The war in Ukraine damaged the opposition movement, but it also provided many activists with a new purpose, and a potential means of striking back at the Kremlin. As the death toll in the conflict rose, some in the opposition redirected their efforts towards proving the presence of Russian troops in the former Soviet republic. Putin denied they were there, and said any Russians fighting on the side of pro-Moscow separatists in Ukraine were ‘volunteers’. He maintained that there was nothing Russia could do to stop these people – often heavily armed, and equipped with top-of-the-range combat gear – crossing the border into Ukraine. As for any serving Russian soldiers involved in military action in eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin insisted they had travelled to the conflict zone on their own initiatives during sabbaticals from military service.1 There were, of course, bona fide volunteers who had journeyed to Ukraine in the belief that, as billboards in the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk declared, they would have the chance to ‘fulfil a historic duty’ to fight Nazism, but it was inconceivable that rebel forces could have stood up to the Ukrainian army and pro-government militia for so long without the assistance of the well-equipped and well-trained Russian army.
The Kremlin’s denials often stretched credibility to breaking point and beyond. When ten paratroopers were captured in Ukraine, Russia said they had got lost and ‘mistakenly’ wandered over the border.2 When apparent Russian soldiers cheerfully admitted to journalists that they had been sent to eastern Ukraine by army chiefs,3 the Kremlin either refused to comment or rubbished the reports. Still, the evidence mounted, from video footage of huge colonies of what seemed to be Russian military hardware moving deep inside Ukraine,4 to satellite images that NATO said showed Russian tanks fighting on the side of separatist forces. Western journalists also witnessed Russian armoured vehicles driving into Ukraine.5
Additionally, there were sporadic opposition media interviews with the relatives of Russian soldiers reportedly killed in eastern Ukraine, including one with the mother of a sapper whose son had told her, ‘I’m going to war.’6 Opposition activists set up a website called Cargo 200 – military slang for the zinc coffins of dead servicemen – to monitor the increasing number of Russian army casualties in eastern Ukraine.7 But most bereaved relatives were coerced into silence through a combination of threats and financial rewards.
Attempts to reveal the truth were often met with violence. When Lev Shlosberg, an opposition politician in Pskov, a Russian town near the border with Estonia, interviewed soldiers whose comrades-in-arms had been killed in Ukraine, and also drew attention to the fresh graves of paratroopers from the region, he was beaten unconscious by unidentified assailants. All too often the troops being deployed to Ukraine were young conscripts – exempt from foreign service under Russian law – rather than well-trained contact soldiers. ‘This is all criminal, this is all against the law – against Russia’s own law,’ raged Valentina Melnikova, head of the Russian Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers pressure group.8
‘[Putin] is a cunning person. He tells the whole world there are no troops there. But then he says to us “come on, come on”,’ a Russian solider named Dorjhi Batomunkuyev told the opposition Novaya Gazeta newspaper during an interview in the Moscow hospital where he was undergoing treatment for horrific injuries suffered in eastern Ukraine. ‘We all knew we were crossing the [Ukrainian] border. What else could we do? We couldn’t stop then. We had to follow orders.’9 (When a newspaper from Batomunkuyev’s home region of Buryatia, in Russia’s south, printed a follow-up story about the soldier’s injuries, a ‘public outcry’ – most likely a euphemism for political pressure – forced the editor into a drastic move: he not only ordered the article to be removed from the paper’s website, but also handed his staff scissors so that they could help him in cutting out the offending piece from 50,000 print copies of the newspaper that were awaiting distribution.10)
Despite the growing evidence of Russian military involvement in Ukraine, opposition figures were all but helpless in the face of the Kremlin’s control over state media, the main source of news for some 90% of Russians. Their investigations simply weren’t getting through the deafening white noise of disinformation. The difficulties faced by the opposition were illustrated perfectly in a satirical cartoon by Russia’s finest political cartoonist, Sergey Elkin, which depicted a figure slouched in front of a television set, both the screen and the anonymous viewer’s brain filled with identical swirls of bewildering electronic static.11
Public opinion surveys by the independent Moscow-based Levada Centre pollster indicated that the majority of Russians believed the Kremlin’s denials. ‘They are all volunteers,’ an elderly woman told me in central Moscow in late 2014, as we both watched a small group of opposition activists protest the war. ‘They’ve just gone to protect relatives from the fascists. Wouldn’t you do the same in their shoes?’
This willingness to believe the Kremlin’s line wasn’t merely the result of propaganda, suggested Lev Shlosberg, the opposition politician who had been assaulted after his investigation into the deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. ‘People want to believe that Russia is innocent, and that it is not spilling blood,’ he told me. ‘This belief is a form of psychological defence. A realization of the scale of the deceit involved will only come later, when a critical mass of Russian society has woken up. But this will not be for a long time.’12
Not everyone was prepared to wait.
‘This is what we need to do,’ said Nemtsov, when he entered the Moscow headquarters of his RPR-Parnas party early one morning in 2015. ‘We need to write up a report, “Putin: War”, publish huge numbers of it, and hand it out on the streets,’ the opposition politician told his fellow activists. ‘We’ll tell people how Putin unleashed this conflict.’13
It was an ambitious plan, but one that had no guarantee of success. For starters, it would be a near impossible task to print any such report in sufficient enough numbers to reach even 10% of the population. And, secondly, it was far from certain that even a well-presented report with incontrovertible proof of Russian military involvement in Ukraine would be powerful enough to penetrate the wall of non-stop Kremlin propaganda. It was also unclear what exactly it would take to combat the widespread willingness to turn a blind eye to Putin’s sins that Shlosberg had highlighted. But Nemtsov was determined to go through with the project. ‘He infected us all with his enthusiasm, like always,’ said Ilya Yashin, the opposition figure’s political ally and long-time friend.14
Some two months later, Nemtsov scribbled a note to his assistant, Olga Shorina, in which he revealed that he had been contacted by a group of disgruntled paratroopers who had fought in Ukraine. ‘But for now they are afraid to talk,’ Nemtsov wrote. Shorina kept the scrap of paper and later showed it to Reuters.15
The day after writing the note, Nemtsov appeared on air on the Echo of Moscow radio station to appeal to Russians to attend a 1 March 2015 protest rally against the war in Ukraine and the growing economic crisis. Public interest in the rally was low: the authorities had given permission, but insisted it take place in a residential area far from central Moscow. For many opposition activists, the decision to agree to demonstrate in what some scathingly dubbed a ‘reservation’ was indicative of the protest movement’s passiveness. Navalny was, however, in favour of the rally, saying it would bring the opposition ‘closer to the people’. But the anti-Putin movement’s figurehead would not be attending: finally released from house arrest on 18 February, he was jailed a mere fifty-five hours later for fifteen days on charges of handing out opposition leaflets in the Moscow metro. In Navalny’s enforced absence, Nemtsov seized the role of main agitator for the rally.
