I remember, as a 17-year-old girl, meeting a boy on Bolshoi Moskvoretsky bridge in summer. It was a place for such lovely things. Years later, I would walk across it in the evenings, feeling completely safe, even when it was late and the darkness came early. For what could possibly happen to anyone so close to the Kremlin walls?

Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was gunned down here on Friday. “Moskvoretsky” is one of the most picturesque spots in all of Moscow, popular with tourists and locals – a prime picture-taking spot from where you can enjoy views of St Basil’s Cathedral, the Kremlin, the Moskva river. This is the bridge you take when you want to stroll from Red Square into the historic neighbourhood of Zamoskvorechye.

In attempting to make sense of Nemtsov’s breathtakingly brazen murder, I reached out to my old Zamoskvorechye neighbours, people for whom this act hits especially close to home. “Don’t call it murder, call it what it is – a public execution,” Katya, an old friend of my family and local resident, told me.

In her 40s, Katya is one of those “old-school” Muscovites who has lived in Zamoskvorechye most of her life. For her, Nemtsov’s death is just another disaster in “a series of disasters” which have followed since Russia annexed Crimea last March. Katya said she wasn’t sure who might benefit from such an act of violence, but pointed out that the government’s actions, combined with state propaganda, have done much to destabilise society. “Maybe it’s a group of kooks who have watched too many [TV] programmes about scary liberals,” she said. “Maybe it’s much worse.”

Feelings of this sort often end up alighting upon Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. They reference many of Kadyrov’s recent statements, including one in December 2014 that terrorists’ families should be held liable for terror attacks. Kadyrov’s claims caused controversy in Moscow – particularly because they made it appear as though the Chechen leader does not feel he needs to follow Russian law on Chechen territory.

Most stop short of directly blaming Kadyrov for Nemtsov’s death, but many point out how his rhetoric, and similar rhetoric in public life, leads to greater acceptance of violence in society.

In the 1990s, a decade characterised by chaos and instability in Russia, Nemtsov emerged as a government insider, a parliament member, and a deputy PM. A member of then-president Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle, Nemtsov was edged out of mainstream politics after Putin came to power. Nemtsov’s criticism of what he saw as Putin’s anti-democratic policies largely fell on deaf ears in the government.

Today, supporters of the government agenda are already pointing out that Nemtsov’s murder could be the result of a liberal conspiracy, a kind of “sacrifice” to the anti-government cause.

The logic runs like this. Who benefits from the murder? Not Putin, but the liberals, Sergei, a retiree, said. “Let’s face it, Nemtsov was nothing special. He was only well known because of his government past. He had no political future. So his own little friends decided he was expendable.”

Sergei would represent a substantial part of the population who rallied around Putin when Crimea was annexed. In spite of Russia’s current economic problems, they still tend to believe that the future is bright. They argue that Putin gave people hope, and gave them back Crimea – their “birthright”. This results in defiance against what they see as foreign provocations.

In the hours since Nemtsov’s death, I’ve encountered many sentiments along similar lines.

However, for the minority of Russians who have watched, aghast, as their country turned against both neighbouring Ukraine and the west, the killing of such a prominent government critic is a symbol of more horror to come. Marina Krapivina, a playwright and Zamoskvorechye resident, says that she is now seriously wondering about the possibility of yet another terror, similar to the bloody events of the 1930s, being unleashed in Russia. “I envy people who still have illusions that everything will turn out fine,” Marina told me. She would draw on an increasingly held minority view that the failures of the 1990s are to blame for the current level of hatred and paranoia in society. “There was no real reckoning. People weren’t allowed to blow off steam, to make peace with the [Soviet] past, to reassert their identities,” she said. “We didn’t deal with old wounds, and the wounds have festered.”

One result has been a desperate need by the majority to deflect any blame from the government – including deflecting blame from the government propaganda machine, which has cast government critics such as Nemtsov as dastardly traitors with a pro-western agenda. Authoritarian government essentially takes its own citizens hostage. Many Russians, then, have been living as hostages for a generation. They have Stockholm syndrome. They want to believe their rulers are kind and merciful and only want what’s best – there is almost an animal horror you have to confront if you admit the truth.

In a city where thousands recently marched in opposition to the Ukrainian protest movement – a literal protest against a protest, and in a foreign country, no less – some holding banners demanding “purges,” the idea that an actual purge has occurred is still difficult to confront.

The barbarism of it, the body bag lying sadly on the ground with beautiful St Basil’s, a true symbol of Russia, as the backdrop; the tranquillity of a historic neighbourhood shattered; the possibility that repeatedly calling for punishments can have consequences ... all of this is likely to be suppressed in the public conscience. It is, quite frankly, too much to bear, especially in a country as reliant on one-sided television coverage as Russia is when it comes to public opinion.

Plenty of my journalist colleagues have reminisced about Nemtsov, his larger-than-life nature, his brusqueness, his conflicted past. I was surprised by how dapper he was, and how polite, and how beneath that politeness there seemed to be a terrible stress, the sense of a tightly coiled spring. Here was a man who seemed very tired of his role as a public enemy. Now Nemtsov is at peace. The rest of us, however, I am seriously worried about.

Natalia Antonova is a Moscow-based journalist and playwright