Posted on 02/28/2015 10:11:07 AM PST by kristinn
When reporters asked former world chess champion and Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov who was behind the assassination of opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, he dismissed the question as irrelevant.
Whoever did the dirty work, he implied, would have done so only with President Vladimir Putin's blessing.
"Who gave the order to kill Nemtsov? Who knows,” Kasparov said. ”But this was done not far from the Kremlin and it would have been done by Putin's cronies. Who ordered it? I don't care. Putin must be held responsible for the murder of Boris."
Kasparov’s remark gets to the heart of the larger significance of Nemtsov’s killing. We don't yet know who ordered and carried out the hit or why. But the specifics don't matter as much as the signal it sends -- and what it portends.
"The message is this," Kasparov said. "We have no allergy to blood and anyone can be killed."
Exactly one year after Putin launched a hybrid war in Ukraine with the appearance of the storied "little green men" in Crimea, the killing of Nemtsov -- by men shooting from a little white car -- appears to mark an escalation of what can be described as a hybrid campaign of terror against Russia’s beleaguered and largely ineffectual opposition.
Like the hybrid war against Ukraine, Putin’s war at home, his Hybrid Great Terror campaign against his domestic critics, uses multiple methods: a well-honed disinformation campaign, legal machinations, stage-managed public demonstrations, and indiscriminate violence.
The regime’s opponents have been derided as traitors in the state media, harassed by Kremlin-sponsored youth groups, hit with absurd criminal charges, put under house arrest, and sent to prison camps. They’ve been marginalized, vilified, and ridiculed to the point of irrelevance.
And like in Ukraine, the whole thing is designed to give Putin plausible deniability.
Just as Russia’s invasion of its southern neighbor is framed as a "civil war" in which Moscow is just an interested observer, the campaign against the opposition is presented as just journalists doing their job, just concerned citizens speaking out against sedition, just the justice system carrying out its work.
But the Nemtsov assassination takes Putin's hybrid war at home to a whole new level. The penalty for opposition now, is not just imprisonment -- it is death.
Yes, other Putin critics have met violent, mysterious, and unexplained ends -- State Duma deputies like Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, who were investigating the 1999 apartment bombings that helped bring Putin to power; investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya; and emigre security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko just to name a few. But none had profiles as high as Nemtsov.
Taking out an internationally known former deputy prime minister whom Boris Yeltsin once touted as his potential successor as president suggests that -- just as in Stalin’s Great Terror of the 1930s -- nobody is immune.
It is hard to imagine assassins pulling off such a clearly professional hit on a figure of Nemtsov's stature and getting away clean -- in the heart of Moscow, just blocks from the Kremlin, in one of the most heavily policed parts of the capital -- without official sanction.
"Boris Nemtsov took not a step nor a breath that wasn't under the intense surveillance of the FSB. Just like all opposition leaders in Russia. Nothing Boris Nemtsov did was not bugged, tailed, filmed or monitored by the secret police,” journalist and Kremlin-watcher Ben Judah, author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin, wrote.
"It is quite simply impossible that this man could have been shot dead without the Kremlin knowing there was a plot afoot to kill him. This means the murder of Boris Nemtsov was either ordered or allowed to happen: which come to exactly the same thing."
Indeed, whether the permission to assassinate Nemtsov was in the form of an explicit order, came with a nod and a wink, or was the result of the general political climate in which opposition figures are vilified as traitors and enemies of the state, is largely irrelevant.
"In Putin's atmosphere of hatred and violence, abroad and in Russia, bloodshed is the prerequisite to show loyalty that you are on the team," Kasparov wrote on Twitter.
"If Putin gave [the] order to murder Boris Nemtsov is not the point. It is Putin's dictatorship. His 24/7 propaganda about enemies of the state."
For his part, Putin has condemned Nemtsov's killing, took personal control of the investigation, and said it could have been a "provocation" aimed at destabilizing Russia.
"But who was the provoker?" Bloomberg political commentator Leonid Bershidsky, a prominent Russian journalist who emigrated last year, asked in a column.