‘Let’s just imagine a public debate between me and Putin,’ said a furious Nemtsov, glasses perched on the end of his nose, as he spoke at the Echo of Moscow studio. ‘I would start with a very simple question, for example, “Why are Russian soldiers being killed while you, Mr Putin, disown these soldiers and lie, saying that they are not involved in fighting? How can you, as commander-in-chief, disown them? How dare you remain commander-in-chief after that?”’16
It was to be his final public appearance.
After the radio interview, Nemtsov went to meet his Ukrainian girlfriend, a twenty-three-year-old model named Anna Durytska. The two ate a late meal at Bosco, a chic Red Square restaurant that overlooks the Kremlin, and then walked towards Nemtsov’s nearby apartment in a light drizzle. As they crossed the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, a concrete walkway over the Moskva River that was completed in 1937 – the height of Stalin’s Great Terror – a man overtook the couple, turned around swiftly, and fired several shots. Four bullets stuck Nemtsov, hitting him in the head, heart, liver and stomach. He died almost instantly. Durytska was unharmed, but did not see the assassin’s face. The killer then leapt over a barrier into the road, and got into a waiting car with no number plates, which sped off unhindered into a stream of late-night traffic. It was, activists would later note with grim irony, 27 February, the date that Putin had recently declared a new national holiday – Special Forces Day – in honour of the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea.
Reports of Nemtsov’s murder shook late-night Moscow. Yashin was the first opposition figure to make it to the bridge. Gazing at the stark sight of Nemtsov lying in a black body bag, he fired off a chilling message on Twitter. ‘Nemtsov has been shot. He’s dead.’17 Activists who rushed to the bridge in response were dismayed to find police already hosing down the murder scene, apparently washing away any vital evidence. Others counted at least a dozen security cameras in the immediate vicinity, with at least one pointed directly at the exact stretch of bridge where Nemtsov had been gunned down. How, they wondered, had the killer been able to flee so easily? After all, on the rare occasions that anti-Putin activists attempted to protest on nearby Red Square – one of Russia’s most heavily guarded public spaces – they were invariably nabbed within seconds. It was later reported, in what seemed like a suspiciously convenient coincidence for the assassin, that the cameras on the bridge had been ‘turned off for maintenance’ that very evening.18
By morning, Nemtsov’s murder was the talk of Russia. Of course, there had been other political murders in the country’s violent post-Soviet history, but none of the victims had enjoyed anything like Nemtsov’s fame. One of the ‘young reformers’ who had overseen a disastrous economic restructuring during the late 1990s, Nemtsov had even been briefly considered for the presidency, before the ailing Yeltsin eventually decided on Putin. Even two decades on, despite being banned from appearing on state-run television, he remained a household name. I had visited Nemtsov at his central Moscow headquarters in the spring of 2013. Gregarious to the point of coarseness, he had addressed me, as he did everyone, as ‘ty’, the informal Russian form of ‘you’, which is considered rude when not speaking to anyone who is not friend, family or close acquaintance. Curious to see how he had charmed US Congressmen into adopting the Magnitsky Act, I asked if we could switch to English. The transformation was instant. Gone was the rather rude Russian politician, and in his place was a perfect gentleman. ‘Yes, of course,’ he purred, acquiescing to my request. You could say what you liked about Nemtsov, but he never failed to make an impression. And now he was dead, murdered by an assassin’s bullets within sight of the Kremlin’s illuminated walls. He was just fifty-five years old.
*
The Investigative Committee, the powerful law-enforcement organization answerable only to Putin, quickly announced what it considered to be the most probable motives for the murder. Unsurprisingly, none of these included the possibility that Nemtsov was killed for his tireless opposition to the Kremlin. Instead, the Investigative Committee’s list of possible motives included a violent row linked to Nemtsov’s famously colourful private life, a business dispute, or an attempt to destabilize Russia. ‘Nemtsov could have been a kind of sacrifice for those who stop at nothing to attain their political ends,’ said Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin.19 He also suggested that the killing may have been ordered by ‘radical figures’ involved in the fighting in Ukraine. An unnamed law-enforcement source later told Russian media that Nemtsov had been killed by Adam Osmayev, the Chechen commander of a pro-Ukrainian volunteer battalion, in a bid to destabilize Russia. Osmayev rubbished the allegations, and described Nemtsov as a ‘true hero’.20
Yet the most unexpected of the possible motives put forward by investigators was that the bitter Kremlin critic had been murdered by religious extremists in revenge for his stance on the January 2015 attack by Islamist gunmen on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris.21 This was a deeply flawed theory for one simple reason – Nemtsov had written only one short text about the shootings and the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that had provoked them. In the piece, entitled ‘The Islamic Inquisition’ and posted on the website of the Echo of Moscow radio station, he had said that Islam was a ‘young religion’ that had yet to ‘mature’. He also said there could be no justification whatever for the violence in Paris.22 His comments stirred up exactly zero controversy, and there was not a single report of any Muslims being offended by the text. Given the far more explosive statements being made by Russia’s far right, it was also highly unlikely that Islamist militants would have felt it necessary to scour the website of a liberal Moscow radio station in search of ‘offensive’ texts.
‘Suggestions that Boris [Nemtsov] had in some way insulted Islam are just ridiculous,’ raged his former ally Yashin. ‘Investigators need to ask, “Who benefited?” And the answer to that is Vladimir Putin,’ the opposition activist told me. ‘We have long been used to smear campaigns, criminal charges and even beatings, but this has taken things to a new level. We are all in a dark forest now, and anyone who opposes Putin is in danger.’23 It was an accusation that gained further credibility when it was revealed that police officers had removed documents and computer drives from Nemtsov’s apartment in the hours after his assassination.
