twenty-one
THE SOCHI OLYMPICS ENDED on February 23, 2014. The following day, a Moscow court sentenced eight of the Bolotnoye case defendants. Weeks earlier, when the sentencing was scheduled, it had been clear that setting it for the first day when Putin would not be concerned with projecting a temporarily gentler image boded ill. The Bolotnoye case might be the Kremlin’s chance to avenge the humiliation of having been forced to release Khodorkovsky.
Only one of the defendants, a nineteen-year-old woman who had already spent more than a year under house arrest, was given a suspended sentence. The rest—seven men, all of whom had been in pretrial detention—were sentenced to between two and a half and four years behind bars.1 A small crowd gathered outside the courthouse on the day of the sentencing, and there were arrests—police loaded 234 people onto buses and took them away. Later in the day, people began gathering in Manezhnaya Square in the center of Moscow, the same square where thousands had come to protest Navalny’s sentence seven months earlier. This time, there were only 432, and they were all arrested.2
Nemtsov was standing on the sidewalk being interviewed by a French television crew when a police officer approached him and said, “Please come to the bus with me.” Nemtsov excused himself and followed the policeman. Time was, he would have refused to go, demanded to know on what grounds he was being detained, and made the police work to drag his large body onto a bus. But six months earlier Nemtsov had reentered electoral politics—such as remained in Russia. Only some mayors and municipal-council members in some cities were still elected directly. Nemtsov had been elected to the city legislature of Yaroslavl, a town of roughly half a million people about two and a half hours’ drive from Moscow. He took the job seriously—he was now spending roughly half his time in Yaroslavl, where he had become a public figure. He dove into issues of local corruption and promoted local sports. As an elected official, he could not simply be detained by the police: there was a special court procedure for people like him. So he strolled to the bus, his city-legislature credentials in hand—and found himself arrested.
He and Navalny spent that night in a two-person cell.3 The following day, Navalny was sentenced to seven days’ arrest and Nemtsov to ten. Several other activists were sentenced to between one and two weeks. All of them had been found guilty of disobeying police.4 The message was clear: with the Olympics over, the crackdown would intensify. Protest would be punished. Nemtsov was a fool to think that any Russian law would protect him.
—
WHILE NEMTSOV WAS LOCKED UP, Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms invaded Crimea. Nemtsov wrote a short blog post and had it sent to Echo Moskvy, the radio station where he was a regular on the air and had his own blog on the website. Echo sent a message back: he needed to tone down the post. Specifically, they wanted him to remove the phrases “fratricidal war,” “mentally unstable secret-police agent,” and “the ghoul feeds on the people’s blood.” Nemtsov refused and put up the post on his Facebook page instead.
Putin has declared war on Ukraine. This is a fratricidal war. Russia and Ukraine will pay a high price for the bloody insanity of this mentally unstable secret-police agent. Young men will die on both sides. There will be inconsolable mothers and sisters. There will be orphaned children. Crimea will empty out, because no one will vacation there. There will be billions, tens of billions of rubles taken from the old and the young and thrown into the fire of war—and then even more money will be needed to support the thieves in power in Crimea. He must see no other way to hold on to power. The ghoul feeds on the people’s blood. Russia will face international isolation, the impoverishment of its population, and political crackdowns. God, what have we done to deserve this? And how long will we continue to put up with it?5
The same day, six people came to Manezhnaya Square and unfurled a banner that said “For Your Liberty and Ours.” It was a double quotation: a Polish slogan adopted in the nineteenth century by Russian supporters of Poland during its struggle for independence, it had been used again in 1968, by the seven dissidents who came to Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. All seven had been arrested then, and sentenced to prison terms and Siberian exile. This time, the six protesters were arrested as soon as they unfurled their banner.6 Later that day more people went to Manezhnaya and others went to the Defense Ministry building—no one really knew where to go, in no small part because Nemtsov, Navalny, and several of the activists who had for years taken care of the where and the when and of getting the word out were in jail. By the end of the day, 362 people had been arrested.7 This was the day the parliament approved use of force abroad and Nemtsov and other Russians who were paying attention realized that their country had started a war with Ukraine.
