On Saturday evening, in Moscow, my daughter and I stopped to buy flowers to take to the site where the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov had been shot the night before. The customer who was in line before us, a bunch of flowers in his hand, was on his way out of the store when he suddenly turned to us and asked, “Are you going to Nemtsov?” I smiled at him. “Yes, but how do you know?” (We were a few miles away from the site of the murder.) “Your intellectual faces,” he said. Such an overt expression of opposition solidarity from a stranger would have sounded natural three years ago, at the time of mass anti-Putin protests in Moscow. But the atmosphere has greatly changed since then.
Boris Nemtsov was among the organizers of a mass protest action called “The Spring,” planned for Sunday, against Putin’s policies and the war in Ukraine. It became a march of mourning instead. There were an estimated fifty thousand people in attendance. The metro station nearest to the gathering point was as packed as a weekday rush hour; men, women, and children “with intellectual faces”—members of the Moscow liberal constituency—were all around. It was drizzling and gloomy as we waited for an hour and a half to pass through metal detectors, and then we marched for another hour to the bridge next to the Kremlin where the assassin shot six bullets at Nemtsov’s back, and then disappeared.
Almost a decade ago, there was another protest like this one. In the fall of 2006, a rally in Moscow was planned to protest the ugly anti-Georgian campaign incited by the government. But the day before the event was to take place, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist and human rights advocate, was murdered, and that protest also became an act of mourning. There have been other political assassinations and physical attacks since Politkovskaya was shot in her apartment building. Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer, and journalist Anastasia Baburova were killed in 2009 as they walked down a street in central Moscow. That same year, Natalia Estemirova, a human rights activist and journalist, was shot in North Caucasus. Oleg Kashin, a prominent Russian journalist and blogger, nearly died from a beating in 2010.
Nemtsov’s murder, however, is the highest-profile and most purely political assassination that has been seen in Putin’s Russia. Nemtsov had been at the forefront of the Russian politics since the collapse of the Communist rule. He started his political career as the governor of Nizhny Novgorod in the early post-Communist period and served as Deputy Prime Minister in Boris Yeltsin’s second-term cabinet. Yeltsin obviously admired the youthful and energetic reformer; at one point he even spoke of Nemtsov as his successor. This by no means turned Nemtsov into a courtier: he aggressively campaigned against Yeltsin’s war in Chechnya, and in 1996 he personally delivered to Yeltsin the signatures of one million Russian citizens outraged by the bloody conflict.
When Vladimir Putin took office, in 2000, Nemtsov became a vocal and highly visible opponent of his policies, at first as a member of the liberal faction in the Duma. In 2002, after the horrific terrorist siege of a Moscow theatre, Nemtsov worked with other members of his party to collect evidence that showed that most of the hundred and thirty hostage deaths were caused by the badly botched rescue operation. He presented the results to Putin who, according to Nemtsov, was unimpressed. In 2003, when the liberals were voted out of the Duma, Nemtsov switched to the informal politics of small parties and groups, public rallies and marches, and countless speeches and interviews. Nemtsov co-authored and published investigations about high-level corruption in Putin’s Russia. Most recently, he was working on a report about Russia’s involvement in the war in Ukraine.
Nemtsov’s personality was arguably even larger than his political legacy. He was honest and courageous; had an unbending spirit; and, perhaps most remarkably, considering all this, maintained a relaxed and assured sense of himself. He was disarmingly handsome and charismatic. On Saturday, a Russian political émigré Web site published a series of photos of Nemtsov titled “A Happy Man.” “He lived in politics not in the way that’s habitual in Russia,” wrote Russian journalist Yuri Saprykin, “not with the heavy sense of a perennial martyr, but with a smile, as if speaking in the Duma or standing in a one-man picket is the same as drinking a glass of champagne.” His liberal political rhetoric may have grown repetitive over the years, but he was loved dearly, as a longtime political companion, by all those who resented the growing anti-liberalism in Russia.
