The Presumption of Guilt - the case of Boris Nemtsov

Since the shooting of Boris Nemtsov (may he rest in peace) in Moscow on Friday, the assumption behind almost everything written and said in British media has been that Vladimir Putin is in some way responsible. Nobody actually says it outright, but you cannot miss the tone. Our Prime Minister, the Hero of Libya and the Guardian of Our Borders, the Great Reformer of Schools and the Man Who Saved the Economy (by borrowing even more money than before) found time to demand an investigation of the killing.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11441729/David-Cameron-says-callous-murder-of-Boris-Nemtsov-must-be-rapidly-investigated.html

 

I should have thought that, with this country awash with uninvestigated, let alone unsolved,  crimes, he might have more pressing concerns.

 

And, if he is so hot on expansionist, repressive police states, perhaps he should be summoning Prince William home from Peking, where the heir to throne is currently consorting with one of the world’s most intolerant and ruthless police states, which can disappear and kill its opponents through the use of utterly subservient courts, police forces - all unexamined by a press so controlled that it makes Russia’s look free.  Prince Charles ought also to be quietly asked to reduce the frequency of his visits to Saudi Arabia, but, whoops, I am applying consistent principles here, which always leads to trouble.   

 

What does an ‘uncallous’ murder look like, by the way? Is there even such a thing?  The incessant deployment of adjectives by modern politicians and media is causing grave strain at the adjective mines in Turkmenistan where (in a little-known but grave, pressing, menacing and indeed possibly terrifying crisis) , adjective-miners are threatening to strike if they are not more richly rewarded. The price of ‘despicables’ has risen to unprecedented heights, and ‘cowardlies’ can now only be obtained on the black market. The only other major adjective mines are in Siberia, under Russian control.

 

This weblog is taking part in a voluntary rationing scheme, under which we seek to limit the use of adjectives to essentials only.

 

Now, back to the murder:

 

First of all, does anyone really think that, when news of Mr Nemtsov’s death reached the Kremlin offices of Mr Putin, that despot whooped with joy and said ‘That is just what we need!’

 

 In what way would Mr Nemtsov’s death help Mr Putin? With all due respect to the dead, Mr Nemtsov was, like his whole generation of Russian politicians, almost totally discredited in the eyes of most Russian voters by his association with the Yeltsin era of gangster privatisation. Though not himself an Oligarch, he was friendly with some of them (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/01/boris-nemtsov ). This absence of effective and convincing leaders has greatly limited the power of the anti-Putin opposition.  Moscow liberals tend to blame this problem on Mr Putin’s repression, which is partly true, but it is also much to do with the general awfulness of the Yeltsin years.  

 

 

Interestingly,  Mr Nemtsov’s foreign policy appears to have been not that different from Mr Putin’s. Mark Almond wrote in the Daily Telegraph today that he  ‘remember[s] Nemtsov pleading with Margaret Thatcher to use her influence to stop Nato expanding into Russia’s backyard because it would revive anti-Western nationalism. He didn’t see the West as a threat, but knew Russians saw its defence wing as one. Because Russians are well aware of the hostility of the Baltic States, for instance, to their old masters in Moscow, the Nato expansion to include Soviet territory was seen as the vanguard of a potential war of revenge by the ex-subject peoples.’

 

Mr Almond’s article (here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11443566/With-the-murder-of-Boris-Nemtsov-Vladimir-Putins-attack-dogs-have-slipped-the-leash.html )

 is interesting and subtle compared with most of the stuff appearing on this subject at the moment. His point, that Mr Putin is not at one with the wilder Russian monarchists and ultra-nationalists who have joined  the rebels in Donetsk and seek to entangle Russia in war there, is neglected by crude anti-Putin writers, but valid. All modern Russian strategists are very wary of foreign entanglements, after being drawn into the mantrap of Afghanistan by Jimmy Carter, the decision which more or less finished the USSR.  Towards the end of an article to which I refer below, Edward Lucas also engages in similar speculation about these ‘thuggish paramilitaries’  , which is much more worthy of his intelligence than the stuff about Kirov and Stalin.

 

One has to ask how these ultra-nationalists became important.  I have my own theories, and it is not the Kremlin I blame (the Kremlin would much rather not have to deal with these people).

