Eternally persecuted

Ivan Rybkin lost the fourth game

The smaller the party, the more principled it is, and therefore extremely strict towards party members. For example, the Socialist United Party of Russia (SEPR) emerged only in March of this year, has not even had time to receive registration documents from the Ministry of Justice, but has already expelled its chairman, Ivan Rybkin.

Mr. Rybkin and the party leadership did not see eye to eye on the Chechen problem, and, having forestalled the organizational conclusions, the chairman left on his own. No one stopped him; everyone agreed with the second person in the party - General Secretary Alexei Podberezkin. Mr. Podberezkin considers the united socialists to be “left-wing patriots” and therefore is confident that they should support Vladimir Putin, who is aiming for a successful anti-terrorist operation. Mr. Rybkin also considers socialists to be patriots and is confident that patriots should seek an early end to the war in Chechnya, demanding negotiations with Maskhadov.

Whether presidential structures need the advice of socialists is unknown. But the Prosecutor General's Office is interested. True, only to Ivan Rybkin. And not for his current party work, but for his activities in 1997 as Secretary of the Security Council related to the settlement of the Chechen conflict. After the first interrogation at the prosecutor's office, Mr. Rybkin published an open letter to the president, in which he advised Mr. Putin to negotiate peace with Mr. Maskhadov, offering his assistance.

As a result, in 13 years of his career, Ivan Rybkin lost his fourth game. During Soviet times, Mr. Rybkin was a member of the CPSU. After 1991, he joined the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which did not prevent him from joining both the Socialist Party of Working People and the Agrarian Party of Russia. With such a set of party cards, Mr. Rybkin became speaker of the first Duma in 1993. But by the 1995 elections, almost all of these parties refused his services, since Mr. Rybkin, on instructions from President Yeltsin, headed the “Ivan Rybkin Bloc.” “BIR” lost the elections, but Mr. Rybkin worked for two more years in the Security Council and even in the government.

In 1997, he founded the Socialist Party of Russia, which received 0.1% of the vote in the 1999 elections. The Spiritual Heritage movement of Alexei Podberezkin had the same percentage - 0.1% - in those elections, with whom Mr. Rybkin decided to establish a single political organization. But they were able to live together in the same party for less than four months. However, the Messrs. are at odds over the fate of socialism in Russia. Podberezkin and Rybkin will not be affected. As well as on solving the Chechen problem.

Victor KHAMRAEV