When the Soviet Union collapsed, Yavlinsky set out sober, sensible reforms which would lead to a properly policed free market. His ideas were passed … - John Sweeney

For most of its history Romania has been divided, skewered and kebabed by a succession of foreign invaders and masters, some of whom were unspeakably nasty. Cruel as Ceausescu's time was, it was not without precedent in his country's history.

A word about the top lawman in the black hat. Aleksandr Bastrykin is one of the top law enforcers in Russia, roughly equivalent to the head of the FBI, but his performance harks back to the bad old days of the Feds, when J. Edgar Hoover made deals with the Mob and told his officers to target political figures who offended his dark sensibilities. Bastrykin is also a self-confessed kidnapper and a plagiarist.
The facts about Bastrykin the copycat are well evidenced, embarassingly so. His 2004 book, Signs of the Hand: Dactyloscopy, about the science of fingerprinting, was a masterpiece of copying and pasting, principally from a book about forensics, The Century of the Detective, by German writer Jürgen Thorwald. [...] The great Masha Gessen noted in The New Yorker that Bastrykin, when he gave a talk at the Sorbonne in November 2013, remained calm when he was heckled about the Russian Investigative Committee's use of torture, but lost his rag when he was personally accused of plagiarism. Dear Reader: I hope you have already worked out the them here, that both Putin and his wannabe Sherlock Holmes steal other people's words.

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.