Russian president Vladimir Putin has condemned the murder of his leading political opponent Boris Nemtsov as “vile”. He is entirely right. The situation in Russia, where anyone who dares to challenge the increasingly autocratic Kremlin leadership is killed off by anonymous hoods, is indeed “vile”. Putin's regrets at Nemtsov's assassination are crocodile tears. The killing took place on Friday, two days before Nemtsov was due to lead a mass protest through Moscow. That event would have been the latest in a tide of protest against Russia's current leadership. Sunday's march went ahead, with maybe as many as 70,000 people. But instead of being galvanized by a speech from Nemstov, the crowd had to listen to its own impotent chants of protest as it mourned the slain politician.
If Putin was watching the demonstration from within the safety of the Kremlin walls, he would have been satisfied that what might have been a new and threatening challenge to his leadership had been turned into a massive wake. For him, the protestors probably now seemed a chicken without a head. They could run around for a little longer, but they had no idea where they were going and, as he will be calculating, will soon lie down and die.
The slain leader's colleagues were loud in their condemnation of the murder, but they will now each be asking themselves if they are prepared to step into Nemstov's shoes. He had said that he fully expected to be targeted by the Putin regime, but he had also said that he was not afraid. His murder brings to seven the number of leading opponents of the Putin Kremlin who have been murdered, two of them abroad in exile. Sergey Yushenkov, a Putin critic was gunned down in Moscow in 2003, two journalists, the Russian editor of Forbes magazine Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politovskaya, were also shot dead and another, Yuri Shchekochikhin died after a mystery illness. This may have been plutonium poisoning, which is what killed Alexander Litvinenko in exile London. Also to die in unexplained circumstances in the UK was the billionaire Putin critic, Boris Berezovsky.
Under Putin, leading critics have also been jailed, such as the former billionaire owner of the Yukos oil company Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Yury Shutov, who died in prison and most recently critic Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg. In a neat twist, Alexei's sentence for fraud was suspended while his brother was given ten years, thus becoming a hostage for Alexei's good behavior.
All of this, as Putin says, is “vile”. But at present he can afford to be as vile as he likes towards his opponents. His already-strong popularity ratings soared after he invaded the Ukraine and there is considerable support for his aggression in eastern Ukraine. At the same time there is a general feeling that those who protest Putin's leadership are unpatriotic and seeking to undermine Russia from within. Therefore few ordinary Russians will have been particularly upset by the murders of Nemtsov and other Kremlin critics.
Popular protest is currently largely middle class and based on political principles. It will be a different matter if, because of international sanctions and enduring weak oil prices, the Russian state finances begin to collapse. Then Putin could face streets thronging with angry, hungry ordinary people accusing him of leading them to disaster. That would be a far more dangerous sort of challenge.
