Press Release, 04.05.2018

On 4 May, the leaders and activists of the Yabloko party laid wreaths and flowers to the Eternal Flame and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Alexander Garden by the Kremlin wall and honoured the memory of those killed in the Second World War by a minute of silence.

Yabloko leaders Grigory Yavlinsky, Alexei Arbatov, Sergei Ivanenko, Nikolai Rybakov, Sergei Mitrokhin, Elena Dubrovina and other participated in the action.

Grigory Yavlinsky, Yabloko founder and Chair of the Political Committee of the party noted that that war was both a tragic and heroic event in the history of the country.

“It was a heroic event, because we are a country that liberated the world [from German Nazism], played a decisive role in the struggle against German Nazism, perhaps the most terrible evil of the 21st century. It was tragic, because the Soviet Union paid the price of the lives of 27 million people for this victory. And recent studies sometimes say that this was 40 million people. No one has ever paid such a price for freedom,” Yavlinsky said.

According to Grigory Yavlinsky, the responsibility of the descendants of those who fought in the war so that the country would survive is to make Russia a truly modern and free country.

“These people gave their lives so that we could be free today and build our lives the way we want. The higher is our responsibility to ensure that our life is truly the life of free creative people, so that in our country there is no authoritarianism, mafia, nationalism and banditry. Unfortunately, these phenomena surround us today, and our task is to overcome them, but this is a long hard way,” he stressed.

Acad. Alexei Arbatov said, “Many today succumbed to the arrogant faith in success, a solemn and ceremonial view of the war, that there were only victories, that there were no terrible losses and casualties, that Stalin was not to blame for anything, that the generals who had let the Nazis to close to Moscow in four months, were good. But still there are young people, including those who support Yabloko, who understand what a terrible tragedy it was, and what a tremendous responsibility the Stalinist leadership bears for the price that had to be paid for the victory.”

It is important that the young people learn the truth about the war, the academician stressed.

Yabloko conducts its solemn ceremony in the memory of the victims by the Kremlin’s walls every year.