Russia’s Supreme Court threw Yabloko off September’s Duma ballot. The antiwar party has just 4,000 members, but 8,000 people have applied to join in the last two weeks.

Yabloko’s election campaign became Russia’s biggest political story of the summer before it had even properly begun: the Supreme Court removed the party from the ballot, and hundreds of young people came out to support Yabloko. Meanwhile, one of Yabloko’s leaders, Lev Shlosberg, was sentenced to 11 years on trumped-up charges. Amid all that, the party is riding an unprecedented surge of popularity: thousands of people have already submitted applications to join, and Yabloko has picked up hundreds of thousands of new followers on social media. Bereg, a cooperative of independent journalists, spoke with Kirill Goncharov, head of Yabloko’s Moscow branch, about how the party reads its own popularity and what it intends to do with it. Meduza is translating the piece in full.

The interview started a little later than planned, and Kirill Goncharov opened by explaining the delay.

— I asked to push things back five minutes because a hearing was going on at the same time for a young man, Artem Kuznetsov. We don’t know him personally, just as we don’t know most of the detainees who were outside the Supreme Court, but one way or another, we’re responsible for him even though we’ve never met. He was given 14 days in jail.

After the hearing, my mind switched completely from the campaign to human rights work, so I haven’t even had time to process what happened. Something tectonic has probably happened, some kind of tectonic shift, but it’s too soon to draw conclusions, especially since the process is still unfolding.

The [State Duma election] campaign is still ahead of us — [Yabloko’s] candidates in single-mandate districts, party lists in the regions. In that sense, we’re continuing the campaign, and we’re feeling a real burst of optimism, no matter what.

— What exactly does Yabloko’s assistance to the detainees involve?

— We find lawyers and pay for them, which isn’t cheap given how many people have been detained. Sometimes we have to find them in the middle of the night — at two or three in the morning it turns out that someone is being held at a temporary detention center or a police station. The day before yesterday, we launched a Telegram bot to field requests.

We’re following the cases and getting the word out — people travel to see the detainees, form support groups, and pack care packages.

Two days ago, one of the detainees sent me a private message: “Thanks for getting the word out — the cops were talking about it, and it helped. They knew they couldn’t rough us up.” That made me think I should write about this more often, since it can actually help.

— How many people has Yabloko given legal assistance to?

— Everyone who’s had charges filed against them. That’s 10 to 12 people. At first things went reasonably well. From what we heard, police detained people en masse on the first day, August 17, and then let them all go without filing any charges. It felt like they’d simply decided to detain everyone outside the court to break up the line and demoralize people, then let them all go without charges.

But it turned out that charges were mostly filed against people who had come to the August 10 hearing [on removing Yabloko from the State Duma election]. Many of them weren’t even there on August 17 — the police detained them at home, near their homes, or elsewhere, tracking them down on surveillance cameras. They’re getting hit with either organizing an unauthorized rally or so-called obstruction of traffic.

— What are your impressions from talking with the young people who came to the courthouse to support Yabloko on August 10 and 17?

— I don’t know if you were around for the Moscow rallies of the 2000s and 2010s. You’d show up and run into Mikhail Shneider, Roman Dobrokhotov, Oleg Kozlovsky… say hello, chat for a bit — it was a kind of roving rally.

But now it’s a completely new crowd, and I mean that in a good way. Young, driven, really fired up. Some of them probably haven’t figured out yet what country they’re living in. Many are 18 or 19. But they already feel suffocated, because the one time they decided to go and vote, they were stripped of the chance before they even got there.

They can’t explain it to themselves, let alone to anyone else. They watch what’s happening in the courtroom and understand it’s a huge injustice. A lot of them lose heart. Many cried outside the court — and that’s not a figure of speech. They really cried.

After the August 10 hearing, my colleagues and I went to a fast-food place. We walk in, and the whole crowd is already there — about 50 people who’d been standing outside the court. Everyone was crying, coming up to us, asking what would happen next. I even said to my colleagues, “God, why did we come in here?”

I genuinely feel for these people. Fine, the authorities are trying to shut Yabloko out of the election — but on top of Yabloko, you’re shutting out tens of thousands of voters. Nationwide, we’re confident we would have won several million votes from people who chose to stay in Russia, to live and work here. And they don’t have many other outlets for civic life or self-expression.

Elections were the last outlet left. The authorities always told us: “Rallies are bad, pickets are bad. Run in elections, appeal to society through elections. And if society backs you, fine, we won’t resist.” So we ran in the election — and got the same result.

