"Apple" on a scorched field. Where did the party's attempts to get into power lead?

The main political event of the summer in Russia unexpectedly was the decision to first allow and then remove one of the oldest Russian parties, Yabloko, from the State Duma elections. On August 17, she lost her appeal in the Supreme Court. For the last 25 years, Yabloko has been trying to unite the liberal electorate while remaining part of the system, but the war in Ukraine has made this almost impossible.

Anti-war street protests in Russia in the fifth year of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine are rare. Rallies of young people in defense of a party that is older than those gathered themselves, even more so.

Politician Kirill Goncharov, who heads the Moscow branch of Yabloko, arrived at the Supreme Court on Povarskaya Street an hour before the hearing and found himself in a line of hundreds of people lined up at the entrance.

“Nobody invited these people, but they are absolutely not closed-minded, they are absolutely not afraid of anything,” he tells the BBC.

On August 10, the Supreme Court considered the claim of the pro-Kremlin Rodina party to exclude Yabloko competitors from the elections. The reasons are copyright violations in campaigning and extremist slogans.

In the first case, we were talking, for example, about a photograph of a nuclear explosion, quotes from the poem “Let there always be sunshine” and the phrase “if only there was no war” from the play “Five Evenings.” The second is about Yabloko’s calls “for peace and a ceasefire.”

In recent years, Yabloko's rating, according to various surveys, remained at the level of 1-4%. The last time the party entered the State Duma was more than 20 years ago, before Vladimir Putin came to power.

But a month and a half before the first wartime Duma elections, Yabloko, the only party that openly opposed the war in Ukraine, turned into a social network phenomenon.

Russian segments of TikTok and Instagram are filled with videos of young people posing with apples, dancing to songs of the same name, or directly calling for voting for the party. Until recently, Yabloko could only dream of such activity.

Closed polls began to predict the party's entry into parliament.

“Every day there continue to be reports of deaths, disasters, explosions. And against the backdrop of this, no increase in ratings can please us. Everything would be fine if there had not been such a tragedy,” party leader Nikolai Rybakov tells the BBC.

Whether its sudden popularity was the last straw for the Kremlin in its decision to remove Yabloko from the State Duma elections - for the first time in its history - Rybakov cannot guess, but the court upheld Rodina’s claim.

Young supporters of Yabloko greeted the decision of the Supreme Court with shouts of “Shame!” They were forced to disperse by the police, who threatened that the most stubborn would be taken to the military registration and enlistment office.

Before this, Rybakov managed to address them from the porch of the court, holding an apple in his hands. “We’ve had different periods in history,” he said. “For so many of you today everything is just beginning.” You came to us for the first time, we just met. Therefore, we have a long, common road ahead of us.”

It is difficult to say now how long this road will be. Yabloko's removal from the Duma elections threatened its existence. By law, parties must participate in federal elections every seven years or face liquidation.

For Yabloko, this period will expire in 2028. The necessary quota can be fulfilled by participating in regional elections, but it is possible that the surge of support in the current Duma campaign will be the last bright episode in the history of Yabloko - a party that, being in opposition to the Kremlin, tried to play by its rules.

The leaders of Yabloko do not see any major political miscalculations in their 35-year history. “Was it possible to do any other movements? Well, it's probably possible. But then there would be no “Apple”. We would remain on the ballot, but we would lose meaning,” Rybakov tells the BBC.

He came to Yabloko thirty years ago. At that time it was not yet a party, but a liberal bloc that formed before the 1993 elections to the Duma of the first convocation.

The creators were the co-author of economic reforms of the 90s Grigory Yavlinsky, former high-ranking official in the presidential administration Yuri Boldyrev and former Russian ambassador to the United States Vladimir Lukin. The bloc received its fruity name - based on the first letters of the leaders' surnames - from journalists, and after its election to the State Duma, it became the official name of the Duma faction.

The main motive of Yabloko's first election campaign was criticism of the current government. Yavlinsky criticized “shock therapy” and privatization, Boldyrev - corruption and the authoritarian draft of the Constitution, Lukin - Russian foreign policy. Yabloko received 7.86% of the votes and a faction in the Duma of 27 deputies. In 1995, at the next elections, it increased it to 45 people.

