Like Terminator 2, Navalny was an awkward sod but that comes with the territory if you have the balls to stand up to Putin. He was also charismatic, … - John Sweeney

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.

What the fuck was Navalny doing?
The evidence points to the videos being made when Navalny's fury at the ineffectiveness of the liberals to land a punch on Putin was at its most extreme and irrational and that he later regretted them but, Navalny being Navalny, he couldn't bring himself to take them down. Over the next three years he pursued his grand strategy of trying to get the nationalist right to wake up to the threat from Putin's fascism. When he realised that strategy wasn't working it was, for him, too late, and a tad embarassing, to delete the videos, so they stayed up. He didn't get it, that the liberal world hates this kind of stuff and the stink of it followed him down the years even though he had turned himself into something quite different. [...] When one avenue of fire failed, he would pursue another, and then another. The goal was to defeat Putin; he didn't realise that with the NAROD videos he ended up defeating himself.

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.