Statement by the Yabloko Bureau, 12.11.2021

Photo by Pyotr Kassin / Kommersant

After the elections to the State Duma, the authorities intensified repressions against civil society and the country’s intellectual elite, and began to crack down on independent public institutions.

The lawsuit of the Public Prosecutor General’s Office to liquidate Memorial, the oldest human rights organisation, in the year of the 100th anniversary of its first Chairman, Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov; hanging labels of “foreign agents” on increasingly more organisations and public figures; criminal prosecution of the rector of one of the best private universities in the country, Shaninka [the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences founded by Prof. Sir Teodor Shanin] – all this testifies to the complete degradation of relations between the state and society, the transformation of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian system into a totalitarian dictatorship, where the main concern and the raison d’être of state bodies is to maintain the power of the current grouping and gagging all dissent.

Three decades ago, democratic transformations in the country began with the fact that it became possible to speak the truth about the situation in the country and the crimes of the totalitarian regime. Now ideological heirs of the NKVD/KGB are trying to deprive all those who all these years have defended freedom and human rights, preserved the memory of the repressions, and recalled the names of victims of state terror at the Solovetsky Stone [monument], of their legal status and, in a Stalinist way, declare them “enemies of the people” and “foreign agents”. The circle of history has closed.

The authorities give a clear signal to all citizens of Russia: if you are engaged in human rights protection, independent journalism, or opposition politics, there will be no dialogue. The only language they know is prohibitions and repression.

A few days ago, the Ministry of Justice included the lawyer Ivan Pavlov and members of his Team 29 Valeria Vetoshkina, Maxim Zagovor, Yelena Skvortsova and Maxim Olenichev (a member of the Yabloko party) in the list of “foreign agents”.

The toughening of repression is a natural result of the elections of 19 September, during which citizens of democratic views sacrificed their ideals and values and called on to vote for the Communists, supporters of Zakhar Prilepin [writer and nationalist who publicly boasted of killing people in Donbass, Ukraine] and Vladimir Zhirinovsky [head of the pro-Putin LDPR parliamentary party]. Persecution of free citizens and destruction of independent opinion is the essence of the Bolshevik ideology, and its successors sit in the Kremlin and the State Duma today.

The responsibility for the intensification of repression lies not only with those carrying it out, but also with those calling to vote for the parties that adopt and justify laws, according to which these repressions are then implemented.

Yabloko expresses its support and solidarity with Memorial, Ivan Pavlov, Maxim Olenichev and others who are labeled with the odious mark of “foreign agents”.

We are well aware of the difficulties that those labeled with this mark will have to face. Our party went to the elections with this stigma, and we know how difficult it is.

Yabloko insists on the complete abolition of all repressive laws and continues its struggle for human dignity, truth and freedom, building a democratic state in Russia without prohibitions and repressions.

Nikolai Rybakov,

Yabloko Chairman