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.