Grigory Yavlinsky’s web-site, 19.06.2026

Watch on YouTube with automatic English subtitles

At the beginning of the 20th century, technical progress moved to a qualitatively new level. Europe’s political elites proved incapable of making adequate decisions and, like sleepwalkers, with no understanding of what was happening, plunged the world into two world wars. Around 100 million people died then.

Today, amid a new qualitative technological breakthrough, and against the backdrop of military clashes already under way and rapidly growing new political threats, it is becoming obvious that the world cannot exist normally without observing the principle of the supreme value — the preservation of human life.

People, their lives and development, must become the central goal of politics. Only with people at the centre of politics, and only in conditions of freedom and creativity, can the gap between humanity and technological progress be closed — so that it is not technology that manipulates people, but people who govern technology.

The principal political task of today is to reunite human values with politics. In other words, to institutionalise values: to organise the structure of the state in such a way that the people, their life, their freedom, their creativity and development, become state and political institutions. Only in this way can the looming civilisational catastrophe be averted.

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A new episode in the A Frank Conversation series with Grigory Yavlinsky is now available on video.