There was also a hastily organized march in support of the invasion—the parliamentary newspaper described it as a march “in support of the people of Ukraine and against the provocateurs who have usurped power in Kiev.”8 Pro-Kremlin youth organizations advertised for participants on social networks:
RALLY AND CONCERT, 500 RUBLES FOR 1 HOUR
Rally connected with current events in Ukraine. Meet up at 15:00 at Pushkinskaya Metro station, in the center of the hall. 50 young people needed. Apply here with two photographs, name, last name, age, and phone number, or call 89104465285, ask for Maxim. Cash payment upon completion.9
The ad spoke more to the youth movements’ standard organizing practices than it did to the need to pay people to celebrate the occupation. The outpouring of joy was massive and genuine. Zhanna felt it happening all around her. Everyone had lost their minds. Zhanna experienced political outrage—political passion even. She had never felt it before, not even when her father was arrested on New Year’s Eve 2009, certainly not when she was running for office. All these years, her support for her father’s causes had been intellectual: she had agreed that he was right on the merits of his arguments, and even that was not true all the time. But now she felt like she was staring into an abyss. How could people—intelligent people like her grandmother or the people she worked with—not understand that war would bring disaster? How could people whose opinions on the economy she respected not understand that the economy would now go from sluggish to death-bound? She realized, quickly, that they too felt gripped by passion, and that passion had nothing to do with intelligence. She also realized that refusing to share her nation’s joy made her a pariah at her office and in her country.
She wanted to talk to her father about it, but he was in jail again. She brought him food. It was a newly renovated jail building this time, with shiny slippery tile floors and plastic window frames, and, as it turned out, bizarre food rules: tomatoes were allowed but cucumbers were banned.
She talked to him as soon as he was released.
“We have to leave,” she said. “This country is finished.”
He listened.
“I want to quit my job,” she said. “What’s the point of debating the future of the gas monopoly when the country itself has no future?”
“Don’t quit,” he said. “Find another job first.”
“I want to go to Ukraine.”
“Then go.”
Zhanna went to Kiev, knocked on all the doors of all the television stations and found nothing. Boris suggested that he could call Petro Poroshenko, his friend who was now running for president in Ukraine, and ask him for help in finding a job for Zhanna.
“Though it wouldn’t be a good look for me, to have you living in Ukraine,” he added. Now that Russia was at war with Ukraine, his ties to that country, and to the Orange Revolution, were mentioned ever more frequently. He had become the very image of a traitor.
“No, don’t call,” said Zhanna. It was not because of what he had said about his reputation—she was worried about hers. She had worked too hard to be seen as her own person.
“Then you have to keep doing your job at RBK as long as they’ll let you.”
RBK belonged to former metals magnate Mikhail Prokhorov, a friend of Boris’s who had himself dabbled in politics. He was the one who had once offered to bankroll Zhanna’s campaign while also funding her opponent. Prokhorov tried to at least appear independent of the Kremlin, so his media outlets took more freedoms than most. Zhanna had a job in journalism in which she was not forced to broadcast outright lies—this was a luxury. Soon, Zhanna and her father both knew, having a job at all might feel like a luxury.
—
AS SOON AS Boris and the other Solidarity activists were released from jail, they filed for a permit to hold a peace march. About fifty thousand people came on March 15—a stunning turnout. If the polls were right and only 1 percent of Russians opposed the war, then in Moscow, nearly all of this opposition would seem to have come out for the march. On the other hand, perhaps the polls reflected the fact that only members of the die-hard, risk-everything opposition were willing to express a dissenting opinion anymore, even to a survey taker. Boris marched at the very front, in the middle of a row of people holding a banner that said “Hands Off Ukraine.” Behind them, many of the signs said “For Your Liberty and Ours.”
Nemtsov was the first speaker at the rally. He talked not so much about Ukraine as about Putin.
