On Victory Day, activists and leaders of the Yabloko party traditionally came to the Preobrazhanskoye Cemetery in Moscow

Press Release, 9.05.2019

On Victory Day, activists and leaders of the Yabloko party traditionally came to the Preobrazhanskoye Cemetery – the largest military burial in Moscow. The war should never happen again – that was the leitmotif of all the speeches at the memorial to the fallen soldiers.

“We have been coming to this cemetery for many years, where thousands of Muscovites and defenders of the city are buried, just as many people do today – throughout our country and around the world,” Nikolai Rybakov, Yabloko Deputy Chairman, said.  “We come here to maintain the link of generations, so that people remember that terrible war. Our task and responsibility is to ensure that this never happens again.”

Boris Misnik, Coordinator of the party’s Federal Political Committee, said , in his speech that there are fewer people left who survived the war — not only front-line soldiers, but also their children who lived “in evacuation, in hunger, cold weather, waiting for letters from their fathers who fought waiting for them [to return] from the war. ” “And not all of our generation waited for their fathers and mothers from this damned war. For us who survived it, it was a damned war,” Boris Misnik stressed.

According to him, “Victory Day is a day of sorrow, a day of tears.” “War is not heroism, not guns, tanks and airplanes. War is dirt, hunger, cold and suffering of people,” Misnik noted.

“Eternal memory to the dead, eternal memory to the participants of the war, eternal memory to people who died during this war. And thank you all for this memory,” Boris Misnik concluded.

On 8 May, the delegation of Yabloko headed by Grigory Yavlinsky, the founder of the party, laid a wreath and flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Alexander Garden in Moscow. In St. Petersburg, the delegation of the Yabloko members took part in two memorable actions: Nikolai Rybakov, Yabloko Deputy Chairman, Boris Vishnevsky, head of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, and other members of the Petersburg Yabloko commemorated the city’s defenders at the Piskarevsky memorial cemetery, and the delegation led by Yekaterina Kuznetsova, Chair of the St.Petersburg branch of Yabloko, laid flowers to the Monument to the Defenders of Leningrad in Victory Square.

Photos by Ksenia Yablonskaya.