So when the authorities shut such a huge number of people out of public life, and then turn aggressive toward children outside the courthouse… These really are children. The people there were 17 to 19 years old. Even I felt very old in that crowd [Goncharov is 34].

I don’t recognize a single meme they use, and I don’t know what some of their words mean. And these are finally kids who, unlike the generations before them, want to take part in politics, and right away they get shut out.

I think this is a major civic and humanitarian catastrophe for our country. In the long run, the authorities won’t achieve anything good by shutting so many people out of the [political] process. Yes, they’ve won for now, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory. No one knows what it will turn into in a year, or two, or three — but it certainly won’t be anything good.

— Was there even a sliver of hope the court might rule differently?

— On the legal merits, yes. The defense’s position was absolutely ironclad. Every lawyer we corresponded with — even those outside the case who knew our arguments from the preparation stage — agreed it was well argued. What’s more, not even an ordinary Moscow district court would have accepted the Rodina party’s lawsuit if the case weren’t politicized and the decision weren’t coming from senior officials. The court, to put it mildly, didn’t stick to the tradition of adversarial proceedings.

— I want to ask not about the legal grounds — those are clear — but about the political reality. What did Grigory Yavlinsky say, as someone who knows all the key political figures and can see how events will unfold?

— I won’t relay our conversation, but of course no one had any illusions. Personally, I didn’t expect us to be registered at all.

I’ve been in politics since 2010. I remember the protests of 2011 and 2019 — I took part in all of them and organized some myself. A year ago I was already saying big protests were coming, because the protest trend was building. This past winter, I told colleagues that 2011 could repeat itself.

What I felt in 2011 and 2019 was very close to what’s happening now, except that now there are more social problems on top of it: the attacks on Wildberries, the drone attacks on oil refineries, the fuel crisis that followed, and the campaign against the internet.

All of that is pushing people into politics. Eventually even people far removed from politics start asking about root causes and how to end it all. And it turns out what’s needed is a ceasefire and peace. So who’s speaking up for peace in Russia right now? People google the question, find Yabloko, and subscribe to its channels. Yabloko’s leaders repeat that [call for peace] every day. And people start supporting the party.

Yesterday I was walking down the street and about five people walked past me and there was a bit of a commotion. They looked at me and started smiling. I figured they’d recognized me — it’s been happening a lot over the past two weeks. People recognize me and come up to me, especially in the metro.

— I wanted to ask what you attribute Yabloko’s rapid rise in popularity to, but it seems you’ve already answered that.

— There was a match between what people were hoping for and what we stand for. Our position has never changed, but what people expect is always shaped by context. The context of summer 2026 is a public demand for peace — and we’re the only ones who can meet that demand, because we called for a ceasefire from the very beginning.

In 2022, everyone piled on us for those exact same words. Yabloko took so much criticism — literally from the people who support us today. Now they say the whole opposition has consolidated around Yabloko. But they consolidated around us behind the very same slogans they criticized us for four years ago, when they called us “Kremlin agents.”

— Who criticized you?

— I won’t name names.

— Representatives of the non-systemic opposition?

— Yes.

— Doesn’t it sting to hear the opposition abroad argue that Yabloko isn’t oppositional enough?

— Be my guest. We’re not in anyone’s way. They’re welcome to come back and be more oppositional themselves. I just don’t know what the criteria for “oppositional” are. Two Yabloko deputy chairs are sitting in prison — one got seven years, the other 11. Isn’t that a criterion?

All right, let’s take another criterion. Not a single party leader was able to run in this election. It’s honestly unclear now why the authorities bothered, since in the end they let no one in at all. But for a full year they hounded the party chairman and all his deputies with fines, and now every one of them carries a fine that bars them from running. Isn’t that a criterion? Not oppositional enough?

All right. They removed us from the election. Isn’t that a criterion too?

Well, excuse us, but we’re not a guerrilla unit — we’re never going to take up arms. We believe in evolutionary change. But that’s not a measure of how oppositional you are. Honestly, I’m just tired. I’ve stopped arguing with people who say we’re not oppositional enough. Fine, I get it. Come here and be oppositional yourselves — we’re not stopping you.

— And yet when word came that Yabloko had been registered, Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Yulia Navalnaya, and other opposition figures living abroad backed you en masse. Did you expect that kind of unified response?