He is a sick man. . . . But he is not merely a sick man: he is also a cynical and dishonest man. He has occupied Crimea because he wants to rule forever!10
Zhanna went to the march—the first time she had joined her father in the streets since she had found herself running away from police that New Year’s Eve back in 2009.
A few days after the march, Nemtsov heard that he would be charged in the Bolotnoye case. Considering what had happened to the other protest leaders, he was not surprised. Udaltsov was in jail; Navalny had escaped prison only because thousands had taken to the streets, but now he was facing new trumped-up fraud charges; Kasparov had left the country after being threatened with prosecution. Boris told Zhanna that he wanted to talk.
“I don’t know if I could survive a ten-year sentence,” he said. “I’m fifty-five, you know.”
He worked out every day. He windsurfed. He loved pictures of himself at the beach. He wore tight blue jeans and white shirts unbuttoned to show off his pecs. His last two or three girlfriends had been younger than Zhanna—Zhanna, in fact, appreciated the current one, a long-legged, dirty-blond-haired young woman from Kiev, for never inserting herself into grown-up conversations, like the one they were having now.
“I’ll always support you,” said Zhanna. Family could make the difference between surviving in a Russian prison and not.
“You’ll lose your job.”
“You know I don’t care.”
“In that case, if they lock me up, will you mention it live on air?”
“You got it.”
—
ON MARCH 26, the fourteenth anniversary of Putin’s first election, Zhanna turned thirty. Boris called her in the morning.
“I’m sorry I can’t come tonight,” he said. “I’m in Israel. Will you come visit me?”
Zhanna bawled. They had never missed each other’s birthdays. They always had big parties. “I think this is the last time I have a party,” she told Raisa. Everyone else came, and everyone noticed Boris’s absence, but no one asked about it.
Zhanna flew to Tel Aviv the following week. Boris picked her up at the airport looking like Al Pacino in The Godfather, when his character had the permanent black eye. Except Boris had two.
“I had the bags under my eyes removed,” he explained. “I needed a doctor’s note.”
He was referring to the Yaroslavl city legislature’s mandatory attendance policy. But what was he thinking? That he could be here on indefinite medical leave? That the Investigative Committee would change its mind about the probe if he waited them out? Was he planning to stay in Israel?
He said he was staying. He also complained about not feeling at home in Israel. Zhanna said she agreed. It was too dense, too hot, and too humid.
“There are other countries,” she suggested. “With better weather.”
Her father said nothing.
They walked on the beach, and he talked about his life as though he needed to sum up his accomplishments. He seemed old—something he had never seemed before. He did not seem like a superhero. He kept suggesting they go shopping. He wanted to buy her things. She demurred.
Before she left, he told her not to tell anyone where he was. He was not hiding: he was hiding the fact that he was not in Russia. Zhanna told no one. Even when her boss asked her directly if her father was in Israel, she said, “What are you talking about?”
Zhanna’s grandmother knew he was abroad, of course, and she was thrilled. To ensure that he stayed abroad, she decided to publish an open letter to her son on the Echo Moskvy website. She sent it to Boris’s cousin to arrange publication. The cousin sent it to Zhanna. Zhanna sent it to Boris.
I have only one thing to ask you, to beg of you—you can call it my will and testament, if you like. Don’t go to prison. It will do no one any good. I mean the people who love you and people of good will in general.
How was Dina Yakovlevna suggesting that he avoid prison? She was a woman born and reared in the Soviet Union, so she could not openly recommend emigration: for most of her life, émigrés were condemned as traitors to the Soviet cause. Still, everyone would know that when she begged him not to go to prison, she was asking him to emigrate. Since this was an open letter, she addressed the obvious concern, that her son, were he to emigrate, would be perceived as unpatriotic.
I would like to add that my father, Boris’s grandfather, was, from a young age, a member of the Bolshevik party, a sincere believer in Leninism, and he personally saw Lenin speak. He was later honored by the Soviet Union in retirement, so he was a most honorable man. Boris’s ill-wishers fail to understand that all his thoughts and actions are driven by honesty and his love for Russia. These are not just words. By the way, this is something that he shares with Putin: a love of Russia.
