by Luke Harding
In Sudoplatov’s view, Stalin and Beria were tragic and criminal figures – but also visionaries who played a constructive role in transforming the Soviet Union from a backward peasant state into an atomic superpower. ‘Victorious Russian rulers always combined the qualities of statesmen and criminals,’ the general observed.
Like Service, Sudoplatov believed the truth of any conspiracy would eventually emerge: ‘History shows that no top-secret decisions, no secret crimes or terrorist plans can be concealed forever. This is one of the great lessons of the breakdown of the Soviet Union and Communist party rule. Once the dam is broken, the flood of secret information is uncontrollable.’
13
Leviathan
Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, Moscow, 27 February 2015
‘He is a totally amoral human being. Totally amoral. He is a Leviathan’
BORIS NEMTSOV ON VLADIMIR PUTIN, FEBRUARY 2015
Boris Nemtsov was in good spirits. It was February 2015 and Nemtsov – once Russia’s deputy prime minister but for many years at odds with official power – was due to lead an anti-government rally. True, the authorities had banished the protesters to Marino, a gritty suburb of Soviet high-rises in Moscow’s distant south-east. And true, Russia’s opposition was, generally speaking, in poor shape.
A few years earlier it was just about possible to fantasise that street power might drive Putin from office. His announcement that he was ‘returning’ to the presidency – after four years as prime minister – triggered the biggest demonstrations since the end of the Soviet Union. But the euphoric rebel mood of 2011–12 was gone. People had been arrested and given lengthy jail terms; Putin had enacted the worst human-rights crackdown for decades; human-rights groups were being forced to register themselves as ‘foreign agents’.
The Putin era looked interminable. Brezhnev did eighteen years as general secretary of the Communist Party, his rule associated with stagnation. Putin – on fifteen – seemed poised to overtake him. In 2017 Putin would likely stand again as president. Another seven years would take him to 2024.
And then there was the war in Ukraine. In the wake of Crimea’s annexation, the president’s ratings had skyrocketed. Many former liberals had embraced the new patriotism, cut dead their western acquaintances, and adopted the slogan Krym Nash – Crimea is ours! One morning a Dutch reporter in Moscow – married to a Russian woman and with a small child – found the words ‘Nato out’ written on his postbox in the stairwell of their communal apartment building. Nationalism – sullen and defiant – was everywhere.
Against this backdrop, Nemtsov knew that the numbers for the rally would be relatively modest. Even if the turnout were huge, the protest wouldn’t feature on night-time TV. Nemtsov hadn’t appeared on federal channels for eight years. The Kremlin had slowly strangled Russia’s opposition, denying it finance, airtime and the ability to take part in elections. Those indomitable souls who kept going weren’t activists but this century’s dissidents, in the tradition of Sakharov and Bukovsky.
Since 2000, Russia had gone from a semi-democracy into something approaching a dictatorship. So why bother? Well, for one thing Nemtsov believed in democratic methods, even though democracy in Russia had practically disappeared. For another, there was Putin’s covert invasion of Ukraine. According to Putin, Russian forces played no role in the conflict. The lie was so blatant, so ridiculous and so easily disprovable, it gifted fresh impetus to Russia’s liberal intelligentsia, lifting them out of their low morale and disarray.
It was a Friday, 27 February. The march – dubbed ‘Spring’ – was due to take place on Sunday, 1 March. Nemtsov was sitting in the studio of Echo of Moscow, the independent radio station. Many opposition media outlets had closed since Putin resumed the presidency in 2012, for the third time. Somehow Echo of Moscow survived. Nemtsov was a frequent guest here. He was dressed casually, as always, in jeans and a turquoise jumper. Nemtsov was an alluring figure – fifty-five years old, good-looking, charismatic.
During his early political career, he had enjoyed high office. He came to prominence in the 1990s as the governor of Nizhny Novgorod. A reformist, a liberal and a supporter of Boris Yeltsin, he rose in 1997–8 to become deputy prime minister. He was talented and genuinely popular, with more than a sprinkling of stardust. Was he, as some thought, even a future president?
In fact, the new millennium belonged to Putin, an obscure and charmless KGB agent. Nemtsov started his own liberal party, the Union of Right Forces, which in the early stages of Putin’s presidency was electorally competitive. Slowly, however, he was squeezed out – from the Duma, from TV, from public space. He carried on anyway – co-founding another democratic party, Solidarity, in 2008, and standing to be mayor of Sochi, his home town, the following year.
