Statement by the YABLOKO party, 10.06.2014

The YABLOKO party is categorically against the return of the name [Stalingrad] coined after executioner of Russia’s people Joseph Stalin to the city of Volgograd. Nobody in Russia or in the world will take such renaming as entrenchment of the historic battle [under Stalingrad in the Second World War].

The renaming will be perceived as an attempt to politically rehabilitate the person who purposefully doomed millions of people to death and, in addition to all this, personally eliminated thousands of peaceful residents of the ancient Russia’s city Tzaritsin in 1918 and then sanctioned a grovelling initiative to rename the city after his own name.

The argument that there are squares and streets named after the battle of Stalingrad in many West European cities is not convincing. In Europe such names are not associated with crimes against peoples of those countries.

But for the long period of time while the city has been holding the name of Volgograd it has become larger and has expanded beyond its the old territorial borders, thus the renaming will actually refer to a different city.

A poorly concealed Russian President’s support of the renaming demonstrates that today a deathly poisonous ingredient of sheer Stalinism is added to the anti-Western ideological cocktail of “the Eurasian way of development” and the “conservative ideas of the great superpower statehood” which the authorities have been trying to hocus the Russian society with.

We would like to remind to all the representatives of the ruling elites flirting with Stalinism that neither high-rank officials nor the most avid Stalin’s supporters were indemnified against the state terror policies associated with the name of Joseph Stalin. None of those who has been trying to let this genie out of the moldy bottle can count that they won’t die from him in the first flight.

We demand from Vladimir Putin to clearly express a negative opinion about the idea of renaming Volgograd [into Stalingrad] and other initiatives targeted at rehabilitation of the misanthropic symbols of the past.

Sergei Mitrokhin,

YABLOKO Chairman