When Crimea joined Russia, I was euphoric like everyone else. I thought justice had triumphed. I talked about it with my son-in-law, and we both came to the conclusion that Putin had secured his place in history. We are simple people. We didn’t know how this was all going to turn out. We didn’t see the flip side of the coin.
But now I realize. I think that maybe Putin isn’t so thrilled with all of this himself anymore. My daughter says that maybe his advisers weren’t all in favor of this scenario. Some of them are probably smarter than others.
Getting back to Boris now. I remember reading in some newspaper that Khodorkovsky was asked, “How did you, being such a smart man, end up in prison when you could have avoided it?” And Khodorkovsky said, “There are smart men and then there are wise men.”
Borya, please be wise.
Love, your mother,
16 April 2014
Boris was livid. The idea of being addressed through an open letter by his own mother, the naive attempt to manipulate his will and his image by appealing to Soviet concepts of honor, but most of all, the comparison to Putin—the assertion that they had their love of Russia in common—made him incensed. Still, Zhanna felt that he railed excessively that day on the phone. He seemed to be overreacting a lot these days.
Around the same time, a former socialite who was now an anchor on TV Rain tweeted, “Turns out Nemtsov is in Israel. Probably not returning to Russia, because of criminal probe.”11 When they discussed this on the phone, Boris sounded hurt: he had thought this woman was his friend.
He was a terrible émigré: his heart was not in it. The successful ones ran to save their children or their fortunes. He was running to save his life, but his life was in Russia.
A few days later he went to Khodorkovsky’s congress in Kiev, and from there he flew to Moscow. He took a selfie at the airport and posted it on Facebook with a reference to the TV Rain anchor’s two-week-old tweet. He was back.12
—
BORIS WAS on borrowed time now, so he worked twice as furiously. He published a report on corruption and fraud in the lead-up to the Sochi Olympics. The report focused on, among others, Vladimir Yakunin, head of the Russian railroads monopoly and a key funder of Russian Orthodox “traditional values” activism. His wife ran an organization called Sanctity of Motherhood and was a fixture of World Congress of Families gatherings. Born in 1948, Yakunin had been a KGB officer in Soviet times. He had been a member of the Putin clan since the 1990s.13 Nemtsov’s focus, however, was not on Yakunin’s life but on the business he had done in Sochi, including a contract to build a forty-eight-kilometer* stretch of highway at a cost of more than $50 billion. Nemtsov was certain this was a world record. He called this chapter “The Most Expensive Project of the Most Expensive Olympics in History.”14 That spring Yakunin started dragging Nemtsov into court: he sued him for libel, demanding 3 million rubles—the equivalent of nearly $100,000 when the suit was first filed but worth only about half that amount by the time the case was finally on the docket late the following winter.15
Nemtsov also began assembling a report on Putin’s war in Ukraine. It would include proof of the use of Russian troops in both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. It would include body counts, which the Kremlin had classified. It would include proof that the missile that shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane in July 2014, killing 298 people, was fired from a Russian-made launcher located on territory controlled by Russians and the Ukrainian separatists they backed. It would include information about peace negotiations held in Minsk in the fall of 2014—like the fact that Russia appended its signature (it was represented by Moscow’s ambassador to Ukraine, Mikhail Zurabov) to the accords reached there, thereby acknowledging that it was a party to the conflict.16
Nemtsov led a second peace march in Moscow on September 21, 2014—about twenty-five thousand people came.17 That day one of the buildings along the route featured a two-story-tall square banner bearing the words “March of the Traitors.” Beneath images of the U.S. flag and the White House, the banner showed the faces of six people—two writers, a rock musician, and three activists, including Nemtsov.18 At least half of these people were spending all or most of their time outside Russia. Nemtsov’s face had appeared on a similarly large poster that had been hung on a building in the center of the city back in April, when he was in Israel. That one was captioned “The Fifth Column. Aliens Among Us.” The group was almost entirely different, but Nemtsov’s face was a constant.19 He appeared again in January 2015, on the largest banner yet—this one covered three and a half stories of a high-rise apartment building. “The fifth column insisted on sanctions against their own country. By supporting sanctions, they are causing incomes to fall and prices and unemployment to grow.” A quote from Nemtsov’s blog appeared next to his face: “The sanctions that have been imposed may destabilize the country. Putin will be facing a crisis and chaos in Russia.”20
