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The oppositionists Gudkovs expelled from the A Just Russia Party

The reason was the refusal of active participants in the street opposition actions to quit the Opposition Coordination Council

State Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov and his father Gennady Gudkov, who was stripped of a deputy seat in September 2012, were expelled from the A Just Russia Party on Wednesday. They were expelled from the party after the refusal of active participants in the street opposition actions to quit the Opposition Coordination Council. The A Just Russia leadership headed by Sergei Mironov has put forward this ultimatum a month ago, the RBC daily reported.

State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev (he is a member of the Left Front) and leader of the Astrakhan office of the A Just Russia Party Oleg Shein (a member of the Opposition Coordination Council) turned out to be in the similar situation, but they have made a choice in favour of the party. The Gudkovs did not take any decision.

Only deputy Valery Zubov came out in protection of the Gudkovs, “We are not a sect, we are a party and should work with those, who are outside the party, including the Opposition Coordination Council.”

Finally both members of the party were expelled from the party in an almost unanimous vote “for the actions, which are detrimental and discrediting for the party.” A source of the newspaper in the party stated that the Gudkovs “were seriously lucky,” as the inquiries in the activities of the Gudkovs were timed to “active steps, which Sergei Mironov is taking towards the Kremlin.”

One more episode over Dmitry Gudkov’s trip to the United States, where he was participating in a conference, which the foundation of Pavel Khodorkovsky organized, was also involved in the debates over the fate of the Gudkovs in the A Just Russia Party. The text, which Gudkov Jr. was reading at the conference, was debated. He claimed that he wrote this text during his flight to the US. But Chairman of the A Just Russia Party Nikolai Levichev presented an analysis of the text from an independent expert, who said that the report was drafted beforehand “in a good English language and with quite difficult phrases and rare words, which are rarely used in the common talk even by the native speakers,” meanwhile, Dmitry Gudkov knows English not at the high level.

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