The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, commonly known as the Liberal Democratic Party, and the Yabloko Democratic Party, whose characteristic is usually reduced to the definition of "social liberal", in fact, should have been similar. Just based on "species". Meanwhile, it is difficult to find more dissimilar platforms, programs, and conceptual political positions in general. Of course, the Liberal Democratic Party as it exists is not very liberal and not very democratic. But the paradox is still curious. Even Kozma Prutkov argued that if “buffalo” is written on the elephant’s cage, then most likely the eyes are lying. True, he did not specify whether it was in relation to the inscription or in relation to the inhabitant of the cage. The same problem with the modern political arena.
Political views of the party
Yabloko party leaders traditionally position it as democratic, liberal and socially oriented. Such a strange cocktail of definitions is explained by the historical context and the peculiarities of the national mentality. In many countries of the world, especially in conservative Europe, liberal and social parties are striving for maximum socialization of the state, limiting the role of capital and privateproperty in the country.
In Russia, the situation is reversed. Here, in contrast to Europe, there is a reverse bias - an excessive regulatory function of the state, the absence of true freedom of entrepreneurship, the absence of an effective practice of budget allocation with a sufficiently high level of taxes. That is why the liberal party of Russia should advocate for a reduction in the tax burden and maximum support for entrepreneurs, while within the framework of the European political tradition these goals are just characteristic of conservative parties. The leaders of the Yabloko party are well aware of the duality of such a position. And they explain it by the historical and cultural context. Europe's high taxes are distributed efficiently. It is thanks to them that a high level of social protection of citizens is achieved. If, with a high tax rate, it is impossible to organize a decent work in the social sphere, then why bleed the business? Wouldn't it be more logical to direct these funds to its maintenance? Then, by increasing the number of objects of taxation, the total amount of budget revenues will also increase. In Europe, this position is meaningless - everything is fine with private business there. In Russia, alas, not yet.
Liberalism in Russian
Yabloko party leader Sergei Mitrokhin links the political activities of the party with pre-revolutionary democratic traditions. The traditions of the Constituent Assembly, in his opinion, were an island of European democratic legitimacy in a series of various types of dictatorships, from monarchical toproletarian. It is the Constituent Assembly that is the first and only legitimate representative of legality and liberalism in Russian political life. Alas, the attempt to replace monarchical rule with democratic ended in failure. The Constituent Assembly did not last long, its activity was ineffective, and its fate was sad. The Yabloko party, which claims to be the cultural successor to the traditions of Russian democracy, has also not achieved much success in the political arena. Does this mean that democratic traditions are alien to Russia, or that Russian democrats tend to make mistakes that lead to tragic results for them and for the country? The question is debatable, but in the context of time it is extremely relevant.
Party election program
Now, probably, few people remember that the name of the party, in fact, is an abbreviation compiled by journalists from the names of the founders of Yabloko. Yavlinsky, Boldyrev, Lukin. These people have long been unrelated to the party, the average person, most likely, will be able to identify only Yavlinsky from this list, but the party's comic nickname, accidentally born by the media, really became its name.
Initially it was not a party, but a bloc. It included the Republican, Social Democratic parties and the bloc was Christian Democratic, which now even sounds funny. In the 1993 elections, this association received almost 8% of the vote and, accordingly, a seat in the Duma. After that, Yabloko was a stable member of the Duma, although a large number of votescould not boast. And only in 2001 the Yabloko party was officially created. The party program, of course, has changed more than once since then, but the basic postulates have remained the same:
- personal integrity;
- civil rights and freedoms;
- judiciary reform;
- reform of special services and law enforcement agencies: a professional army, the possibility of public control over the activities of government agencies and various law enforcement agencies;
- expanding the powers of the subjects of the federation, weakening the centralized power vertical in favor of local self-government;
- privacy;
- free competition, simplification of legislative mechanisms regulating business activities, guarantee of consumer rights;
- modernization of industry and agriculture;
- rationalization of the country's infrastructures;
- taking measures aimed at reducing the social fragmentation of the population, reducing the difference in income between the richest and poorest segments of the population;
- development of education, medicine and culture;
- state support for science;
- improving the level of environmental safety of production, supporting environmentally friendly methods of energy production.
