Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder

On February 28, 2015, shortly after I had returned from London, where I attended hearings of the British High Court into the 2006 murder there of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, I woke up to terrible news. Late on the previous night, Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s leading democratic oppositionist, had been gunned down while walking with his girlfriend on a bridge just minutes from the Kremlin. I’d never met Nemtsov in person, but had several conversations with him by phone in the spring of 2008, when I was writing an article for The New York Review of Books about a groundbreaking report Nemtsov had just published, together with his colleague Vladimir Milov, on the vast corruption of the Putin regime.¹ Nemtsov, who continued to meticulously document claims against Putin in further reports, and traveled to Washington to urge the U.S. Congress to broaden the list of Putin’s cronies who were on the U.S. sanctions list because of their human-rights violations and the invasion of Crimea, was my hero and a hero to many others in both Russia and the West. Now he was no more.

When I heard about Nemtsov’s murder, I recalled, with a shiver, a visit I’d had with Milov in Moscow in March 2008, when Nemtsov was traveling abroad. Milov explained to me why it was so important for him and Nemtsov to publish their scathing indictment of the Putin regime. They were trying, against seemingly insurmountable odds, to get the truth out about Putin and his allies so that their democratic movement would gain momentum. Milov, a former official in the Russian government, told me that he had heard that their report had created a “hysterical” reaction in the Kremlin and led to urgent high-level meetings. I asked him if he was not worried that he and Nemtsov were in danger. He just laughed and said that if anything happened to them, it would be a huge advertisement for their report. Something did happen. Seven years later, the Kremlin finally got its revenge.

Nemtsov’s murder sent shock waves throughout Russia and beyond. U.S. President Barack Obama, who had met Nemtsov in Moscow in 2009, condemned the killing and praised Nemtsov for his defense of human rights and his “courageous dedication to the struggle against corruption in Russia.” But Obama unfortunately avoided the fact that Nemtsov’s revelations about Russian corruption were directed specifically at Putin and his close cronies, which was probably why he was killed. Obama said that “we call upon the Russian government to conduct a prompt, impartial, and transparent investigation into the circumstances of his murder and ensure that those responsible for this vicious killing are brought to justice.” Did he not realize, after more than six years of dealing with the Kremlin, that a transparent investigation of the case was virtually impossible in Putin’s Russia?

Many Russia experts, myself included, had already expressed the view that Putin and his colleagues were behind earlier killings of Russian oppositionists and independent journalists who criticized the regime. But the murder of Putin’s most outspoken foe on the doorstep of the Kremlin took his galling vengeance against his critics to a whole new level. The Bol’shoi Moskvoretskii Bridge, where Nemtsov was riddled with bullets from a Makarov pistol, was under the extensive surveillance (both by cameras and manned patrols) of Putin’s Federal Protective Service (FSO) because of its proximity to the Kremlin. Yet, strangely, the cameras were not working that fateful night and there were no patrols in sight. The killers, Chechens, were rounded up within a few days, but the person who orchestrated the murder has never been identified.

In looking at the Nemtsov killing after decades of studying the Soviet Union and Russia, I was struck by how scary and unpredictable Russia has become, even in comparison with the post-Stalin years, when Khrushchev and then Brezhnev were running the show. Yes, of course the Soviets had a massive nuclear-weapons arsenal (which the Russians still have) and there were dangerous confrontations between the Soviets and the West, most notably over Cuba in 1962 and later in the Middle East in 1967. Using the KGB, the Kremlin was ruthless in its persecution of political critics, throwing them in labor camps after mock trials or in psychiatric institutions. As a student in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1967, I was myself arrested by the KGB for consorting with dissidents and interrogated throughout the night, only to be released the next day after bribing my KGB questioners with Marlboro cigarettes. But Stalin’s successors did not, with a few exceptions, resort to killing dissidents; they did not need to.

Things are different now, in many ways. When I was arrested in Kiev, Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, and the Kremlin was in control of a vast territory. Now Ukraine has forged its own way as an independent state, along with countries in the Baltic region and states in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Putin regime does everything it can to maintain Russia’s sway over its former empire, but is increasingly threatened by the rise of democracy outside its borders. Indeed, the Kremlin greatly fears the spillover effect from people’s revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. So its modus operandi against opposition in Russia has become a murderous game: make an example of critics by killing them.

The new U.S. president, Donald Trump, has voiced admiration for his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, because, in Trump’s view, Putin rules with a strong hand at home and does not hesitate to boldly assert his country’s global interests. There is no doubt that Putin wields tremendous political power and that Russia’s military assertiveness abroad—in Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere—has made his country a major player in the global arena after its decline during the Yeltsin era. (This is not to mention Russia’s recent use of sophisticated cyberwarfare and disinformation to influence American and European electoral processes, which adds to the picture of Russia’s strength as a nation.)

