ONCE-POTENT LIBERAL VOICE IN RUSSIA VIES TO SURVIVE
ALAN CULLISON
Yabloko Party
July 1, 2008; Page A10
Lowers Its Hopes, Seeks New Leader
Fifteen years ago, Grigory Yavlinsky founded a political party that
became the voice of Russia’s newly liberated intelligentsia. It held
a chunk of parliament, where its deputies clamored for European-style
democracy and an end to the war in Chechnya and to shady privatizations
that enriched Kremlin-connected oligarchs. Garnering millions of votes,
it became a political fixture.
Today, with independent parties crushed and replaced by Kremlin
loyalists, Mr. Yavlinsky’s party, Yabloko, has set its sights on a
more immediate goal: survival. "It’s like Soviet times," says Mr.
Yavlinsky. "You hold on to your principles and your position…and
prepare for the day when the situation changes."
The dialed-back hopes of politicians like Mr. Yavlinsky expose the
calamity that has befallen Kremlin critics in today’s Russia. While
some politicians continue a noisy fight, others say their efforts
yield only muted protests and police roundups.
Mr. Yavlinsky says self-preservation — not victory — should be the
priority today. His party, he says, is still too fragile to be driven
into collision with the Kremlin. "They can shut us down whenever they
want," he says. The Kremlin denies any such plan; earlier this year,
then-President Vladimir Putin met Mr. Yavlinsky in the Kremlin.
The struggle over how hard to fight has shaken Mr. Yavlinsky’s party,
and last week he stepped down as chairman, a post he had held since
he founded Yabloko. Mr. Yavlinsky, 56 years old, says he hopes to
re-energize the party by making way for a new generation of leaders.
Mr. Yavlinsky has been the last of the liberal politicians from
the 1990s to keep a place in national politics. At its height in the
mid-1990s, Yabloko controlled 10% of the seats in parliament, making it
a key broker of legislation during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. The
party last year lost the last of its seats as it collected just 1.6% of
the vote in a contest that Mr. Yavlinsky says was tainted with fraud.
In an interview, Mr. Yavlinsky says a host of factors, including the
decline of the U.S. as a democratic role model, are to blame for his
party’s difficulties. But he says the fall has been overstated —
government pressure and monopoly of the press have made many Russians
too fearful to express their views.
Still, he ridicules street demonstrations as a futile response
to rising Kremlin power and says his party will steer clear of a
coalition led by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov that is
staging protests to increase pressure on the government. Though the
group includes Westward-leaning liberals, it also has Communists,
nationalists and neo-Stalinists — Yabloko’s traditional rivals.
"We must be ourselves, we must be Russian democrats," he says. "If
we try to be something else, that will be the end of us."
Mr. Yavlinsky’s successor, Sergei Mitrokhin, has promised to keep
the party’s focus on citizens’ rights. But so far he appears to be
stressing nitty-gritty issues of local politics — at a news conference
last week, he said he wants to come to the aid of Russians who are
being illegally evicted from their apartments, or garage owners who
are losing parking spaces to unscrupulous businessmen.
Mr. Yavlinsky has been no stranger to hostility. After founding
Yabloko, he became an early opponent of the war in Chechnya. In 1994,
abductors kidnapped his son — an aspiring pianist — cut off some
of his fingers and told Mr. Yavlinsky to back off. Mr. Yavlinsky sent
his son and daughter to live in the U.K.
In parliament, he became a champion to millions of Russians who yearned
for Western-style democracy but saw the flaws in the country’s nascent
capitalism. Unlike many other avowed liberals, he never took a post in
Mr. Yeltsin’s government, saying it was shot through with corruption.
Mr. Yavlinsky’s principled stands made him a role model for Russian
democrats but a poor partner in forming coalitions, says Vladimir
Ryzhkov, a former independent member of parliament. In 2003, when
pollsters warned that liberals would have to join forces to make it
over the 5% barrier needed to get into parliament, talks broke down.
Kremlin-created parties swept the elections.
Yabloko also ran into financial problems. A major donor was oil
tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who before 2003 elections was arrested
on charges of tax evasion and fraud. Today, Yabloko owes several
million dollars to state-run television networks — the government
demands the party repay the networks for free network time since it
mustered such a small number of votes for parliament.
The remaining donors are mostly small and midsize businesses that
could easily buckle under government pressure, says Boris Vishnevsky,
a longtime leader of Yabloko in St. Petersburg. "I would prefer a
harder opposition, but at the same time I don’t know where we would
get our money," he says.
Irina Khakamada, a former deputy in Russia’s parliament, says Mr.
Yavlinsky’s resignation from the top job at Yabloko comes as Russia’s
1990s attempts at liberal politics have all but died. "Right now we
live like in the 1980s, when politics was discussed in the kitchen,"
says Ms. Khakamada. "Maybe in 10 or 15 years, when new leaders appear,
its moment will arrive."