Nemtsov, of course, had known that his opposition to Putin and his not-so-secret war in Ukraine meant he was a target. He often received death threats, including one that he reported to the authorities just weeks before he was killed. (No action was taken over his complaint.) As political repression increased in the backdrop to the war in Ukraine, Nemtsov had feared arrest – reportedly hiding out for months in Israel in mid-2014 – and, to a lesser extent, assassination. ‘Every time I call her [my mother], she says, “When are you going to stop having a go at Putin? He’ll kill you!” And she’s totally serious about this,’ he told a Russian opposition journalist just two weeks before he was murdered. When asked by the reporter if he shared her fears, he responded: ‘A little. Not so much as Mum, but still… But I’m not that afraid of him [Putin]. If I was that afraid, I wouldn’t head an opposition party, and I wouldn’t do what I’m doing.’24
‘He knew he was in danger,’ Nemtsov’s assistant, Olga Shorina, told me. ‘But he didn’t think the situation in the country had reached the stage where the Kremlin’s political opponents could be killed in assassinations designed to send a signal to the whole country.’25 Despite the hazards involved in political opposition to Putin, Nemtsov had not employed bodyguards. Indeed, I had seen him the day before his murder, walking along a street in central Moscow with a woman I didn’t recognize. People turned their heads to stare at him. ‘He always insisted that, if they wanted to kill him, they would, and it didn’t matter how many bodyguards he had,’ said Yashin.
Nemtsov’s eldest daughter, Zhanna, a journalist with the Moscow-based business channel RBC, also accused the authorities of complicity in her father’s death. ‘I believe the murder was politically motivated, and because of this it will not be completely solved, and far from everyone who is guilty will be punished. At least while Putin is Russia’s president,’ she told me in an email from Europe, after fleeing Russia over concerns for her safety.26
When pressed to comment on allegations that the Kremlin was involved in Nemtsov’s shooting, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, sighed and suggested that the opposition figure was not worth the Kremlin’s bullets. ‘In political terms he did not pose any threat to the current Russian leadership or Vladimir Putin,’ he said. ‘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.’27 It was a scathing assessment of the opposition figure’s role, and one that brought back memories of Putin’s infamous statement that Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist murdered in Moscow in 2006, had done ‘greater damage’ to the Kremlin through her death than with any of her publications. Nemtsov’s murder, Peskov added, bore ‘all the hallmarks of a provocation’. It was a message that was picked up on and amplified by state-run TV, whose top attack dog, Dmitry Kiselyov, insinuated during his weekly news show that the West had ordered Nemtsov’s assassination to provoke a Maidan-type protest in Moscow. He also spent an indecently long time highlighting the results of opinion polls that proved Nemtsov did not enjoy widespread political support among Russians.28 Other pro-Kremlin media promoted the theory heavily. ‘Shooting Nemtsov, aiming at Putin’, was the headline on the website of the best-selling Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, which suggested to its millions of readers across Russia that the CIA had killed Nemtsov in a false-flag operation to discredit Putin.29
Although state media exaggerated and distorted the facts, for many neutral observers it was hard to see why the Kremlin would have ordered Nemtsov’s murder at a time when the anti-Putin opposition was struggling to remain a viable political force. Nemtsov’s association with Yeltsin’s catastrophic presidency meant he would always be distrusted by large numbers of voters. His RPR-Parnas party, which he co-founded with Mikhail Kasyanov, the former prime minister known as Misha 2% for his alleged fondness for bribes while in office, had largely failed to capture the imagination of disaffected Russians. ‘Of course, anyone who was in Yeltsin’s government is forever associated with the image of the 1990s,’ Nemtsov had once admitted to me. Suggestions that he had been shot in order to prevent the release of his report on Putin’s secret war in Ukraine, which he had barely had time to begin work on before his murder, also appeared far-fetched. There already existed plenty of evidence of Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine: what exactly could Nemtsov have uncovered that would have spooked Putin enough for him to have the veteran opposition politician killed?
Yet while Nemtsov was unlikely to have toppled Putin, at the ballot box or otherwise, his activities, from his no-holds-barred reports on top-level graft to his campaigning for the imposition of foreign asset freezes against corrupt officials, had undoubtedly caused serious headaches for influential figures close to the Kremlin. There was little question that he had plenty of powerful enemies. But the nagging question remained: if the authorities had taken to murdering opposition figures on the streets of Moscow, then why was Navalny – by far the most serious threat to Putin’s kleptocracy – still alive?
Just days before Nemtsov’s assassination, some 40,000 people had marched through the centre of Moscow to denounce Russia’s ‘fifth column’. The rally was attended by NOD activists, Cossacks and the pro-Putin motorcycle club, the Night Wolves. One prominent banner accused Nemtsov of being an ‘organizer of Maidan’. Although many at the rally, which was covered extensively by state television, had been bussed in for the event, there were also plenty of true believers. ‘The fifth column must be destroyed. It threatens Russia’s very existence,’ said an excited twenty-something NOD member, who gave his name only as Alexei. On stage, a worker from a Urals-based tank factory hammered home the message. ‘These traitors are an insignificant few, but we must remember that they are arrogant and cynical people who will stop at nothing to destroy our country,’ he shouted. ‘Motherland! Freedom! Putin!’ chanted some in the crowd in response.
‘I do not want the United States to do to my country what it has done to other countries,’ Alexander Zaladantsov, the heavily tattooed, middle-aged leader of the Night Wolves motorbike gang, told me after the rally.30 ‘We will defend Putin and Russia by any means necessary.’ It was a remarkable turnaround for a man who had helped defend Gorbachev’s reforms against a KGB-backed coup in 1991. ‘I was a naive youngster in those days,’ he explained, before launching into an impassioned, if somewhat incoherent speech about the ‘eternal greatness’ of Stalin. ‘You in the West will never understand. Even now he frightens you,’ he told me.
It wasn’t only Zaladantsov whose opinions had undergone a radical rethink. The attitudes of ordinary Russians towards state-sponsored political terror also appeared to be shifting rapidly. According to the results of a public opinion survey published in early 2015 by the independent, Moscow-based Levada Centre pollster, some 45% of Russians – a figure that had almost doubled in just two years – said they believed the millions of victims of Stalin’s gulags and purges could be ‘justified’ by historical circumstances.31
The atmosphere was explosive. News of Nemtsov’s grisly demise came as a shock for his fellow activists, but there should have been little surprise. Less than twenty-four hours before his murder, shots were fired at the windows of an apartment owned by Anna Stepanova, the head of Nemtsov’s RPR-Parnas party in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod.
