Jail, Exile, or Death: Three Outcomes of Opposing Putin-Robin Shepherd
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/5640/jail_exile_or_death_three_outcomes_of_opposing_putin
Did Putin order Boris Nemtsov’s murder? That question risks missing the point. The Russian state is a collection of financial, political and security interests that will do whatever it takes to protect their position. Instilling fear does not require an order from the top.
So, “Will no-one rid me of this troublesome priest”? Or, “Blow his brains out!” We will probably never know what kind of chain of command was at work in Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin concerning the assassination of former Deputy Prime Minister and Putin critic Boris Nemtsov.
But we do know this. If you take on the Russian state in any meaningful way you must reckon with three potential outcomes: prison, exile, or death.
The most famous political prisoner of the Putin era was of course Mikhail Khodorkovsky who spent years in a labour camp on essentially trumped up charges for using his vast wealth — he was once Russia’s richest man — to threaten an alternative to the Putin regime. It is easy to forget that he was once regarded as a potential Russian president.
The most famous exile was Boris Berezovsky who often said that if he ever returned to Russia from Britain he would be shot dead right at the airport. As it happened, he died in an apparent suicide in 2013, though the coroner eventually returned an open verdict.
Berezovsky, perhaps the iconic oligarch of the 1990s, was a fierce critic of Putin’s Kremlin which effectively declared him public enemy number 1.
Boris Nemtsov was shot four times in the back in what looks like a drive-by murder in the centre of Moscow on Friday night. Hours earlier, he had appeared on Ekho Moskvy radio encouraging people to join a demonstration on Sunday.
He wasn’t the first Putin critic to pay the ultimate price for his opposition. Back in 2006, the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in the elevator at her apartment block.
Such is the way of things in modern Russia.
Of course, we all want to know who ordered Nemtsov’s murder. Someone did. This was not a random attack, or a robbery gone wrong. Someone wanted him dead.
Was that “someone” Vladimir Putin? Quite possibly, though that isn’t the same as saying he gave the order. Though Putin is the most powerful single figure, the Russian state is not a Hollywood-style one man dictatorship.
It is better understood as a collection of financial, political and security interests for which Putin is the figurehead. These interests do not need an order from Vladimir Putin to know how to protect their position.
Nor do they need to engage in mass terror. Like the dictatorship in Belarus, they know that selective action against specific targets can spread a generalised message of fear throughout society.
And make no mistake about it, Russia today is a frightened society. The question that every oppositionist is now asking is this: Who’s next?
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