Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov

Moscow March marchers. Photo by Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via The Guardian.

As soon as the news of the assassination of Boris Nemtsov started coming out, so did the propagandists, with a bit of classic misdirection on the subject of whether Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his circle could have had anything to do with the killing:

.@Freedoooom @bazmaniandevil @russianmachine In this case the killer didn't think he was a nobody. Somebody was very afraid of him--who?
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2015

Somebody in my online circle even came up with a remarkable analogy: What if people had gone around accusing FDR in the assassination of Huey Long, September 8 1935 and just a month after the Kingfish had announced his candidacy for president?

Well, what indeed, aside from the fact that the Long killing had had plenty of eyewitnesses, not just of the killing itself but of the antagonism between the governor and the murderer as it had blown up that afternoon, while the Nemtsov killing has no identified suspects? Most importantly, I think, that Nemtsov wasn't much of a candidate for anything and had hardly been one for some years, not since he lost the mayoral contest in Sochi in 2009, not at the national level since he dropped out of the presidential race in favor of Mikhail Kasyanov in 2007, just a modest representative in the regional parliament of the Yaroslavl Oblast. There's no reason to think his death had anything to do with electoral politics, none at all.

Also, how many political assassinations were there in the US in the Roosevelt era? (Wikipedia lists three, all Democrats, including Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, killed by someone who probably meant to kill FDR himself, and Long Beach, NY mayor Louis F. Edwards, murdered by a former chief of the local police benevolent association, who blamed Edwards for losing him the position.)

Whereas in the Putin era of Russian history, as BBC reminds us, there has been a startling number of generally unsolved violent deaths, clustered mostly around the president's first period in office, from 1999 to 2008, before he decided to take a little break and be prime minister instead for a few years.

The list begins with Sergey Yushenkov, shot down in the street with a silenced weapon in April 2003, and Yury Shchekochikhin, who died of mysterious symptoms that July; mysterious, because the medical facts are a state secret (but they were consistent with a diagnosis of poisoning by some radioactive material such as thallium, like the kind with which the KGB failed to kill Nikolay Khokhlov in 1957, or the unknown substance that killed Putin's bodyguard Roman Tsepov in 2004). Both men were members of the commission founded by the Glasnost' hero Sergey Kovalëv (founder of the Moscow Amnesty International, early opponent of the Chechen war) to investigate the September 1999 Moscow apartment house bombings.

Those bombings took place at a critical moment for post-Soviet Russia, as the health of the frail alcoholic President Yeltsin began to fail and accusations of embezzlement swirled around him and his family and his crony Boris Berezovsky, and as his heir apparent, the former FSB head V.V. Putin, sought to make himself known to the voters. Some kind of awful act from inside the state apparatus had been widely foreseen, as Amy Knight wrote in NYRB:

In June 1999, two Western journalists, Jan Blomgren of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and Giulietto Chiesa, the respected, longtime Moscow correspondent for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, reported that there was going to be an act of “state terrorism” in Russia. The goal would be to instill fear and panic in the population. Chiesa wrote:

With a high degree of certitude, one can say that the explosions of bombs killing innocent people are always planned by people with political minds who are interested in destabilizing the situation in a country…. It could be foreigners… but it could also be “our own people” trying to frighten the country.

These reports were followed in July by an article by the Russian journalist Aleksandr Zhilin in the national paper Moskovskaya pravda warning that there would be terrorist attacks in Moscow. Citing a leaked Kremlin document, Zhilin wrote that the purpose would be to derail Yeltsin’s political opponents, in particular [Moscow mayor] Yury Luzhkov...

And sure enough, in August the Second Chechnya War began (with Putin, now Prime Minister, playing a prominent role), in September apartment blocks in three cities—Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk—were blown up, killing 293 people, the attacks being imputed to Chechen terrorists, and in December Luzhkov's party lost big to the pro-war, law and order Putin faction in the Duma elections, and folded itself into a pro-Putin Unity Party. At the end of the month Yeltsin abruptly resigned, leaving Putin as acting president and hence incumbent for the upcoming elections, for which the dates were advanced from the expected June to March, and Putin won in something like a landslide (53% on the first round), while Yeltsin vanished into an almost silent but comfortable retirement, surviving until 2007. Exactly the results, in fact, that might have been aimed at by an act of state terror like that predicted by Chiesa.

Meanwhile, the Chechen fighter Ibn al-Khattab, charged with being the mastermind of the bombings, was executed extrajudicially, but openly, in the oddest way, with a sarin-like poison inside a letter he thought was from his mother, delivered by an FSB courier. And the Kovalëv Commission disbanded, after the sudden deaths of the two key members Yushenkov and Shchekochikhin and the arrest of a third, their legal counsel, Mikhail Trepashkin (on charges of "illegal arms possession, revealing state secrets, and abuse of office"—he got four years in prison). Yet another member, the journalist Otto Latsis, was assaulted in the street in November 2003 and killed in a hit-and-run car accident in 2005. An FSB officer called Vladimir Romanovich who had rented the basements of both of the bombed Moscow apartment buildings (as well as two others, we are told, where police were alerted and were able to prevent bombs from going off) is also said to have been killed by a car, in Cyprus, some months after the bombing (although this part of the story, which may have originated in a possibly dubious report of an interview with Trepashkin from just before he was jailed, does not seem too clearly substantiated).