‘If, just a few days ago, people in our city were carrying signs that said, “Let’s kill off the fifth column,” and today they kill Nemtsov, then what will happen tomorrow?’ asked Anatoly Chubais, who served in Yeltsin’s government alongside Nemtsov, after visiting the murder scene.
For opposition activists like Ksenia Sobchak, the socialite turned Kremlin critic, Nemtsov’s murder seemed to signal that this state-encouraged hatred of political dissent had taken on a life of its own, inspiring rogue elements to take bloody revenge against opposition figures that they – and Putin – believed were Russia’s enemies.
‘It would be in some way less disturbing, if Putin had ordered Nemtsov’s murder,’ she wrote in a much-discussed article. ‘This would be an awful system, but at least it would still be a system. A manageable system. But there is no Putin who gave the order for the murder. There is only Putin who has created a hellish terminator that he has now lost control of. There is no one controlling the process any more. There is chaotic hatred. A hatred that is fuelled every day by the national media.’32
*
In the aftermath of Nemtsov’s assassination, the rally that he had been promoting on the night of his death was scrapped, and – after hours of tough negotiations – the opposition was permitted to gather instead in central Moscow for a march of remembrance. Ironically, this would be the closest to the Kremlin that Putin’s opponents had been allowed since the birth of the white ribbon protest movement in 2011.
The mood ahead of the rally was a potent mixture of despair and defiance. ‘I know who killed Boris Nemtsov,’ wrote one Russian émigré Facebook user,33 in a post that went viral among opposition supporters. ‘He was killed by the hatred poured into the air… He was killed by those who draw Obama with fangs… He was killed by those who hate darkies, yids, Ukrainians, and, especially their neighbours. But physical death is not so important. We all die sooner or later. But take your children away from Russia, so that they do not become infected.’
Others were possessed of a quiet determination. Nemtsov’s assassination had raised the stakes to unthinkable heights, and the only way out now was forward. ‘The morning after Nemtsov’s murder, we all came to work convinced more than ever that we have to continue our political activities, to push on further,’ Georgy Alburov, one of Navalny’s key activists, told me ahead of the rally. ‘What else can we do?’
The march in honour of Nemtsov took place on 1 March, officially the first day of spring on the Russian calendar. From morning onwards, long lines of people clutching flowers and photographs of the veteran opposition figure streamed through central Moscow. Nemtsov’s murder had stirred something in the Russian capital. ‘Enough is enough,’ Artyom, a middle-aged man with a bushy beard, told me as we queued to gain entry to the start of the march. ‘It’s time for Moscow’s decent, intelligent people to reclaim the streets from the thugs and the killers.’
And they came that afternoon in the tens of thousands, many holding aloft the Russian tricolour, marching through the heart of Moscow, past Red Square and the psychedelic domes of St Basil’s Cathedral, until they filed, slowly, onto the landmark bridge where Nemtsov had been gunned down in cold blood. ‘No War!’ chanted the crowd, as it marched towards the murder scene, where a growing pile of flowers lay in the slow, constant drizzle. A police helicopter buzzed low above the mourners. Just feet from where Nemtsov had been shot dead, a protester held up a sign: ‘Propaganda kills.’
It was hard to escape the feeling that afternoon that Nemtsov’s death marked a turning point. Who would triumph in the vicious battle for Russia’s soul? The self-styled ‘patriots’ fed a steady diet of hate speech by national TV? Or these tens of thousands of Muscovites alarmed by Russia’s increasing international isolation? ‘I am not afraid,’ read another popular banner. Others held up placards with a play on Nemtsov’s first name so that it read, simply, ‘Fight!’ It was a noble sentiment. But the struggle was getting harder, and much more dangerous.
Two days after the march, thousands queued in the snow and ice to pay their last respects to the slain opposition leader, whose open coffin lay on view in the Sakharov human-rights centre. Nemtsov then was laid to rest at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery, a sprawling graveyard on the edge of western Moscow that also contains the graves of journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Dmitry Kholodov, who was murdered in 1994 after investigating military corruption. Neither Putin nor any other high-ranking Russian politician was in attendance.
‘Nemtsov’s murder could be the start of a wave of killings, if the Kremlin continues to set people against one another,’ opposition politician Gennady Gudkov said as he stood in line to pay his respects. ‘This could lead to civil war.’ The sense of impending violence was almost tangible.
As Ksenia Sobchak left the funeral, a stranger whispered to her, ‘Keep in mind, Ksenia, you’re next.’ If Putin’s rumoured goddaughter was now a target, then no one in the opposition was safe.
Two days later, an anti-Putin activist named Alexei Semenov was savagely beaten in Moscow by assailants wielding baseball bats. His attackers were never found.
For Navalny, talk of a pro-Kremlin ‘rogue element’ inspired by state television to murder Nemtsov was a ludicrous and dangerous illusion. ‘I believe that Nemtsov was murdered by members of a government (the special services) or pro-government organization on the order of the country’s political leadership (including Vladimir Putin),’ he said in a statement from jail on the morning of the funeral.
‘Let’s stop repeating this nonsense that “Boris was killed by an atmosphere of hatred,”’ he went on. ‘What atmosphere of hatred are you on about? We have had an atmosphere of hatred since 2007, but in the past few months we have seen the organized creation of pro-government extremist-terrorist organizations, who openly declare that their aim is to fight the opposition in ways the police can’t.’
Navalny also tore into the popular view that Nemtsov possessed insufficient political clout to warrant a Kremlin-ordered hit, highlighting the politician’s ceaseless endeavours to bring together disparate groups within the opposition movement, as well as his fearless anti-corruption work. ‘He did things, rather than waiting for the regime to fall. This is why he was both relevant and dangerous.’
