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,… - John Sweeney

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.

How Putin must have hated him. Navalny was the tsar of charisma, courage and connecting with people; Putin the tsar of the knout, the cosh and the hypodermic syringe.

The particularly horrible thing the Russian army did [in Chechnya] was the 'Slon', Russian for 'The Elephant' from the Soviet issue gas mask which has a corrugated tube hanging down from the face mask to the filter which looks like an elephant's trunk. They would tie a Chechen captive's arms behind his back, place him on the chair, fix 'The Elephant' over his face, unscrew the filter and then squirt CS gas up the tube so the victim would start to drown in his own tears, vomit and snot. One Chechen victim told me for our BBC Radio 5 documentary, Victims of the Torture Train: 'Once the gas mask was on, they would choke you, so you were gasping to breathe. And they would squirt CS gas down the breathing hole. It was so bad just the sight of the gas mask in the room would make people confess to anything'.
Imagine my horror when I went to a police station in newly liberated Kherson in Ukraine twenty-two years later which had been used as a torture chamber. And there, in the basement, was an Elephant gas mask, without the filter.