By Joaquin Flores
Nemtsov lying dead, obligingly right in front of the Kremlin. Even the dumbest in the West will get “the message” of the framing, as intended, and if not there will be thousands of righteous voices interpreting the event for them.
Much controversy surrounded this affair back in 2006. Of course in the realm of romantic problems, we have significantly those surrounding the woman he was last seen with. This woman, Anna Duritskaya, was also present during the shooting. Rumors are floating around that this could do with her recent abortion and surrounding points of melodrama.
Whether the actual shooting was done by contract or not, is also not very important except when looking at the forensics of the crime scene, and the immediate circumstances themselves. These might tell us a few things, except that in cases such as this we must always be mindful that looking like an unprofessional job – such as in this case – would be something a professional would do to throw off the scent.
Thus this act in “broad daylight” was very clearly a murder meant to be known as a murder. This does not fit into either a Russian motive or modus operandi.
.
Cui bono??
That said, it is the US that has the most to gain from this. The Western press has painted Nemtsov for years as the likely person to replace Putin in the event of a serious fracture of political stability in Russia. This follows a self-serving western narrative, where western liberal values—the values fueled by capitalism and its inevitable offshoot, predatory imperialism— are superimposed as natural and universal around the world.
BELOW: Gennady Zyuganov at Moscow communist rally 1 May 2012.
While Nemtsov was one of the US’s favorites, he is not a favorite with the Russian people. The actual ‘runner up’ party in Russia, which is projected to surpass Putin’s ruling party in the event of a serious change, is the Communist Party of Zyuganov. But this narrative cuts against western interests, and is at odds with the west’s narratives about the Cold War and its results.
These statements from NATO and foreign governments are outrageous, but not surprising, because they imply that the Russian government was behind the crime. Why would the murder be ‘condemned‘? Besides the fact that all murders are condemned, generally, by the societies in which they occur (hence there are laws against them), why would this particular murder be ‘condemned’ politically without knowing at this point if there was a political motive at all?
For western audiences, Russia is already a totalitarian regime in which opposition is silenced, and its leaders imprisoned and killed in cold blood.
In such an event, it is obvious how the US will likely spin the “propaganda fallout” of this event, and the call will soon begin openly—as it did for Assad— for Putin to step down. While this last part may be an eventuality at any rate, the events tomorrow will tell us whether we should expect a serious escalation of this cynical process.
[box]Joaquin Flores is an American expat living in Belgrade. He is a full-time analyst at the Center for Syncretic Studies, a public geostrategic think-tank. His expertise encompasses Eastern Europe and Eurasia. [/box]