Speech by the head of the Yabloko faction in the St.Petersburg Legislative Assembly, 3.02.2021

Photo: Boris Vishnevsky/ photo from the official website of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg

Laws have been passed in this room for more than a quarter of a century.

However, for the past ten days St. Petersburg has ceased to be a zone of law and has turned into a zone of lawlessness.

Tough detentions of civilians, beatings of women, use of electric shockers, demonstrative humiliation of citizens – all this in response to a peaceful protest, the right to which is guaranteed by the Constitution.

Non-admission of lawyers to the detained, many hours of detention of people with sight disabilities and mothers of young children, refusal to provide information to MPs, ignoring any indications of violations of the law – all this done with an insolent grin “if you are dissatisfied, you can complain”.

The concept of human rights has ceased to exist, as well as the concept of law.

High-speed justice, night courts (apparently, soon trials will be held right in the police vans in a specially arranged “compartment for trials”), overnight keeping of dozens of people in police vans, torture conditions in police departments where people are kept for up to two days, bans on giving them food and water, confiscation of phones…

This is St.Petersburg of the 21st century. Under President Putin and Governor Beglov.

The Governor, who had been deafeningly silent for a week, and then claimed that reinforced security measures were taken when the “mass walk” began. Given that the city began to resemble the city captured by Aliens a day before the start of the walk.

All this is an obvious operation to intimidate society: to intimidate, so that they would shut up and sit quietly at home, criticising the goverment only in the kitchen.

But it won’t work.

Because the idea of ​​change is becoming dominant.

“You can’t live like this,” as they said [in the USSR] in the late 1980s [on the verge of collapse of communism].

I would like to remind you that at that time people took to the streets not for Boris Yeltsin to replace Mikhail Gorbachev, but for changing the political system.

So that there would no the leading role of the communist party any more; so that there would be a multi-party system and freedom of speech, fair elections and economic competition.

And the system did change – although later, in the past two decades, it began to return to the former in many ways.

Today it responds to public protests only with repression – the former lower ranks of the KGB and ex petty officials from the Leningrad Executive Committee and the St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office have no other way to talk to people.

The system neither knows any other ways and means, nor has a desire to know them.

Moreover, it deliberately shows that it will only respond to protests with violence and maliciously joyful humiliation of human dignity, and even greater strengthening of the power of the irreplaceable leader.

The authorities do not remember how the course towards strengthening the czarist regime ended a hundred years ago, it became hated by the overwhelming majority. And when it began to crumble, no one came to protect it.

The current protest is no longer a protest for Alexei Navalny only, and the court sentence to him has the same relation to justice as [Putin’s propaganda journalist] Vladimir Solovyov to journalism or [Spokesperson of the Russian Foreign Ministry] Maria Zakharova to diplomacy. It should be canceled, like other sentences to political prisoners.

And the protest is no longer a protest against Putin only.

This could have been be dealt with by letting Alexei Navalny go and replacing Putin by his successor with the help of another “reshuffle”.

This is a protest against the System.

Also this is the protest of a generation against the System.

The System is always doomed in such a confrontation.

Change is inevitable and cannot be stopped,

As they failed to stop the change three decades ago.

BORIS VISHNEVSKY

is Deputy Chairman of the Yabloko Party,

member of the Yabloko Federal Political Committee and  Bureau.

Leader of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg