An election where one of the candidates has total control over who the other candidates are is not an election but a coronation. With Yavlinsky out o… - John Sweeney

Full of flaws, unbelievably arrogant, a man who did flirt with the far right, but, over the course of the last ten years, the boy from Chernobyl stood up for the idea of another Russia, a country not defined by grotesque corruption, cruelty and a stupid war, but by honesty, courage and great good humour. That secures his place in history. When all hope was lost, and Russia turned, yet again, back to darkness, then along came a knight in dented armour, tilting at evil windmills.
Alexei Navalny was bold and good.
Alexei Navalny kept the red eye of Russia's soul alive and one day it will start blink-blink-blinking again as it stomps, like Terminator 2, towards the machinery of greed that controls the Kremlin.
Alexei Navalny is dead, but what he stood for will be back.

September 1999 is the time, the way I see it, when Russia ceases to be a democracy. The Moscow apartment bombings were Vladimir Putin's original sin, and any Russian who dared to investigate them lived in mortal danger.

What was supposed to be a safety test at the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April 1986 was the sickest of jokes. The RMBK reactor was the Soviet solution to big oil prices. But it had a series of horrible design flaws. It couldn't tell its operators what was really happening in its guts. Operators could turn a valve by moving a helm-sized wheel and not know whether this would make things more or less dangerous. And the designers' safety test could could lead to a disastrous chain reaction which boiled the nuclear kettles. That had happened eleven years before in 1975 in Soviet Leningrad, now St Petersburg, when Putin was just starting his career inside the KGB in his home city. The secretive Soviet state covered up the huge leak of radiation. The exposed population were not told of the danger. The accident was not reported in the media. The Ministry of Medium Machine Building blamed the accident on poor construction, not terrible design. The commission investigating the incident made several recommendations. None were implemented. No one complained because no one knew. Welcome to the Soviet Union.