Navalny drew historical parallels between Putin and some of the world’s most infamous dictators. ‘Those who say Nemtsov’s death was of “no benefit to Putin” can join in the corner those who say “[ex-Haitian dictator François] Duvalier had no need of killings, Stalin had nothing to gain from the Red Terror, or Augusto Pinochet gathered everyone in the stadium for a game of football”,’ he wrote. ‘This was beneficial for Putin. Open up your history books – it’s all written there.’34
Less than three months after Nemtsov’s murder, the report that the opposition politician had been working on before his death finally saw the light of day. Completed by fellow activists and some of Russia’s finest opposition journalists, it was entitled, as Nemtsov had planned, ‘Putin: War’.35 Along with dozens of other journalists, I attended its 12 May 2015 presentation at the central Moscow headquarters of Nemtsov’s RPR-Parnas party. Expectations were high. But, although it was well presented and written in an accessible style, the report failed to live up to the hype. It relied on open source material and there were, as its authors freely admitted, ‘no sensations’ within its glossy pages.
However, as a vivid chronicle of the escalation and consequences of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, which the report’s authors estimated had cost the lives of at least 220 Russians soldiers, ‘Putin: War’ was unheralded. ‘It’s everything that Boris wanted it to be,’ said Yashin.
Predictably, activists had struggled to find printers willing to handle such overtly anti-Putin material. As a result, they had managed to produce only some 3,000 copies. The report was, of course, available online, but its limited availability in print meant it had more in common with Soviet-era dissident literature than a powerful weapon in the battle to bring down Putin. ‘It’s unlikely to change public opinion,’ confessed opposition journalist Oleg Kashin, who had worked on the report. In truth, Nemtsov’s posthumous report was little more than a potshot at Putin. But by this stage, the opposition’s depleted armoury was capable of little else.
Early on 7 March 2015, eight days after Nemtsov had been gunned down, Zaur Dadayev, a senior Chechen police officer, was detained by armed investigators while driving to visit relatives in Magas, the capital of the North Caucasus republic of Ingushetia. His cousin, Anzor Gubashev, a security guard at a hypermarket near Moscow, was also arrested the same morning. Like Dadayev, he was seized while driving to visit family in Ingushetia. Both men were charged with Nemtsov’s murder.
Dadayev’s arrest raised eyebrows. A member of the powerful Chechen interior ministry battalion, Sever, he was rumoured to be close to Ramzan Kadyrov, the ruthless Chechen leader given free rein by Putin to run the volatile mountainous republic as a generously funded personal fiefdom in return for suppressing separatist and Islamist forces. De facto ruler of the republic since the death of his father, Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, in a bomb attack in 2004, he had recently formed an unholy alliance with Vladislav Surkov, the half-Chechen architect of Putin’s ‘sovereign democracy’. The arrest of one of Kadyrov’s trusted officers in Moscow on charges of carrying out modern Russia’s most high-profile murder was a development that was as unexpected as it was ominous.
‘Dadayev is a deeply religious person and like all Muslims he was very shocked by the actions of Charlie [Hebdo] and by comments supporting the printing of the caricatures of the [Prophet Mohammed],’ said Kadyrov in an Instagram post, his preferred means of communication with the world. Given that the Chechen leader had organized a 500,000-strong rally in Grozny against the caricatures just days after the killings in Paris, his comment was widely viewed as a thinly disguised justification of Nemtsov’s murder. Yet it was still hard to believe that the assassination had a religious angle. In other comments, Kadyrov also described Dadayev as ‘a genuine Russian patriot’.36
Later that week, Putin awarded Kadyrov the Order of Merit, the first of three state awards that the former rebel fighter would receive over the next nine days. If little else was clear, it was obvious that Putin had no qualms about honouring a man who had just praised the main suspect in the cold-blooded killing of one of his most outspoken critics.
Some forty-eight hours after their arrests, both Dadayev and Gubashev were dragged handcuffed into a Moscow court by masked police officers clutching automatic weapons. The judge informed the court that Dadayev, the alleged gunman and ringleader, had confessed to the shooting. The Chechen police officer made no comment other than to raise his index finger and say, ‘I love the Prophet Mohammed.’ Three other Chechen men were also ordered by the court to remain in custody pending further investigation, although they were not charged. Russian media reports said another suspect, Beslan Shavanov, had blown himself up with a hand grenade when police came for him in Grozny. Dadayev later said he suspected Shavanov had been murdered.
Investigators were under immense pressure to close the case as swiftly as possible, and they appeared to be taking no chances. Almost inevitably, when Andrei Babushkin, a member of Russia’s human-rights council, visited Dadayev in jail, the Chechen told him that he had been tortured into confessing. Dadayev also claimed he had admitted to the murder only after investigators had agreed to free an officer colleague also being held in connection with the killing. ‘I thought that I would be able to tell the court the full truth. That I am innocent,’ he told Babushkin. He also said he believed that his confession would save his life.37
Someone also appeared to have been putting pressure on Dadayev’s relatives. Less than twenty-four hours after he had confessed to Nemtsov’s murder, his family members abruptly annulled the contracts for legal advice that they had signed with both his Moscow-based lawyer, Zaurbek Sadakhanov, and Kheda Saratova, a well-known human-rights worker based in Grozny. ‘The family were either afraid, or they hoped that Kadyrov would be able to get Dadayev out with a mere wave of his hand,’ Saratova told me. ‘But they were badly mistaken.’38
The arrests set off alarm bells among opposition activists. Chechens have frequently been fingered as ‘trigger men’ in high-profile killings in Russia, but critics say those who order the murders are never brought to justice. ‘Two Chechens somehow appointed guilty. So predictable, there’s not even anything to say,’ commented Vladimir Milov, an opposition figure who had co-authored with Nemtsov a 2010 report on Kremlin corruption.39 ‘Our worst fears are coming true: the hitman has been arrested but the commander will remain free,’ said Yashin.40
*
That Kadyrov had been ill-disposed towards Nemtsov was not in doubt. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Rebel, Nemtsov related how the future Chechen leader had threatened him in 2002, after he proposed changes to the North Caucasus republic’s constitution that would have greatly reduced the powers of the president. ‘When I came out of the hall, a person came up to me and said that I should be killed for my speech. I asked “Who are you?” and he pulled out FSB identification. It was Ramzan Kadyrov,’ wrote Nemtsov. ‘I can’t say that I was very scared, as the Chechens around me said he was joking. But I didn’t see any sign of a joke in his eyes. I saw only hatred.’41
Kadyrov had also called for Nemtsov to be imprisoned over his role in the mass anti-Putin protests that broke out in Moscow in December 2011.42 ‘Kadyrov has serious psychological problems,’ Nemtsov responded, speaking to journalists on the streets of Moscow. ‘He needs to be treated, and urgently. He should be hospitalized and treated for schizophrenia.’43 Despite the death threat, and the well-documented history of mutual animosity between the two men, Kadyrov was not summoned to Moscow for questioning. ‘Putin is afraid to have Kadyrov questioned,’ Vadim Prokhanov, a lawyer for the Nemtsov family, told me. ‘He is afraid of discrediting him, and the consequences of a Chechnya without Kadyrov in charge.’