Grigory Yavlinsky quickly became the sole leader of Yabloko. By the time the bloc was created, the young politician had already worked in positions of the rank of deputy prime minister: in the last years of the Soviet Union - deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, and after the 1991 putsch - deputy head of the Committee for the Operational Management of the National Economy of the USSR.

In those years, he was known primarily as the co-author of the economic program “500 days” - a radical plan for the transition of the Soviet economy to a market economy. The program remained on paper. It was buried by the then Union Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, because he developed his own and insisted on its adoption. Yavlinsky resigned from the post of Deputy Prime Minister.

Yavlinsky's ambitions were not limited to work in the Duma. In 1996, he went to the presidential elections for the first time - despite the fact that the team of then President Boris Yeltsin persuaded him to withdraw in exchange for deputy prime minister.

As Yavlinsky himself said in Mikhail Zygar’s book “Everyone is Free,” instead of negotiating a position, he demanded that Yeltsin achieve the release of oppositionists in Belarus.

Yeltsin agreed. During the call, Alexander Lukashenko asked the Russian president who approached him with such a request. “Dissidents! I have a lot of them here... In general, listen, Russia is asking you. Russia is asking you! That’s it, the conversation is over,” Yeltsin replied.

The Belarusian oppositionists were released, but the Yabloko leader did not withdraw from the elections. Then, in 1996, he received 7.34% of the vote in the first round. After that, Yavlinsky twice became a presidential candidate, but that result remained the highest in his career.

Then, in the 1990s, Yavlinsky developed a relationship with future President Vladimir Putin. In 1999, speaking from the Duma rostrum, the head of Yabloko said that his colleagues did not support Putin’s appointment as prime minister.

“We don’t think it’s right that our country is led and, moreover, can participate in the presidential elections by people who worked in the Soviet secret intelligence services,” Yavlinsky said. And then, contrary to the opinion of some deputies of his own faction, he voted for Putin’s candidacy.

He would later explain this decision with personal reasons. As Boris Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Yumasheva said, a year earlier, in 1998, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov demanded that Putin, then director of the FSB, wiretap Yavlinsky. Putin refused to do this (and allegedly threatened to resign).

Despite the reputation of an opposition party, many politicians managed to work for Yabloko in those years and subsequently continued their careers in government. Mikhail Men, for example, later worked as governor of the Ivanovo region and minister of construction. The former deputy chairman of the faction, Igor Artemyev, headed the Federal Antimonopoly Service for 16 years.

It was from Yabloko that the ultra-conservative politician Elena Mizulina was first elected to the Duma; the general public remembers her as the co-author of many repressive laws. Irina Yarovaya, vice-speaker of the Duma from United Russia and the author of the “anti-terrorist” law named after herself, until 2007 was a deputy of the Kamchatka Legislative Assembly from Yabloko and deputy chairman of the party.

“Yabloko was part of the system and always wanted to be part of this system,” oppositionist Ilya Yashin, who joined the party’s youth wing in the early 2000s, tells the BBC.

He recalls how in 2003, on the eve of the first parliamentary elections under Vladimir Putin, it was discussed in the “main Apple offices” that the party needed to defeat its liberal competitors from the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and take a place in the country’s party system.

“Because whatever liberal party passes, it will be like that for centuries,” Yashin explains this logic.

At the same time, even then there was an important difference between Yabloko and other liberal forces, which would play a key role 25 years later: from the very beginning the party positioned itself as anti-militarist.

In the 1999 Duma elections, she was the only one to speak out against the war in Chechnya. Then one of the leaders of the SPS, Anatoly Chubais, declared Yavlinsky a traitor. Three years later, Yavlinsky himself was one of those who personally negotiated with the invaders of the theater center on Dubrovka during the musical “Nord-Ost”.

Chairman of Yabloko Rybakov, even now, discussing the history of the party, recalls that Yavlinsky predicted war in the post-Soviet space back in 1995. “Our peculiarity is that when they ask us “why were you silent before?” [we answer] - maybe you just didn’t hear us. Maybe we haven’t talked about it loudly enough,” he says.