These are the goals that the Yabloko party traditionally declares in its election manifestos. The party program involves the fight against corruption, oligarchy and civil lawlessness. The fundamental moments for the Yabloko party are the national, religious,racial tolerance and official condemnation of Stalinist and Bolshevik repressions. They consider the USSR to be a state that arose illegitimately, and they believe that it is possible to restore the continuity of official power only by recognizing the coup of 1917 as illegal.
Real goals or more promises?
Of course, all the points announced in the election program sound just great. The leaders of the Yabloko party say the necessary and correct things, just like representatives of any other party taken at random. The question is how and by what methods such promises should be realized. The Yabloko party is no exception in this regard. The party program, summarized, sounds like another list of populist slogans. Alas, it is impossible to know if this is so. The only way to assess the quality of an election program is to give the party the opportunity to implement it. Since Yabloko has remained not a very popular opposition movement, it is impossible to talk about its ability or inability to realize the promise. The party does not offer effective mechanisms for the implementation of all the miraculous things promised in the election program. But maybe they have. Who knows…
Practical results achieved by party activities
At the moment, the assessment of the political activities of the Yabloko party is possible only on the basis of the mathematical principle "by contradiction". That is, it is impossible to say that it was she who did good, simply because the party did not have such an opportunity. On the other hand, it can be said which dubious initiatives of the government the leadersthe Yabloko party consistently objected. Actually, this can also be considered a "quality criterion", especially for a traditional opposition party.
Thus, the leader of the Yabloko party, Yavlinsky, spoke extremely negatively about the privatization of the 1990s. He believed that in the form in which this action was carried out, it was not only useless, but also harmful. Such a privatization scheme ruled out the possibility of a fair redistribution of state property. The only thing that could be achieved by such economic reforms was to concentrate a controlling share in the hands of the heads of enterprises and people involved in privatization at a level that can be called professional. As practice has shown, Yavlinsky was right. It was the privatization of the 90s that served as the launching pad for the emergence of the largest oligarchic structures in modern Russia. Many billion-dollar capitals of people whose names are now on everyone's lips come precisely from the privatization hype of those times.
Voice of Reason
There are a few more very significant moments in which the Yabloko party showed sanity and adherence to principles. The leader of the organization advocated an alternative, milder form of post-perestroika economic reforms. The party considered the option of "shock therapy" unacceptable. Also, Yabloko did not share the position of the authorities regarding the conflict in Chechnya. They considered the forceful method of resolving the issue to be unsuccessful. Party representatives even tried to negotiate with the militants, trying to find peaceful ways to solve the problem, but the initiativeended in failure. The direct decisions of the military leadership of that time were subjected to particular criticism. Yavlinsky even demanded the resignation of Grachev, the defense minister, and Barsukov, director of the FSB. Again, taking into account the fact that subsequently many decisions of the country's leadership regarding the military conflict in Chechnya were recognized as erroneous, the Yabloko party turned out to be right once again.
In May 1999, one of the forces that spoke out for the impeachment of the president was the Yabloko party. The leader of the party, Yavlinsky, supported the initiative to remove Yeltsin. Apart from Chechnya and economic reforms, Yavlinsky strongly disagreed with the armed dispersal of the Supreme Soviet in 1993.
The rapid decline in popularity
If in 1999 the Yabloko party, headed by Yavlinsky himself, approved of Putin's coming to power, by 2003 the position on this matter had changed dramatically. Either the new head of the country did not live up to the expectations placed on him, or the already familiar “opposition reflex” worked, but one of the parties that voted for the vote of no confidence in the government was the Yabloko party. The leader of the 1990s, the permanent Yavlinsky, again clearly outlined the position of the party, but, alas, these were already the 2000s. Tough political opposition led to the loss of votes, and in the elections in 2007 the Yabloko party did not receive a seat in the Duma.