 

The picture caption in the Telegraph article makes the same amusing mistake as so many others do, confusing the ice-cream domes and curlicues of St Basil’s Cathedral with the very different  towers of the Kremlin itself, which is nearby but not the same thing.

 

This trivial but startling error, made by so many news outlets in the last few days, symbolises rather well the sketchy ideas of most Westerners about Russia, its nature and history. Mixing up St Basil’s with the Kremlin is , in British terms, like mistaking the Houses of Parliament for Westminster Abbey. And if you saw a Russian TV or newspaper reporter opining weightily on British politics, while making that error, you would wonder about the rest of what he or she said.

 

In any case, do we really think that the killers zoomed out of a secret gate in the Kremlin wall, drove up to Mr Nemtsov, murdered him and then drove back in to the famous fortress, there to be congratulated by the authorities who of course would have revelled in this action on the eve of an anti-government demonstration in Moscow? I mean, wouldn’t they? No.  The idea that the crime was done by anti-Putin provocateurs is indeed ridiculous. But it is no more ridiculous than the idea that it is Mr Putin’s work.

 

But if we don’t think that the killers came from there,  why has almost every news account stressed the closeness of the killing to the Kremlin?  Most of Moscow is close to the Kremlin, a  vast and sprawling city-fortress.

 

In fact, it happened there because Mr Nemtsov lived nearby and, unlike most prominent Russian public figures, was walking rather than in a car, and had no bodyguards. In a city where gangsterism is far from unknown (though I think it is less bad than it was in the Yeltsin boom years), and in which a flashy fat car is a symbol of importance,  this is unusual.

 

But alas, it made it much easier for any murderer to strike, succeed and vanish unscathed.

 

Mr Almond’s speculations are interesting , though (like everyone else’s) speculation is what they must remain until we have facts. Many things are alleged against the Putin state, and aren’t deemed to require much proof because everyone thinks he’s guilty anyway.

 

I personally think Mr Putin would have been mad and stupid to order or countenance the killing of Mr Nemtsov, who was much less of a threat to him alive than he is dead. The same goes for the journalist Anna Politkovskaya. No doubt she was a grave nuisance to the Kremlin, but, as a martyr, she does far deeper damage to the Russian state.

 

On the other hand,  the most unanswerable case against President Putin, and the one which leads me to classify him unequivocally as a sinister tyrant, is the crime against Sergei Magnitsky, mistreated to death in a prison cell while under the direct authority of the Russian state which Mr Putin heads.  

 

 

Interestingly, the phrase ‘sinister tyrant’ was used in this article today by my old friend and adversary Edward Lucas http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2974971/My-friend-s-murder-chilling-echoes-Stalin-Edward-Lucas.html

 

But, much as I love Edward (and I will be debating against him in Cambridge on Friday week http://www.sid.cam.ac.uk/life/news/762/poland-between-russia-and-germany.html ) I don’t buy his parallels between Putin and Stalin, or between Sergei Kirov and Boris Nemtsov.

 

The Stalin comparison seems to me to utterly misunderstand both Stalin, an ideological dictator on the edge of megalomania, invested with absolute power in a closed society, and Vladimir Putin, a surprisingly precarious minor despot, much mere comparable with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, where a repressive government is,  even so,  tempered by pockets of free media, an openness to foreign scrutiny, and even legal protest on the streets. Boris Nemtsov could not have existed in a Stalinist system.  As for the Russian media, no doubt they tell many lies and descend to crude propaganda.

 

But their view that the country is now under a sustained western attack is not wholly unfounded.

 

The catastrophe of western policy towards Russia, and its accelerating drive towards what may be actual war, is very well explained in a powerful new book by Professor Richard Sakwa, (Frontline Ukraine, Crisis in the Borderlands, published by I.B.  Tauris).  This book, interestingly, has been reviewed in only one newspaper, the Guardian,

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/19/frontline-ukraine-crisis-in-borderlands-richard-sakwa-review-account

I plan to review it here shortly. My main difficulty with it is that its author’s position is perhaps too close to mine. I would almost rather it was more hostile to my arguments.

 

But I will provide a couple of quotations which I think are rather apposite to our current mood:

 

‘In the end’, Professor Sakwa writes, ‘NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage the security threats provoked by its enlargement….This fateful geopolitical paradox – that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence – provoked a number of conflicts. …by treating Russia as the enemy, in the end it was in danger of becoming one’.