Less than a year after Boris Yeltsin named him responsible for national economic reform, the Russian economy completely collapsed; his closest political ally, Anatoly Chubais, is one of the most hated men in Russia; under his leadership the Union of Right Forces party managed to eke out a liliputian 4% in the 2003 elections.

With a CV like that, the small-fry Boris Nemtsov should have more to fear from ordinary Russians than the country’s monopolistic political establishment. So why is he being increasingly harassed in the madcap vaudeville race to rule Sochi, the lucrative seat of the 2014 Olympics?

In a nailbiting ruling just hours ago, the Sochi Electoral Committe finally approved him as an official candidate, but not after several mysterious last minute scandals involving some dodgy campaign donations from Brighton Beach that Nemtsov’s team called a “Kremlin provocation”.

Perhaps even more threateningly for the preternaturally tanned Nemtsov, a group of Nashi activists had also recently doused him with ammonia.

If the Kremlin is indeed to blame, it appears to be lavishing a somewhat excessive amount of energy to derail a politician already sorely lacking in grassroots support because of his past as a neo-con, free marketeer who helped engineer the 1998 default.

What’s going on?

Nemtsov’s people will tell you that Moscow begrudges his involvement in the opposition as a co-founder of both the Committee 2008 and the Solidarity Group. In addition, Nemtsov was the most vocal Russian supporter of  Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, and even served as an advisor to President Victor Yuschenko. Even Nemtsov’s website is orange!  That may have been what prompted the prank by Nashi, who are motivated by their hatred of ‘coloured revolutions’.

On the other hand, Nemtsov is not as ‘oppositionist’ as he likes people to believe. After all, he shares the Kremlin’s basic political and economic ideology (free-market liberalism), differing mainly on who should be in charge, what tactics to use, and disapproving of increased ’statism’. And for many Russians, his associations with the Yeltsin administration and the rouble collapse are non-negotiable deal breakers, especially these days.

Even more crippling for his outsider credentials are his enduring associations with Chubais, who masterminded the 1990s privatisation, survived the transition to Putin as chief of the state electricity company, and was recently nominated by Medvedev to head the state-owned nanotechnology firm Rosnanotech.

Chubais is almost mythically despised in Russia, and had lately survived an assassination attempt. In its aftermath, a popular joke had it that any Russian person would have done a better job with his bare hands than then incompetent hitman.

Indeed, “opinion polls singled out Mr. Chubais as Russia’s most hated politician of the 1990s for his role in a massive sell-off of state assets to a handful of Kremlin-connected “oligarchs” that plunged ordinary people into poverty”.

Though Chubais is loved by some in the West as an independent liberal, the truth is that he remains a government insider.

Back to the question of why should the Kremlin sabotage Nemtsov’s bid: what, if anything, might it have to do with the presence in the race of Alexander Lebedev, the billionaire ex-KGB owner of the London Evening Standard and Putin critic?

The way things are going now, Lebedev and Nemtsov are poised to split the opposition vote in a similar way in which the disastrous Yabloko-Union of Right Forces schism of 2003 destroyed both of those parties.

In that sense, the Kremlin should have every interest in making sure that Nemtsov at least participates; so far, for all the petty harassment, the script has borne this out.