On New Year’s Eve 2015, Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg were found guilty of defrauding a company whose representative testified that it had not in fact been defrauded. Alexei was sentenced to three and a half years of house arrest—the authorities were apparently trying to avoid another mass protest—but Oleg got three and a half years in prison. He was a hostage now.21
With Navalny sentenced, Udaltsov in prison, and Kasparov and Ponomarev in exile, Nemtsov was now the only one of the prominent protest organizers left walking around Moscow (and Yaroslavl). After the winter holidays, he began organizing a third march, timed for the anniversary of the invasion. This time he could not get a permit to march in the center of the city. Nor could he get much support, even among fellow activists, for the march itself. His allies argued that Russians were now concerned more with their own economic problems than with the war. Nemtsov compromised on both counts: the march would be held on the outskirts of the city—an hour’s Metro ride from the center—and it would be called “The Spring March Against the Crisis.”
Ten days in advance of the scheduled march, on the anniversary of the day when Ukrainian president Yanukovych was deposed, a government-sanctioned march was held in central Moscow. It inaugurated yet another pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Anti-Maidan, with the prevention of a “color revolution” in Russia its sole declared goal.22 About thirty thousand people came, many of them carrying flags and preprinted banners bearing slogans such as “The Maidan Brings War and Chaos.” A giant black banner carried by more than a dozen people at once read, in white lettering, “Clean Out the Fifth Column.” A single poster, copies of which were carried by dozens of the marchers, featured a black-and-white photograph of Nemtsov in an orange frame. The caption said, “Organizer of the Maidan.”23
—
ZHANNA WAS NOT PLANNING to go to the march out in the suburbs. She had no use for the euphemism in its name: she wanted to march against the war, or not at all. She was going on vacation to Italy instead—the first week of March, when it always felt like Moscow winter would never end, was the right time to get away. Raisa would come too—she came to Moscow from Nizhny Novgorod on February 27 to spend the night before they flew out together. On the way home Zhanna stopped by Boris’s building and left an envelope containing $10,000 in cash with the doorman. This was money for the report on Putin’s war in Ukraine. It was about to go to the printer’s.
Zhanna said good night to Raisa at half past eleven, went to her bedroom, and turned off the lights and her phone—she always followed this mental-health rule. Raisa was sleeping in the living room.
Zhanna woke up because Raisa was screaming. Zhanna knew it was her mother screaming, yet it was a voice she had never heard before, a voice of terror. Zhanna must have forgotten to lock the door, there must be an intruder.
Raisa was in the living room alone. She was sitting on the couch screaming. She held her phone in her hand.
“They killed him,” she said.
Zhanna turned on her phone and the television. There were text messages and news stories. Her father had been shot on a bridge not fifteen minutes from here. Raisa was having trouble breathing.
“It’s okay,” said Zhanna. “We’ll go there now.”
It was pouring rain. She hailed a car.
“Take us to the Moskvoretsky Bridge, please.”
“What do you need there?”
“They killed Nemtsov there.”
The driver looked at her for the first time. His face, lit by a streetlamp, looked angry.
“What do you care?”
“Well, maybe you don’t care that a world-renowned man was just shot to death in the center of Moscow, but he happens to be my father.”
The police had sealed off the bridge. Zhanna went from officer to officer, showing her press credentials and her passport. “I’m press. We are family. I’m press.” It took forever.
The first person they saw on the other side of the barrier was Vladimir Kara-Murza, Boris’s young friend, a co-organizer of the peace marches who was now working for Khodorkovsky.
“The body is in the ambulance,” he said. “I’ll follow it to the morgue.”
There was no point in driving all over town now.
“We have to think about how to tell Grandmother,” Zhanna said to Raisa.
