It's hard to convey just how poor ordinary Russians are, but I got a flavour of that in 2007 when I made a BBC TV documentary, Vodka's My Poison. The… - John Sweeney

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It's hard to convey just how poor ordinary Russians are, but I got a flavour of that in 2007 when I made a BBC TV documentary, Vodka's My Poison. They called it the yellow death. It started in the summer when dozens of people turned up in casualty, a vile shade of yellow. The dozens turned to hundreds, then thousands. The better cases recovered, but will die long before their time. The worst cases? Natasha was not yet thirty, she had a seven-year-old boy called Maxim and she had less than a year to live. Her whole body had gone yellow, an instantly recognisable feature of toxic hepatitis. Something had destroyed her liver and now all the natural toxins in the body were stacking up. Her own body was poisoning her and there was nothing medicine – or at least nothing state medicine in Russia – could do about it. How come? Putin put up the price of vodka threefold in one strike. Craving alcohol, Natasha and her friends had added a new brand of handwash to their moonshine. The handwash was cheap and highly alcoholic, but also lethal. I remember the gloom in the hospital basement, steel doors slamming shut, dark yellow wraiths living out their last weeks, the lack of medicine, of care, of money, of light, of hope. It made me angry; it still does; and what I felt would be a fraction of the rage that consumed someone like Navalny who had a clear grasp of where the extraordinary riches of the Russian state were being siphoned off.