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L ast week, the Russian opposition leader, Boris Nemstov, was shot dead. Nemtsov, 55, was shot four times in the back as he was heading home from dinner with his wife. His death came only a day before a planned protest against the current Russian government.

Nemstov was the co-leader of the Republic Party of Russia; as such he was the premier opposition to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. He was an outspoken critic of Putin and, specifically, the Russian-fuelled war in Ukraine. He had already been labelled by the world as a target.

It is alleged he was shot down in order to protect a secret dictatorship disguised as a democracy. However, President Putin has condemned the murder and vowed to bring the assailant to justice. Putin has even elected to take personal control of the investigation.

Many have come to the conclusion, understandably, that the order for the Nemstov murder secretly came straight from Putin himself. This is not an unrealistic assumption.

Putin steadily rose to a position of power after leaving the KGB (in English, the Committee for State Security) to become a politician. He has been the president for eleven years and prime minister for five. He had met minimal opposition, until Nemstov.

Putin’s seemingly unchallenged political career has been rivalled only by the likes of Joseph Stalin. In 1934, Sergey Kirov, a political opposition to Stalin, was murdered. The historical parallels have extended further than one event. Putin’s reach back into Eastern Europe seems compelling as evidence of a historical relapse. Many critics have viewed Russia’s annexing of the Crimea as a reassertion of the Soviet Union’s former control over the region. The growing sense of dictatorship is fuelled further by the increasing autocracy of Putin’s rule.

It is unsubstantiated that Vladimir Putin had anything to do with the murder of Boris Nemstov.