'Boris Nemtsov's murder marks a new era for Vladimir Putin and Russia'

The shocking murder of opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, literally in sight of the Kremlin, clearly marks the beginning of a new era in Russian politics and Russia-watching alike. And it is unlikely to be pretty.

Who was responsible for his death? At this stage it’s absolutely unclear. The government? It’s hard to believe Putin would actually order Nemtsov killed, not because Putin is a pacifist but because there’s no real advantage to him.

Already people are throwing around a parallel with the murder Sergei Kirov in 1934, which at one stroke did away with Stalin’s greatest rival and gave him a pretext for purging the elite. But Putin doesn’t needs any excuses for whatever repressions he may want to carry out, and Nemtsov was certainly no threat. (I doubt he had the kind of “smoking gun” information on Ukraine some have suggested.)

Besides, for a leader whose legitimacy is in part based on the way he ended the bespredel, the overt and violent lawlessness of the 1990s, this happening so close to the seat of power is an embarrassment. If anything, it I suspect is likely to galvanise the opposition.

Perhaps it was carried out by over-zealous security officers doing what they thought would please the boss? Maybe, but there’s no reason to believe that. Or was it nationalists or crazies inspired by the new mood of xenophobia and witch-hunting being stoked by the Kremlin? This is much more plausible. But suggestions that opposition figures wanting a martyr or, to go to the real extremes of the crazy spectrum, US agents stirring trouble are scarcely credible.

But no one knows. We know pretty much nothing but the facts, and so we are all tempted to interpret them based on our assumptions about Russia and Putin and the world. That’s human, and inevitable, and dangerous.

And it also points to the way this murder is something of a watershed, marking three things that have been processes rather than sudden events, but as is often the way they have become demonstrated at particular moments.

1. The death of neutrality

It is increasingly difficult not to be on one side or the other. We’ve already seen this over Ukraine (I’ve been castigated as a Kremlin stooge for not using the word “terrorist” to describe the rebels, and a western patsy for claiming that Russian troops are present, all for the same article), but it’s also happening with Russia.

Not to regard Putin as a murderous mafioso-fascist-tyrant-kleptocrat who kills for the hell of it is to be an apologist. To refuse to believe the American state department is actively trying to install opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the Kremlin makes you a tool of western “colour revolution”.

Analysis increasingly takes second place to assertion of the world as the observer “knows” it to be.

2. The death of ‘stuff happens’

Nothing, it seems, is not part of a plan, a strategy, a ploy or a gambit. The downing of flight MH17 was a Ukrainian act of misinformation to demonise the rebels (arrant nonsense). Nemtsov must have been killed by the state because he was under 24/7 surveillance (very doubtful: that kind of surveillance would require a massive operation, out of proportion with his actual importance).

The truth of the matter is that politicians and the government are much less in control of events than they and we might think.

My working hypothesis is that Nemtsov was killed by some murderous mavericks – not government agents nor opposition fanatics. But the reason they felt obliged to go and gun down a frankly past-his-peak anti-government figure is highly likely to be precisely because of the increasingly toxic political climate that clearly is a product of Kremlin agency, in which people like Nemtsov are portrayed as Russophobic minions of the west, enemies of Russia’s people, culture, values and interests.

So to loop things round, Putin is guilty, I suspect – with all the caveats about the lack of hard evidence yet – the same way that tobacco companies are considered guilty of cancer deaths after they may have known about the risks. The same way any hate-speaker may be when some unhinged acolytes take their ideas and decide to turn them into bloody action. This implicitly points to a third casualty:

3. The death of optimism

How does a regime soothe such feverish sentiments? Indeed, can it do so? I do not believe Putin is intent on a third world war or wants to create a neo-Stalinist terror-state or do any of the other things the more extreme critics aver.

But I suspect that in the name of holding onto power (his greatest ambition) and asserting the true sovereignty of Russia (his second greatest), regardless of the opposition of liberals at home, Ukraine, the west, or whoever, Putin has taken a step too far along a dark and dangerous path for him ever to be able to step back or even, worst yet, stop walking forward.

@MarkGaleotti is a professor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University and former advisor to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The article first appeared on his site In Moscow’s Shadows