This was Russia’s most protected area. Wherever you looked there were CCTV cameras; unauthorised demonstrators who popped up here in the heart of political power were detained in a matter of seconds. The Kremlin even had its own powerful internal agency, the Federal Protection Service or FSO, with thousands of agents. It took care of security around state buildings.
Around 11.30 p.m., Nemtsov and Duritskaya started walking across Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge. Beneath them was the Moskva river, cold, glittering, black.
The bridge offered a panoramic view of the city’s illuminated skyline. Tourists come here to photograph St Basil’s, dazzlingly floodlit at night and flanked by the white towers and golden domes of the Kremlin’s churches and cathedrals. There were generous views along the river. The Gothic Kotelnicheskaya apartment building hulked imperiously over the water to the east, one of the capital’s seven Stalin-era skyscrapers; in the opposite direction you could see the ivory edifice of Christ the Saviour cathedral – demolished by Stalin, rebuilt by Yeltsin – and the beginnings of Gorky Park.
Normally there was traffic. At this moment the bridge was oddly deserted. Only two vehicles were visible: a slow-moving municipal truck hugging the pavement and a white car. According to Duritskaya, someone emerged from immediately behind them. She didn’t see his face. The assassin shot Nemtsov six times in the back. Four bullets hit him, one in the heart; he died instantly. The killer jumped into the car. It reversed back towards Nemtsov’s body – seemingly to check if he was dead – and then shot off into the night.
The hitmen were evidently professionals. Their weapon was a Makarov pistol, a standard Russian and Soviet police-issue semi-automatic. Six 9-mm cartridge cases were recovered.
Nemtsov was the victim not of a subtle poison but of old-school mafia methods. The location too told its own chilling and melodramatic story: an opponent of Putin lying dead in the street, under the implacable walls of Russian power, and next to St Basil’s, the country’s chocolate box landmark. The visual scene was perfect for TV. The first militia officers turned up. There was nothing to be done. They heaved Nemtsov’s body into a black plastic bag.
It seemed extraordinary that a former vice premier could be murdered here, outside the Russian equivalent of the White House or the Houses of Parliament, with the shooter apparently able to simply drive off.
The murder of Boris Nemtsov was Russia’s most high-profile political assassination for seventeen years. (In 1998 the liberal politician Galina Starovoytova – a notable opponent of the security services – was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment building in St Petersburg.) Nemtsov’s body had scarcely been loaded into an ambulance before the Kremlin responded. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, said that the president believed the murder was a ‘provocation’.
‘With all due respect to the memory of Boris Nemtsov, in political terms he did not pose any threat to the current Russian leadership or Vladimir Putin. If we compare popularity levels, Putin’s and the government’s ratings and so on, in general Boris Nemtsov was just a little bit more than an average citizen,’ Peskov said. The rhetoric – insignificant, irrelevant, etc. – was reminiscent of Putin’s response to the murders of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya.
The word ‘provocation’ carries its own special meaning in Russian. What Putin meant is that whoever murdered Nemtsov did so to discredit the state. Since the state was the primary victim here, the state couldn’t be held responsible, this logic runs.
The office of Russia’s prosecutor general offered an array of motives to explain Nemtsov’s murder. None seemed convincing. It suggested his killing might be the work of Islamist extremists, radical Ukrainian factions, or the opposition itself, which could have used Nemtsov as a ‘sacrificial victim’. Putin’s ally Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen president, accused ‘western spy agencies’. They were trying to ‘destabilise Russia’, he said. The muckraking website LifeNews.ru, which has links with the FSB, pointed to Nemtsov’s colourful love life and his relationship with Duritskaya, a 23-year-old model and Ukrainian citizen.
The investigative committee seemed to be moving in a predictable direction: towards an old-fashioned cover-up. Officials released one carefully curated CCTV film taken from far away. The municipal truck obscures the moment when Nemtsov is killed. The video offers few clues. There are no close-ups of the suspects. Three days after Nemtsov’s death, officials told Kommersant newspaper that the Kremlin’s CCTV cameras immediately next to the spot where he was shot ‘weren’t working’.
Like all high-profile critics, Nemtsov was under close FSB surveillance. The spy agency would have monitored Nemtsov carefully: it expends enormous efforts on keeping track of its targets. On this occasion, however, an organisation known for its resources and unlimited manpower seems to have lost him. Meanwhile, his killers appear to have had real-time intelligence concerning his movements.
The murder made headlines around the world. The Russian authorities avoided the one explanation that made sense: that Nemtsov was shot for his opposition activities. Specifically, for his public criticism of the war in Ukraine, in which – at the time of his death – at least 6,000 people had been killed and 2 million displaced.
In his last Echo of Moscow interview, Nemtsov had called Putin’s intervention in Ukraine ‘insane’, and ‘murderous’ for Russia and its citizens. He described the takeover of Crimea as ‘illegal’, though he acknowledged it had the consent of many Crimeans.
At the time of his death, Nemtsov had been gathering material for a new report on Ukraine. Its contents were to have been explosive. Over the years he had written eight pamphlets on a variety of themes. One of them, Putin: A Reckoning, accused the president and his circle of massive personal corruption. It said that they had accumulated enormous personal wealth by pillaging oil revenues. Nemtsov shared Litvinenko’s thesis that Russia had grown into a mafia state. He alleged Putin had links with the Tambov crime group.
Another Nemtsov booklet targeted Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor, and his billionaire wife Elena Baturina. (A year after it came out in 2009, Medvedev gave Luzhkov the boot.) There were further dossiers on the 2014 Sochi Olympics, where billions of dollars of public money had gone missing, and Gazprom.
According to his aide, Olga Shorina, Nemtsov came up with the idea of a Ukraine dossier in early 2015. It was to be called Putin and the War. It would reveal how Russian commanders had secretly smuggled servicemen into Ukraine to fight in the Donbas. His friend, the opposition leader Ilya Yashin, said that one morning Nemtsov turned up at his party HQ and announced triumphantly: ‘I’ve thought what to do. We need to write a report, publish it with a massive circulation, and distribute it on the streets. We explain how Putin unleashed this war. Only that way can we beat the propaganda.’
Nemtsov believed that opposing the war was a patriotic act, Yashin said – and that by handing out the dossier outside metro stations he could punch through the wall of state disinformation. Putin’s intervention in Ukraine was ‘base and cynical’. It had led directly to sanctions, international isolation and the needless deaths of Russian citizens. The idea germinated in February, when relatives of servicemen killed in eastern Ukraine approached Nemtsov. The Russian ministry of defence was refusing to pay the families compensation – since the soldiers had, like so many ghosts, never officially been there.
Hours before his murder, Nemtsov wrote a note to Shorina. Scribbled in blue Biro, on a sheet of white A4, it said: ’Some paratroopers from Ivanovo have got in touch with me. 17 killed. They didn’t give them their money, but for now they are frightened to talk.’ Ivanovo was 185 miles (300 km) north-east of Moscow and home to the Russian army’s 98th paratroop division. There were no other details.