Moscow, 8th August: A number of prominent political and public figures concerned about the threat of authoritarianism in Russia issued a joint appeal on Tuesday [8th August] calling for a new public political movement to be born.

Signing the document were the writer Vasiliy Aksenov, tycoon Boris Berezovskiy, actor Sergey Bodrov, moviemaker Stanislav Govorukhin, journalist Otto Latsis, theatre director Yuriy Lyubimov, actor Oleg Menshikov, the former first deputy chief of the presidential staff, Igor Shabdurasulov, and a "founding father" of perestroika, Aleksandr Yakovlev.

This document, entitled "Russia at the crossroads. An appeal to society", which has been obtained by Interfax and the full version of which will be published in an upcoming issue of `Izvestiya', says:

"On the threshold of the 21st century, Russian society is facing a new choice: to live in an authoritarian or a truly democratic country. This choice is not between such polar opposites as in 1996, when the question whether we would return to the communist utopia or continue moving along the path of liberal reforms had to be decided. But the current choice will very soon also radically influence the lives of each and everyone regardless of one's political views, property or social status, age or ethnicity.

"The new president's quite understandable and natural eagerness to create an efficient and responsible power and thus halt the process of the state's disintegration evokes the ruling bureaucracy's traditional reflex 'to seize and forbid'. The main achievements of the past decade are endangered: the free press, free enterprise and, most importantly, intellectual freedom and the spirit of independence.

"If these trends are not curbed, the logic of conflict between the authoritarian instinct of any power and the people's democratic aspirations will lead either to the dismantling of the major successes of recent years or to a paralysis of the governing system. That will be a tragedy for yet another generation," the document says.

"Russian democracy is young and too dependent on the recent totalitarian past. The peculiarity of the current situation consists in the weakness of the social institutions that are the basis of civil society. Our intelligentsia, the traditional bearer of liberal values, has become unable to fend off the threat of authoritarianism on its own since the economic shocks of the past years. However, a new generation of politically and economically active citizens has developed in the past decade: elected public politicians, independent journalists, businessmen and simply self-reliant young people. It is chiefly against them that the present authoritarian impulse of the community of administrative power is directed," the document charges.

"We believe that many Russian citizens share our concerns. We propose to unite in order to create a new public political movement based upon the ideas of the freedom of conscience and religion, the freedom of the individual, the supremacy of law, respect for national traditions, the freedom of the press and the inviolability of private property," it says.