— We hadn’t really thought about it, and we didn’t expect it — not because we doubted they’d support us, but because that wasn’t part of our plan. We’re focused on the people who live in Russia.

— In recent weeks, TikTok has been flooded with videos of teenagers backing Yabloko, set to a song by the singer Yolka. Did the hype frighten you?

— No, these are great kids. The hype may have frightened Yolka, since as far as I know she isn’t especially oppositional — at least she wasn’t before. Maybe now, with hundreds of thousands of these videos out there, they’ve finally won her over. But it didn’t frighten us.

The other day I heard from a good friend in Montenegro who had to leave Russia after all this started: “Kirill, could you and I have imagined back in 2016 that Yabloko would become the trendiest political party in Russia in 2026?” At first I said, “Of course not, we couldn’t have.” Then I thought, “Damn, actually, maybe we could have.” We’ve been doing this for many years — we never left, never gave up, never abandoned the party, just kept doing what we do. Somewhere deep down, we were probably waiting for this moment. We were just too embarrassed to say it out loud to each other, because it seemed crazy and abnormal.

But that’s exactly what we worked for — for people to learn about our position, and for that position to reach a mass audience. We never doubted it could be popular, but it had never been a mass position before. That always surprised me, because there’s nothing to argue about here. It’s like arguing over whether a person needs two arms and two legs. Everything we propose in our platform is vital: human rights, freedom, and choice.

We’re not orthodox militarists, communists, or fascists. We’re normal people who demand to be treated normally. No more, no less. And people like that are the majority in Russia.

That is precisely why they pulled [Yabloko’s party list] from the election.

— I get the impression you’re a little euphoric about this influx of support. Is that true?

— No, not me, definitely not. Let me explain why. Yesterday we held a party commission meeting — that’s where we interview people who want to join. We have a huge number of applications.

People are handing over their passport details and aren’t afraid to do it. We tell every one of them: thank you, this is incredibly brave, we appreciate it enormously. But it matters to us that this isn’t a byproduct of the hype, because by fall that wave [of hype] could pass. What will you do then? Will you still want to be a party member once the hype fades, or not? That matters to us, and we’re not wearing rose-colored glasses — we understand what kind of moment this is. It’s like the World Cup, when everyone suddenly starts rooting for some national team. It’s the same now. In politics, elections are the World Cup. Everyone got swept up and picked a team to cheer for. What matters is that it doesn’t pass with time.

We don’t feel euphoria — we feel joy at what’s happening. We really are glad when people are willing to state their position, when they aren’t afraid and they support us. It would be foolish not to be.

— How many new membership applications have come in altogether, and how many members did Yabloko have before this?

— Over the past two weeks, we’ve received 8,000 applications. The party has about 4,000 members.

— Wow. So the party could potentially triple in size.

— Yes, and the whole campaign is still ahead of us.

— That could substantially change the mood among party members and the party’s direction.

— Yes, 100%. And that’s exactly what we’re urging people to do. We can sense that a lot of people are demoralized and disappointed right now over our removal. One thing that can keep people going is staying in a circle of like-minded people. It’ll do people as much good psychologically as politically.

— Aren’t you worried that another 200% will join, bringing their own vision of politics, and eventually pull the party in a radically different direction?

— We’ll bring them in. I oversee the federal party school, which works with young people and runs educational projects. On top of that, they don’t become party members right away — it takes two years, which gives us time to work with them.

— And to block them from joining if they don’t match your values?

— If people don’t fit, they sense it themselves and don’t put themselves or us through it. But that doesn’t happen very often.

— Well, there have been cases of people being expelled from Yabloko.

— There have been expulsions. That’s exactly why we introduced the two-year probationary period — so people can figure out how well we suit them, and we can figure out how well they suit us. But the young people coming in now are wonderful. We see them, we talk with all of them, and I have no doubt they’ll be a great addition.

— Have you measured your rise in popularity any other way? Through social media, maybe?

— Yes, of course. When it all started, the first place we looked was social media, because searches [for Yabloko] on Yandex were outpacing searches for every other party combined. Our channels started picking up subscribers. The biggest jump came on the party’s Telegram channel, which has almost 308,000 [new] subscribers; before the party was registered for the election in July, it had 12,000.

We were always accused of not knowing how to work online. This campaign showed that when the conditions exist, we can. When they don’t, nobody can. And there’s still YouTube, Instagram, and the personal social media accounts of Yabloko’s leaders.

— Has Yabloko conducted its own polling?