"In recent months, Putin's propaganda machine has been vigorously inciting Russians against the 'fifth column' -- those who protested against the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin-instigated war in eastern Ukraine. Nemtsov was on every list of traitors published on the Internet and aired on state TV."
If you thought it couldn’t get much worse, if you thought Putin’s Kremlin couldn’t get more brutal or brazen, think again.
"Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia with three things: money, propaganda and terror," Judah wrote.
"Now the money is running out, the equation has shifted. Today, Russia is ruled mostly through propaganda and terror."
SNIP
This means the murder of Boris Nemtsov was either ordered or allowed to happen: which come to exactly the same thing. That he could be killed like this has shaken the oligarchs and the officers of the Russian elite to their core. Boris Nemtsov was once Russia’s deputy prime minister and a protégé of Boris Yeltsin. He was almost picked as a successor instead of Putin. His murder means that the Putin’s solemn – and public – promise not to touch Yeltsin and his allies has been torn up.
This means the old Moscow rulebook has been torn up, too. Ever since fall of Khrushchev power in Moscow has changed hands without executions. Once ousted, old ruling cliques were allowed to live their lives out in irrelevance. Ripping this up works perfectly for Putin. Those contemplating, even in the abstract, a coup know they could be executed for it – and those loyal to Putin now believe that they must fight to keep him in power as they could be executed in revenge should he fall. Vladimir Putin now has the elite exactly where he wants them: terrified.
Sounds like a paradise, right?
/sarcasm
Garry Kasparov better watch his back.
We’re halfway there under Obama & Dems.
I noticed the reference to investigating the apartment bombing that brought Putin to power. At the time I thought it was very suspicious and politically useful. If the old Moscow rulebook as been torn up, then perhaps Putin will need to watch his back more than before. With all these frightened, very rich oligarchs, what is to prevent someone from hiring assassins for a multi-million dollar hit. There must be someone out there with terminal cancer who would like to leave a fortune to family and wouldn’t mind a quick cyanide pill death if caught. If not planned by Putin, this could have been like the murder in Britain of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. The story is that King Henry II said something like, “Will nobody rid me of this meddlesome priest,” which 4 of his nobles took as an order and acted upon. Becket was trying to prevent the King from taxing church lands or some such thing.
Kasparov seems careful not to blame Putin directly, but clearly he thinks this was fueled by him.
Most in the US don’t realize just how much passions in Russia have been inflamed by the Civil War in Ukraine. To them, this is clear-cut, U.S.-sponsored ethnic cleansing of ethnic Russians.
This is supported in the media, and in the idiocy coming from Kiev, like today’s moronic statement by Kiev Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, that, “everyone who speaks russian in Ukraine is a potential traitor.”
Well, if Russians ever get tired of Putin, he has his fans on FReeRepublic. They could buy a small island together and create a cult of catamites willing to serve Putin in a new Putinstan.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/05/putin_condemned.html
http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/mar/11/journalist-safety-vladimir-putin
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/19/AR2009011902604.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11212072/Russian-actor-and-Putin-critic-found-dead-in-Moscow.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Anna_Politkovskaya
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mi5-believe-vladimir-putin-behind-3897973
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/18/observer-editorial-putin-russia-journalists-murdered
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardbehar/2014/07/16/open-letter-to-russias-putin-on-tenth-anniversary-of-forbes-editor-paul-klebnikovs-murder-why-havent-you-solved-this-case/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10728908/Billionaire-critic-of-Putin-may-have-been-murdered-rules-coroner.html http://www.amazon.com/Putins-Labyrinth-Spies-Murder-Russia/dp/0812978412
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/22/brits-investigate-the-assassination-of-the-spy-who-warned-us-about-putin.html#
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/21/malaysia-airlines-flight-father-letter_n_5607856.html
http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2014/07/13/19336.shtml
November 1998 - Less than four months after Putin takes over at the KGB, opposition Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova, the most prominent pro-democracy Kremlin critic in the nation, is murdered at her apartment building in St. Petersburg.