There was just the one minor flaw that Berezovsky had a disagreement with Putin and fled to London, where he began suggesting darkly that the apartment bombings might have been carried out by the FSB, in a conspiracy in which he himself would have participated.

In 2009, Russian journalist and radio host Yulia Latynina, commenting on Scott Anderson's article "Vladimir Putin's Dark Rise to Power" noted that deaths of Sergey Yushenkov and Yury Schekochihin "in any case, had no relation to bombings in Moscow". Latynina opined, that the version that FSB did the bombings was not only absurd, but purposefully invented by Berezovsky after he was deprived of the power. Her major argument was, that since Berezovsky was one of the key figures to push Putin into the power, he knew for certain the theory was wrong.

That's some argument. Berezovsky would definitely have known if he was lying or not, therefore he must have been lying?

The American journalist Paul Klebnikov was among the first to report the hypothesis that the Russian government might itself be directly responsible for the apartment bombings, in Forbes in November 1999:

Alexander Lebed, the blunt former paratroop general who was responsible for ending the first Chechen war in 1996, says that it is the kleptocrats’ desperation to hang on to power that lies behind the recent outburst of terrorism. A month ago the French daily Le Figaro asked Lebed if the Russian government had organized the terrorist attacks against its own citizens. “I am almost convinced of it,” he responded. “The subtle aim is to create massive terror, total destabilization, so at a certain point you can say [to the Russian people]: ‘You can’t go to the voting booths, you’ll be blown up.’”...  (Lebed’s aides now say he was misinterpreted.) 

It should be noted that Lebed was himself a candidate for president at the time of the interview, staying in the race longer than Luzhkov, alleging that the aim of the attacks was specifically to stop people from voting for him. I can't find the Figaro article itself (I looked it up because Klebnikov's book seems to place the interview bizarrely in 1997), but some quotation from a May 2004 article by Paul Labarique at voltairenet, "Business et terrorisme à Moscou", gives enough of its flavor to show that a "misinterpretation" was very unlikely:

le général Lebed, candidat déclaré à l’élection présidentielle de 2000, se dit« presque convaincu » que le gouvernement russe a organisé les attaques terroristes contre ses propres citoyens. Pour lui, « le but recherché est de créer une terreur massive, une déstabilisation qui permette à un moment de dire : Tu ne dois pas aller dans les bureaux de vote, sinon tu risques de sauter avec les urnes » [4]. Ces déclarations suscitent un tollé à Moscou, obligeant le cabinet du général à publier un démenti, arguant d’une« erreur de traduction ».

General Lebed, a declared candidate in the 2000 presidential election, says he is "almost convinced" that the Russian government organized the terrorist attacks against its own citizens. For him, "the goal sought [not "subtle goal"] is to create massive terror, a destabilization that would allow somebody to say at some point: You shouldn't go into the voting booth, or you could risk getting blown up along with the ballot boxes." These declarations set off a ruckus in Moscow, forcing the general's office to issue a denial alleging a "translation error". 

Klebnikov was of course gunned down from a moving car, four shots just like Nemtsov, in July 2004, for reasons that have never been explained; it's likely that he had many enemies in the Federation oligarchy for his exposure of corruption among the higher ranks, but here he is in the apartment bombing story. Berezovsky, the villain of the piece where he brought up the Lebed interview, was blamed by many.

Anna Politkovskaya, too, had written in depth about the imprisonment of Trepashkin, among many other dangerous investigations in and around the Chechen war, and worked directly with Yury Shchekochikhin on the investigation of the apartment bombings, and these played a role in the death threats she faced:

According to Russian state security officer Alexander Litvinenko, Politkovskaya asked him if her life was in imminent danger before the assassination. He confirmed the danger and recommended her to escape from Russia immediately. He also asserted that former presidential candidate Irina Hakamada warned Politkovskaya about threats to her life coming from Putin. Hakamada later denied her involvement in passing any specific threats, and said that she warned Politkovskaya only in general terms more than a year before her death.^[11] It remains unclear whether the warning by Litvinenko was related to an earlier statement made by Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who claimed that former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Boris Nemtsov received word from Hakamada that Putin threatened her and like-minded colleagues in person. According to Berezovsky, Putin uttered that Hakamada and her colleagues "will take in the head immediately, literally, not figuratively" if they "open the mouth" about the Russian apartment bombings.