But if one looks below the surface, one sees a different picture. Because of lower oil prices and Western sanctions, Russia’s economy is stagnating badly, with real incomes falling and its national debt growing significantly. Corruption, rampant among the Kremlin elite, has resulted in highly publicized scandals, and it may be only a matter of time before ordinary Russians will express resentment over the huge discrepancy between their modest incomes, many below the poverty line, and the vast wealth of Putin and his cronies.

It is important to remember that, unlike Boris Yeltsin, Putin did not achieve the presidency in 2000 on the basis of truly democratic elections. Yeltsin and his inner circle designated Putin as Yeltsin’s successor because, as head of the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, he was in a position to protect them from charges of corruption once Yeltsin left office. A huge government propaganda machine was put in place, with the help of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky and others, to ensure that Putin would become president in elections where no other meaningful candidate was offered.

Thanks to the Kremlin’s control of Russia’s three main television stations, which is where the majority of the population still gets its news, Russians continue to be fed a steady stream of anti-Western propaganda, coupled, of course, with constant glorification of Putin. All this has maintained Putin’s apparent popularity. But it is far from clear that these efforts will keep simmering discontent from rising to the surface, as it did in 2011–2012, and again in the spring of 2017, when there were mass protests against the Putin regime. The Kremlin wants to avoid a repetition of these events at all costs.

However much Trump admires Putin, the Russian president’s hold on power has always been more illusory than real because it is based on the mechanisms that all dictators use to ensure their rule: control of the media, military forays abroad to focus the population away from domestic concerns, elections that exclude democratic challengers, and suppression of internal political opposition. Lacking democratic legitimacy, regimes such as that of Putin are inherently weak and unstable. Nowhere is this weakness more clear than in the Kremlin’s use of political murder and terrorism as instruments to maintain its power, which is a subject I have followed closely for many years and is the topic of this book.

***

Nemtsov’s killing was the latest in a long string of political murders that have occurred under Putin. The victims include Kremlin critic and liberal Duma member Galina Starovoitova, shot to death in 1998 (just after Putin became head of the Russian FSB); Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of Forbes Russia, assassinated in Moscow in 2004; the courageous journalist Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down in 2006; ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London a month after Politkovskaya; and numerous other Russian journalists and political activists. (Nemtsov’s colleague Vladimir Kara-Murza came close to being on the list of such deaths. He was poisoned in Moscow not long after Nemtsov’s murder and barely survived, only to be poisoned yet again in February 2017.)

This is not to mention those who perished in the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia, which are widely assumed to have been the work of the FSB. Then there is the March 2013 death in London of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Putin’s long-time enemy, which many view as suspicious, and finally the FSB’s mysterious behind-the-scenes role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. The unexplained 2012 death in London of Aleksandr Perepilichnyi, a Russian businessman and whistleblower against the Kremlin, may well also be attributed to murder, once the inquest in Britain is completed.

As this book demonstrates, there is a distinct thread that ties these many cases together: the political motives of the Putin government that hover over the killings, and the vast amount of circumstantial evidence that points to Kremlin involvement. I do not claim to have definitive proof of the complicity of Putin and his allies in these crimes. That would be impossible, given that they control the investigations and that there would be no written orders. But the evidence leads us well beyond the premise of some Western observers—that Putin has only “created an environment for the violence” but may not be personally involved. One suspicious murder might be dismissed as coincidence, but these many crimes form a familiar pattern, which has been repeated over and over since Putin arrived in the Kremlin.

The late Harvard historian Franklin Ford observed in his book Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism that historical truth “is not determined by the institutional requirement that it be announced, flatly, at a given point in time. Instead it is truly the ‘daughter of time,’ in the sense that it is subject forever to possible revisions in light of new evidence…. There may be a temptation to say that because we don’t know everything, we really don’t know anything—we shall have to wait. That, however, seems irresponsible….”² Many of the cases I discuss in this book are ongoing, in the sense that new details are continually emerging. In ten or twenty years, more will be known, but it would indeed be irresponsible not to present the evidence against the Putin regime that is available now and let the reader judge. There is simply too much at stake—for the families of victims, the Russian people, and the West—to do otherwise.

Some have argued that Putin would not be so reckless as to order these killings, because he has his image to protect. But it has become clear to me that Putin’s need to eliminate critics outweighs this consideration, particularly since he always has plausible deniability and the power to have key facts covered up. Also, as I argue in this book, it seems that at some level Putin wants people to suspect Kremlin involvement in these murders as a way to intimidate those who oppose him.

My conclusions lead to larger questions, which are important for the West. What do the political murders tell us about the nature of the Putin regime and its likely future course? Will the killings continue unabated? Or will the Putin regime self-destruct, given its costly military forays abroad, the steep decline in the Russian economy, and the continued revelations of high-level corruption, touching even Putin’s closest comrades?

