Yashin is being expelled from the party. At one time, he was the only member of the Bureau who voted against my expulsion. And now they’re expelling him too. To me, that sounds simply insane. Yashin was always the most hardcore Yabloko member there was. Even more than Yavlinsky himself. It would be hard to find a bigger party patriot. I worked with him starting in 1999, and all that time Ilya wore a Yabloko badge on the lapel of his jacket like some kind of fool. He stood at every picket, hauled around stacks of campaign leaflets, built the youth wing. Everyone liked him. Everyone valued him. Everyone knew he was a sincere Yabloko man. That lasted until he announced that he would run for party chairman. Since then, Yavlinsky hasn’t been answering his calls, and Yashin has been systematically pushed out of every position. And now they’re expelling him. As for me, expelling me was easy enough—they pinned “the promotion of nationalist ideas” on me and got a pretext to proudly, pompously, and indignantly spray spit all over the conference tables. It’s harder to expel Yashin, and I’m curious to see how the vote will go. I hope they won’t expel him in absentia. That would really be too much.. Mitrokhin, unlike , is a normal guy. He’s not afraid of criticism to his face or of a showdown. I don’t think he’ll put the question of expelling Yashin on the table without Yashin himself being there.