I first met Nemtsov in 2009, on the campaign trail. We sat together in a rusty yellow minivan as it rattled up Sochi’s steep hills. Nemtsov was bitterly critical of the forthcoming Sochi Olympics, a project mired in corruption and ‘banditism’. He visited sanatoria and held meetings with local Sochi workers. He was a charming and persuasive candidate.
Terrified that their apparatchik candidate might lose, the local Sochi authorities banned Nemtsov from appearing on TV and in local newspapers. He faced dirty tricks and a pro-Kremlin activist chucked ammonia in his face. The Kremlin candidate won. Undeterred, in 2011 Nemtsov co-founded the Popular Freedom party – together with Mikhail Kasyanov, the former PM. Election officials refused to register it.
Even now, Nemtsov had not lost hope. During the interview with Echo of Moscow, Nemtsov came across as honest and cogent. He rubbished the Kremlin’s mismanagement of Russia’s economy and its ‘dead-end domestic politics’. The current model, of giant state corporations run by incompetent bureaucrats, had failed, he said. Much of Russia was in a state of crumbling decay. He wanted an improved deal for the provinces, an end to rigged elections, better healthcare.
But his main preoccupation was Putin’s Big Lie. Nemtsov had always seen his role as educational. He would explain to voters, argue with them, debate. At a time of blanket state propaganda this mission – you could call it enlightenment – was more important than ever.
The interview lasted an hour. Nemtsov told the station’s listeners that he had ‘documentary proof’ that undercover Russian soldiers were fighting and dying in eastern Ukraine. This was borne out by a steady flow of zinc coffins returning in the dead of night from the war zone in Donetsk and Luhansk – back to Russian cities like Pskov, Kostroma and Nizhny Novgorod, where Nemtsov was once governor. Putin wasn’t just a liar – he was a specialist in lying, Nemtsov said. A ‘pathological liar’, in fact.
The interview went well. Nemtsov was optimistic that a well-attended march for peace might have a sobering effect on the Kremlin, and challenge the prevalent mood of ugly nationalism. That evening he had a late dinner with his girlfriend, Anna Duritskaya. She was Ukrainian and he’d collected her from the airport that morning. They ate at a café in GUM, the State Department Store, famous in Soviet times and now a capitalist shopping mall with worn marble stairs and ornate balconies off Red Square. Fairy lights outlined the nineteenth-century building. The café, Bosco, looked out onto Lenin’s tomb.
Normally, Nemtsov would drive home in his Land Rover. He decided instead to walk. They took a scenic route south past the red walls of the Kremlin, the iconic Spassky tower, and the surrealistic domes of St Basil’s cathedral.
This was Russia’s most protected area. Wherever you looked there were CCTV cameras; unauthorised demonstrators who popped up here in the heart of political power were detained in a matter of seconds. The Kremlin even had its own powerful internal agency, the Federal Protection Service or FSO, with thousands of agents. It took care of security around state buildings.
Around 11.30 p.m., Nemtsov and Duritskaya started walking across Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge. Beneath them was the Moskva river, cold, glittering, black.
The bridge offered a panoramic view of the city’s
illuminated skyline. Tourists come here to photograph St Basil’s, dazzlingly floodlit at night and flanked by the white towers and golden domes of the Kremlin’s churches and cathedrals. There were generous views along the river. The Gothic Kotelnicheskaya apartment building hulked imperiously over the water to the east, one of the capital’s seven Stalin-era skyscrapers; in the opposite direction you could see the ivory edifice of Christ the Saviour cathedral – demolished by Stalin, rebuilt by Yeltsin – and the beginnings of Gorky Park.
Normally there was traffic. At this moment the bridge was oddly deserted. Only two vehicles were visible: a slow-moving municipal truck hugging the pavement and a white car. According to Duritskaya, someone emerged from immediately behind them. She didn’t see his face. The assassin shot Nemtsov six times in the back. Four bullets hit him, one in the heart; he died instantly. The killer jumped into the car. It reversed back towards Nemtsov’s body – seemingly to check if he was dead – and then shot off into the night.
The hitmen were evidently professionals. Their weapon was a Makarov pistol, a standard Russian and Soviet police-issue semi-automatic. Six 9-mm cartridge cases were recovered.
Nemtsov was the victim not of a subtle poison but of old-school mafia methods. The location too told its own chilling and melodramatic story: an opponent of Putin lying dead in the street, under the implacable walls of Russian power, and next to St Basil’s, the country’s chocolate box landmark. The visual scene was perfect for TV. The first militia officers turned up. There was nothing to be done. They heaved Nemtsov’s body into a black plastic bag.
It seemed extraordinary that a former vice premier could be murdered here, outside the Russian equivalent of the White House or the Houses of Parliament, with the shooter apparently able to simply drive off.