***

The Pentagon has been sounding the alarm about the Kremlin for several years now, warning that Russia, with its vast nuclear arsenal and its continued aggression beyond its borders, has become a huge threat to the United States and its allies. But state-sponsored political murder is a topic that Western governments have largely chosen to avoid because it raises uncomfortable truths whose implications the West is not ready to confront. How could such killings happen in what the Kremlin calls a “managed democracy,” where people are free to engage in private enterprise, travel internationally, and use the Internet? The West badly needs Russia’s cooperation in dealing with the Syrian conflict, Ukraine, and Iran. Can Western governments afford to shut Russia out because of its secret, or not-so-secret, political killings?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal in January 2017, political commentator Holman Jenkins postulated that “the CIA may … be able to tell us more than we already know about many convenient murders and suspicious deaths that greased Mr. Putin’s rise and protected him from inopportune disclosures.” But, he adds, “Let us stop kidding ourselves…. Western governments have kept silent even on the polonium murder in London of dissident Alexander Litvinenko, an act of international nuclear terrorism. Why? Because they are unwilling to press hard on the Putin regime, fearing either blowback or his replacement by the devil they don’t know.”³

Jenkins is all too right. According to one unnamed U.S. intelligence officer: “The Kremlin has aggressively stepped up its efforts to eliminate and silence its enemies abroad over the past couple of years.”⁴ Yet, as this book will stress, the White House and its European counterparts have largely turned a blind eye to the evidence of Kremlin complicity in these acts of murder and terrorism, for reasons of expediency. With this thesis in mind, my narrative will follow three interwoven threads: the courageous struggle of Russian independent journalists and politicians to expose the malfeasance of Putin’s regime; the Kremlin’s largely successful efforts to destroy this opposition through political killings, and to persuade the West that the real threat to Russia is terrorism, which they assert all nations face together; and the continued weak response among Western governments to the evidence that Putin has killed his own people and spread violence to the West. (Despite the overwhelming conclusions of a British High Court in January 2016 that Litvinenko was killed most probably on Kremlin orders, even the British government had a half-hearted reaction to the court’s findings. For Russia, there were no consequences.)

The Trump administration is unlikely to change this narrative. Indeed, Trump has stated clearly that he does not believe that Putin commits political murder and has even questioned the Russian role in cyber attacks against the United States. (It is significant that, while members of both the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress voiced outrage about Russian hacking in the 2016 presidential campaign, only a very few, including senators John McCain and Patrick Leahy, have expressed similar concern about the far more sinister aspect of Putin’s rule, political murder.)

Of course, Russia’s cyberwarfare, and its efforts to sway Western public opinion with propaganda and false news on the Internet, constitute a threat that needs to be met head-on. But the Kremlin’s use of murder against its own people—and its cynical role in terrorist attacks, including possibly the Boston bombings—also has important implications for the West in its dealings with Russia. In short, as this book will demonstrate, Western governments are facing in Russia a truly criminal regime. Acknowledging this publicly and insisting that the Kremlin must stop its use of covert violence should form the basis of all interactions that the U.S. and the rest of the West pursue with Russia.

It should be added that such acknowledgment may give hope to the embattled oppositionists and independent journalists in Russia who continue to make their voices heard. Recall that Western support for dissidents during the late Brezhnev and early Gorbachev years gave Russian democrats huge momentum to dismantle the corrupt and dictatorial Soviet system. Yes, Yeltsin turned out to be an erratic and ineffectual leader, whose commitment to democracy was half-hearted at best. And his political reforms were completely reversed under Putin. But that should not be reason to dismiss the current efforts of Russians who want to transform their government into a democracy.

For the purpose of my narrative, I should clarify what I mean by political murder. Franklin Ford defines the term as “homicide related to the body politic and its governance,” including “everything from the most narrowly targeted assassination to random killings designed to intimidate opponents, while calling attention to a given cause.”⁵ This seems appropriate for the term as I use it here, although I would point out that in the cases of the 1999 attacks in Russia and the Boston Marathon bombings, where victims were killed or injured en masse, the term “political murder,” as opposed to “assassination,” is synonymous with state-sponsored terrorism.

notes

¹ Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, Putin. Itogi. Nezavisimyi Ekspertnyi Doklad. (Putin. The Results: An Independent Expert Report.) (Moscow: Novaya gazeta, 2008). My article, “The Truth about Putin and Medvedev,” appeared in The New York Review of Books, 55, no. 8, May 15, 2008.

² Franklin Ford, Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1985), 367.

³ Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., “The CIA Keeps Putin’s Secrets,” The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2017.

⁴ “Poison in the System,” Buzzfeed, June 12, 2017. This is one of an excellent four-part series investigating suspicious deaths of Russians in Britain.

⁵ Franklin Ford, Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1985), 1.