In a country where the mass media is a monologue, the offense is not violence, but difference. It is not the act of war that makes the state take arms, but the mere, frightening expression of addressing it by its name. This truth has turned into an everyday, gristly persecution of the members and the supporters of the Yabloko party, a political party in Russia, the very name of which translates to apple, implying a seed of some other fruit. We are not only now observing a political crackdown, but we are beholding a carefully planned criminal revenge campaign; the last organized whispers of dissent and anti-war feeling on Russian soil are to be rooted out. It is the tale of the human personality acted behind the legal headlines, a tale of disappearing activists, mumbled excuses, and the unremitting engine of repression of the state.
Yabloko is not an extreme rebellion. Established in the turbulent 1990s, it has long been a pillar of the so-called systemic opposition in Russia, a traditionally social-liberal party that promotes both the norms of democracy, the rights of people, and one unified Russia and the West. It worked within a limited yet existent spectrum, a tolerated, albeit marginal, voice, over decades. Nevertheless, that weak tolerance was broken by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Sometime during the night, the original ideas of Yabloko, dialogue, peace, rule of law, had turned into not only a political stand, but a criminal resistance to the official, militant patriotism of the state.
The “Crime” of Naming the War
The initial and most powerful tool to use was the law itself, which was turned into a cudgel. The speed with which Russia passed draconian censorship laws left any open criticism of the military or the description of the conflict as a war (as opposed to the required special military operation) a felony with long prison sentences. This was an untenable dilemma to the members of Yabloko, whose identity was pegged on peaceful resistance. Their right to speak was the price for their liberty. Yet, many did.
Nor was it a wave of arrests that followed, but a strictly personal, cold-blooded reprisal campaign. The policy of the state seems to be aimed at destroying Yabloko not by one dramatic ban, but by cutting off the heads of this organization, one activist at a time, with a scalpel. Visits to local party organizers in remote areas started to be received, who could have otherwise imagined that their efforts were so far out of focus in Moscow. Student activists giving out leaflets were now facing accusations of discrediting the military. Social media posts citing the founding leader of Yabloko, Grigory Yavlinsky, were fined into poverty by the elderly members of the party who survived the Soviet times.
The cases are all personal apocalypses, the door being knocked, phones and computers being seized, the horrible formalities of an interrogation, followed by the horrible wait as a verdict is given by a judicial system that is an arm of the state. The point is plain: to develop a debilitating taxonomy of effects. Make each of the regional organizers witness what is happening in another city. Make all the parents of the party take fear of their child. Make the price of friendship so graphically personal that the conception of joint action dries up inward.
The Human Toll: A Network of Isolated Souls
Mangled lives lie behind the figures. Consider the example of a middle-aged provincial city teacher and Yabloko member. Her offence was the organizing of a small and authorized vigil of peace at the town square in March 2022. She was not arrested that day. Rather, the police arrived six months later. The name was accused of having planned an extremist event that was outlawed by the new war censorship laws. Her certificate to teach was suspended. Her neighbors even cross the street to evade her. Her son was bullied at the university to publicly condemn her worldview. The punishment that was administered by the state was much more than the courtroom and aimed at removing her from the face of the community in which she belonged.
This is the model. It is the repression by a thousand cuts. The lawyer is the one who loses his certification due to what he has done with a Yabloko activist. The party donor is the local business owner, whose premises are subject to endless sanitary inspection by authorities until he reaches bankruptcy. It is the mental combat of being watched all the time, the unseen vehicles outside of the apartment, and the implicit threat that spreads to the families. The point is not merely, you will be silenced, but you will be made an example of, and thou alone.
The Bigger Picture: Erasing the Alternative
This crackdown goes beyond the destiny of a given political party. Yabloko is a kind of threat to the present Kremlin ideology: an institutional, living alternative. It is evidence that there was another Russia, one that is oriented towards Europe, dialogue, and civil society, but it was not only present; there was also a polity. The state is not just punishing the opposition by criminalizing the anti-war position of Yabloko and discrediting the activists of this organization by systematically disabling them. It is trying to destroy the historical memory in such a different way.
It sends a warning to any other possible source of dissent, within or without the official political structure: the price. It will be no argument, no political struggle. Any questioning of the monolithic account of war and national fate will not be a political issue, but a fraud of treason, which will be opposed by all the personalized might of the system of punishment.
Yabloko is crushed, which is a tragedy for Russia. It is the premeditated extinction of one of the few lights of organised, principled, and peaceful political opposition. The vacant seats at local conferences, the switched-off telephones, the terror in the gaze of the others who are there, these are the actual measures of this suppression. It is not merely that the authorities are increasing reprisals, but that, brick by brick, instead of mortar with the idea of peace, they are using the lives of the simple, brave citizens, whose lives are the mortar. The apple has fallen far asunder the tree of liberty in this new Russia, and the state is making sure that nothing is growing where it is.
