NewsMax.com
Friday, Feb. 2, 2001

Grigoriy Yavlinskiy, who heads the Yabloko political movement, says his party’s most important task "is resisting efforts to turn Russia into a police state and struggling against this."

Speaking at a press conference at the Interfax news agency in Moscow, Yavlinskiy warned: "Elements of a police state have manifested themselves through absolute political pressure on the mass media, and in the fact that Russia has actually been deprived of independent mass media.

"Moreover, some of the law enforcement agencies commit outrages without any supervision at practically all levels. Authority is becoming unshakably irremovable, particularly in the regions," Yavlinskiy said at the Jan. 22 news conference.

As previously reported in NewsMax.com, Yavlinskiy has charged that the FSB, the successor police agency to the dreaded KGB, has sought to infiltrate his movement and spied on some of its members, one of whom was expelled from graduate school because of his membership in the group.

He singled out the Putin administration’s harassment of NTV, Russia’s only independent television network, as an example of the police state methods now becoming evident. NTV is owned by Vladimir Gusinsky, founder and head of the media empire Media-MOST. Gusinsky, a former supporter of President Vladimir Putin, was jailed late last year but never charged.

The campaign against NTV is "a manifestation of pressure on NTV", he charged. "The pogrom against NTV television is a purely political action aimed at curbing the freedom of the press in Russia."

Instead of resorting to police-state methods against its critics, Yavlinskiy said, the government should devote its time to straightening out the nation’s economy and paying its debts.

"We think that the most important thing now is settling all disagreements over the debt [to the Paris Club, an international consortium of lenders that includes the United States], and beginning serious changes in the economic mechanism that will make it possible to narrow the gap between the law and actual economic practice," Yavlinskiy said.

Regarding the debt to the Paris Club, he said that his party had had consultations with the government and was prepared to support it if the Cabinet offered budget amendment proposals in order to start debt payments to the club. "The budget has enough resources for this," he said.

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