There's Nemtsov! Politkovskaya, though, was shot dead (four bullets) in the elevator of her apartment block in October 2006; and the former FSB agent and Putin opponent Aleksandr Litvinenko, the author of another of the earliest arguments blaming the government in his 2002 "Blowing Up Russia", who had tried to save Politkovskaya by telling her to get out of Russia, died that November out of Russia himself, in London, of polonium poisoning, apparently administered by two colleagues from the old Soviet KGB. And then the whole cycle seemed to have come to an end (except for Berezovsky's apparent suicide in March 2013).

What I can't help wondering now is whether this new murder signals the start of a new cycle, about something different. An extraordinary number of killings and other approaches between 2000 and 2006 seem to have been devoted to silencing talk about the 1999 apartment bombings, by somebody, by the FSB, by Poutinisme, and then it more or less ended. What's going on now?

Last May, Boris Nemtsov came out to complain, on the basis of budget numbers, that the Putin government seemed to be preparing for war:

In a report on Ekho Moskvy on Saturday, Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader, publishes a table showing Russian budgetary figures by sector and year since 2011. Over that period, military spending has risen 80 percent, and spending on the special services [intelligence] and police has gone up 50 percent.

Putin’s priorities are obvious, he says. They are headed by “preparation for war and repressions inside the country.” They do not include education, health care or infrastructure development.

The greatest budgetary loser, Nemtsov points out, is education, spending for which if one takes inflation into account has fallen by 30 percent. That has led to the imposition of tuition at the university level and “the degradation” of higher education. The Russian opposition figure says that he is “certain that this is the conscious policy of the highest authority.”

Putin “doesn’t need the intelligent and the educated,” he says. Such people “give unnecessary questions, aren’t loyal and are more difficult to zombify.”

Spending on health care, again with inflation taken into account has fallen by “almost a quarter.” Given that high levels of mortality exceed fertility and “under conditions of African-level life expectancy,” such a pattern of spending on health “cannot be characterized as anything but that of an occupation regime.”

That was obviously after the Maidan uprising had driven out the Ukrainian president Yanukovych (February 22), and after Russian troops had occupied Crimea (March 6), and Yanukovych, in Russia, agreed that he had been "wrong" to ask Russian troops into Crimea (April 2, anybody remember that one?), and pro-Russian gunmen began to take over in Slovyansk (April 12) and Donyetsk (April 16) and Luhansk (April 21) but long before it became undeniable that Russian troops were there, and certainly long before August, when those empty, white-painted army trucks began piling over the Russian border into Ukraine, to the bafflement of all observers (including me), until some of us began to understand that the trucks weren't meant to bring things in to Ukraine but to bring things out: the bodies of Russian soldiers, killed for Putin's very interesting geopolitical requirements, being brought back to their mothers.

Here's, coldly, what I think: Vladimir Vladimirovich has certainly made a few catastrophic mistakes in his career, but up until recently only one so bad that he frightened himself half to death, like Boris Godunov (in the play and the opera, not the real one) killing the little Tsarevich, when he, or he and Berezovsky, staged those fake terrorist bombings in September 1999, to smooth his way to the throne of poor old addled Boris Nikolaevich, creating a terrified and yet patriotic mood in the country, and murdering almost 300 Russians. It's the mass murders of Russians that were too much, and he worked, through the terrorizing of the journalists and opposition politicians and intellectuals, to make it not have happened.

Now at last he's made a similar mistake with Ukraine, and he's in trouble, everything's going wrong, and the killing seems to be recommencing. It wasn't because Nemtsov was a politician, but because he was a writer like Klebnikov and Politkovskaya and Lebed, with a book in the works:

He was, as always, pugilistic and excited, saying he wanted to publish the research in a pamphlet to be called “Putin and the War,” about President Vladimir V. Putin and Russian involvement in the Ukraine conflict, recalled Yevgenia Albats, the editor of New Times magazine. Both knew the stakes.

And a demonstration too, not an electoral assault but a mass meeting of the kind that had frightened Putin and his friends so much after the fraudulent legislative elections of 2011, or the kind, more pertinently, that had overthrown the Yanukovych regime in Kiyiv. Putin and his friends are more frightened than ever, and more dangerous. Everybody (especially you Ukrainian idiots), please be careful.

Nemtsov wasn't the sort of politician I'd applaud in Russia back in the 90s; too close to Yeltsin and the catastrophe of privatization that created the social inequities that in turn created Putinism, too much of a "free-market" conservative. But it wasn't about politics.

“This is a reprisal,” [former prime minister Mikhail] Kasyanov told Meduza. “I can find no other words to rationalize this murder that’s taken place only a few steps from the Kremlin.” Standing next to him was Ilya Yashin, one of the leaders of Nemtsov’s political party, Republican Party of Russia–People's Freedom Party (RPR-Parnas). Yashin said relatively little, mostly holding his hands up to his face. “This has nothing to do with his work in Yaroslavl,” Yashin said, when asked about Nemtsov’s role as a member of the Yaroslavl regional parliament. “This isn’t about what he was doing there. Nemtsov could only have been killed for the investigatory work he did on Ukraine and the Russian military’s role in destabilizing that country.” (Meduza)

Image via NBC News.