It was soon after the second Chechen war.
I had come to Russia to interview Igor Ivanov,
Russia’s minister of foreign affairs at the time.
I took advantage of the trip to see, at the
offices of an association of mothers of soldiers, a man who was then only a
former governor of Nizhny-Novgorod. He had long been the presumed heir of
Yeltsin but was overtaken in the home stretch by Vladimir Putin, the KGB man.
At the time Nemtsov had not yet become
the embodiment of the democratic opposition in Russia.
But he had the charm, the charisma, and—behind
the handsome face of a stubborn, wary boxer—the hypnotic intensity of those who
have, even if they are not yet fully aware of it, decided to devote their life
to a cause greater than themselves.
And I recall the calm, almost logical, anger
with which he described some of the bloodiest episodes of the fall of Grozny
the month before. Such radical independence was not common in a democratic camp
contaminated by Great Russian nationalism, which persists to this day even in a
man like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and it made of this reasonable yet fervent young man the
most lucid and above all the most complete opponent of the new “red-brown”
tyranny that was raining on Russia.
Those who killed him on Feb. 27 on
the great stone bridge just outside the Kremlin knew that.
They knew that they were eliminating the man
who, from Chechnya to the immense exercise in corruption that was the Sochi
Olympics, and passing through his uncompromising defense of press freedom, was
the most consequential of the nation’s opposition leaders.
They knew that the man they gunned down, who, for
more than 10 years had never stopped denouncing the mafia-like quality of
Putin’s tyranny, was about to make public (as he had announced) a report
proving the direct involvement of the Russian military in Donbas.
They could not have been unaware that their
target that night was the soul and the conscience of the party of choice of the
growing number of people who understood, even in Moscow, that the war in
eastern Ukraine was madness—not only criminal but suicidal and apt to end with
Russia on its knees.
In short, in the manner of the assassins of Anna
Politkovskaya in 2006, the killers of Sergei Magnitsky and Stanislav Markelov in
2009, and others, they killed the man whose resounding voice—a voice that even
when stifled never went silent—was the honor of the Russian people, whose
highest values Putin is doing his best to betray.
Nemtsov was the anti-Putin.
Whereas one self-identifies with Stalin and
the worst czar in Russian history, Nicholas I, the other was the heir to Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the dissidence of the Soviet era.
And it is obvious that his death is a harsh
blow for the truly great Russia, the Russia that is great not through arms but
in spirit and in that insatiable yearning for freedom that extends from the
Decembrists to Boris Pasternak, embracing Alexander Pushkin’s and Mikhail Lermontov’s odes to
“Circassian liberty,” which Nemtsov may well have had in mind at the time
of our meeting 14 years ago.
As I write, no one knows who ordered the
crime.
And we can rely on the devious Putin to
produce, at just the right moment, the ideal perpetrator whose personality and
affiliations will reinforce the fanatical conspiricism that he feeds his people.
But what we already know is that such a horror
was possible only in a Russia that has suffered from two decades of unpunished
state-sponsored violence.
What is sure is that Nemtsov would still
be alive and leading Sunday’s anti-war demonstration, a call to which he issued
on the Ekho Moskyy channel just three hours before his death, if Putin’s Russia
had not spent the last 20 years hunting down opposition figures and
methodically dragging through the mud and suppressing anyone professing
democratic values.
Nemtsov’s murder resembles that of Jean Jaurès on July 31, 1914, in the sense that history recalls less clearly the direct perpetrator than the
ill wind that made the murder possible, a wind that, in Jaurès’s France, had
been blowing for years through the far right, nationalistic, and anti-Alfred Dreyfus
press.
Let us hope that the parallels end there.
Let us hope that Nemtsov’s death will never
come to have the retrospective meaning of the demise of the last advocate of
internationalism before the catastrophe of 1914.
A similar hope seems to be on the minds of the
massive outpouring of Muscovites and many others from around the country who
came into the streets on March 1 to pay tribute to their assassinated Russian
hero.
One might have expected an opposition dazed,
paralyzed and intimidated by those four revolver shots—one shot, observed
Nemtsov’s friend Garry Kasparov, for each of the children he left behind.
But no.
The opposite was true.
Far from falling back into line and yielding
to terror, tens of thousands of Russian men and women, in the manner of the
French who so recently proclaimed “Je suis Charlie,” came out to shout “I am
Boris” into the ears of Putin, who has never faced an adversary as
vibrantly alive as this newly dead man.
Sunday’s marches, beautiful and solemn, in
which Ukrainian flags mingled with Russian, were the first real reversal for
the party of war in Europe.