Kadyrov’s enemies frequently meet grisly ends. ‘He acts like a medieval tyrant. If someone tells the truth about what is going on, it’s like signing one’s own death warrant,’ said Movladi Baisarov, a former Chechen special forces officer, in a Russian newspaper interview in 2006.44 A month after that interview, Baisarov was shot dead in Moscow while ‘resisting arrest’. Eyewitnesses claimed he had been executed by Chechen police officers while their Moscow counterparts stood by and watched. His murder was just the beginning of a trail of blood that critics say leads straight to Kadyrov. ‘You don’t survive long once Kadyrov names you as his personal enemy,’ said Russian journalist Sergei Darenko.45
In January 2009, Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard for Kadyrov, was gunned down as he walked out of a grocery store in Vienna. Israilov had accused Kadyrov of abductions and torture, and had reportedly been warned to withdraw the allegations. Three Chechen men were later jailed by a Viennese court over his death. Kadyrov denied any link to the shooting. ‘If I had wanted him dead I could have killed him in Chechnya and no one would have known about it,’ I later witnessed him tell astonished fellow journalists at a late-night news conference in Grozny.46
In the aftermath of Nemtsov’s murder, opposition figures recalled a huge rally that Kadyrov had overseen in a stadium in Grozny in late 2014. Addressing some 20,000 heavily armed members of the Chechen elite guard, including members of the black-clad Kadyrovtsy, his much-feared private army, Kadyrov asked Putin to consider the assembled fighters ‘a special volunteer unit of the commander-in-chief’. He also instructed his forces to be ready to fulfil any order from Putin anywhere in the world. ‘We recognize that Russia has a regular army, an air force and nuclear weapons, yet there are some tasks that can only be carried out by volunteers,’ he declared, before shouting: ‘Long live our great motherland, Russia! Long live our national leader, Vladimir Putin! Allahu Akbar!’47
Kadyrov may have professed loyalty to the Kremlin, but opposition figures – including Nemtsov – questioned how long that loyalty would last as funding for the republic dried up amid Russia’s growing economic problems. ‘The unspoken contract between Kadyrov and Putin – money in exchange for loyalty – is coming to an end,’ Nemtsov wrote. ‘Where will these 20,000 Kadyrovtsy go? What will they demand? How will they behave? When will they come to Moscow?’48
The already portentous atmosphere in Moscow was heightened when, just six days after Nemtsov’s murder, Putin appeared to go missing. At first, nobody noticed anything untoward. That is until the RBC business newspaper reported on 12 March 2015 that Putin had not been seen in public for a week, and that there had also been no new television footage of the president during the same period.49 This was an unthinkable amount of time for a man whose words and actions usually dominate national television broadcasts. Speculation that something was amiss increased when a government official in Kazakhstan told Russian media that a visit by Putin to the Central Asian republic had been cancelled because he had fallen ill.50 Another visit, this time by South Ossetian officials to Moscow, had also been put off for the same reason, reports said.51
When questioned, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, insisted that the ‘national leader’ was in fine health, and that he would soon appear in public. However, he could not say when. But if Putin was not ill, then where was he? In a bid to calm the situation, the Kremlin posted old images of Putin online, but the deceit was quickly discovered by bloggers and opposition media. State TV then aired a bizarre news item in which Putin’s impending meeting with his Kyrgyz counterpart, Almazbek Atambayev, was reported in the past tense.52 A spokesperson for the channel said the report had been an error, but, when a line of mysterious trucks was spotted outside the Kremlin’s walls that very same evening, speculation reached fever pitch.53 Putin had been deposed in a palace coup.He was visiting his alleged lover, the ‘extremely flexible gymnast’, Alina Kabaeva, who had reportedly given birth to a baby Putin in Switzerland. Or was he dead? (Someone quickly spliced together footage of Putin saying ‘and snuffed it’, over a grimy hip-hop beat, and uploaded the clip to YouTube.54) Russians with long memories started to wonder how long it would be before their television channels started to air nothing but looped performances of Swan Lake, the Tchaikovsky ballet that had been broadcast by state media during the unsuccessful 1991 coup by KGB hardliners, as well as ahead of the announcements of the deaths in quick succession of Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.
Amid the cacophony of conspiracy theories, there soon emerged one dominant version of events. That Putin had retreated from public view in order to resolve a vicious behind-the-scenes conflict between the FSB and Kadyrov. For the many analysts and journalists who supported this theory, the only issue in doubt was the final outcome: whose side would the president take? Would Putin risk losing the support of the Moscow-based state security service, or would he abandon his merciless Chechen ally?
