Boris Nemtsov’s dead body was still lying on the icy asphalt when Vladimir Putin’s spokesman announced that the president believed the murder to be a “provocation”.

“With all due respect to the memory of Boris Nemtsov, in political terms he did not pose any threat to the current Russian leadership or Vladimir Putin. If we compare popularity levels, Putin’s and the government’s ratings and so on, in general Boris Nemtsov was just a little bit more than an average citizen,” Dmitry Peskov added later on.

Despite the astonishing tone of the statement, its sentiment has some truth to it. Nemtsov’s anti-corruption investigations and criticisms of the Putin regime were scathing, but did not reach many outside the “liberal bubble” of the small urban opposition.

The proximity of one of the Kremlin towers to the spot where Nemtsov was shot in the back is darkly melodramatic, and the symbolism could not be clearer. But this is not the way that the Kremlin has tended to deal with its internal political enemies. Take Alexei Navalny, arguably a far greater potential threat than Nemtsov, who has instead been frustrated with numerous court cases, house arrests, detentions and other harassment. Thuggish irritations and intimidations, not murder, have been the tools to disarm the opposition.

None of this is to suggest that the possible reasons for Nemtsov’s murder announced by Russia’s investigative committee are convincing. According to spokesman Vladimir Markin, the murder was either a set-up by the opposition to use Nemtsov as a “sacrificial victim”, a personal issue, a settling of scores between radical groups fighting on either side of the Ukraine conflict, or an act of Islamic terrorism. Not a mention of the frequent smearing of opposition politicians by groups close to the Kremlin, or of Nemtsov’s frequent appearance on online lists of “national traitors”.

Anyone who watches Russian state television – and that includes the vast majority of Russians – will have seen a picture painted over the past year of a victimised Russia attacked by voracious western vultures who want, at least, to make Russia irrelevant on the world stage, and at worst to mount a coup and install a puppet government. According to this narrative, the Russian opposition are traitors, working to destroy the country.

The Russian president and his TV channels have worked relentlessly to push this theory. Putin may have sent a telegram expressing his condolences to Nemtsov’s 87-year-old mother, in which he said Nemtsov always argued his points “directly and honestly”, but his tone in public has been rather different.

When he was asked about what Nemtsov and other opposition leaders wanted during a televised phone-in session back in 2010, Putin said they had stolen billions while in power in the 1990s, and if they were allowed back they would “not stop at billions but sell off the whole of Russia”.

As the conflict in Ukraine has intensified, the rhetoric has hardened. Now the opposition are not just corrupt, but “traitors”. In December, Putin was asked by a journalist whether he felt his use of the term “fifth column” and speaking about the political opposition as traitors was causing dangerous divisions in society.

“The line that separates opposition activists from the fifth column is hard to see from the outside,” said the Russian president. “What’s the difference? Opposition activists may be very harsh in their criticism, but at the end of the day they are defending the interests of the motherland. And the fifth column is those who serve the interests of other countries, and who are only tools for others’ political goals.”

Putin may have slightly fudged his answer, but much of the television propaganda makes it very clear on which side of this division patriotic citizens should locate the current political opposition.

NTV, which has run a series of programmes on Russia’s opposition and their apparent links to foreign intelligence services and other nefarious interests, had another dubious exposé lined up for Sunday night, in which allegations about Nemtsov were apparently due to feature. The programme was quietly removed from the schedule after Nemtsov’s murder.

At a recent launch of the Anti-Maidan movement in Russia, the leader of a biker gang, known as “the Surgeon”, who has been photographed many times with Putin, said foreign powers were sharpening their teeth to attack Russia. The Anti-Maidan movement would ensure that they could not do so, with violence if necessary. Another name for the movement was “death to faggots”, said the Surgeon.

Nemtsov frequently appeared on lists of “traitors” published online by extremist groups, and given that many radical Russian nationalists have been fighting a war in east Ukraine for the past six months, there have long been fears that the bloodshed could at some point move to the streets of Moscow.

The well-organised hit, in one of the most closely watched parts of Moscow, of a man who was undoubtedly under state surveillance just two days before a major opposition march, does not smack of an amateur job. Assuming a jealous lover or angry fellow liberal would not be able to organise a drive-by shooting in the shadows of the Kremlin towers, the remaining options are disturbing.

If, as Peskov says, it was senseless for the Kremlin to kill someone who posed very little threat, that leaves another option that is perhaps even more terrifying: that the campaign of hate that has erupted over the past year is spiralling out of the control of those who manufactured it.

“Actually it would be in some way less worrying if Putin had ordered Nemtsov’s killing,” wrote Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite turned journalist and opposition activist. “It would be an awful system, but at least a system, a manageable system. But I feel, unfortunately, this is not the case. There is no Putin who gave a command to kill. But there is a Putin who has built an appalling terminator, and he has lost control of it.”