As the authorities perfectly knew, Nemtsov’s investigation was a bold challenge to Putin. From late 2013 onwards, the president had used his monopoly over state TV – watched by the overwhelming majority of Russians and the prime source of political information – to unleash a wave of nationalist hysteria and hatred. TV depicted the uprising in Ukraine as a ‘fascist coup’, backed by America. Ukraine’s new provisional government was a ‘fascist junta’.
According to this narrative, the rebellion in the east – actually choreographed by Moscow and its special services – was a continuation of the great patriotic war fought in 1941–5 by the Red Army against the Nazis.
The propaganda had little basis in reality. The far-right Pravy Sektor won less than 2 per cent of the vote in Ukrainian parliamentary elections in 2014 but was presented every evening as Ukraine’s ruling political party. Some stories were wildly exaggerated. Others were made up. An eyewitness told Channel One she had watched Ukrainian Nazis crucify a six-year-old Russian boy in Slavyansk. The report was a lurid invention. However, the remorseless campaign worked. Most Russians believed that fascists were torturing and murdering their brother Slavs in eastern Ukraine; that the conflict next door was ‘unfinished business’.
The prevailing ideas on Russian TV talk shows were familiar ones – victimhood; encirclement by the west; the evils of Nato; Russia’s reemergence as a great power; the US’s swooping plan for global hegemony.
At the same time, the propaganda had a dark internal message. The Kremlin branded those at home who opposed the war as fifth columnists. Russia’s opposition supporters had grown used to the accusation that they were western stooges, paid by the US State Department, whose goal was to install a pro-US puppet government. A sign at one opposition rally joked: ‘Hillary, I’m still waiting for my money.’
As the war intensified, the humour disappeared, and the accusations got nastier. Online lists began to circulate identifying ‘national traitors’. The NTV channel ran a series of ‘exposés’ claiming links between anti-government activists and the CIA. It began planning a hatchet job on Nemtsov, entitled Anatomy of a Protest, to be broadcast on the day of the 1 March rally.
Nemtsov was aware that this swirling toxic climate made him vulnerable. As well as opposing the war in Ukraine, he had lobbied western leaders to impose sanctions on Russia, an action bound to infuriate the Kremlin elite. He was one of only two or three opposition leaders who could talk directly to Washington, Brussels and London. Sanctions – linked to Magnitsky or Ukraine – were a threat to the financial interests of Putin and his circle. And, from their point of view, treason – a betrayal every bit as great as Litvinenko’s.
In an interview with the Financial Times, four days before he was gunned down, Nemtsov said Putin was distinctly capable of murder: ‘He is a totally amoral human being. Totally amoral. He is a Leviathan.’ He added: ‘Putin is very dangerous. He is more dangerous than the Soviets were. In the Soviet Union, there was at least a system, and decisions were taken by the politburo. Decisions about war, decisions to kill people, were not taken by Brezhnev alone, or Andropov either. But that’s how it works now.’
By 2015, Nemtsov was one of the few opposition leaders still based in Russia. Many had gone abroad. The former oligarch and prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky lived in Switzerland and the UK; Kasparov, the ex-chess champion turned Putin critic, was in self-exile in New York. The anti-Kremlin blogger Alexei Navalny remained in Moscow, though under house arrest. Prominent journalists and economists had departed too. Some moved to Paris or Chicago. Others went to London, following a well-trodden path taken by Litvinenko a decade and a half earlier – and by Lenin, a century before that.
The peace rally Nemtsov had been planning to lead turned into his funeral march. Fifty thousand mourners filled Moscow’s embankment: a human mass dressed in thick hats and padded winter coats. They carried flowers, icons, Russian tricolours, homemade placards, and photos of Nemtsov with the words ‘Boris’ and ‘I am not afraid’, in black and white. Posters linked the four bullets that killed him to Russia’s four federal TV channels. One read: ‘Propaganda kills’. The spot on Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge where he fell became a makeshift shrine, heaped with tulips and red carnations.
It was an icy day, with a grey sky; the queue to pay respects stretched around the Garden Ring road. Nemtsov’s body was moved in a hearse and then lay in an open coffin for four hours, inside a museum dedicated to Sakharov, the nuclear scientist turned dissident. There were similar memorial meetings across Russia – in St Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod – with smaller gatherings in European capitals. Neither Putin nor prime minister Dmitry Medvedev came. The chief mourner was Nemtsov’s 88-year-old mother; the mood one of profound shock and gloom.
The Kremlin said it had nothing to do with the murder.
Nemtsov’s friends found this denial unpersuasive. They believe that Putin may well have ordered his killing. Or that shadowy nationalist forces were allowed to eliminate someone routinely derided as a US spy. Either way, Putin deliberately fostered the atmosphere of hysteria and hatred that made Nemtsov’s assassination possible; he was, therefore, morally responsible, they argue. As the journalist Ksenia Sobchak told the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Shaun Walker, it was somehow worse if Putin hadn’t given the command to kill. That meant the president had constructed an ‘appalling terminator’ and ‘lost control of it’.
Putin promised to take the investigation into Nemtsov’s murder under his personal control. The statement didn’t inspire confidence and led the satirical magazine Private Eye to feature Putin on its cover with this remark. Putin is giving a large wink. Within days, the case resembled the unsatisfactory probes into earlier politically motivated killings in Russia. There were suspects – or, better, fall guys – but no real evidence, no motive, and a lingering sense that those who ordered the murder would escape justice once more.
Traditionally, the KGB and its successor the FSB had employed hitmen from the North Caucasus to carry out political killings. In his book Blowing Up Russia, Litvinenko recalled how the FSB used contract killers to liquidate a mafia boss in Yaroslavl. After doing the job, they abandoned their automatics at the scene together with the ID of a Chechen: ‘The operation’s Moscow controllers thought it would be a good idea to send the investigation off along the “Chechen trail”,’ Litvinenko wrote.
There were advantages to using outside killers. Any clues leading back to state organs were impossible to find. Such men were expendable.
What happened next was predictable and darkly ridiculous. Investigators arrested a Chechen, Zaur Dadayev, the deputy commander of the Chechen interior ministry’s northern battalion. According to police, Dadayev confessed to shooting Nemtsov. Dadayev had close links with the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov duly provided a ‘motive’ to excuse the crime: Dadayev had been ‘shocked’ by Nemtsov’s support for the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists gunned down in January in Paris by Islamist terrorists.
Four other Chechen suspects were rounded up. Another, Beslan Shavonov, allegedly ‘blew himself up’ when police tried to capture him in the Chechen capital Grozny, officials indicated. The suspects were paraded in front of journalists in Moscow. Dadayev, however, recanted his confession and said he’d been beaten in custody. Human rights observers recorded bruises and cuts on the arms and legs of the other accused.