Winter is Coming (42 page)

Boris Nemtsov, my longtime friend and colleague in the Russian opposition, was murdered in cold blood in the middle of Moscow on February 27, 2015. Four bullets in the back ended his life in sight of the Kremlin, where he once worked as Boris Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister. Photos from the scene showed a cleaning crew scrubbing his blood off the pavement within hours of the murder, so it is not difficult to imagine the quality of the investigation that followed.

Putin actually started, and ended, the inquiry while Boris’s body was still warm by calling the murder a “provocation,” the term of art for suggesting his enemies are murdering one another in order to bring shame upon his innocent brow. He then brazenly sent a message of condolence to Nemtsov’s mother, who often warned her fearless son that his actions could get him killed in Putin’s Russia.

Hours after Boris’s death, reports said that police were raiding his home and confiscating papers and computers. Putin’s enemies are often victims and his victims are always suspects. Boris was a passionate critic of Putin’s war in Ukraine and was about to finish a report on the presence of Russian soldiers in Donbass, a matter the Kremlin has spared no effort to cover up. But “Did Putin give the order?” rings as hollow today as it did when journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in 2006 or when MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine last year.

As long as Putin is in office we’ll never know who gave the order, but there is no doubt that he is directly responsible for creating the conditions in which these outrages occur with such terrible frequency. Putin’s early themes of restoring the national pride and structure that were lost with the fall of the USSR have slowly run out of steam and been replaced with a toxic mixture of nationalism, belligerence, and hatred. By 2014, the increasingly depleted opposition movement, long treated with contempt and ridicule, had been rebranded in the Kremlin-dominated media as dangerous fifth columnists, or “national traitors” in the vile language they frequently borrowed from the Nazis.

To match the propaganda, Putin shifted more support to the most repressive, reactionary, and bloodthirsty elements in the regime. Among them are Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov and chief prosecutor Alexander Bastrykin, who recently declared that the Russian constitution was “standing in the way of protecting the state’s interests.” In this environment, blood becomes the coin of the realm, the way to show loyalty to the regime. This is what Putin has wrought in order to keep his grip on power: a culture of death and fear that spans all eleven Russian time zones and is now being exported to Eastern Ukraine.

Boris Nemtsov was a tireless fighter and one of the most skilled critics of the Putin government, a role that was by no means his only possible destiny. A successful mayor in Nizhny Novgorod and a capable cabinet member and parliamentarian, he could have led a comfortable life in the power vertical as a token liberal voice of reform. But Boris was unqualified to work for the Putin regime. He had principles, you see, and could not bear to watch our country descend back into the totalitarian depths.

And so Boris launched his big body, big voice, and big heart into the uphill battle to keep democracy alive in Russia. We worked together after he was kicked out of parliament in 2004 and by 2007 we were close allies in the opposition movement. He was devoted to documenting the crimes and corruption of Putin and his cronies, hoping they would one day face a justice that seemed further away all the time.

Along with a report on Russian soldiers in Ukraine, he had been working hard on the protest march planned for that Sunday in Moscow, a march that became his funeral procession. Boris and I began to quarrel after Putin returned as president in 2012. To me it signaled the end of any realistic hopes that there could be a peaceful political solution to regime change in Russia. But Boris was always hopeful. He would tell me I was too rash, that “you have to live a long time to see change in Russia.” Now he will never see it.

We cannot know exactly what horror will come next, only that there will be another and another as long as Putin remains in power. The only way Putin’s rule will end is if the Russian people and Putin’s elites understand they have no future as long as he is there. Right now, no matter how they really feel about Putin and their lives, they see him as invincible and unmovable. They see him getting his way in Ukraine, taking territory and waging war. They see him talking tough and making deals with Merkel and Hollande. They see his enemies dead in the streets of Moscow.

Statements of condemnation and concern over Boris’s murder quickly poured forth from the same Western leaders who have done so much to appease Putin in recent days, weeks, and years. If they truly wish to honor my fearless friend, they should declare in the strongest terms that Russia will be treated like the criminal rogue regime it is for as long as Putin is in power. Call off the sham negotiations. Sell weapons to Ukraine that will put an unbearable political price on Putin’s aggression. Tell every Russian oligarch that there is no place their money will be safe in the West as long as they serve Putin.

The response so far is not encouraging, a phrase I tire of writing. Many of the habitual statements of concern and condemnation call for Putin to “administer justice,” a plea that could almost could be considered sarcastic. Western media inexplicably continues to give a platform to Putin’s cadre of propagandists without challenging their blatant lies.

We may never know who killed Boris Nemtsov, but we do know that the sooner Putin is gone, the better chance there is that the chaos and violence Boris feared can be avoided. It is a chance Russia and the world must take.

