Nemtsov

This week's number of the NYRB carried a review of a book about the murder of one Boris Nemtsov, a Russian physicist turned politician. For some reason, despite the steady stream of such stuff, I found this particular review particularly depressing. That an otherwise civilised country, producing its fair share of talents in more peaceful departments of arts and science, for example novelists and musicians, not to mention physicists and mathematicians, should still go in for executing people for political offences, something we have more or less abandoned here in the west for some hundreds of years. It sticks in my mind that that the last time such a thing happened in this country was in the reign of good queen Anne, although I cannot now track it down.

Should we take comfort from these murders being disguised as the work of gangsters rather than that of the law courts; as a sign of progress?

Sticker price 40USD, with Amazon offering a copy at £25 or so and ebay one at £50. I hesitate, both with my money and my time. Slightly put off by the very long title, another habit we lost in this country in the eighteenth century.

PS: SPSS, in this context, stands for Soviet and post-Soviet politics and society. But the acronym is better known to me as the statistical package for social scientists, around since at least the time of my débuts in computing in the early 1970's. I may have even used it once or twice. Now part of the IBM family. See reference 2.

Reference 1: The February 2015 Assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Flawed Trial of His Alleged Killers: An Exploration of Russia's "Crime of the 21st Century" - John B. Dunlop - 2018.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPSS.