International
Al Jazeera America
Liberal Russians are growing increasingly fearful of the political climate in Russia since the Feb. 27 assassination of Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader and a vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin. Many see it as the grimmest sign yet that there won’t be an evolution toward a more Western liberal market economy. Grimmer still is the assessment that this will have virtually no impact on Putin’s hold over Russians.
“Boris Nemtsov’s murder is just the latest in a series of killings of Putin critics,” says Chrystia Freeland, a Canadian Parliament member and former Financial Times Moscow bureau chief. She calls it a shift from a “soft authoritarian path” to “violent dictatorship.” Last March she was barred from entering Russia, along with 12 other Canadian officials, in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Moscow over the annexation of Crimea.
In 2003 there was the mysterious death of investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin, who had written a series of reports alleging a nexus between the secret service and the Russian prosecutor general’s office. In 2006, Anna Politkovsky, an award-winning journalist and a Kremlin critic, was shot outside her Moscow home. Alexander Litvinenko, former Russian secret service agent turned dissident died of polonium poisoning in London the same year.
Boris Nemtsov
Slain Russian Opposition Leader
Shot four times in the back, Nemtsov, was a former deputy prime minister who dared make direct and radical statements against the Kremlin. Just hours before his murder, he openly criticized Putin in an interview with Ekho Moskvy, a radio station in Moscow. “When the power is concentrated in the hands of one person and this person always rules, everything ends up in an absolute catastrophe. Absolute.”
He was galvanizing support for the Anti-Crisis Spring March to demand political reform and lead the opposition’s revival. The march, planned for March 1, turned into a memorial march. Yet with the world watching and grief-stricken Russians protesting, the opposition failed to capitalize. Attendance appeared under the 50,000 people the opposition had hoped for, Reuters reported.
“Unfortunately, as much as we’d love to believe that Nemtsov’s murder will undermine support for Vladimir Putin, the reality is most Russians simply don't care,” says Maria Snegovaya, a columnist at Vedomosti, a Russian business daily. She points out that the number of people at the march roughly equaled those of past opposition protests.
Nemtsov’s perception in Russia also plays a role in the lack of a widespread public response. Many conservative Russians saw him as a traitor for opposing the war in Ukraine, with Russian state media’s painting Ukraine’s February 2014 ouster of Moscow-leaning President Viktor Yanukovych as a fascist coup only adding to that belief.
The lack of a unified agenda is another stumbling block for the opposition, which has failed to turn protesters’ emotions into actionable demands. “You have thousands of lost and disoriented people who feel hopeless to change the country’s dangerous direction in the near future,” says Snegovaya.
But demanding reform in the current political climate may be tough. Russian liberals and opposition groups are fearful. Their concerns include growing persecution by Russian authorities and “patriotic” groups signaling a descent into a repressive totalitarian regime.
Is there anyone left to stand up to the government now? Yes and no. The most promising among them, Alexei Navalny, who was recently released after a 15-day jail sentence for handing out leaflets in Moscow to promote a protest rally, vowed to keep fighting and not let Nemtsov’s assassination silence him.
However, Nemtsov was among the opposition’s most charismatic and eloquent leaders; his most important contribution was unifying a fractured opposition that otherwise suffered collective action problems.
“Overall, there are people left, but they are few, and their ranks are thinning,” laments Snegovaya.
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