If Boris Nemtsov, the Russian statesman and activist killed in Moscow last week, had been a character in a political thriller—and he certainly had the looks and charisma for the part—the script might have been criticized as lacking subtlety. There is the opposition leader gunned down on the eve of a major protest march, shortly after an interview that foreshadows his murder. There is his nemesis, the authoritarian strongman whose foes often turn up dead, vowing to personally oversee the investigation.
In the new Russia, political murder is old hat. Even before Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, member of parliament Galina Starovoitova, a leading pro-democracy voice, was shot dead in 1998 in an apparent hit ordered by a fellow MP with ties to organized crime. Notable Putin-era victims include journalist Anna Politkovskaya and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov. Yet even with this grim history, Nemtsov’s murder was shocking—both because of his stature and because of the brazenness of an assassination on the doorstep of the Kremlin.
The details of the murder remain murky, almost certainly as a result in part of deliberate disinformation. Nonetheless, Nemtsov’s allies are pointing to the Kremlin as directly or indirectly responsible. Putin himself has called the murder a “provocation,” and his defenders argue that he is far more likely to be hurt than helped by Nemtsov’s death. In fact, circumstantial evidence of government involvement—with or without Putin’s actual approval—is compelling. But those who seek to exonerate Putin of this crime may ultimately be right about its outcome.
Nemtsov, 55 at the time of his murder, was by all accounts a remarkable man, one who could have been a brilliant physicist if he had not traded science for politics. Raised in the provincial city of Gorky in the Soviet Union’s twilight years, he became politically active in the late 1980s, Russia’s genuine era of hope and change. In 1990, he was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation; during the hardliners’ coup in August 1991, he grew close to Boris Yeltsin, leading to his appointment that November as administrative chief of the Nizhny Novgorod region (Gorky in Soviet days). Later he won a popular election for governor, leaving that post in 1997 to join the Yeltsin government.
At the time, the young, dynamic, charming Nemtsov was touted as an heir apparent to Yeltsin; a 1997 poll found him leading potential presidential candidates with nearly 30 percent support. That plummeted to 1 percent after the economic collapse of 1998, which shattered Russians’ faith in the pro-Western course Nemtsov championed. When Yeltsin sacked the government in the wake of the crash, he asked Nemtsov to stay; Nemtsov chose to resign and return to independent politics.
Always his own man, Nemtsov was willing to defy his mentor on such issues as the war in Chechnya, against which he led a petition drive in 1996. Still, like many Russian liberals, he staked his hopes on a powerful pro-market, pro-freedom president rather than a system of checks and balances. That was a fatal error: The executive powers created for Yeltsin enabled Putin’s authoritarian restoration. Early on, Nemtsov hailed Putin himself as the new “good czar,” endorsing him as Yeltsin’s successor and even coauthoring a January 2000 New York Times op-ed that defended Putin as “Russia’s best bet.”
Sincere or tactical, these sympathies were short-lived, and Nemtsov soon found himself in increasingly vocal—and futile—opposition. His attempts to get elected to Russia’s parliament, the Duma, were stymied both by lack of popularity and by changes in election laws intended to hobble independent parties. He persisted, working to unify opposition groups and publishing several acclaimed reports that scathingly analyzed Putin’s policies and claimed to document his illegal wealth. In late 2011 and early 2012, the revival of protests after the announcement of Putin’s return to the presidency propelled Nemtsov to the front rows of vast crowds; it also earned him several arrests and stints in jail, including a day in a barely lit solitary holding cell with no bunk or chair.
By the summer of 2012 the protest movement had waned, demoralized and frightened into submission; in 2014, the crisis in Ukraine gave it new life. This was a cause with special meaning for Nemtsov, who had supported the Orange Revolution in 2004-2005 and served as a consultant to Ukraine’s pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko. Yet, with the Kremlin propaganda machine in overdrive and with paranoid and patriotic fever running high, the liberals’ position was more precarious than ever. Putin, always inclined to paint critics as disloyal, spoke darkly of “national traitors.” The media followed with an orgy of dissident-bashing; nationalist groups that openly urged violence against “enemies” moved from the margins to the mainstream. Last April, a large banner with five faces—one of them Nemtsov’s—and the words “The fifth column: Aliens among us” hung briefly outside a bookstore on a main avenue in downtown Moscow.
At the time, Nemtsov told the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta that he saw the banner as a signal of a likely crackdown. When the reporter asked what he expected the authorities to do to prominent dissenters, he replied, “Lock them up. . . . Why, are there any other options? Well, maybe kill them, I don’t know. But probably lock them up.” Still, the other possibility was on his mind. On February 10, he told the online magazine Sobesednik.ru that his 86-year-old mother feared for his life: “Every time I call her, she laments, ‘When are you going to stop badmouthing Putin? He will kill you!’ ” Pressed on whether he shared those fears, he said he did “a bit,” then laughed it off: “If I was actually scared, I wouldn’t do what I’m doing.”
Just over two weeks later, before midnight on February 27, Nemtsov lay dead on Big Moskvoretsky Bridge, shot in the back four times; two bullets hit his head and his heart. Initial statements from Moscow police said that he was shot from a car as it sped by; later reports, backed by what appears to be a video recording from a distant security camera, indicate that the shooter approached on foot and then fled in a car. Many questions remain; Nemtsov’s girlfriend, Ukrainian model Anna Duritskaya, who was walking with him to his apartment after a late-night dinner, has said that she did not see the killer and was in too much shock to notice the make of the getaway car.
Many of Nemtsov’s friends and allies have blamed his murder on the climate of virulent hate toward “the fifth column.” Others, including Vladimir Milov, Nemtsov’s former colleague in the Yeltsin government and coauthor of his reports on Putin, are convinced that the killer was not just a self-styled patriot acting on his own. Writing on his blog, Milov has noted that the area where the shooting took place is under tight control by the security services and that Nemtsov himself had to be under close surveillance, especially given that he was one of the leaders of a major protest march scheduled for March 1.
Why kill Nemtsov, who ostensibly posed no threat to the regime? The reasons could be many, from intimidating the opposition—which makes Putin nervous despite its small numbers and marginal status—to silencing a political activist who had some influence in the West. (Nemtsov was a strong backer of sanctions personally targeting high-level Russian officials.) Nor should revenge be underestimated as a motive. Igor Yakovenko, a columnist for the independent website EJ.ru, notes that Putin regarded Nemtsov as “personal enemy number one.”
Could this murder speed the undoing of the Putin regime? It was tempting to think so as one watched tens of thousands marching in Nemtsov’s honor last week, in lieu of the protest he was to have led—a march that his death brought to the heart of Moscow, where the original rally had been denied a permit. The demonstrators’ signs said, “We will not forgive or forget,” “I am not afraid,” and “Heroes never die”; a popular placard added a silent letter to the name “Boris” to form a word that means “Fight on.”
In the final hours of his life, and his final interview on the embattled radio station Ekho Moskvy, Nemtsov voiced the hope that the March 1 protest would be the start of a “spring revival” for the opposition. When host Ksenia Larina questioned the rally’s “springtime” theme given the bleak situation in the country, Nemtsov replied: “No one wants to go to a wake.” In the end, it was his own wake that became one of Russia’s most powerful recent moments of resistance to power.
Cathy Young is a columnist for Real Clear Politics and a contributing editor to Reason.
