He [Prigozhin] became the Kremlin's court jester, but beside the jokes he was, in essence, the psychopath's psychopath, Putin's personal cook and per… - John Sweeney

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 of the way and Navalny not well known enough to run, Putin's hand-picked opponents were Gennady Zyuganov, an elderly Commie, trusted to rock the boat of his geriatric supporters and that alone, Mikhail Prokhorov, a giraffe-like oligarch, Vladimir Zhirinovksy, the fool's bladder on a fascist stick, and Sergey Mironov, a nonentity with the flavour of the actor who gets killed in the first five minutes of a movie.

No Marxist could take Ceausescu seriously after he was seen wandering around on state occasions carrying his sceptre in 1974, the one which so delighted Salvador Dali. The sceptre was the physical emodiment of Ceausescu's drift from the anti-statist, anti-personality bedrock of Marxist thought and practice. Of course, these principles had more often been breached than obeyed in the various communist states since the October revolution, but to play king so blatantly was thought somewhat indecent even among the unblushing despots of the Soviet empire. The 'Bourbonification' of the Ceausescu dynasty can be traced back to the early Seventies, but in the late Eighties it became more and more crass.

Chernobyl scarred Navalny like Voldemort scarred Harry Potter, the scar so deep he could never root it out. From the age of ten, Navalny saw how a state that lied to its people was a thing of evil, that, in politics, in power, you must tell the truth to people. After seeing what moronic, lying power did to his childhood idyll, he spent the rest of his life not lying to people.