The Twenty Percent Solution

"The Russian people are just so tired of Putin and his team that they will ultimately change the system. But the real danger for the country is that there will be a bloody revolution."
Boris Nemtsov

The body of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, covered with plastic, lies on Moskvoretsky bridge near St. Basil's cathedral in central Moscow on February 28, 2015 (AFP Photo/Dmitry Sereryakov) 

"Boris Nemtsov was a stark opposition leader who criticized the most important state officials in our country, including President Vladimir Putin."
"As we have seen, such criticism in Russia is dangerous for one's life."
Ila Yashin, Russian opposition activist, Moscow

"Maybe if a hundred people were to die people would rise up, but I don't really believe in that."
"People are so under the influence of the (TV) box that they will believe anything that television tells them. If it tells them that terrorists from the Islamic State group came to Russia in order to blow up the fifth column, they'll believe it."
Sergei Musakov, opposition activist, Moscow

Russian opposition supporters carry portraits of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov during a march in Moscow on March 1, 2015 after his murder on a bridge a stone's throw from the Kremlin walls (AFP Photo/Sergei Gapon)

"[Weighing whether the murder represents] a provocation to destabilize the political situation in the country, where the figure of Nemtsov could have become a sort of sacrificial victim for those who stop at nothing to achieve their political goals."
Russian prosecutors

"[It looked like a] provocation [according to Putin]. With all respect to Boris Nemtsov, he did not pose any threat in the political sphere."
"If we compare his popularity ratings with the government's ...Nemtsov was quite an average citizen."
Presidential spokesman

"I know that for many people Boris's death will become so much of a Rubicon that the entire country may become different. Will we find ourselves standing even closer to the precipice of all-out war of everybody against everybody? Or will we find within ourselves the strength to understand that political differences are not a reason to stop acting like human beings?"
"For more than a year now, the television screens have been flooded with pure hate for us [the opposition to Vladimir Putin]. And now everyone from the blogger at his apartment desk to President Putin himself is searching for enemies, accusing one another of provocation. What is wrong with us?"
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former imprisoned gas oligarch, exiled in Switzerland

What is wrong with Russia is the totalitarian power structure that Vladimir Putin has set up to ensure that the opposition to his reign is not supported by any Russian majority. His control of the news media ensures that his propaganda is the only news that reaches the ears and eyes of most Russians wedded to their television sets imbibing Mr. Putin's views and boasts and nationalistic pomp and ceremony so appealing to the Russian belief in themselves as entitled and superior.

Superior to their neighbours and entitled to the empowerment by whatever means deemed necessary to portray Russia as the commanding presence whose disfavour of any other nation's aspirations is to be avoided at all costs. The Kremlin had identified Mr. Nemtsov as a leader of a "fifth column"; he was portrayed along with others criticizing the Putin autocracy as traitors doing service to the West hostile to and jealous of Russia's prominence on the world stage.

Others representing an intolerable fifth column were summarily disposed of, from Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist and Kremlin critic who was shot to death at age 48 outside her Moscow apartment in 2006; Alexander Litvinenko, the 44-year-old former KGB officer who suffered excruciatingly with radioactive polonium-210 poisoning for accusing Vladimir Putin of corruption, and Boris Berezovsky, found dead with a ligature around his neck in his London mansion in 2013.

Boris Nemtsov's mother, fretting for the safety of her outspoken son knew of what she spoke when she informed him that he was inviting death by criticizing President Putin. He refused to back down from his campaign to unseat a president who denied his opposition party status in a general election, and who had him imprisoned on trumped-up charges time and again.

But despite the country's economic crisis through sanctions evolving from the Ukraine crisis engineered by Mr. Putin, his strongman image so beloved by Russians who celebrate the return of Crimea to Russia from he undeserving Ukrainians, has garnered him an unstoppable 80% approval rating.

And now that Mr. Nemtsov has joined the ranks of those who have paid the ultimate price for irritating Vladimir Putin by charges of corruption and skullduggery, who will there be, courageous enough to do likewise and place his life on the line?