Press Release, 25.10.2023

Photo: Boris Vishnevsky and Alexander Shishlov / Photo by the Yaboko Press Service

The Yabloko faction in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly criticised the bill on the return of Soviet and Russian monuments from abroad. The initiative bill was examined in the first reading at the meeting of the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday, 25 October.

The bill envisaged evacuation to Russia of the Soviet and Russian monuments that were under the threat of damage or destruction abroad.

The head of the Yabloko faction, Alexander Shishlov, said that monuments could only be returned on the basis of international treaties and intergovernmental agreements, and not unilateral acts.

“Such a bill does not bear or give rise to any legal consequences. It represents a pseudo-patriotic imitation of lawmaking. What legal consequences do the authors of the bill expect? Are you proposing to carry out special operations on dismantling and removing monuments?” Alexander Shishlov asked Vsevolod Belikov, a deputy of the pro-government United Russia party, who represented the initiative.

Deputy head of the Yabloko faction Boris Vishnevsky noted that he was against the demolition of any monuments. However, he added that we should start with ourselves: this problem also concerned Russia at present – where memorials disappear from time to time, and sometimes simply become abandoned.

“Monuments to the victims of Stalin’s repressions are being demolished, dismantled, and destroyed, across the country, they also need protection. We are approaching 30 October, Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression. And the administration still cannot tell us when the monument to the repressed Poles, which was dismantled under strange circumstances and has not been returned to its place, will be returned to the Levashovsky cemetery,” Vishnevsky said.

Deputy Vishnevsky also noted that since 2013, the work of the Commissioner for Human Rights in St. Petersburg (then Alexander Shishlov) began to identify abandoned monuments. Among them were monuments to famous Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, Academician physiologist Leon Orbeli and a monument to those who fell in the Soviet-Finnish War. They are still left without care.

The Yabloko faction voted against the bill.