Press Release, December 17, 2013

Grigory Yavlinsky believes that refounding of Russia’s statehood on the basis of historical continuity is critically important. There are important pivotal points in Russia’s history that determine its modern development. Such a statement was made by Grigory Yavlinsky at the conference on history organized by YABLOKO and attended by the country’s leading historians.

Grigory Yavlinsky stressed that there is a complex but inextricable connection between history and politics, however, for politics it is crucial to understanding of historical meanings, mechanisms and development trends. In this sense, in his view, the policy is a special form, another dimension of history. According to Yavlinsky, such understanding is another form or another dimension of history. He noted that the famous statement by famous Russian historian Vassily Kluchevsky was very timely at present: “Politics must be no more and no less than the applied history. Now it is no more than a negation of history and no less than its distortion.” “We need to move away from arbitrary political interpretation of history, we need a maximum honest attitude to history with the ability to discuss any topic,” Yavlinsky said.

According to Grigory Yavlinsky, in the past one hundred years in Russia history and politics broke apart which led to a massive crisis of legitimacy and self-identity. Yavlinsky expressed his certainty that Russia’s leadership sensed this crisis, and used a “modern political Post Modernism mixing the things that did not mix, denying all meanings and the analysis of the causes and consequences of historical events, and consciously cultivating imitation and ignorance.” He said that today this “political Post Modernism” manifested itself in the today’s state symbols – “the imperial coat of arms, the Soviet anthem and the trade-and-democratic flag”, as well as in the idea to introduce a common history textbook.

According to Yavlinsky, illegitimacy of the Russian power represents a direct consequence of the “coup d’etat of 1917 – 1918”. “It might be tolerable in the Soviet system, which denied all historical continuity, but you can not build a law-governed state on the coup and the terror that followed,” he said. Grigory Yavlinsky also noticed that “this illegitimacy is seen in the extreme uncertainty of the present nomenclature” so it pictures history “as an endless process of searching of past victories”.

YABLOKO leader also stressed that overcoming the long political crisis implies overcoming Bolshevism and Stalinism and restoring historical continuity with the [old] Russia – not “with the artificial gold plated empire”, but with the country that “was able to abolish serfdom without a civil war, [start] great reforms, and made a dramatic way to the Constituent Assembly.”

Yavlinsky said that the strategic goal can be creation of a modern state based on historical continuity, connected with the society and being an extention of the society, which represents actually the refounding of the state.” “In 1613, it was impossible to build a state on the legacy of the Time of Troubles, but a new turmoil has been lasting not for the past 20 years only, but all the years after the Bolshevik coup,” he said. Also Yavlinsky expressed his confidence that “there are no obstacles to realization of these goals in the Russian history and culture.”

According to Grigory Yavlinsky, this goal should become the basis for formation of the modern democratic movement: “We should engage in dialogue around this, rather than around how we should quickly dump the power.”

The conference-debate “Historical Knowledge as a Factor of Development ” was held on December 16. It was organized by the YABLOKO party, the Memorial society and the Sakharov Centre. The main theme of the conference were approaches to the studies of national history. Prominent historians, sociologists, teachers of history and authors of textbooks, such as Yury Afanasiev, Andrei Medushevsky, Konstantin Morozov, Boris Dubin, Leonid Vasilyev, Igor Dolutsky, Alexei Kara-Murza and others participated in the conference.