Russia robbed of a brave, authentic and distinctive voice
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Version 0 of 1. Charismatic, good-looking and typically dressed in tight-fitting jeans and a casual leather jacket, Boris Nemtsov was a genuinely popular Russian politician. He was also a remorseless critic of Vladimir Putin. He spoke out strongly and vehemently against government corruption. Nemtsov opposed Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his covert war in eastern Ukraine – a needless adventure and “Putin’s war” in Nemtsov’s view. Related: Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov shot dead in Moscow All of this made him an unpopular figure in the Kremlin. By 2015, he was one of the last opposition leaders in Russia still standing. Some – such as the former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in a Siberian jail – are in exile. Others, like Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption blogger, are under house arrest. On Sunday, 1 March, Nemtsov was due to lead a major political opposition rally. Instead, he was shot dead at 11.40pm Moscow time on Friday night. His murder took place in the heart of Moscow, within touching distance of the Kremlin and the fantastical bulbous domes of St Basil’s cathedral. It is an area infested with police, who typically break up opposition manifestations within seconds. And yet Nemtsov’s killer was seemingly able to escape, having shot his target four times in the chest from a white car. Born in Sochi on Russia’s Black Sea coast in 1959, Nemtsov studied physics at Gorky state university. He embarked on a political career in the late 1980s Soviet Union, standing as a reformist. After an unsuccessful first attempt, he won a seat representing Gorky – later renamed Nizhny Novgorod – and became a staunch Boris Yeltsin loyalist. His reward came early: Yeltsin made him the governor of Nizhny Novgorod. In 1997, he became deputy prime minister. At one point, he looked like a future president. But the next decade after Yeltsin exited the Kremlin belonged not to Nemtsov but to an obscure and charmless former KGB officer called Vladimir Putin. Nemtsov founded his own liberal party, the Union of Right Forces, which in the early stages of Putin’s presidency was electorally competitive. Slowly but surely, however, Putin began to squeeze out opposing civic forces. The space in which Nemtsov operated got smaller. By 2004, Nemtsov had more or less abandoned parliamentary or Duma politics. Instead he relaunched himself as a waspish critic of Putin’s and of the country’s sharp drift towards authoritarianism. In 2008, together with Garry Kasparov, the chess champion turned Putin foe, Nemtsov launched Solidarity, a progressive, democratic political party. But its rallies in Moscow never attracted much of a crowd. Nemtsov, who had been a ubiquitous figure in the 1990s, disappeared from state-controlled TV and found himself on the margins of public life. He did not give up, though. He wrote a series of dissenting pamphlets, including Putin: a Reckoning, which accused the president personally of massive corruption. Similar polemics followed against Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor, whom the Kremlin subsequently toppled. In 2009, Nemtsov stood to become mayor in his native Sochi. In a fair fight he might have won. But it wasn’t a fair fight: officials accused him of fraud, while an activist from the Kremlin youth group Nashi threw ammonia in his face. The pro-Putin candidate won. Nemtsov had spoken out against massive corruption in Sochi, as contractors built venues and palaces for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Despite accusations that he was himself corrupt, Nemtsov’s campaign was hardly lavish: he rattled up the city’s hills in a rusty yellow minivan. Nemtsov said the Olympics – Putin’s showcase project – was of dubious benefit to local residents and should be spread among other Russian cities where there was more snow. In 2011, Nemtsov tried to re-enter formal politics. He founded the Popular Freedom party, together with the former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. The authorities refused to register it; Nemtsov was annoying some very powerful people. Gennady Timchenko – a billionaire friend of Putin’s, sanctioned last year by the US – tried to ban Nemtsov from leaving the country. (At that point, he was in Strasbourg.) It was the application of Soviet methods to a post-communist problem. Nemtsov flew back to Russia anyway. In the end, Nemtsov fell victim to old-fashioned mafia methods. His shooting is the first assassination of a major political figure in Moscow for a decade. It robs Russia of a brave, authentic and distinctive voice at a time when the country is locked in a dark spiral of war and propaganda. |