*
The murder of Boris Nemtsov was Russia’s most high-profile political assassination for seventeen years. (In 1998 the liberal politician Galina Starovoytova – a notable opponent of the security services – was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment building in St Petersburg.) Nemtsov’s body had scarcely been loaded into an ambulance before the Kremlin responded. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, said that the president believed the murder was a ‘provocation’.
‘With all due respect to the memory of Boris Nemtsov, in political terms he did not pose any threat to the current Russian leadership or Vladimir Putin. If we compare popularity levels, Putin’s and the government’s ratings and so on, in general Boris Nemtsov was just a little bit more than an average citizen,’ Peskov said. The rhetoric – insignificant, irrelevant, etc. – was reminiscent of Putin’s response to the murders of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya.
The word ‘provocation’ carries its own special meaning in Russian. What Putin meant is that whoever murdered Nemtsov did so to discredit the state. Since the state was the primary victim here, the state couldn’t be held responsible, this logic runs.
The office of Russia’s prosecutor general offered an array of motives to explain Nemtsov’s murder. None seemed convincing. It suggested his killing might be the work of Islamist extremists, radical Ukrainian factions, or the opposition itself, which could have used Nemtsov as a ‘sacrificial victim’. Putin’s ally Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen president, accused ‘western spy agencies’. They were trying to ‘destabilise Russia’, he said. The muckraking website LifeNews.ru, which has links with the FSB, pointed to Nemtsov’s colourful love life and his relationship with Duritskaya, a 23-year-old model and Ukrainian citizen.
The investigative committee seemed to be moving in a predictable direction: towards an old-fashioned cover-up. Officials released one carefully curated CCTV film taken from far away. The municipal truck obscures the moment when Nemtsov is killed. The video offers few clues. There are no close-ups of the suspects. Three days after Nemtsov’s death, officials told Kommersant newspaper that the Kremlin’s CCTV cameras immediately next to the spot where he was shot ‘weren’t working’.
Like all high-profile critics, Nemtsov was under close FSB surveillance. The spy agency would have monitored Nemtsov carefully: it expends enormous efforts on keeping track of its targets. On this occasion, however, an organisation known for its resources and unlimited manpower seems to have lost him. Meanwhile, his killers appear to have had real-time intelligence concerning his movements.
The murder made headlines around the world. The Russian authorities avoided the one explanation that made sense: that Nemtsov was shot for his opposition activities. Specifically, for his public criticism of the war in Ukraine, in which – at the time of his death – at least 6,000 people had been killed and 2 million displaced.
In his last Echo of Moscow interview, Nemtsov had called Putin’s intervention in Ukraine ‘insane’, and ‘murderous’ for Russia and its citizens. He described the takeover of Crimea as ‘illegal’, though he acknowledged it had the consent of many Crimeans.
At the time of his death, Nemtsov had been gathering material for a new report on Ukraine. Its contents were to have been explosive. Over the years he had written eight pamphlets on a variety of themes. One of them, Putin: A Reckoning, accused the president and his circle of massive personal corruption. It said that they had accumulated enormous personal wealth by pillaging oil revenues. Nemtsov shared Litvinenko’s thesis that Russia had grown into a mafia state. He alleged Putin had links with the Tambov crime group.
Another Nemtsov booklet targeted Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor, and his billionaire wife Elena Baturina. (A year after it came out in 2009, Medvedev gave Luzhkov the boot.) There were further dossiers on the 2014 Sochi Olympics, where billions of dollars of public money had gone missing, and Gazprom.
According to his aide, Olga Shorina, Nemtsov came up with the idea of a Ukraine dossier in early 2015. It was to be called Putin and the War. It would reveal how Russian commanders had secretly smuggled servicemen into Ukraine to fight in the Donbas. His friend, the opposition leader Ilya Yashin, said that one morning Nemtsov turned up at his party HQ and announced triumphantly: ‘I’ve thought what to do. We need to write a report, publish it with a massive circulation, and distribute it on the streets. We explain how Putin unleashed this war. Only that way can we beat the propaganda.’
Nemtsov believed that opposing the war was a patriotic act, Yashin said – and that by handing out the dossier outside metro stations he could punch through the wall of state disinformation. Putin’s intervention in Ukraine was ‘base and cynical’. It had led directly to sanctions, international isolation and the needless deaths of Russian citizens. The idea germinated in February, when relatives of servicemen killed in eastern Ukraine approached Nemtsov. The Russian ministry of defence was refusing to pay the families compensation – since the soldiers had, like so many ghosts, never officially been there.
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 eve
ning 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.
