Who Killed Nemtsov
By Israel Shamir
The
alleged killers of Boris Nemtsov are apprehended, and they are (a
dramatic pause) some Muslims from Chechnya who allegedly desired to
punish the politician for his Je suis
Charlie position. There is no official
report available yet, but this implausible version is being promoted in
Moscow. What’s that, a poor man’s 9/11? Indeed the Russian politician’s
assassination seems to be produced by the same great studio that gave us
9/11, Boston marathon, Charlie killings. These crimes in New York,
Boston, Paris and now Moscow have two common features: Muslims are
accused of committing them, and there is a very strong and widely spread
lack of belief in this accusation and in the details of the crime as
published.
These doubtful crimes have an additional common quality: their striking
visual aspect. Nemtsov’s death wasn’t on the Twin Towers scale, but the
flamboyant playboy and an opposition politician was dispatched in style.
Fluffy snow falling upon the bridges over Moscow River with brightly-lit
polychrome domes of St Basil’s Cathedral and the red crenelated walls of
Kremlin provided a perfect background. Add six bullets, a white American
car the assassins used to flee the scene, and a Ukrainian beauty model
Anna, 23, stooping over the prostrated body of her dead lover, and
you’ll get a haunting picture Raymond Chandler could script and Howard
Hawks direct. Or perhaps James Cameron of the Titanic would be a better
choice.
A
tinge of envy may be felt in my description. Nemtsov had a charming
life, and a beautiful timely death, too. A young physics graduate, he
was elevated by the revolution of 1991, made a governor of a major city,
a deputy prime minister, a claimant to presidency, a dollar millionaire.
Since 2000, his life in politics went downhill by virtue of his previous
success. Nemtsov was generally considered an enabler of the grand
larceny of Russia by the oligarchs, a promoter of “robber
privatisation”. This was
confirmed by Mr Ponomaryev MP, his friend and a prominent
oppositionist. Some Yeltsin’s cadres retained important positions in
Putin’s Russia to this very day, but Nemtsov was not among them.
His
attempts to get elected a mayor or a parliament member all failed. He
had little to do, but to enjoy life, womanising, drinking, dining and
nursing his resentment of Putin he was on first-name-terms with. Still,
he wasn’t bitter but cheerful. At 55, he was a has-been, nothing to
expect, but going to demos and repeating the same dreary slogan of
Down with Putin as
he did on the US-owned and financed channels. He was killed Friday
night, and on Sunday he was supposed to go to Maryino, a dreary suburb
of Moscow, to demonstrate against inflation. The assassination saved him
from this tedious task: he died still youngish, still slim and lithe,
still a curly gypsy boy, in the arms of a delectable young thing.
His
death also saved the demo, a first pro-Western demo in Moscow for
months, from the expected debacle. Not many people were supposed to
come, the white-band movement was practically gone. With his death, the
Sunday demo was cancelled and instead, a mourning march took place that
attracted some fifty thousand citizens, a respectable number. However,
the march was peaceful, and no violent confrontations issued.
The
Western mainstream media went to full attack mode, like they did at the
Malaysian airliner crash. They accused Putin for sending his henchmen to
kill, for he was afraid of Nemtsov’s political clout. This story could
work for external use only: Russians would never believe that Putin sent
the killers. It is not his style. And Nemtsov was not a threat to
anybody. Internally, pro-Western Russian media said that Putin is
responsible for Nemtsov’s death because he ignited hatred to “the fifth
column”.
Actually, there is much of mutual hatred between ordinary Russians and
pro-Western opposition. The oppositionists call their fellow citizens
“vermin” and “rednecks” (“vata”), claiming in rather racist way
that they
belong to different species. Their chances to gain power by
elections are nil. They are useful for Putin, as they solidify his
popular support by their hatred. He is aware of it, and he is not likely
to kill these useful props.
Many Russians believe (on the qui bono basis) the killing being
ordered by Nemtsov’s competitors within the pro-Western opposition, such
as Mr Khodorkovsky, a ruthless oligarch with many dead bodies at his
trail and nine years of jail behind his back. But majority ascribes the
murder to the Western secret services attempting to destabilise Russia.
Russia is not an Arab state, but the organisers of Nemtsov’s
assassination could forget this geographic fact. During the Arab Spring,
killing of an opposition figure invariably triggered popular uprising in
the capital, the uprising caused a harsh government response, more
bloodshed, international condemnation, government collapse and
establishment of a new ruler, more pleasing to the revolution sponsors.
This routine was scripted in the booklet by Gene Sharp, the wise man of
NED (The National Endowment for Democracy), a semi-clandestine branch of
the US intelligence in charge of “colour revolutions”.
