Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder

373 Pages·2017·15.31 MB·English

by  Amy Knight

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About the Author
Copyright Page

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To Marina Litvinenko, a woman of extraordinary courage and perseverance
Nobody has proven that he’s killed anyone.… He’s always denied it.… It has
not been proven that he’s killed reporters.
—DONALD TRUMP,
speaking about Russian president Vladimir Putin, December 2015
A dog senses when somebody is afraid of it, and bites.… If you become jittery,
they will think that they are stronger. Only one thing works in such
circumstances—to go on the offensive. You must hit first, and hit so hard that
your opponent will not rise to his feet.
—VLADIMIR PUTIN,
First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait
Our two leaders of the Western World.
(Photograph courtesy of Mikhail Pochuyev/TASS)
INTRODUCTION
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 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