The tangled web of alleged plots and possible motives around Nemtsov’s murder had been complicated even further by widespread speculation that the FSB was exploiting the brazen assassination to put pressure on Kadyrov, a bitter foe and rival for influence. The history of enmity between the FSB and the Chechen leader dated back almost a decade. In May 2007, just months after Kadyrov had become president of Chechnya, formalizing his already de facto rule of the republic, local FSB officers had refused to allow armed men from Kadyrov’s personal guard into their headquarters. Kadyrov’s response? He ordered his men to weld shut all the building’s entrances and exits.55 A violent escalation of the situation was only averted by the intervention of Nikolai Patrushev, the then head of the FSB. Four years later, when Chechen security personnel were arrested in Moscow on abduction and torture charges, but then subsequently allowed to walk free, furious FSB officers leaked information and gave anonymous interviews to opposition newspapers.56
‘The FSB hate Ramzan [Kadyrov] because they are unable to control him,’ Alexey Malashenko, an expert on the Caucasus region at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told The New York Times. ‘He does whatever he wants, including in Moscow. Nobody can arrest members of his team if there is no agreement with Putin.’57
The FSB was also rumoured to be nervous about Kadyrov’s growing political ambitions. ‘There are only two politicians in Russia, Putin and Kadyrov,’ said analyst Andrei Okara. ‘The rest are bureaucrats, propaganda agents or clowns.’58 It was an evaluation that rang true. Aside from Putin, Kadyrov was the only high-level official in Russia both willing and able to force his own agenda on the national stage. Despite his frequent declarations of devotion to Putin, his actions demonstrated a genuine independence, something no other member of the Russian political elite could boast. This independence was highlighted dramatically later that year when Kadyrov, enraged by the killing of a Chechen man in Grozny by police from the neighbouring Stavropol region, ordered his security forces to open fire on law-enforcement officers from other Russian regions. ‘I am officially stating, if any [security officer], whether from Moscow or Stavropol, appears on your territory without your knowledge, shoot to kill. They have to take us into account,’ he said in a statement aired on Grozny TV. Kadyrov later said his comments had been the result of ‘emotions’, but the incident was another reminder of the Chechen leader’s seemingly insatiable appetite for confrontation.59
For much of his blood-soaked reign, Kadyrov had been content to concern himself with events in Chechnya and the neighbouring North Caucasus republics. But with the start of the war in Ukraine, and the dramatic deterioration of Russia’s relations with the West, Kadyrov increasingly sought to influence Kremlin policy. From an offer by the Chechen parliament to provide weapons to ‘separatist movements’ in Texas to the flow of Chechen fighters to eastern Ukraine, Kadyrov was flexing his muscles like never before. It was likewise no secret that he coveted a high post in Moscow, and that he wished to install his cousin, Adam Delimkhanov, as his successor in Chechnya. There was even talk that Kadyrov, this former rebel fighter with only a rudimentary formal education, had his eye on the Russian presidency. All of which would have made the FSB extremely uncomfortable.
Accordingly, a series of security services leaks to Russian media followed Nemtsov’s murder, including a report that suggested the killing had been orchestrated by one Major Ruslan Geremeyev, a Chechen security officer and close Kadyrov ally. Another security services source told the opposition-friendly Rosbalt news agency that at least one of the suspects in the murder had used a government ticket-booking service to reserve his seat on the plane that took him to Moscow from Grozny.60 Rumours of a vicious behind-the-scenes power struggle gripped Moscow’s chattering classes.
‘For the first time in his 15-year rule Putin has encountered a really serious problem: a virtually open conflict between the two pillars of his power, the federal security establishment and Ramzan Kadyrov,’ wrote Stanislav Belkovsky, a well-connected former Kremlin insider. ‘As far as I know, the FSB is almost directly accusing Ramzan Kadyrov of involvement in Boris Nemtsov’s murder, and is demanding that Kadyrov be jailed. Putin can’t give up Kadyrov, but he can’t humiliate the federal security force either.’61
If anything was to happen to Kadyrov, a new war in Chechnya would be almost inevitable – would Putin back out on the Faustian agreement he had concluded with the former rebel fighter? It seemed unlikely. War in Ukraine was one thing, but a new brutal conflict in the Caucasus would pose a direct threat to Putin.
Ten days after he had first gone missing, Putin resurfaced. He looked and sounded in good health. But his reappearance had coincided with reports that investigators were about to reclassify the Nemtsov murder from a contract killing to a hate crime. This would mean that the investigation would end with Dadayev and his alleged accomplices. In these circumstances, Kadyrov would be safe from any possible prosecution. Had Putin made his choice?
‘Putin appeared, live and legitimate, at exactly the same moment when Interfax reported that the Nemtsov assassination wasn’t a contract hit,’ said Leonid Volkov, a leading activist and analyst with Navalny’s anti-corruption movement. ‘Putin had to make a decision. Either feed Kadyrov to the FSB-men, or give up the FSB to Kadyrov. It’s a difficult and unpleasant choice… And he chose the one and only thing he could choose: Kadyrov.’62
If analysts like Belkovsky and Volkov were right, then Nemtsov’s murder had exposed dangerous fault lines within Putin’s system. Yet there could be no cause for celebration for opposition activists. Putin’s foes were in more danger than ever. Just weeks after Nemtsov’s assassination, one of his fellow party members, an activist named Vladimir Kara-Murza, fell into a coma with acute kidney failure after becoming ill at the offices of a state news agency in Moscow. Just days before, Kara-Murza and his colleagues at the Open Russia pressure group had released a documentary film detailing torture, murder and corruption allegations in Chechnya. The activist’s family suspected poisoning, but tests were inconclusive. A week after he had lost consciousness, Kara-Murza emerged from his coma. Unsurprisingly, he did not feel safe in a Moscow hospital, and fled Russia to seek continued medical treatment abroad. ‘I am certain that this was not an accident, but I cannot say anything definitively,’ he told me, from a hospital in Europe. ‘What is certain is that over these past fifteen years political opponents of Vladimir Putin have had a very unfortunate track record.’63 His father, also an opposition journalist named Vladimir, echoed his son’s thoughts. ‘Maybe they’ve thought up some new poison,’ he said. ‘If someone wanted to scare us, then they have done so.’64
The Kara-Murzas were not the only ones frightened. Even before Nemtsov’s murder, as the crackdown on dissent gained pace, there had been a fresh wave of emigration from Putin’s Russia. The official statistics were startling: the number of disenchanted Russians who left their country for foreign shores in the two years following Putin’s 2012 return to the Kremlin was some five times higher than in the two before he began a new presidential term. Experts said the real number may have been much higher.65
Those leaving were some of Russia’s best and brightest. In an opinion poll published in mid-2014 by Moscow’s Levada Centre pollster, one in every four Russians with a higher education indicated they were seeking to emigrate. The figure rose to nearly one in three among those who described themselves as ‘well-off’. Of those respondents planning to move abroad, 31% said they wanted to provide a ‘worthy and hopeful future’ for their children.66 But unlike past brain drains in modern Russia, which were more about economics, the reasons behind this exodus had more to do with politics than money.