You
can’t always rely upon generosity of the government, oppressive it may
be, that they will kill a right sort of person in the right time and
place. That’s why
les forces obscures behind the revolutions prefer to make
the killing themselves and blame in on the government. This is called a
‘sacrifice routine’. An improved form of the sacrifice script was
activated in the Ukraine last year, when few dozen activists were shot
by mysterious snipers. The snipers disappeared, but international
condemnation led to the President’s flight, and to the coup d’état,
establishing pro-Western nationalist regime.
Russians were wise to this scheme. During the 2011 wave of unrest, the
government was cautious to create no martyrs, and the revolutionary
crowd was timid enough to comply. Now, in 2015, there was no visible
reason for worry. Vast majority (86%) of Russians support the President,
while pro-Western opposition dwindled. The activists were lazy and
greedy, the Western emissaries said. They were angry at the opposition
leaders for not trying hard enough to remove Putin. If you take our
cookies you should do some work for us, this line was attributed to the
State Department people in Moscow. John Tefft, the US Ambassador to
Russia, was widely quoted as saying a week before the assassination,
that “Messrs Navalny and Nemtsov will make a great contribution to our
cause in the nearest future”. Mr Alexey Navalny, the most visible
opposition leader, avoided “making a contribution” by getting himself
imprisoned for a small offence for the crucial week. Perhaps he got the
hint, people say.
Anyway, while the mourning and the funeral did not cause any breach of
peace, the march did not turn into a Maidan or Tahrir, and Bernard Henri
Levi did not land on the Red Square, the Putin’s government got cold
feet. For a long eight days Russian police looked for the murderers, and
meanwhile the Yeltsin’s cadres, people of nineties assaulted Putin from
within and the Western media and officials from without. President Putin
is not a Genghis Khan, he is a non-confrontational bloke whose great
ambition is to live in peace and harmony with the West while defending
Russia’s vital interests, and observing interests of Russia’s wealthies
and worthies. He also wants to be accepted as an equal among the world’s
great, East and West. His desire to be popular and accepted abroad never
reached the sick extreme of Mikhail Gorbachev or Anwar as-Sadat, but he
was upset the Western public being convinced he personally shot Nemtsov
from his bedroom window in Kremlin for the heck of it. Discovering the
assassins of Nemtsov received their brief from a Mrs Nuland of this
world would never pass the muster in the West.
“Muslim extremists” are patsies nobody can reasonably object to. If they
killed cartoonists in Paris and dropped the Towers in New York, they
could kill a minor politician in Moscow. Prescient Mr Eduard Limonov, a
writer and a revolutionary,
predicted this choice on March, 3d: “the Russian administration
would prefer Nemtsov being killed by an Islamic extremist. It is most
improbable, but this version would allow to get close to the West.
Islamic extremists are a common enemy... Russia wants to get closer to
the West while preserving its own dignity. And what could be better for
this purpose than a still warm dead body of a common victim killed by a
common enemy?”
This version is not entirely fanciful: Russia’s pro-West liberal
opposition is Islamophobe and Zionist. Late Mr Nemtsov was true to form:
he hated ‘gooks’, spoke in favour of Charlie Hebdo, supported
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and had a nice old Jewish mother. In his
last
text he referred to Russia’s FBI as ‘filth’ and suggested they
should go and fight Islamic terrorists in Chechnya instead of bothering
liberals. (A macho man, he described Putin’s party as ‘buggers’ in this
interview).
Nemtsov was not worse than any other leader of Russia’s liberal
opposition. Khodorkovsky (now the leader) called upon every Russian
newspaper to print a daily Prophet Muhammad cartoon; Echo Moskvy
Ganapolsky
called Muslims “non-human”; the voice of the opposition Makarevich
went to Israel to support Liberman, the far-right Jewish nationalist;
Julia Latynina blessed Jewish cannons destroying Arab vermin of Gaza.
Still, one has to start somewhere, supposedly mused the “Muslim
extremists” and started with Mr Nemtsov .
Many people doubt this version. Are they “truthers”? ‘Truthers’ are not
a small sect anymore: people disbelieve what they are told, they
distrust pictures they are being shown and they reject explanations
being given. But the Russian Truthers are embraced by the Western media
that shied from the Western Truthers. Vladimir Milov, a leading
oppositionist
questioned the details of Nemtsov’s assassination in much the same
vein as Truthers doubted the Charlie or Marathon killings. He arrived to
the same conclusion as Truthers: killings were done by Secret Services.
But in a
CNN interview, Christiane Amanpour calls a Russian politician Sergey
Markov “a conspiracy theorist” for refusing to accept Russian Truthers’
version of events. So your freedom fighter is my terrorist, while your
official version is my conspiracy theory.
Will Nemtsov’s murder have an impact on developments in Russia? It is
plausible that Putin will try to be more accommodating towards the West
and towards Kiev regime. The Russians are worried that pro-Western
neoliberal party will regain the positions they lost after 2000, and
dead Nemtsov will indeed be more useful for his cause than alive one.