Russian Assassination

After Boris Nemtsov’s Assassination, ‘There Are No Longer Any Limits’

By JULIA IOFFE

On Friday evening, Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader and former first deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, went on a prominent Moscow radio station to exhort his fellow citizens to come out to protest President Vladimir Putin’s policies. There would be a rally on Sunday, a spring march, to demonstrate against the deepening economic crisis and Russia’s involvement in Ukraine. The most prominent Russian opposition leader, Aleksei Navalny, had been put in jail for 15 days, which just happened to be long enough to keep him from attending the rally. Nemtsov, who was older and, by now, less influential, had handed out leaflets in the metro and encouraged people to come anyway.

After the radio show, on which Nemtsov warned that too much power in the hands of one man would “end in catastrophe,” he met Anna Duritskaya, his girlfriend of three years — and, as the police would later pointedly note, a citizen of Ukraine. They had dinner and then headed home, strolling across Red Square and past the swirling domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, adjacent to the Kremlin. Just before midnight, as they crossed the bridge toward the historic Moscow neighborhood where Nemtsov lived, a white car pulled up, and, according to investigators, someone inside fired seven or eight shots. Four of them hit Nemtsov in the head, heart, liver and stomach, killing him on the spot.

Duritskaya was unharmed and immediately taken in for questioning. Nemtsov, a big, broad man, was left on the pavement in the rain, his shirt yanked up to his chin.

On Russian social media, liberal Moscow has struggled to wrap its head around something that seemed like it simply couldn’t happen, until it did. It had been years since Nemtsov, a rising star in Yeltsin-era politics, had been the standard-bearer of Western liberalism, and he could be a silly bon vivant. But he was deeply intelligent, witty, kind and ubiquitous. He seemed to genuinely be everyone’s friend; when I lived in Moscow as a journalist, he was always willing to jaw over endless glasses of cognac. And he was a powerful, vigorous critic of Vladimir Putin, assailing him in every possible medium, constantly publishing reports on topics like the president’s lavish lifestyle and the corruption behind the Sochi Olympics.

How could such a prominent politician — a founder of the opposition Solidarity Party, a sitting member of the Yaroslavl city parliament — be gunned down so brazenly, within steps of the Kremlin? “We didn’t kill members of government,” Gleb Pavlovsky, an independent political consultant who used to work for Putin, told me over the phone. “It’s an absolutely new situation.” Olga Romanova, a prominent opposition activist and a close friend of Nemtsov, said, “There are more cameras in that spot than there are grains in a packet of grain.” When I called her last night, she had just come from the scene of the crime, where her friend still lay on the ground, surrounded by laughing policemen. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a very close person murdered, lying on the pavement,” she said. “It’s terrifying.”

Putin promptly called Nemtsov’s mother to offer his condolences and threw what seemed like the entire Ministry of Internal Affairs on the case. Yet we can be sure that the investigation will lead precisely nowhere. At most, some sad sap, the supposed trigger-puller, will be hauled in front of a judge, the scapegoat for someone far more powerful. More likely, the case will founder for years amid promises that everyone is working hard, and no one will be brought to justice at all. This has been the pattern for other high-profile killings, like those of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky.

Already, the Kremlin is muddying the waters. Immediately after the shooting, Putin’s press secretary called the killing “a provocation.” This morning, he clarified that there was no political motive behind the murder. LifeNews, a publication with close ties to Russia’s security agencies, has suggested three possible theories that are under investigation: The killing might have been revenge for forcing Duritskaya to get an abortion; it might have had something to do with money Nemtsov was receiving from allies abroad; or it might have been an attempt to smear the Kremlin. By afternoon, the government’s Investigative Committee had issued a statement saying it believed Nemtsov may have been killed by someone from his own opposition movement who wanted to create a martyr. There was even a suggestion that the assassination was connected to the Charlie Hebdo killings.

Even if one of these theories were true, none of Moscow’s embattled liberals would be convinced. “I will never believe it,” Yevgenia Albats, editor of the liberal magazine New Times and an old friend of Nemtsov, told me. “This is not about some domestic affair. These were absolute professionals.” Ilya Yashin, a member of Nemtsov’s Solidarity Party, was of the same mind. “It’s totally obvious for me that it’s a political killing,” he said. “I don’t have the slightest doubt about that.” Maxim Katz, another opposition activist, claimed on Twitter that, any way you slice it, Putin is responsible: “If he ordered it, then he’s guilty as the orderer. And even if he didn’t, then [he is responsible] as the inciter of hatred, hysteria, and anger among the people.”

It’s hard to argue with this last point. Putin’s aggressive foreign policy, his increasingly conservative domestic policy, his labeling the opposition a “fifth column” and “national traitors,” his state television whipping up a militant, nationalistic fervor — all of this creates a certain atmosphere. Putin, after all, has a history of playing with fire, only to have the flames get away from him. After years of the Kremlin tacitly supporting ultranationalist, neo-Nazi groups, the same skinheads staged a violent protest at the foot of the Kremlin walls in 2010 while riot police officers stood by and watched helplessly. Today, a rabid nationalism has swallowed up most of the country, and it is no longer clear that Putin can control it. “In this kind of atmosphere, everything is possible,” Pavlovsky told me. “This is a Weimar atmosphere. There are no longer any limits.”

Until relatively recently, the risks opposition activists knew they were taking on were not generally thought to be life-threatening. The government was likely to hassle activists and make their lives uncomfortable, but mostly it just marginalized them, like the town fool. This began to change with the arrests of protesters in the summer of 2012. When Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison a year later, it came as a shock; this had never been done before. Even after the sentence was suspended, it seemed to be a warning to the opposition.

Nemtsov’s assassination took that warning to its logical conclusion. Now, “we live in a different political reality,” tweeted Leonid Volkov, a prominent opposition activist. “The fact that they killed him is a message to frighten everyone, the brave and the not brave,” Yashin said. “That this is what happens to people who go against the government of our country.” Anatoly Chubais — who, like Nemtsov, served in the Yeltsin government, and who remains close to Putin — visited the site of the shooting this morning. “If, just a few days ago, people in our city are carrying signs that say ‘Let’s finish off the fifth column,’ and today they kill Nemtsov,” he said in a statement, referring to the Kremlin-sponsored anti-Maidan protest in Moscow last weekend, “what will happen tomorrow?” Or, as Albats put it, “Hunting season is open.”

Nemtsov had been confiding to friends of late that he was growing frightened. This summer, he went to Israel to hide out for a few months, fearing arrest. He told Albats that he worried he wouldn’t be able to withstand a stint in a Russian penal colony. In the fall, he filed a police report because of threats he was receiving on social media. It didn’t seem to go anywhere. Recently, he even let his bravado slip in public, telling an interviewer two weeks ago that he was scared Putin would kill him.

And yet, he didn’t let up. According to Albats and Yashin, Nemtsov was working on a particularly incendiary report that he planned to call “Putin and Ukraine,” which would trace the stream of weaponry flowing from Russia to separatists in the Donbass. He was meeting with the families of Russian men who had died fighting with the separatists. He kept up his withering attacks on Facebook and Twitter. He kept traveling to Ukraine and meeting with president Petro Poroshenko, something that couldn’t have gone unnoticed by the Kremlin’s security agencies. And still, Nemtsov never hired a bodyguard. He walked home through Moscow late at night unprotected.

And he almost made it. His apartment building was visible from the bridge. “From his window, where he worked out in the mornings, you can see the place where he was killed,” Romanova told me. “For many years, he saw the place where they would kill him.”