Parker is wrong. Simply because he does not know the situation. Mitrokhin is one of the few capable politicians in YABLOKO (a Russian liberal political party). And certainly the only capable person in its leadership. As for the others, you could not even hand them over to a clinic for experiments—they would not be accepted. Some have sunk into senility, others never emerged from it in the first place, and none of them is capable of doing anything even remotely resembling organizational work. They are not even capable of showing up at their workplace with any regularity. That is why the decision to make him chairman was the right one. And the only possible one. But Parker’s biggest mistake, and that of the other commentators, is that they think Yavlinsky has left. No. He is still with us. A Political Committee was created specifically for him, endowed with some fantastical powers—from finances to personnel decisions, including the power to remove the party chairman. That is where all decisions will be made. Both the Bureau and the Federal Council are being turned into optional, secondary bodies. And Mitrokhin will face an extraordinarily difficult task: legitimizing the Political Committee’s decisions by pushing them through the Bureau. That will be hard. Decisions in the Political Committee are made on the basis of political alignments. But Mitrokhin will have to present them to the Bureau as if they follow from the party program and declared principles. We have already seen this with Luzhkov: Everyone understands that the decision to support him was made out of naked self-interest, and so they had to invent the absurd theory that by supporting Luzhkov, YABLOKO was fighting Sechin. I imagine Sechin was laughing. So I do not envy Mitrokhin. It will be especially hard for him given the partial loss of control over the party congress and the Bureau. The fact that the “Yavlinsky list”—the main instrument of кадровой работы in YABLOKO—won less than half the seats says a great deal. The election of Reznik to the Bureau and Popov to the Political Committee, both hated by Yavlinsky, says even more. A considerable share of party members has moved from the tactic of trashing Yavlinsky behind the scenes to a tactic of petty nastiness and sabotage in secret ballots. Mitrokhin will be the one left to clean all this up. All I can wish him is good luck. Given that the newspaper "Vedomosti" ends its report from the congress with the phrase: **Yabloko has no future either with Yavlinsky or without him **, he is going to need it.
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