Grigory Yavlinsky’s Facebook page, 30.10.2023

During the years of Joseph Stalin’s rule in the USSR, millions of citizens of the country were repressed and killed. This is the scale of a real national catastrophe. The crimes of Stalinism and Bolshevism affected almost every family in our country. It is impossible to simply forget and move past such a tragedy and move on as if nothing had happened. Or rather, it is possible, as it turned out, but we feel the consequences of this increasingly often today.

Back in the early 1990s, immediately after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian government was obliged to give, at the state level, a legal assessment of the entire era of Stalinism and adopt an appropriate package of laws that would guarantee that the country would not return to a regime similar in essence to the Stalin-Bolshevik regime, so that power in our country would never again be concentrated in the hands of one person, so that human life in any situation would be considered as the highest value, so that the terrible and inhuman Bolshevik principle “the end justifies the means” would never be implemented again.

But the chance was missed – and Russia again came to an authoritarian system, where there is no independent parliament, independent courts and independent press, where everything is subjected to the will of one person. Under these conditions, human life and freedom have lost any value; people have turned into expendable material. We live in a political system whose foundations were laid in the 1990s, a system that has been consistently built over the past three decades.

Today the world is divided into two parts: the countries where the authorities are doing everything to ensure that their citizens live in freedom, and the countries where the authorities want people to live in constant fear. Without giving a state-legal assessment of Stalinism and Bolshevism, Russia will never be able to become a free country, and Russian citizens will never get rid of fear. Only by laying the foundation of a new system of guarantees for human freedom and the inviolability of human life (and also real and inviolable private property, independent press, and separation of powers – an independent parliament, an independent court, and an executive branch controlled by citizens), can we build a state with a safe future for its citizens.

October 30 is the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression. Eternal memory to all those who suffered during the years of Stalinism! Strength and hope to all political prisoners of modern Russia!

Source

Grigory Yavlinsky

is Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of the Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko, Vice President of Liberal International, PhD in Economics, Professor of the National Research University Higher School of Economics.