The list of talented Russians who have fled their country since Putin returned to the Kremlin makes for lengthy and depressing reading. One of the most high profile of those to book their tickets on the modern-day version of ‘the philosophers’ steamboat’ – the name given to the exodus of educated Russians after the Bolshevik Revolution – was Yevgenia Chirikova, the housewife turned eco-activist who had played a major role in the 2011–12 protests. ‘I decided to remove my greatest vulnerability from Russia – my children,’ she explained, after settling in Estonia.67
Another to have turned his back on Russia is Pavel Durov, the founder of the successful VKontakte social network website, often described as Russia’s Facebook. In a statement explaining his departure, Durov said he had been forced out of the company over his refusal to co-operate with the security services, and that his company was now under the ‘full control’ of Kremlin-friendly figures. Leonid Bershidsky, a well-known journalist who was the founding editor of Russia’s top business daily, Vedomosti, as well as the first publisher of the Russian edition of Forbes, is another who has cut his losses. ‘The Kremlin doesn’t care because it doesn’t consider the likes of me Russia’s best and brightest,’ he told me by email after his departure to Germany. ‘To them, we’re the traitors, the fifth column.’68
While the exit of opposition-friendly activists and journalists was unlikely to cost Putin too many sleepless nights, there were others leaving with them whom Russia could ill afford to lose, from scientists to economists to talented young graduates. ‘The brain drain is significant and symptomatic,’ said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst.69
‘[I] try to count how many friends and colleagues have left Russia already, and stop counting when I run out of fingers on both hands,’ wrote Moscow-based human-rights worker Tanya Lokshina in May 2015, in an article that read as an obituary for the brief flowering of Russian civil society that had occurred in 2011 and 2012. ‘Some left because they could no longer do their work. Some feared for their lives or the lives of their loved ones. This exodus is a loss for Russia. These people were in fact Russia’s future, the future stolen from the Russian society by the powers that be.’70
For many of those in the anti-Putin movement who have dared remain in Russia, their struggle has taken on an undisguised moral element. Modern-day examples of the Communist-era inakomyslyashchie – literally, ‘those who think differently’ – these men and women are no longer simply pushing political programmes: many are unaffiliated with any of Russia’s beleaguered and often outlawed opposition parties. Instead, by their willingness to speak out, to risk dismissal from their workplaces, or arrest, or beatings, or worse, they are simply refusing, in the famous words of the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to ‘live a lie’. Their bravery rarely makes the news, either in Russia or the West. They are Russia’s near-anonymous, modern-day dissidents, possessed of a quiet resolve to build a fairer future for their troubled homeland.
They are people like Mark Galperin, a forty-seven-year-old anti-Putin activist who is facing up to five years behind bars after being one of the first to be charged under Putin’s new draconian laws on public protest. ‘We are engaged in a struggle. It’s our task to bring about regime change,’ he told me, when we met in a central Moscow café one afternoon in the spring of 2015. ‘It is the minority who always make history.’ Aside from criminal charges, Galperin and his fellow activists face frequent harassment, and even assault, from state-sponsored activists emboldened by Putin’s attacks on the opposition. ‘These pro-Kremlin groups will not stick their necks out for Putin when push comes to shove,’ Galperin said. ‘But opposition activists risk their freedom, their lives every day.’71
They are people like Ruslan Leviyev, a former police investigator from the Siberian city of Surgut, who left the force after becoming disgusted by the ‘culture of corruption’ he had witnessed, and moved to Moscow in 2009. Inspired, like so many others, by the anti-Putin protests of 2011–12, Leviyev, a tattooed twenty-nine-year-old, is now one of the country’s top ‘social media dissidents’. Armed only with a computer, and aided by a team of five anonymous internet assistants, Leviyev scours social media in search of evidence of Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine. His quest frequently takes him offline: Leviyev has travelled to towns and villages across Russia in search of graves of soldiers killed in eastern Ukraine. ‘Sometimes when I explain to the family members of dead soldiers that it’s wrong that we are sending young men to die in an illegal war, and that Putin disowns them when they perish, I can make a connection. They start to understand,’ he told me, when I questioned him as to his motives for his arduous and dangerous work. Under a new law signed into force by Putin in May 2015 that makes all deaths of Russian soldiers during ‘special operations’ a state secret, Leviyev and his fellow activists now face up to seven years behind bars. But the activist refuses to be frightened off. ‘I’m determined to carry on. I’m ready for prison. I’ll get through it, if it comes to it,’ he told me, as we spoke opposite a freshly painted portrait of the Soviet military commander Marshal Zhukov in central Moscow. ‘All this hysterical propaganda has resulted in a degradation of society. We have to put an end to this as soon as possible. Otherwise things will only get a lot worse.’72
They are people like Denis Bakholdin, a thirty-three-year-old financial expert, whom I first met ahead of the anti-war protest in Moscow in March 2014. He was standing near Red Square, in his hands a sign urging people to attend the upcoming rally. It was rush-hour, and it didn’t take long before he attracted the attention of passers-by. ‘Only a bastard would go on that!’ yelled a middle-aged man, his face flushed with rage, after reading the sign, which was painted in the colours of both the Russian and Ukrainian flags. ‘We don’t need a Maidan here!’ Shortly after, a swarm of pro-Kremlin youth activists surrounded Bakholdin and his dozen or so fellow protesters. ‘Traitors!’ they chanted, before police officers moved in to break up the gathering.
Bakholdin is a rank-and-file protester who says he has no interest in a career in politics. A quietly spoken, studious man, he has paid a high price for his public opposition to Putin’s rule. Shortly before that afternoon’s protest, he had been dismissed from his well-paid job at a privately owned Moscow bank. The reason? His refusal to promise he would cease his frequent attendance at opposition rallies. The vice-president of the bank, it turned out, was a member of Putin’s United Russia party, and had ordered management to ‘tame’ Bakholdin, or get rid of him. ‘I told them straight out that I was opposed to Putin, and that what I do in my own time is my own business,’ Bakholdin told me. His defiance means he is unlikely to find work any time soon: bank management wrote in his work book – the document that all Russians are obliged by law to present to employers – that he had ‘violated work discipline on multiple occasions’. He is now surviving on his rapidly dwindling savings.
I suggested that Bakholdin would perhaps be wise to consider following the well-beaten path out of Russia for a few years. If not until Putin leaves office, then at least until the searing hatred for those who dare to dissent has cooled. He smiled, as if humouring me. ‘I’ve thought a lot about leaving Russia, and trying to start a new life in Europe,’ he shrugged. ‘I’ve seen how much better things are there. But, look, if your neighbour has better wallpaper and nicer furniture, you don’t just move into their apartment. You try to improve your own home, right?’ He paused. ‘So that’s exactly what I plan to do here.’73