In the 2000s, many prominent politicians left the organization - Sergei Popov, Irina Yarovaya, Galina Khovanskaya, Ilya Yashin. Alexander Skobov and Andrei Piontkovsky joined Solidarity, this was another loss suffered by the Yabloko party. The Moscow branch of the organization lost Alexei Navalny in 2007. He was expelled from the party allegedly for statements of a nationalist nature, although he himself assured that the problem was in criticism of the decisions made by Yabloko's permanent leader Yavlinsky.
Such losses greatly weakened the party.
Authoritarian liberalism
Many of those who left noted that the Yabloko party leadership has always shown intolerance towards the personal views of members of the organization. Oddly enough, one of the most important leaders of the democratic forces, Grigory Yavlinsky, turned out to be a very authoritarian leader. As one of the “Yablokovites” who left the party stated, the once bright and promising organization has turned into a way to satisfy the ambitions of one person that never materialized.
This would not seem so paradoxical if Yabloko adhered to authoritarian political views. But for liberals and democrats, such a position seems very, very unexpected. The very essence of liberalism is respect for the opinions of others. Here the situation is simply anecdotal. “We respect your opinion as long as it is correct, and it is correct as long as it coincides with the party line.”
Moreover, all the leaders of the Yabloko party showed similar unanimity in following the authoritarian methods of leadership. Photos of these people are habitually associated with slogans about freedom, equality and the right toself-expression. Do such predilections in the choice of leadership style mean that liberal theses are just a desire to occupy an empty political niche? Or, on the contrary, is it such a peculiar form of fidelity to ideals?
Party criticism
In addition to internal authoritarianism, the Yabloko party also has features traditionally popular with critics. So, often the organization is reproached for the inability to work in a team. Back in 1999, this was obvious. The logical ally in the elections for Yabloko was the Union of Right Forces - SPS. And for some time, these parties really acted together, especially since Yavlinsky and Nemtsov were connected not only by common interests, but also by rather warm personal relations. But even this did not save the coalition from collapse.
To be fair, it is worth noting: not everyone believes that the Yabloko party was the culprit for the collapse of the political union. The leader Nemtsov showed himself in this situation as a very unreliable partner. When it became obvious during the elections that the main opponent of the Union of Right Forces in the category of "democrats and liberals" was precisely "Yabloko", Nemtsov launched an active propaganda activity, including using "black" PR. Yavlinsky was accused of collaborating with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and the Yabloko without Yavlinsky movement arose, created solely to delay votes. But whoever was to blame for the collapse of the temporary alliance between Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, the result was natural. None of the parties made it to the Duma.
Sunset or just a timeout?
Accusations ofthat the political ambitions of "Yabloko" are reduced to the struggle for the place of "the president's favorite opposition party." In every country, every government should have an opposition. That's just it can be both real and manual, puppet. Of course, the latter option is much more convenient for the authorities. And, alas, for the opposition too. This is exactly what the Yabloko party is accused of today.
There are fewer serious statements, fewer and fewer significant tasks set by this organization. From a real participant in the political struggle, she turned into an element of decor, limiting herself to insignificant statements on minor occasions. The party does not join the pro-government bloc, preserving the image of the opposition, and does not take an active part in the actual opposition movement. Opponents of the party explain this strategy by the conformist moods of the Yabloko supporters, while supporters explain it by common sense, restraint and dislike for radical measures, traditional for this party. Who is right, time will tell.
So far, one of the most significant political actions carried out by the Yabloko party recently has been a rally dedicated to the memory of the victims of Chernobyl. It took place in many regions of Russia, from Bashkortostan to Vladivostok. The slogans announced at the rally were not only about the greatest man-made disaster of the 20th century. Thus, the leaders of the Yabloko party in Ufa spoke not only about environmental problems, but also raised purely political issues. In particular, they emphasized the fact that many victims could have been avoided if the authorities had timely informed the population about what had happened and taken emergency measures.measures to adequately eliminate the disaster. Thus, the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant demonstrated the political failure of the government, which neglected the lives of citizens in order to maintain the appearance of well-being.
