Murder of a friend - Edward Lucas

Murder of a friend 
My immediate reaction to the opposition leader’s death on Friday evening was misery and fury. Now, it is fear. Fear for what the assassination of my friend may herald—either a return to a terrifying past, or a descent into a still more alarming future. 
Edward Lucas
Boris Nemtsov was my closest friend in Russian politics. I had known him since the late 1990s when he was trying vainly to stem the sleaze and authoritarianism that eventually brought Putin and his ex-KGB cronies to power. 
Unlike some Russian liberals, Nemtsov saw through Putin from the beginning. He disliked the new leader’s background as an unrepentant KGB officer, and worried about his murky years spent in the city administration of gangster-ridden St Petersburg. 
He decried the political bargain that the new regime offered as sinister and misleading: Russians craved stability but it should not come at the price of ending political pluralism. 
As the regime tightened its grip on the electoral system, Nemtsov and other liberals were excluded from public life. He turned to protests and to investigating corruption and incompetence. 
One set of possibilities surrounds the theory that his assassination was ordered by the Putin regime. It could be a simple attempt to silence him. Nemtsov was about to release a report on Russia’s war in Ukraine. I doubt that would justify his murder. His other investigative reports were damning—but they had little impact, because the official media ignored them. Russia’s role in attacking and destabilising Ukraine is well proven. The shortage is not of more evidence, but of will power in the West. Even Nemtsov could not provide that. 
Nor do I think it likely that he was killed to forestall a protest march planned for last Sunday. The opposition in Russia is barely worthy of the name: Nemtsov himself told the FT shortly before his death that he was now a mere dissident. The regime has plenty of way of keeping its quarrelsome and marginal critics in check, chiefly by harassing them through the criminal justice system. Why add the extra complication of murder?
More likely is that the killing was symbolic. The official media, with suspicious unanimity, is taking the line that Nemtsov was murdered by other opposition elements, or possibly their foreign paymasters, in order to destabilise Russia. 
It is hard to follow this perverse reasoning, or to find any facts to support it. But as with the Kirov murder in 1934, which gave Stalin reason to purge Soviet life of any dissent, Nemtsov’s killing could give the regime grounds for launching a serious crackdown.
Russia’s history is drenched in blood and tears. Countless people died in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. The pretext for these purges was a spectacular murder. The bon vivant Sergei Kirov, Communist Party boss in Leningrad, was a growing threat to the brutal, suspicious Josef Stalin. 
Though a die-hard communist, he thought the country’s leadership had gone too far. Kirov objected to the persecution of the Soviet peasantry which had led to lethal famines in Ukraine and elsewhere. And he resisted Stalin’s manic, paranoid tightening of Communist Party discipline. 
That cost him his life. In a mysterious shooting on December 1st 1934—amid astonishing negligence by his bodyguards, in a prestigious party headquarters building, the Smolny Institute—Kirov was shot dead.
Stalin responded with a vehement public condemnation. He carried the coffin at Kirov’s funeral and took personal charge of the investigation. But it mushroomed into a massive purge of the Party—and then the whole country. Hysterical suspicions, of treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage, swirled through every corner of Soviet life.
Yet even similar motives as with the Kirov murder seem a bit unlikely. True, the Kremlin likes phoney legalism to mask its repression at home and aggression abroad. But why go to the trouble of killing Nemtsov, when so many other pretexts abound? 
Most likely is that Nemtsov’s killing was a political signal from one part of Russian politics to another: that it is now acceptable to kill a former deputy prime minister within a stone’s throw of the Kremlin. The fact that the murder happened on the newly proclaimed Special Forces Day may have something to do with it. 
In the Kremlin’s propaganda the Russian opposition, along with Zionists, Fascists, paedophiles and CIA plots are stitched together into fiendish plots against holy Mother Russia. Some senior Russians know privately that it is nonsense. After all, they educate their children in this demonic West, and invest their money there. But others believe it. 
Boris Nemtsov—brilliant, charming, handsome, honest and brave—was no Kirov. He was no blood-stained Communist apparatchik, but a physicist who turned to politics out of patriotism. Nemtsov was a pro-Western Jewish liberal who bravely decried Russia’s war in Ukraine as an outrage, was a particular hate figure among these people. Many would like to kill him anyway—especially if it would also signal to the Kremlin that if the regime does not get tough with traitors, others will. 
The official reaction to Nemtsov’s murder has the most sinister overtones of the past. The Russian president Vladimir Putin has taken personal charge of the investigation of his opponent’s death.That is offensive as it is farcical. The many murders and beatings of Kremlin critics in recent years have gone unsolved, amid bluster, confusion and incompetence.
The authorities show no sign of treating this case any differently. The investigators detained Mr Nemtsov’s girlfriend, a Ukrainian model, and have ransacked his apartment, seizing his computers and papers.
But the truly chilling echo of the Kirov case comes in the media coverage. Russia has already descended into a propaganda hell in which the Russian opposition, along with Zionists, Fascists, paedophiles and CIA plots are stitched together into fiendish plots against holy Mother Russia. 
That is all too reminiscent of the Stalinist media in the 1930s. Dissent is treason. Contact with foreigners is espionage. Enemies are everywhere. 
As Karen Dawisha, a brave American academic who has laid bare the links between the Putin regime and gangsterdom, has written, “when the Kremlin publicly labels the opposition leaders as enemies, and spews out nothing but hatred toward those who have a right to demand freedom, then killings – irrespective of who pulled the trigger—are a logical result.”
Now—in a truly sinister twist reminiscent of the Kirov case—official media is blaming Nemtsov’s allies in the opposition for his murder. In the Kremlin’s perverse logic, they are the likely culprits, because they will benefit from the outrage around the killing. 
In truth, that outrage is limited. A demonstration yesterday attracted tens of thousands of mourners—a respectable total, but not nearly enough to rock the regime. The shooting instils fear, rather than stoking indignation. 
Many critics of the regime, in Russia and abroad, are asking who will be next. 
My friend Yevgenia Albats, editor of one of the few remaining independent magazines in Moscow, says: “the hunting season is open.” 
The logic may be bizarre, but there is no doubting the Putin regime’s determination to stay in power. 
If, as the regime seems to be arguing, the Nemtsov killing was an attempt by the opposition and its foreign paymasters to destabilise Russia, then the response must be ruthless. Lies and terror will have Russia in their grip.
It may be hard to imagine anything more unpleasant than the crooked spooks of the Putin inner circle. But the climate they have created is fostering even more loathsome elements.
They include the fearsome legions of the despotic Ramzan Kadyrov, the eccentric strongman leader of Chechnya. Having lost a war of secession against Moscow, the warlike Chechens have now thrown in their lot with Putin—and have gained increasing and sinister influence in Russian politics as a result. 
Of similar vein are the separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine. Thuggish paramilitaries, often with ties to organised crime, they are like the hard men of the Troubles generation in Northern Ireland. Like the IRA and UDA they have a taste for violence, coupled with intransigent, extremist political views.
In the case of the new Russian hardliners, these are a toxic cocktail of Stalinist nostalgia, overt fascism, ultra-orthodox religiosity and a bitter hatred of the West. Some are also part of motorcycle gangs with exotic names such as the Night Wolves. 
These people do not see Mr Putin as a sinister tyrant. They think he is too soft. 
They would have no compunction in murdering someone like Nemtsov—and might see it as a way of signalling to the Kremlin that if the regime does not get tough with traitors, others will. 
I hope we in the West are ready for an era in Russia which may make the last 15 years seem like little more than mild inconvenience.
Edward Lucas is the author of The New Cold War: Putin’s Threat to Russia and the West, and Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West