embodiment of human values.

The task of the Party is to promote the possibility of developing different semantic trends – conservatives, including Christian Democrats, liberals and greens, as well as social democrats, and so that they could further form a semantic base for the entire Russian political system in the diversity that our society will be able to create in the future: meanings must be taken care of in advance, already now.

Scientifically based preparation, political promotion and practical implementation of these foundations in the Russian reality is the goal and meaning of all the activities of the Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko in the new conditions.

Grigory Yavlinsky,

Chairman of the Yabloko Federal Political Committee