When a government starts murdering its critics in the streets, it has crossed the line into barbarism. President Vladimir Putin of Russia is fond of accusing the administration in Ukraine of fascism. But it is the aggressive, self-pitying nationalism whipped up by Mr Putin — allied to the persecution and now murder of his domestic opponents — that is truly reminiscent of the politics of Russia and Germany in the 1930s.
No outsider can know if Mr Putin ordered the killing of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader gunned down within sight of the Kremlin. But the Russian president and his acolytes undoubtedly created the atmosphere of nationalist paranoia that made his assassination permissible. State television had repeatedly labelled Nemtsov,
a critic of Russia’s war in Ukraine, a “traitor”.