— No, we didn’t have the money for it.

— I’ve heard from sources close to Yabloko’s election campaign that this sudden popularity in Russia left the party in a mild stupor. Is that true?

— I don’t know. The party is big. Maybe someone went into a stupor, someone else into a coma, and someone else had a stroke. Everyone’s different. But people are happy. They didn’t expect this.

Last winter, I talked with a colleague from Yabloko, a very serious man. We argued — we had two different points of view. I said people could get political very soon. The authorities were already blocking the internet and Telegram. He told me Yabloko would never make it back into the State Duma and would never clear the [5%] threshold, because that had never happened in history.

I said history isn’t linear. Just because something hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it never will. He came back at me with examples, tables, expert opinion, and analysis, all to prove it never would.

And here we are. There were different opinions then — and now everyone has different emotions.

— This new support is major political capital, but it’s very dangerous in the current climate. What’s happening inside the party? There must be debate over how to proceed — surely there are veterans in Yabloko who want to fight to preserve the party at any cost.

— No, there’s no such debate. Preserving the party doesn’t mean turning support away. Any party should be fighting for people’s support.

I can point to my speech at the party congress — held before Yabloko was registered — in which I described exactly what ended up happening: that a window of opportunity would open, that the political reality would shift. Even then I was saying that a lot of people were coming to us; you could already feel that trend. So nothing surprising happened, as far as I’m concerned. And my colleagues don’t see it as some kind of challenge either. For everyone, this is simply a new stage in our development.

— Still, there’s a sense of a turning point in the party’s history. You yourself mentioned tectonic shifts. Yabloko has always been a fairly systemic opposition force — and that’s what kept it alive until today. But now it seems the party can no longer exist by its old rules. You don’t agree?

— No, I don’t. This is an argument about what “systemic” even means. Every party that exists in Russia came out in support of the ”special military operation” [the Kremlin’s term for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine]. We didn’t — from the very start. By the standards of what counts as systemic, where do we fit? Are we somehow still systemic? Hardly. Our leadership is sitting in prison.

By the system’s own standards, we were always non-systemic. We never fit into their worldview or their political spectrum. There was just this trend where you always had to knock Yabloko for being systemic. One popular figure said it, everyone else repeated it, and for those people it became a given.

But we never saw ourselves as a systemic party. We were always ready to be repressed, and there’s always repression, more of it or less of it.

— Until now, party leaders weren’t given actual prison time. That started in the summer of 2026.

— Look, party members of ours have been murdered. Farid Babaev, for one, was killed in the entryway of his apartment building in Dagestan. Yuri Shchekochikhin was poisoned in 2003. Those are the basics. Hardly anyone knows about them.

— Yabloko used to be seen as Yavlinsky’s party, and he personally made all the key decisions. Until recently, few people had even heard of the party chairman, Nikolai Rybakov. What role does Yavlinsky play in the party now?

— Yavlinsky has always been the party’s ideological leader and its engine — the one who puts the ideas into words. He came up with the slogan “For life, for peace and freedom, for a life without fear,” and now 14-year-olds across the country are repeating it. It’s a universal opposition slogan. Formally, our chairman is someone else, and our chairmen change.

— Why didn’t Yavlinsky run for president in 2024?

— Because there were no presidential elections in 2024 — in the sense that they never would have let Yavlinsky take part. With this State Duma election, that wasn’t as obvious, so we decided to run, partly to change the political climate.

Our participation [in the campaign] clearly achieved that in the end. Three months ago, the words “I’m for peace and freedom, I’m for a life without fear” would have sounded forbidden, marginal, and isolated. Just running in the campaign, short as it was, legitimized that message and showed millions of people they weren’t alone. The Kremlin understood that, which is why it removed us.

We were told: “You’re running to get 2%, and the Kremlin will be rubbing its hands with glee.” Well, look at us now — we’ve broken out of that marginal position.

— What was the logic behind Yabloko’s federal list? It’s either people known only locally or complete nobodies.

— Well, thanks a lot.

— You’re more the locally known type.

— I’m kidding. There was a simple answer to the authorities here. You jail our leaders, Maxim Kruglov and Shlosberg. You don’t let Rybakov or other well-known figures run. And you think that will bleed us dry. So look: out come these nobodies, as you call them. And millions of people immediately rally around those nobodies and support them, and their ratings climb. That tells you it’s not about the people — it’s about the values. People support the position, not specific last names.

