Let me be a little more blunt: Putin doesn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone in the West thinks of him.
That includes Barack Obama and the hand-wringers of the European Union as well as you and me. He knows none of us will do anything except squeal like little piggies.
The only opinion Vlad Putin cares about is that of the amorphous blob known as “the great Russian people.” And he has that opinion firmly in hand through his almost-complete control of Soviet (sorry, “Russian”) media outlets and the constant, repetitive, unwavering, unquestioning propaganda of his mouthpieces.
Voices of opposition like that of Boris Nemtsov have been silenced by harassment, arrest, prosecution, incarceration, exile and — in the most extreme cases, like that of Nemtsov — murder.
Internal Russian opposition to Putin’s kleptocracy reached its peak in 2012 in the run-up to the national elections that saw Putin returned to the presidency for the third (but certainly not last) time.
Since winning that election by a significant margin (through both fair and foul means), Putin has tightened his grip, extended his reach and struck out ruthlessly against those who stood against him.
The Russian opposition has been in shambles for more than a year now, broken and splintered, torn by internal divisions (many engineered by the Kremlin’s ferrets), a mere, mocking shadow of the democratic movement that drew hundreds of thousands of hurt, tired, cheated, angry Russians into the streets of Moscow to protest (futilely, as it turned out) against Vlad Putin’s relentless march to complete domination in 2012.
Western media reports tell of the “thousands massed” on Sunday for the memorial march in remembrance of the murdered Boris Nemtsov. But it was, in reality, a pathetically small turnout to mark an atrocity that truly shocked all of Russia by the very nakedness of its brutality. The hundreds of thousands of 2012 have now dwindled to a few thousand.
Of course, not all Russians buy into Putin’s party line. But fewer and fewer are willing — or able — to take a public stand against Putin’s increasingly absolute rule.
Part of the message to the Russian people sent by the Nemtsov murder was that anyone who stands against the Putin regime is targeted. So the thousands of 2015 (the brave survivors of the hundreds of thousands of 2012) will soon dwindle to mere hundreds, culled by fear and intimidation, by persecution and prosecution, by violence and death.
Nemtsov and Putin in 2000 shortly after Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia. Both were close advisers to Yeltsin and Nemtsov was seen as a possible successor until Putin outmanoeuvred him. Nemtsov initially backed Putin’s presidency (considering him a “progressive modernizer”) and only turned against him when it became apparent that Putin was set on a course of amassing personal power and personal wealth.
I’ve railed time and again about how we should look back at Adolf Hitler’s trajectory in the 1930s to learn valuable lessons about what we can expect from Vlad Putin as the current decade unfolds. Putin, obviously, is not an exact duplicate of Hitler, but he’s certainly used a lot of the same methodology to seize, hold and extend his power.
Key components of that methodology include fusing the projected identity of the leader with the manufactured identity of the great, anonymous, harnessed mass of the “people.”
And anyone who stands against — or even expresses reservations about — that hijacked national identity and purpose is branded a traitor, an enemy of the people, a tool of the nation’s foes. Or, as Vlad Putin likes to call his critics, “fifth columnists.”
That is what Putin labelled Boris Nemtsov and that is why Nemtsov knew it was not only possible but probable that Putin wanted him dead.
If you have any doubt in your mind that Vlad Putin approved the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, then you’re in for an unending series of unpleasant surprises over the next few weeks, months and years.
Of course Putin gave the go-ahead. No action that drastic and public would be undertaken in the heart of Moscow, within sight of the Kremlin, at the very centre of Vlad Putin’s powerdome, without the explicit okay of the supreme leader.
And, of course, Vlad Putin has taken a direct hand in overseeing the criminal investigation into the Nemtsov murder.
Also, of course, the idea that the murder could possibly have been commissioned and/or directed by anyone in the government is definitely NOT one of the five theories investigators are pursuing.
Instead, the marching orders for investigators say that the murder could have been:
1. Political provocation by external enemies or internal “fifth columnists” to destabilize Russia;
2. Somehow linked to shady business dealings in which Nemtsov was involved;
3. Personal, perhaps somehow involving the 23-year-old Ukrainian model who was with Nemtsov when he was shot;
4. Linked to “Ukrainian events” (again the model connection and, more so, Nemtsov’s vociferous opposition to Putin’s aggression in the neighbouring country’s troubles); or
5. An execution carried out by Islamic extremist — which is currently (conveniently) the Kremlin’s favourite theory.
In the end, perpetrators will be “identified,” people will be killed in a shootout and the whole incident will be tied up in a nice package and buried in an unmarked grave beside Nemtsov.
UPDATE: Five Chechens have now been arrested, two of whom are charged with carrying out the murder. They have ties to the regime of the warlord who is Putin’s hatchet man in Chechnya. We’ll see what happens.
Putin simply doesn’t care what anyone says or thinks about anything he does anymore. He completely cows and controls every branch of the media inside Russia now and what anyone says outside Russia is immaterial to his rule.
His internal “enemies” are defeated, destroyed. His external “enemies” are most useful as objects of hatred on which to focus blame for Russia’s fall from grace and thwarted desire to regain its deserved glory and power.
We’ve been down this path before. It’s not a good one.
Pity poor Russia. Pity poor Ukraine. Pity us all.
