I regularly poke fun, on the pages of my little blog, at the mighty Solidarnost movement. A couple of times, participants even contacted me with questions along the lines of "why are you picking on us" (quote). Well, now I’m going to praise them. I was very surprised and pleased by the results of the elections to the political council and its bureau. They differed seriously from what had been planned. First, the Solidarnost people finally did what they should have done long ago: as a result of one hell of an intrigue, they kicked Comrades Ponomaryov and Samodurov out of the leadership. Second, representatives of the democratic movement’s "non-catacomb" wing placed highly in the preferential vote. In the Bureau: Maksimov, Starikov, Milov, Yashin, Zhavoronkov, Kozlovsky, Bilunov. Elected to the political council were Ortega-Yakovlev, Malysheva, Gorodilin, Prokhorov, Feygin. This is very good. We’ll see what happens next. I’m very interested in Solidarnost’s position on participation in elections. Right now they’ve put it cleverly: supposedly they’re both boycotting and not boycotting. But with that kind of cleverness, they can only fool themselves. The Moscow City Duma elections are ahead, and they need to make up their minds.