The predictions of Yabloko leaders came true - both about the war and about the political system in Russia.

In 2003, Yabloko did not get into the State Duma and found itself at a crossroads. Ilya Yashin recalls that he and other young party activists, including Alexei Navalny, wanted to “play all-in.” The old-timers, led by Yavlinsky, advocated a more cautious approach.

“Yavlinsky did not want to share power in the party with anyone, because he did not want to have a real, big quarrel with Putin. Because attracting support to the party always creates risks,” the oppositionist believes.

Yavlinsky was reproached for leaderism almost from the first years of Yabloko’s existence. Attempts to limit his power or remove him from the post of chairman ended with the departure of the initiators of such reforms from the party.

In 2007, Alexei Navalny, at that time the deputy head of the capital’s branch, was expelled from the party, officially for collaborating with the nationalist movement.

Only Ilya Yashin voted against. He later stated that the real reason for Navalny’s expulsion was the demand for the resignation of the party chairman and his deputies.

In 2008, Yashin was also expelled from the party - formally for joining the leadership of the new Solidarity movement. In fact, he also tried to remove Yavlinsky and criticized the situation when “100% of the shares of Yabloko are concentrated in his hands.”

Both Yashin and Navalny were expelled with the wording “causing political damage” to the party. Moreover, later, in 2020, St. Petersburg deputy Alexander Kobrinsky, accused of sexual harassment of students of the Russian State Pedagogical University named after. Herzen, where he taught. Kobrinsky denied this; Yabloko did not conduct an investigation against him, despite the calls of his party colleagues.

The situation in the party also gave reasons for criticism in the 2000s: if in the 2003 elections the Yabloko members, who fell short of the entry threshold by only 0.7%, blamed fraud, then in 2007 the party, although again claiming fraud, suffered a more severe defeat with a result of 1.6% of the vote.

In 2008, Yavlinsky resigned from the post of chairman, transferring the position to his closest associate Sergei Mitrokhin.

The “co-founding father” instead became chairman of the Federal Political Committee, an influential party body that formulates positions “on major political issues” and makes decisions on the volume and main directions of funding. In a recent interview, Yavlinsky said the committee "discusses meanings, but does not give orders or make decisions about what the party should do."

But even under Chairman Mitrokhin, the Yabloko members were unable to unite with other opposition forces. And if their rivals in the opposition camp accused them of being “spoilers,” the party always found reasons for ideological disagreements with other democrats.

In 2013, in the Moscow mayoral elections, Yabloko nominated Sergei Mitrokhin against Alexei Navalny, and in subsequent years it criticized his “Smart Voting” and excluded from its ranks those who supported the project.

Yashin still blames its co-founder for Yabloko’s problems: “It’s all about the role of the individual in history. Yavlinsky had the opportunity at some point to make it so that there would be no Yavlinsky party, but a democratic united party. He faked it. He formally resigned as chairman, remaining the real leader of Yabloko.”

Yavlinsky responds to accusations of leaderism like this: “They agree with me on some things, and disagree on others. I always have opponents. Please note that in Russia there is no longer a party in which the chairmen have changed. And the chairman has all the powers.”

“We are who we are,” says Nikolai Rybakov, who led the party in 2019, now. “Our peculiarity is that we do not exchange our principles or sell them for any short-term benefits.”

In the entire history of Russian politics over the past 30 years, there have been practically no examples of successful democratic associations - they always found reasons for disagreement.

Perhaps Yabloko could be more popular - especially if it were more in line with the “unsatisfied left-wing demand of Russians,” political scientist Ekaterina Shulman argues in a conversation with the BBC.

At the same time, according to her, Yabloko is more of an “ethical than a political party,” which “looks reproachfully at the world, at the government, and at a society that does not support them or does not support them enough.”

“It may limit their electoral opportunities, but at the same time it attracts people of a similar moral position to them, and allows them to survive for so long,” Shulman says.

In 2018, Grigory Yavlinsky participated in the presidential elections for the last time. His election video gave rise to perhaps the most famous political meme in Russia: in one scene, Yavlinsky is holding a poster with the inscription “You can do nothing at all.” Then he pulled out another one: “Can you come and vote,” but the audience only remembered the first part.