Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

by Bill Browder

Everything the authorities did following his murder showed they had no intention of getting to the truth. Instead of chasing proper leads, they raided Boris’s apartment and office, seizing his files, computers, phones, hard drives, and anything connected with his political activities. They were more interested in knowing who was assisting him in his opposition to Putin than establishing who had killed him. The authorities may not have been interested in the truth, but the Russian people were. Two days after his assassination, more than 50,000 of them took to the streets, stretching for miles along the Moscow River. What had been planned as an anti-Putin march before Boris had been killed was now a mass demonstration of public grief, one that demanded justice. Thousands of flowers had been placed on the spot where Boris was assassinated. The authorities swiftly removed these, but people kept coming back to put down more. This happened again and again and again. To this day, flowers still mark the location as a semi-permanent memorial to Boris Nemtsov. Boris’s murder caused such a furor that the Kremlin had to do something, so the authorities arrested five Chechen men (a sixth died in an explosion just as he was about to be arrested). One of these men confessed, but later it transpired that he had been tortured before his confession. Another of the men turned out to be an active member of the Russian Interior Ministry. Eventually, all five would be sentenced to long prison t...