And on the whole, if you look closely, everyone on the federal list is terrific. I like them a lot. They’re all really good at what they do, each in his own region and his own field. And yes, it happens that people in politics aren’t very well known, but that’s not their fault. Now they’ve become known — and I hope they’ll become better known still.

— Do you think they’ll let the party go on existing at all?

— That doesn’t depend on us, and the question shouldn’t concern us at all. We’ve spent the past few years guessing how much time we have left anyway. But institutionally, a party is just a way of working. A form. People can be brought together in plenty of ways. A party is more convenient, of course, because you can run in elections, have political resources, issue statements, and gather people around you safely.

We hope it survives, because the law gives us that right. And people in Russia have that right. We don’t know what decision will be made. It could be anything. The range of what could happen to Yabloko runs from the party being dissolved to our position becoming the cornerstone of the whole state.

— Has it become scarier to stay in Russia?

— I won’t say it hasn’t. Of course it’s scary. And not so much for me — my loved ones are the ones who are very scared.

I did an interview on Alexey Pivovarov’s show Redaktsiya [The Newsroom]. I always ask everyone up front whether they’re a “foreign agent” or have some other designation. He’s a “foreign agent,” but Redaktsiya isn’t, so they can publish anything. My relatives wrote to me right away: “Kirill, get yourself cut out of that video — that’s prison.”

That’s the state people are in right now in Russia — let alone party members. It’s scary, and my colleagues are probably scared too. But it will be scarier if Russia goes to hell and nothing can be done about it anymore. As long as there’s still a chance to do something, better to use it than to regret it later. That outweighs the fear.

— How do you define the goal of your work right now?

— The goal is for people to stop going to the front, stop shooting, stop dying. For them to stop being afraid they’ll be sent to the front — I mean mobilization — and to stop leaving their cities, their villages, and their country. For people to stop losing the ones they love.

That’s the main goal; everything else follows from it. We can see that our voice carries loudly enough that even without seats in the State Duma we can influence the political climate and the situation in the country.

We’ll keep working, but the goal isn’t personal careers or seats. It’s building a modern state that is safe both for its own citizens and for everyone else.

— Do you believe Yabloko can influence the decision on whether to carry out mobilization?

— Yes, I’m 100% sure of it, and this election showed it. It can — 100%, even 1,000%.

— How did the election show that?

— We gave voice to the mood of people who oppose mobilization, and the authorities certainly saw it. They’ll factor that into their policy.

— You were 17 when you joined Yabloko in 2010. Now other 17-year-olds are discovering the party. How has Yabloko changed since then?

— Yabloko has become more modern. Right now it’s the only opposition party that people with our views and values can join. It didn’t shut down, though there were a million reasons to — and credit for that goes to Yavlinsky, who was criticized for exactly the things he’s praised for today. Everyone used to say, “It’s long past time to shut Yabloko down. Why does it even exist?” And today it turns out Yabloko is a kind of Noah’s ark — a place where people who hold antiwar views can come together and not be afraid.

Who else but Yavlinsky could have carried that off? He did — and when they removed us from the election, I went to him and said I wanted to shake his hand. I’m genuinely glad he lived to see times like these in Yabloko. And that all of us did.

— Over all these years in the party, have you dealt with burnout?

— Of course I have, and it’s not some forbidden topic. Everyone deals with burnout. It’s just that at some point, working in Russia, you develop an immunity to it. It was hard not to burn out during the trial, for instance. We’re used to injustice, but injustice this blatant…

Back in 2019, we were collecting signatures for the Moscow City Duma election. Like many others, I wasn’t registered as a candidate, and we held rallies. One of our volunteers collected a signature for me from his grandmother. To keep me off the ballot, the Moscow City Election Commission started doctoring those signatures so it could rule them invalid.

They deliberately [changed] a six to an eight, for instance. And they declared the grandmother dead. We went to see her and recorded a video showing she was alive. It changed nothing, of course. But while we were filming, I got to know her and thanked her for her support. And she said to me: “When my grandson came around to get me to sign for you, I only signed because he’s my grandson. But after seeing how the authorities go after their opponents, you’re the only ones I’ll be supporting. This government considers me dead.”

What’s going on [now] is even more absurd than that was.

And back then, as much as I might have wanted to burn out, I understood that it was the starting point for something new and far more serious. The fact that they fight us so openly, so publicly, is an admission that we’re a real political alternative. And that motivates more than any burnout.