April 2003 - Sergei Yushenkov, co-chairman of the Liberal Russia political party, is gunned down at the entrance of his Moscow apartment block. Yushenkov had been serving as the vice chair of the group known as the “Kovalev Commission” which was formed to informally investigate charges that Putin’s KGB had planted the Pechatniki and Kashirskoye apartment bombs
July 2003 - Yuri Shchekochikhin , a vocal opposition journalist and member of the Russian Dumaand the Kovalev Commission, suddenly contracts a mysterious illness. After his sudden death on July 3rd. The Russian authorities refused to allow an autopsy, his relatives “managed to send a specimen of his skin to London, where a tentative diagnosis was made of poisoning with thallium” (a poison commonly used by the KGB, at first suspected in the Litvinenko killing).
June 2004 - Nikolai Girenko, a prominent human rights defender, Professor of Ethnology and expert on racism and discrimination in the Russian Federation is shot dead in his home in St Petersburg.
July 2004 - Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition Forbes magazine, is shot and killed in Moscow.
September 2004 - Viktor Yushchenko, anti-Russian candidate for the presidency of the Ukraine, is poisoned by Dioxin. Yushchenko’s chief of staff OlegRibachuk suggests that the poison used was amycotoxin called T-2, also known as “Yellow Rain,” a Soviet-era substance which was reputedly used in Afghanistan as a chemical weapon. Miraculously, he survives the attack.
September 2006 - Andrei Kozlov, First Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Central Bank, who strove to stamp out money laundering the highest-ranking reformer in Russia, is shot and killed in Moscow.
October 2006 - Anna Politkovskaya, author of countless books and articles exposing Russian human rights violations in Chechnya and attacking Vladimir Putin as a dictator, is shot and killed at her home in Moscow.
November 2006 - Alexander Litvinenko, KGB defector and author of the book Blowing up Russia, which accuses the Kremlin of masterminding the and Pechatniki andKashirskoye bombings in order to blame Chechen terrorists and whip up support for an invasion of Chechnya (which shortly followed), is fatally poisoned by radioactive Polonium obtained from Russian sources.
On January 19, 2009, Russian human rights attorney Stanslav Markelov was shot in the back of the head with a silenced pistol as he left a press conference at which he announced his intention to sue the Russian government for its early release of the Col. Yuri Budanov, who murdered his 18-year-old client in Chechnya five years earlier. Also shot and killed was Anastasia Barburova, a young journalism student who was working for Novaya Gazeta and who had studied under Anna Politkovskaya, reporting on the Budanov proceedings.
On July 14, 2009, leading Russian human rights journalist and activist Natalia Estemirova , a single mother of a teenaged daughter, was abducted in front of her home in Grozny, Chechnya, spirited across the border into Ingushetia, shot and dumped in a roadside gutter.
http://larussophobe.wordpress.com/putinmurders/ Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3dd_1401997313#XRRREys6DwG6l1tA.99
I just don't see the logic of that statement. To me, it adds a huge fluorescent-green arrow that glows in the dark as it points to Vladimir Putin, KGB overlord of the FSR.
Putin is playing epistemic games with everyone he faces..... To prevent them from drawing strong conclusions and taking actions of their own.
So does Obama. What does that tell you, about who is the Sith Master and who the student?
Sounds like our democrat party
At least the left in this country hasn’t started offing journalists and opposition politicians yet - that we know of
I wonder if there was an article like this when Breitbart died?
Da, comrade.
Breitbart was shot to death?
Most in the US don’t realize just how much passions in Russia have been inflamed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Most in the US don’t realize just how much passions in Russia have been inflamed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
Yet another Orwellian attempt to control the language of this. How unsurprising.
You came up with that on your own, and not from a RT tweet? Surprising.
“You came up with that on your own, and not from a RT tweet? Surprising.”
Oh gee...
You’re trolling again.
How unsurprising.
The guy should stick to chess. Not criminal investigations.
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