Until quite recently, I was a member of the YABLOKO party. Until quite recently, when the name "Galina Petrovna Khovanskaya" was mentioned in YABLOKO, people were practically expected to rise to their feet. She was basically a YABLOKO fetish. The embodiment of someone who "defends people nobly," "does substantive work," "is the only one who really understands the issue." Criticizing Khovanskaya was tantamount to political suicide within YABLOKO. And honestly, there was hardly anything to criticize her for. She dealt exclusively with housing issues and was an absolute monster at them. I remember going to her myself once at the request of some acquaintances. Every now and then she would stick her nose into internal party political maneuvering. Usually in a pretty clueless way, and it irritated me a lot, because as Mitrokhin’s deputy in Moscow, I had to rein her in. But overall she’s not a bad woman, and she certainly doesn’t belong in the TOP 1000 villains YABLOKO ought to be fighting. Her fairly pro-Luzhkov position (by the standards of the time) was always forgiven. Because she was (see above). Then she left for A Just Russia, but even then it was still considered improper to criticize her out loud. And really, how can you accuse GPKh of being "pro-Kremlin" when YABLOKO’s political committee includes Dubrovina, a member of the Central Election Commission — someone effectively complicit in election fraud. And now, following a lawsuit by YABLOKO, Khovanskaya has been removed from the election. Judging by the fact that video recordings, witness testimony, and so on were presented in court, the case was prepared seriously. Seriously in a way that’s very unlike YABLOKO, I’d say. I’m not going to comment. Everything is obvious as it is. I’ll only say that I find all these LiveJournal-style statements about what a terrible guy Mitrokhin is pretty amusing. It’s obvious that the decision to take part in this hatchet job against Khovanskaya was not his. Our Grigory Alexeyevich Yavlinsky always personally handled negotiations with the top Moscow brass. He always liked to mention that he was on a first-name basis with Luzhkov. Going back to the days when they worked together in some kind of Gosplan or Council of Ministers bureaucracy (Soviet state planning/government apparatus).