A week after one of his most prominent opposition figures was brazenly and brutally killed in a public place just steps away from the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin has called on the police to rid Russia of the “shame and tragedy” of political crimes such as the “audacious murder” of Boris Nemtsov. He has vowed that “the most serious attention” will be paid to such crimes. This is unlikely, however, to silence suspicions among the increasingly spare opposition that the state was complicit in the assassination, especially as Putin also urged a continuing crackdown on “extremists” and “unsanctioned” protests. No arrests have yet been made.
There have been instances in the past decade of opposition to the regime being eliminated — in 2006, a journalist was gunned down in an elevator; Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, was found dead of polonium poisoning while in exile in London; and in 2009, two human rights activists were killed — but Nemtsov is the first major political leader to be murdered in nearly 10 years. His assassination suggests a new line in political violence in modern Russia has been crossed.
