I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it, it makes me cringe. - 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.

The 'conditioning' of the communist terror of the late Forties and early Fifties was so strong, so severe that it only required the lightest caress from the Securitate to have the average Romanian lying prone in a position of abject submission. Whatever liberal sentiments Ceausescu expressed in his speeches, the secret policemen were still present, waiting, listening, asking questions. There was no need for Ceausescu to clump heavy-handedly about, threatening people. It had all been done so effectively a generation before and people had not forgotten. The people barked to command, because they knew what happened to the disobedient. Once the dog is trained, there is little need for the whip.

Watch Putin's Palace. More than one hundred million people have. Think of the money squandered on dross while ordinary Russians live in poverty. Think, too, on Putin's taste. Get inside Alexei Navalny's head. Why did he go back to Russia to face near certain death? Because he was sick of Putin the thief, sick of his great robbery of Russian wealth and sick of Putin's fouler robbery of the Russian soul. Navalny went back to Moscow because the other tsar, while controlling perhaps the greatest accumulation of private wealth in human history, built himself a temple to Cupid Stunt.