The day Putin cried

As Russia prepares to elect Vladimir Putin for a fourth term as president on 18 March, the BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse looks back at a revealing event that took place at the start of his Kremlin career - when he was Russia's acting president, running in his first presidential election.

Russians rarely see their president cry, though there has been plenty of tragedy during his 18 years in power. It happened once, right at the start of his rule - on 24 February 2000, at the funeral of Anatoly Sobchak.

Sobchak was one of the men who, alongside Gorbachev and Yeltsin, helped bring about the end of the Soviet Union. He was also the reformer who plucked a middle-ranking KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Putin from obscurity and gave him his first job in politics.

No-one really knows what drove him to make that fateful decision. But today, factions from the old Soviet security establishment have taken hold of the levers of power in Russia to such an extent as to make it a democracy hardly worth the name.