A month and a half has passed since Boris Nemtsov, the Russian political activist who rose to prominence as a dynamic young reformer in the 1990s and later became one of the fiercest critics of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule, was shot dead a few blocks from the Kremlin. The shocking murder, which quickly raised questions about the Putin regime’s culpability, has largely faded from the headlines in the Western press. But in Russia, it has become the center of a real-life crime thriller that hints at conflicts within the power structure—and a battleground of quiet but steadfast resistance to the state.
In the first days after Nemtsov’s murder on February 27, many commentators in the West and in Russia speculated it would remain officially unsolved. Yet the very next week, on March 7 and 8, the authorities announced the arrests of five suspects, initially detained in Chechnya and brought to Moscow; a sixth man, cornered in his apartment, either blew himself up with a hand grenade (the official version) or was killed by the police. The Russian media promptly reported that alleged ringleader Zaur Dadayev had confessed and that his stated motive was Nemtsov’s support for Charlie Hebdo, the French magazine whose editor was murdered, along with 11 others, by Islamists in January for publishing cartoons depicting Muhammad. Later reports said that Dadayev admitted he was promised a payment of 5 million rubles, or about $90,000. Four days after his arrest, Dadayev retracted his confession, claiming he was tortured and threatened; he reportedly confessed again, but proclaimed his innocence in an April 1 court appearance.
One obvious possibility is that Dadayev and his alleged accomplices are designated fall guys—convenient because both the “Chechen connection” and the “Islamic extremism” angle take the focus off Nemtsov’s role as a Kremlin foe. Yet Dadayev makes an odd scapegoat, considering that a trail from him leads to Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov, the former separatist warlord turned Putin’s man in Chechnya.
Until recently, 30-year-old Dadayev was a lieutenant in the elite Sever (North) battalion of Chechen special forces, regarded as Kadyrov’s personal army; he had been on leave since January and requested a discharge the day after Nemtsov’s death. His immediate superior, Major Ruslan Geremeyev, served directly under battalion chief Alibek Delimkhanov, whose older brother Adam, a deputy premier of Chechnya, has been described by the Chechen pro-separatist website Kavkaz-Center.com as “Kadyrov’s personal executioner.” Wanted by Interpol for the 2009 murder of Chechen military leader and Kadyrov rival Sulim Yamadayev in Dubai, Adam Delimkhanov is also linked to two assassinations of high-profile Kadyrov foes in Moscow. KavkazCenter.com, citing sources inside Chechnya, named him the man behind Nemtsov’s murder several days before the first arrests in the case.
The link is Geremeyev, connected to the Delimkhanovs not only by military service but by kinship—he’s their nephew. Witnesses say that he frequently traveled to Moscow with Dadayev; one of his relatives owns the Moscow apartment where Dadayev stayed and allegedly met with his accomplices. Yet the federal Investigative Committee, which is handling the Nemtsov murder case, has been stymied in its attempts to question Geremeyev. According to news reports, he lay low in his home village in Chechnya under heavy guard by local troops, and later fled to either Dubai or Turkey. The only possible explanation is that he was being protected by Chechen leadership.
Meanwhile, Kadyrov responded to Dadayev’s arrest with a statement praising him as a valiant soldier and a “true patriot of Russia.” He also asserted that even if Dadayev is guilty, he would never have taken any action against Russia’s interests—which can be read as tacit approval of the murder.
Was Nemtsov killed on Kadyrov’s orders? That is the most popular unofficial theory in Russia. It is certainly more credible than a mini-jihad over Nemtsov’s fairly low-key Facebook comments on Charlie Hebdo. (Dadayev’s family says he was not particularly devout and never voiced any anger about the Muhammad cartoons; moreover, investigators believe Dadayev and his accomplices had been watching Nemtsov since September, long before the Paris attack.) But the idea that the “Chechen trail” leads no further than Chechnya seems dubious for many reasons, from Kadyrov’s posture as Putin’s super-loyal vassal to evidence suggesting the complicity of federal security agencies.
In a March interview with Ukrainian news agency UkrInform, Soviet defector and former military intelligence officer Viktor Suvorov argued that the location of Nemtsov’s murder makes it all but certain that it happened with the knowledge of the Federal Protective Service, the FSO (officially the Russian counterpart of the Secret Service, but also a powerful intelligence agency in its own right). The area near the Kremlin is under extremely tight, round-the-clock FSO control, patrolled by plainclothes agents and monitored by surveillance cameras—none of which, the FSO claims, captured the shooting. Former government official and close Nemtsov associate Vladimir Milov also points out on his blog that at the time of his death Nemtsov, set to lead a major protest march in two days, had to be under close surveillance by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB.
All this leads to the inevitable question: What did Putin know and when did he know it? A March 19 Bloomberg News report that argued Kadyrov organized the hit on Nemtsov on his own claimed that Putin was “furious” about the murder. Yet the day after Kadyrov’s tribute to Nemtsov’s alleged killer, the Kremlin released a Putin decree granting the Chechen president a top state award, the Order of Honor. While government spokesmen stressed that the award had been approved weeks earlier, it could have been quickly dropped if Kadyrov had fallen out of favor. Instead, it seemed to signal that Putin was standing by his man.
Kremlin critics such as Milov reject the standard argument that Putin had no reason to want Nemtsov dead; they cite such motives as retaliation for Western sanctions targeting the Putin elites—of which Nemtsov was a successful advocate—and a message of intimidation to the opposition.
But there is another possibility: that the message was also directed to factions within Russian power structures dissatisfied with Putin and his policies. The conflict of “clans” inside the Russian government has long been the stuff of rumors; yet it is arguably corroborated by some strange twists of the Nemtsov murder investigation. Official claims about the case have been repeatedly undercut or even demolished by leaks to the news media from law enforcement or other government agencies—from surveillance camera video disproving early reports that Nemtsov had been shot from a passing car to evidence refuting the Charlie Hebdo connection and pointing to murder for hire rather than religious zealotry.
Another generally overlooked but possibly significant fact is that Dadayev and one of his codefendants were initially arrested by the Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN), allegedly trying to buy heroin from an undercover officer, then questioned by drug enforcement agents and turned over to the FSB. The FSKN has long had a tense relationship with the Kremlin; in January, there were news reports (later denied) of plans to disband the agency and fold it into the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Could it be that, far from being designated scapegoats, Dadayev and the other suspects expected to be shielded from arrest by their patrons but fell victim to interagency conflict? This scenario could explain Dadayev’s confessions and retractions. It may also explain the bizarre fact that Putin, who had earlier pledged to ensure Nemtsov’s killers were found and punished, said nothing about the arrests for over a month—until he was directly asked about the case in his April 16 live television chat with the people. And it supports the theory that Putin’s mysterious 10-day absence starting March 5, the day of Dadayev’s arrest, was related to fallout from the Nemtsov case.
If the Kremlin had a hand in Nemtsov’s murder, the plot has backfired in more ways than one. The killing has probably deepened factional divisions within the regime. It has also energized a new spirit of protest, which lives on after the memorial march and funeral. Big Moskvoretsky Bridge, where Nemtsov was shot, remains the site of a remarkable memorial of flowers, candles, photos, and placards; in the past month, it has been repeatedly vandalized by “patriotic” goons and dismantled by city workers under the guise of “cleanup”—only to be doggedly rebuilt by pro-Nemtsov volunteers.
It’s one small war the opposition is winning.
Cathy Young is a columnist for Real Clear Politics and a contributing editor to Reason. Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based independent journalist and political analyst.
