[Russian authorities said on Saturday that they were investigating several theories about the crime, some immediately scorned as improbable, including the possibility that fellow members of the opposition had killed Mr. Nemtsov to create a martyr.]
MOSCOW — About two weeks before
he was shot and killed in the highest-profile political assassination in Russia
in a decade, Boris Y. Nemtsov met with an old friend to discuss his latest
research into what he said was dissembling and misdeeds in the Kremlin.
He was, as always,
pugilistic and excited, saying he wanted to publish the research in a pamphlet
to be called “Putin and the War,” about PresidentVladimir
V. Putin and Russian involvement in the Ukraine conflict,
recalled Yevgenia Albats, the editor of the New Times magazine. Both knew the
stakes.
Mr. Nemtsov, a former
deputy prime minister, knew his work was dangerous but tried to convince her
that, as a former high official in the Kremlin, he enjoyed immunity, Ms. Albats
said.
“He was afraid of being
killed,” Ms. Albats said. “And he was trying to convince himself, and me, they
wouldn’t touch him because he was a member of the Russian government, a vice
premier, and they wouldn’t want to create a precedent. Because as he said, one
time the power will change hands in Russia again, and those who served Putin
wouldn’t want to create this precedent.”
As supporters of Mr.
Nemtsov laid flowers on the sidewalk where he was shot and killed late Friday,
a shiver of fear moved through the political opposition in Moscow.
The worry was that the
killing would become a pivot point toward an even less pluralistic form of
government for Russian domestic politics, already under strain from Russia’s
unacknowledged involvement in the war in Ukraine and runaway inflation in an
economic crisis.
“Another terrible page
has been turned in our history,” Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the exiled former
political prisoner, wrote in a statement about the killing.
“For more than a year
now, the television screens have been flooded with pure hate for us,” he wrote
of the opposition to Mr. Putin. “And now everyone from the blogger at his
apartment desk to President Putin himself is searching for enemies, accusing
one another of provocation. What is wrong with us?”
Russian authorities said
on Saturday that they were investigating several theories about the crime, some
immediately scorned as improbable, including the possibility that fellow
members of the opposition had killed Mr. Nemtsov to create a martyr.
That line of
investigation would examine whether Mr. Nemtsov, a 55-year-old former first
deputy prime minister and longtime leader of the opposition, had become a
“sacrificial victim” to rally support for opponents of the government, the
Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement.
The statement, the
fullest official response to Mr. Nemtsov’s killing so far, said the police were
pursuing half a dozen leads in the case, the highest-profile assassination in
Russia during the tenure of Mr. Putin.
The committee also cited
the possibility that Islamic extremists had killed Mr. Nemtsov over his
position on the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris,
saying that security forces had been aware of threats against him from Islamist
militants.
The committee also said
that “radical personalities” on one or another side of the Ukrainian conflict
might have been responsible. The statement said the police were also
considering possible business or personal disputes as motives.
“The investigation is
considering several versions,” the statement said. The first it listed was “a
murder as a provocation to destabilize the political situation in the country,
where the figure of Nemtsov could have become a sort of sacrificial victim for
those who stop at nothing to achieve their political goals.”
This explanation echoed
and elaborated on a statement posted overnight on the Kremlin website, which
also characterized the murder as a “provocation.”
“The president noted that
this cruel murder has all the signs of a contract killing and carries an
exclusively provocative character,” the Kremlin statement said. “Vladimir Putin
expressed his deep condolences to the relatives and loved ones of Boris
Nemtsov, who died tragically.”
Mr. Putin, in a message
to Mr. Nemtsov’s mother released by the Kremlin, said that “everything will be
done so that the organizers and perpetrators of a vile and cynical murder get
the punishment they deserve,” Agence France-Presse reported.
Life News, a television
station with close ties to the Russian security services, quoted a source as
suggesting that Mr. Nemtsov was murdered in revenge for having caused a woman
to have an abortion.
Law enforcement critics
say this can serve as a smoke screen in high-profile cases, but it also
reflects a Soviet-era policy for managing the security services, under which
investigators are credited with making progress when a version of events is
ruled out — giving the police an incentive to begin with a wide array of
improbable theories.
After laying flowers on
the mound, and kneeling in respect before the blooms festooning the sidewalk on
a rainy, glum midafternoon, Anatoly Chubais, a co-founder with Mr. Nemtsov of
the Union of Right Forces political party, scorned the investigators’ claim.
“Today, we had a
statement that the liberal opposition organized the killing,” he said. “Before
this, they wrote that the liberals created the economic crisis. In this
country, we have created demand for anger and hate.”
Ms. Albats, who had
discussed with Mr. Nemtsov his unfinished exposé of the unstated Russian
military support for pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, said of this state of
affairs in domestic Russian politics, “we are at war now.”
“Those who are believers
in democracy, those who for some reason, back in the late 1980s, got on board
this train, and had all these hopes and aspirations, they are at war today,”
she said.
Alexandra Odynova
contributed reporting.
