August has once more brought disaster to Russia. This same month has, over a dozen years, seen Russia's sovereign default, two submarine accidents, terror bombings of airliners and the Georgian war. Now it has witnessed the deadly climax of the country's worst heatwave.

Wildfires have directly killed at least 54 people and left thousands homeless. The heat and smog from blazing forests and smouldering peat bogs has caused the premature deaths of thousands more. Moscow's mortality rate doubled to 700 a day. Yet, more starkly than ever, the fires have exposed – despite the flood of oil and gas revenues over the past decade – the degradation of Russia's infrastructure and public administration.

The fires have been worsened by shortages of equipment such as fire engines, delays in transporting apparatus over Russia's dreadful roads, and failures of co-ordination. Prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin himself has told of country-dwellers calling emergency services which simply hung up. In short, they have demonstrated once more how crucial is the modernisation of Russia that Mr Putin's successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, declared last autumn to be his goal.