Looking back through history, great changes in the framework between nations have been necessary after a period of great conflict. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia created the modern age of Europe after the Thirty Years’ War. The War of the Spanish Succession was ended by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna created a new European map after the defeat of Napoleon’s France. At the Berlin Conference of 1879 the equilibrium was reestablished after the Russo-Turkish War. At the end of the nineteenth century, the general belief was that this balance would lead to a golden era of peace. Utopian and pacifist literature dreamed of a world without borders right up to the beginning of World War I.

After the First World War we had the Versailles Treaty and the creation of the League of Nations. The League was a failure and the unwillingness to accept this fact led to World War II. On March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, in his renowned “iron curtain” speech, Winston Churchill spoke about the new dangers to freedom, this time from Communism. It is almost forgotten that he also warned how the newly formed United Nations could fail.

Churchill said of the new organization, “We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can someday be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.” Unfortunately, Churchill’s prophecies have come to pass and today we are stuck with an outdated organization that was developed after WWII to prevent a nuclear clash between superpowers. The old stalemate diplomacy of the Cold War will not help us against suicide attacks and hybrid war. Instead of an entity that exists to freeze conflicts, we need one that can offer real solutions based on modern values.

United military intervention to protect human lives and the greater good must also be kept on the table. The value of human life and the value of human freedom in a new Magna Carta must be defended as if they were borders, for that is what they are. They are borders of time and space, separating those who want to live in the modern world and those for whom modernity is a mortal threat.

I advocate for a return to many of the principles and policies that were dominant in the West during the Cold War. But that does not mean I want to turn back the clock. As the Bible says, “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined.” We cannot pour the modern wine of globalization and the multipolar world into the old wineskin of obsolete Cold War institutions and regulations. Times change. Circumstances change. Institutions must change. But our values must not.

What is to be done? Each situation, each crisis, has its own requirements, of course. The shift of a single pawn changes the entire position. This is why I like to say that I advocate principles, not policies. When you have solid principles and the entire world knows what they are, the policies tend to be much easier to develop and enforce.

It is for leaders, for those who are responsible to their people, to form policies. It is for leaders to consult with experts, to evaluate their options, to consider the consequences, to weigh the short term versus the long term. Making recommendations without the authority to enact them or the responsibility to be held accountable for them is an extravagance. It lends itself to the worst kind of posturing and folly. But I realize that this response, however honest and accurate it may be, is also a form of evasion. No one would be pleased with a doctor who diagnoses you with a deadly illness and then declines to suggest a remedy.

There are many steps that can be taken that require only courage and will. A global Magna Carta is one of them, a document that leads to the creation of a united Democratic nations that upholds and enforces the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Democracies can take steps now to protect and support those under attack from the dictators, the oppressors, and the time travelers. The free world possesses wealth and power beyond imagining and it must be used to help the unfree to join us or it is power wasted.

Another reason specific policy recommendations are unsatisfactory is that they are inevitably outdated or entirely obsolete. Over the years I have made a long list of things that should be done to respond to Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship, for example. Even now, after he has proven my worst fears correct and everyone is telling me how right I was, few of those recommendations have been enacted. Others have been carried, such as sanctions and ejecting Russia from the G7, but too feebly or too slowly to have the deterrent impact I had in mind.

Most of the specific proposals I made nearly a year ago regarding dictatorships, Putin, and Ukraine still stand and I have referenced them throughout the book. Isolate dictatorships that exploit engagement to support oppression. Keep human rights and the value of human life as the backbone of policy, including foreign policy. This does not preclude negotiation or trade within certain parameters, but it must never be doubted that relations will always have strict limits as long as repression exists.

Ukraine should be defended as if it shares a border with every free nation in the world. This means providing arms with which it can defend its borders and financial aid to stabilize the economy Putin is trying so hard to destroy. Take a close look at what America and Europe get from Russia—oil, gas, supply lines—and develop substitutes for them. This is why Putin fears fracking and other technologies that make the West less dependent on his energy exports. And yet this very week, at the end of April 2015, it was reported that the Pentagon has asked Congress for permission to use Russian-made rocket engines. When the leading nations of the free world put their militaries at the mercy of the bad guys, what hope can the victims of the bad guys have?

If appeals to morality and values do not move you, America does indeed have vital interests in Ukraine. As the world’s largest economy, military power, and energy consumer, the United States reaps great benefits from global stability. (While big fossil fuel exporters like Russia benefit from instability, which tends to raise the price of oil.) Even if you are a cynical realist or a libertarian isolationist, it is cheaper and more practical to take a stand now over Ukraine than to let it go and then have to worry constantly about even stronger American commitments to the Baltics and Poland, who are NATO members. It is also much safer for Americans, Europeans, and everyone else to maintain a robust global American security umbrella than to encourage rampant military proliferation by closing that umbrella.