At one point, during the eight-hour proceedings at Russia’s Supreme Court, arguments on whether to disqualify Russia’s oldest liberal political party turned to the copyright for a 64-year-old Soviet children’s song about peace, love, sunshine, and mommy.
At another moment, lawyers homed in on a 1945 US Army photograph of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. Still later, the discussion was about a famous Suprematist image dating back to the Russian Civil War.
If you were asking what exactly this has to do with Russian elections, you wouldn’t be alone.
“I really can’t wrap my head around this,” Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin political adviser, said in a post to Telegram.
On its face, the case appeared simple enough: a petition to disqualify the Yabloko party from fielding candidates in next month’s parliamentary elections -- the first since the start of the all-out invasion of Ukraine more than four years ago -- on the basis of alleged copyright and other violations. The petition was filed by a small nationalist party.
The Supreme Court on August 10 ultimately sided with petitioners’ arguments, and barred Yabloko from participating in the upcoming elections in September.
The deeper story, however, was the contortions that authorities went through to eliminate a political message straying from the Kremlin’s singular electoral narrative, about the Ukraine war, above all.
Yabloko had made an antiwar slogan -- “For Peace and Freedom” -- central to its Duma campaign.
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“This is the Kremlin’s first -- and highly significant -- defeat in the State Duma elections, which are not about who gets elected or who holds power, but about image.”
“It’s almost hilarious how [petitioners] brought up copyright infringement as another part of the argument, since Russia as a state (since forever) has not been very observant on those matters,” said Maria Engqvist, a Russia expert at the Swedish Defense Research Agency. “Any formality plays its part when the opportunity arises.”
'This Is Not About The Fate Of Yabloko. This Is About The Fate Of Russia'
Under Russia’s system of “managed” or “sovereign” democracy, Yabloko exists to play the role of the liberal opposition.
In the past, Yabloko and its co-founder Grigory Yavlinsky, at least on the national level, were allowed to win a limited number of seats in parliament. They could cast symbolic votes of protest, to give the legislative process a veneer of democratic debate. Their legislative clout was seen as minimal.
The party has not held a seat, as a bloc, in the Duma since 2003. A handful of individual Yabloko members have held seats in the past as well.
Last month, the Kremlin-controlled Central Election Commission surprised many observers by registering Yabloko for the September 18-20 Duma vote.
Responding to the Supreme Court decision, Yavlinsky issued unusually pointed criticism about the ruling. He did not name the Kremlin or President Vladimir Putin, however.
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During the August 10 proceedings, Yabloko’s lawyers pushed back against the petition filed by Rodina -- which, like Yabloko, also holds no seats in the Duma.
Rodina’s lawyers presented the court with several examples of copyright violations that they argued were grounds for disqualifying Yabloko.
One involved a Soviet-era children’s song called Let There Always Be Sunshine that Rodina’s lawyers argued was used illegally in a Yabloko video interview with Yavlinsky.
Yabloko’s lawyers said the lyrics were spoken by an interviewer speaking with Yavlinsky, not as part of campaign literature. The son of the author of the song lyrics -- which includes the line “May There Always Be Mama” -- later told Novaya Gazeta Europe that he had no objection to its use – and in fact supported it.
Another argument said that Yabloko’s main logo was a rip-off of a 1919 Bolshevik propaganda print that was part of the avant-garde Suprematist art movement. Yabloko’s lawyers pointed out that the party has used the logo for years in past elections -- well before the upcoming campaign.
Other complaints from Rodina focused on images of doves, used by Yabloko in its campaign literature as a symbol of peace, and a photograph of a tank surrounded by sunflowers that Rodina said was stolen from the Kommersant newspaper without attribution.
Yabloko’s lawyers pointed out that the Kommersant image was in fact attributed correctly.
Yet another image that Yabloko used, and that Rodina’s lawyers argued was stolen, was a US Army photograph of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in the waning days of World War II. Yabloko argued the photograph was taken from the US Library of Congress, and had long entered the public domain.
As of August 11, the Kremlin had not commented on the ruling.
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Yabloko: A Safe Vaccine?
Pushed out of the Duma, Yabloko has had greater success in elections for regional legislatures and municipal councils. In St. Petersburg, for example, its candidates regularly won a handful of seats in the city’s legislative assembly.
Whether the party survives in the long run is an open question.
For its critics, like the late anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny and his supporters, it shouldn’t; the party was corrupted or co-opted by the system, and should have died a long time ago, its detractors argued.
The Kremlin’s political advisers -- called “technologists” -- see Yabloko not only as window dressing for a democratic process; the party also serves as a pressure-release valve, allowing Russians to cast an alternative vote, a legal way to dissent from the Kremlin or its affiliated political party, United Russia.
United Russia, which holds 310 of the Duma’s 450 seats, is expected to continue dominating.
Nikolai Rybakov, the head of Russia's Yabloko party, spoke to media outside the Supreme Court in Moscow.
They “had planned to use Yabloko like a safe vaccine -- as a weakened virus with minimal impact on the electorate,” Petrov said. “To this end, all of Yabloko’s prominent and well-known politicians were sidelined through administrative pressure and criminal prosecution. As a result, Yabloko’s party list consists of young and little-known politicians.”
For Yabloko’s supporters, many of whom are old-school liberals from a bygone era in Russian politics, the party’s death would be a Rubicon, showing openly just how authoritarian the country has become.
“Although the entire political system in Russia is now rigged to work against parties like Yabloko, I’m surprised that they have not been closed down earlier,” Engqvist said.
But Yabloko has also drawn interest from younger Russians opposed to the Ukraine war.
Public opinion polls show that Russians are increasingly unhappy with the conflict, even as the Kremlin shows no sign of easing off, despite casualty estimates exceeding 1.5 million men. State-run and independent pollsters show Putin’s popularity declining perceptibly.
For the entire day outside the Moscow court building on August 10, hundreds of people -- many of them university students -- milled about monitoring the proceedings. Many handed out apples -- “yabloko” means apple in Russian -- awaiting the court's ruling.
Among the mostly younger crowd protesting in Moscow was one hand-written protest sign reading “We Don’t Need Mala Tokmachka” -- a reference to a southern Ukrainian village that is on the front lines of the Russian offensive.
Shortly after the launch of the invasion, authorities passed legislation criminalizing nearly all antiwar statements, under the guise of “discrediting the armed forces.”
Yabloko isn’t the only antiwar political entity to have hit a stone wall.
Earlier this month, Boris Nadezhdin, who was barred from challenging Putin in the 2024 presidential election on a platform opposing the Ukraine war, said he had fled Russia after authorities designed him a “foreign agent,” teeing up the possibility of criminal charges. He had tried to register for the September vote.
“What this shows , is how the political leadership in Russia still has an interest to engage in a balancing act…with the general public,” Engqvist said. “Even though they do not want opposition, they also need it to build legitimacy. Not entirely uncommon in authoritarian states.”
“I don’t think that [the] decision will have a major impact on Russian politics vis-a-vis what was already observed since 2022,” said Vladimir Gelman, a Russian political scientist now based in Finland. “Rather, I would expect that the pressure on Yabloko will increase further and would not exclude that the party will be disbanded at all.”
“The Kremlin is scared,” Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who lives in exile and has taken up the leadership of the her late husband’s political organization, said in a video.