As early as 1999, even before he became President, Putin made clear that he believed in the perennial dominance of the state. “For Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly which should be got rid of,” he wrote in a lengthy manifesto. “Quite the contrary, they see it as a source and guarantor of and the initiator and main driving force of any change.” During the first years of his Presidency, Putin effectively subordinated the legislature, governors, business interests, and national television networks to the Kremlin. Political competition was eliminated, and his authority was unchallenged and uncontested. Steadily growing oil prices were instrumental to Putin’s success; without them, despite what he described as the “paternalistic sentiments” of most Russians, he might not have presided over as loyal an elite and as broadly acquiescent a public.
During Putin’s first two terms, the Kremlin could afford to show a degree of tolerance to the opposition. A number of liberal media outlets were allowed to broadcast and publish—as long as they remained within their own milieu and could be kept politically irrelevant. Civic activism was permitted—as long as it did not stir undesired sentiments among the broader public. Political activism was unwelcome, but those who defied government warnings against it were not locked up for years in prison. Their punishments were occasional smear campaigns by the official media, unpleasant confrontations with the police, or, at most, a few days in jail. (Boris Nemtsov served fifteen days in 2010.)
In 2005, Putin admitted that he sought to achieve conditions in which “the sense of absolute freedom would disappear [in Russia], but the sense of fear would not emerge.”
This sense of moderation disappeared with Putin’s return to the Presidency in 2012, as the Russian economy began to slow down and anti-Putin protests erupted in Moscow and other urban centers. The remaining independent media came under heavy pressure from the government; a stream of new legislation further restricted rights and freedoms. For their brief “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Pussy Riot women were subject to an egregiously unfair trial and sentenced to two years in prison camps. About three dozen participants in a May, 2012, mass protest spent long months in pre-trial detention, and a few were sentenced to several years in prison camps. The opposition constituency, which had never amounted to an organization, let alone a party, was intimidated and demoralized, but the government was still relatively careful in its treatment of the movement’s leaders.
In the past year, the crisis in Ukraine, followed by the annexation of Crimea and the bloody armed conflict in Donbas, has precipitated the further transformation of Putin’s regime. He now governs the country as a fortress under siege, surrounded by enemies outside and threatened by a “fifth column” within. The overwhelming majority has rallied behind the commander-in-chief as their only protection against the evil forces of the West, supposedly seeking to do all kinds of damage to Russia. The national television networks have continuously incited intolerance and hatred toward anyone who does not pledge allegiance to the Kremlin. This vicious propaganda has unleashed xenophobic vigilantes who threaten and occasionally attack the Kremlin’s designated targets, from gays, critics of the Russian Orthodox Church, and contemporary artists to liberal politicians and activists.
The government may not be behind every extremist group, but their open threats and physical attacks have gone unpunished. Just a few days before Boris Nemtsov’s assassination, tens of thousands marched across Moscow in an “anti-Maidan” protest, a demonstration of loyalty to the government and raw aggression toward its opponents. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, we are waiting for your order to get the traitors,” one of the speakers said.
The anti-Maidan march, which was staged downtown, with the active assistance of the government, was intended as a counterweight to the anti-Kremlin rally Nemtsov had planned for Sunday. Moscow authorities had forced Nemtsov and his allies to hold their action on the outskirt of the city. It was only when the march became an act of mourning that opponents of the government were permitted to gather in Moscow’s center.
The rally appears to have been peaceful: the police were generally polite and restrained, and no vigilante attacks have been reported. The same government that has encouraged aggression against its political opponents now appears anxious to demonstrate that it bears no blame for Nemtsov’s assassination. Putin offered his personal condolences to Nemtsov’s mother. The official television news shows have been unusually respectful as they talk about Nemtsov’s life and politics; their coverage of the rally in Nemtsov’s memory was decent, even sympathetic. The liberals treated for months as a “fifth column” and “national traitors” have been allowed to mourn their loss undisturbed.