They called Boris’s sister and his cousin in Nizhny, and they went to Dina Yakovlevna’s house to wait for morning. She was bound to turn on the television or radio as soon as she awoke, and they needed to be there to tell her the news themselves.
“I want to go to Moscow,” the old woman said.
The next day Dina Yakovlevna led a march in Moscow. It was not a peace march or a “spring march.” It was a march of mourning. Fifty thousand people walked through central Moscow without a permit. They carried Russian flags and portraits of Nemtsov and a giant banner with the words “Heroes Don’t Die.” No one stopped them.24
—
THERE WERE DOZENS of unanswered calls on Zhanna’s phone. Everyone wanted an interview. She called her own station.
“I want to talk to you first,” she said.
“Sure, let’s get you on tape,” the editor in chief said.
“I want to be live,” said Zhanna.
“I can’t do that.”
She hung up.
She talked to a BBC reporter instead. She said that she held Putin personally responsible for her father’s death. She was merely stating the obvious. Boris was killed on a bridge across the Moscow River, with the Kremlin as the backdrop for the murder. The Kremlin was so close that the bridge was under constant surveillance—as any television journalist who had ever tried to film a stand-up there knew: the Presidential Guard would have been on top of them in seconds. But Boris’s body had lain on the bridge for at least ten minutes, with no Presidential Guard in sight. Not that it mattered where the killing happened: Putin had been portraying Zhanna’s father as a traitor for so long, and as an enemy combatant for the last year—their fears of prison seemed naive now.
There was a funeral. Pavel Sheremet, the journalist who had made the film for Nemtsov’s fiftieth birthday, emceed the memorial service. They miscalculated and had to cut it short—not everyone who had come to pay respects had been able to enter the building by the time the funeral procession left for the cemetery.
Zhanna and Raisa did go to Italy, but the BBC found her there again, and this time Zhanna said even more. Russian police had arrested a Chechen man, a police officer, for Boris’s murder. But she said that she had no trust in any Russian investigation.
You keep asking me if my father posed a threat to the regime. Of course he did. You have such a two-dimensional view of the world. Look wider. Study the totalitarian regimes of the world. The dissidents are either in exile—look at how many people have left Russia, like Kasparov—or else they are in prison or under house arrest, or they are killed. . . . Anyone who thinks differently poses a threat to a totalitarian regime. . . .
Are you afraid to return to Russia?
Not really, I’m not. I’m going back.
Did your father’s murder change your views of—
You know, I was always a pessimist, but this turned my whole world upside down. Not that I had any illusions. But I certainly didn’t think that it’s possible at all—I still can’t believe that they killed my father. I don’t consider myself an activist. But I am an honorable person and I love my father very much, and I want everyone to know the truth. And the truth is what I’m saying—that we’ll never get the truth from the authorities in Russia. But I just want to say that what I’m saying now means that the authorities will now view me as an activist. That’s all I have to say.25
Zhanna did return to Moscow. She figured it was a matter of time before she lost her job—the people at RBK were surely just waiting for an excuse to cut her loose.
Boris’s friends—the activists who had been by his side for the last ten years, in Solidarity, at marches, and in jail—set up a memorial on the bridge. After the first time the authorities removed the flowers and Russian flags, they set up a round-the-clock vigil. Vladimir Kara-Murza was one of the half-dozen people who went there every day, to stand in memory and on guard.
In late May, the University of Bonn invited Zhanna to give a talk in memory of her father. She woke up in a slightly worn German Modernist hotel on the three-month anniversary of Boris’s death. She read the news. Vladimir Kara-Murza had been hospitalized with multiple organ failure as the result of an unknown toxin. So this was how it worked. The famous got a bullet in the heart and the less famous got poison in their tea.
The hotel, it turned out, had a monthly rate. She could stay there while she looked for an apartment. The family who ran the hotel restaurant spoke Italian—she could communicate with them, even if she knew no one else in this town. It did not occur to Zhanna to go anywhere else. Bonn was quiet and clean and safe, as good a place as any. She was never going back to Russia.