A Very Expensive Poison (32 page)

Hours before his murder, Nemtsov wrote a note to Shorina. Scribbled in blue Biro, on a sheet of white A4, it
said: ’Some paratroopers from Ivanovo have got in touch with me. 17 killed. They didn’t give them their money, but for now they are frightened to talk.’ Ivanovo was 185 miles (300 km) north-east of Moscow and home to the Russian army’s 98th paratroop division. There were no other details.

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.

Nemtsov had been one of the few politicians brave enough to criticise Kadyrov. He said openly what was well understood inside the Russian government: that Chechnya had become an out-of-control entity, corrupt, criminalised and increasingly dangerous. Formally it is part of the Russian Federation. In reality, it is an autonomous rogue fiefdom run by one psychotic strongman, to whom Moscow pays tribute in the form of large budget payments.

In January, Nemtsov had attacked Kadyrov on Facebook. Kadyrov had said that Khodorkovsky was an enemy of Putin’s, an assertion that had chilling implications. Nemtsov re-posted a list of Kadyrov’s alleged victims. It included Chechen émigrés gunned down in Dubai and Vienna. One was Umar Israilov, a 27-year-old former insurgent who filed a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights alleging that Kadyrov had personally tortured him in a secret prison. In 2006, emissaries from Kadyrov ambushed Israilov outside a supermarket in Vienna and shot him in the head.

Now Kadyrov was claiming that Nemtsov’s murder was unrelated to internal Russian affairs. Rather, he was killed
because he had offended Islam, Kadyrov proposed, with Dadayev acting from ‘religious feelings’. The Nemtsov investigation looked like a carbon copy of the bungled case into the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, who had been shot dead just before Litvinenko was poisoned in October 2006. It was widely believed that Kadyrov had ordered the hit on the journalist. Several men from the North Caucasus were tried for her murder; I attended their first Moscow trial. But the mastermind and motive remained obscure.

The Kremlin’s aim was to avoid an evidence-led inquiry into Nemtsov’s assassination, it seemed, and to confuse the public mind. The numerous ‘versions’ of Nemtsov’s murder – from love tiff to
Charlie
Hebdo
-inspired Islamists to ‘provocation’ – were part of a sophisticated media strategy with its roots in KGB doctrine. As with Litvinenko, or MH17, there were multiple explanations. How was one supposed to know which one was actually true?

In fact, the aim is to blur what is true with what is not, to the point that the truth disappears altogether. By noisily asserting something that is false, you create a fake counter-reality. In time this constructed sovereign version of events becomes real – at least in the minds of those who are watching.

RT, the Kremlin’s ambitious English-language propaganda channel, uses these same methods for western audiences. Its boss, Margarita Simonyan, argues that there is no such thing as truth, merely narrative. Russia’s narrative is just as valid as the ‘western narrative’, she
argues. In this cynical relativistic world of swirling rival versions, nothing is really true.

In a notable editorial after Nemtsov’s murder, the
Guardian
described this approach as ‘weaponised relativism’:

‘Like so much electronic chaff dropped out of the back of a Tupolev bomber to confuse an incoming missile, the idea that there are multiple interpretations of the truth has become the founding philosophy of state disinformation in Putin’s Russia, designed to confuse those who would seek out the truth with multiple expressions of distracting PR chaff. The tactic is to create as many competing narratives as possible. And, amid all the resultant hermeneutic chaos, to quietly slip away undetected.’

The tactic, the editorial noted, wasn’t new. It came ‘straight out of Mr Putin’s KGB playbook from the 1970s’.

In May 2015, Nemtsov’s friends published the report he was unable to finish. After his death police seized his computer and hard drives. His friends – Olga Shorina, Ilya Yashin, Sergei Alexashenko, Oleg Kashin – made use of Nemtsov’s jottings and notes. ‘Our task: to tell the truth about Kremlin interference in Ukraine’s politics, which has led to war between our peoples. Led to a war that must be quickly stopped,’ they write in the introduction.

As with Nemtsov’s previous reports, the sixty-five-page dossier is based on open sources. It includes interviews with Russian soldiers who had served in Crimea and the Donbas, photos, YouTube videos and social media posts.
Also featured are Nemtsov’s letters to Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB chief, and to Russia’s prosecutor general. These reference Russian media articles which said that Russian troops had crossed into Ukraine, an illegal act. Alexashenko, a former deputy governor of Moscow’s central bank, now based in the US, called the dossier a Wikipedia-style guide to the Crimean–Ukraine war.

According to Nemtsov, the Kremlin began secretly planning its Crimea operation in detail as far back as 2012. The goal was to improve the president’s approval rating, which had sunk to 45 per cent (and by spring 2015 had shot up to 74 per cent). The FSB began actively recruiting generals and officers inside the Ukrainian army, funding pro-Russian groups and media, and offering credit to Crimean business. The revolution in Kiev offered the perfect moment for Putin to push the button on this military plan to seize the Black Sea peninsula.

As well as an invasion by ‘little green men’, state propaganda reached ‘monstrous’ levels, the report says. The Kremlin’s earlier efforts at brainwashing seemed, by comparison, ‘vegetarian’. Federal channels took anti-Americanism to new and extravagant levels. Putin’s favourite TV host, Dmitry Kiselyov, told his viewers that Russia was the only country capable of ‘turning the US into radioactive dust’; the idea of a nuclear first strike, by Moscow against the west, was discussed. The result: an ‘atmosphere of continuous hate’.

In summer 2014, Putin categorically denied claims that serving Russian soldiers and military instructors were in Ukraine. This was, he said, an ‘American lie’.
The report, however, says that Russian troops took part in the fighting and played a decisive role in the conflict. In August 2014, the Ukrainian army was advancing on all fronts. It had driven the rebels from Slavyansk back to Donetsk and had cut off the DNR and LNR from each other. Ukrainian troops were on the brink of seizing back the border with Russia – a move that would sever the rebels’ supply lines.

The Kremlin responded with reinforcements, including heavy weaponry and some regular troops. Moscow sent across the border 120 armoured vehicles – including thirty tanks – and around 1,200 regular servicemen. The Russian counter-attack wiped out Ukrainian troops in and around the town of Ilovaisk. A similar offensive in February 2015 involving Russian tank units made possible the capture by rebels of the Ukrainian government-held city of Debaltseve, straightening a bulge on the map.