Death on the Kremlin’s Doorstep

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Foreign Policy Mag:

It was always hard to ignore Boris Nemtsov. You couldn’t help but notice when he came into a room. The physicist-turned-politician was smart, pugnacious, brash.

 

And so it was when I last saw him, in November 2010. Almost inevitably our conversation turned to the topic of the violence that permeates Russian political culture. We talked briefly about the fate of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer and anti-corruption activist who met an ignominious death in prison in 2009. We discussed Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading journalist who was shot to death in 2006 in the entryway of her home. Nemtsov noted that dozens of other reporters had died on the job in the years preceding — and lamented that the killers rarely faced any accounting for their crimes. “The murderers understand that killing journalists is not a problem,” he told me.“So who protects you?” I asked him. It seemed like a reasonable question. After all, he was one of the most outspoken opposition figures in an era when Russia’s democratic institutions, never especially strong at the best of times, had withered dramatically. There was already plenty of bad blood between Nemtsov and then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who in 2009 claimed that Nemtsov and other politicians of his generation had stolen “billions” during their heyday in the 1990s. (Putin also made a point of mentioning that some of their confederates were in prison.) Threats were a regular part of Nemtsov’s life.My question made him shrug. “God, I don’t know,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t have bodyguards.”Just a few hours ago, early in the morning of Feb. 28, Moscow time, unknown assailants gunned Nemtsov down on a sidewalk in front of the Kremlin. The killing, as veteran Russia-watcher Steve Levine notes here, had all the hallmarks of a contract hit. Speculation about the identity of his killers is already rife — and ultimately academic, since they will never be caught. In Russia they almost never are.

________

 

Putin's latest target.