One of the major Russian opposition politicians, assassinated hundred meters from the Kremlin in Moscow in 2015.
Boris Nemtsov was walking home with his young Ukrainian girlfriend after a visit to a restaurant across the Great Moskva Bridge – with the Kremlin in immediate sight – when a car with four passengers stopped shortly behind him. A killer shot him several times in the back. That was on February 27, 2015.
The shock in Russian society after the demonstrative murder of a prominent politician in front of a symbolic backdrop was deep. Nemtsov, at the time one of the best-known faces of the Russian extra-parliamentary opposition, was also the harshest critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He didn’t shy away from even the worst insults. Already in 2014 he fortold many results of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in the full-scale attack of 2022.
Political star of the 90s
Boris Nemtsov went through several stages and changes in his political career. In the 1990s he was one of the “young guns” of Russian politics: a passionate reformer without a communist background. In 1991, at just 32, he became the youngest governor of the new Russia.
In the Nizhny Novgorod region, which had previously been heavily isolated due to military production, he carried out liberal reforms that were later considered exemplary by the Russian government. At the age of 36, he became deputy prime minister and was considered a possible successor to Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president.
As we all know, things turned out differently. Initially, Nemtsov sought solidarity with Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin. But he soon went into opposition with his “Union of Right-Wing Forces” party. In 2004, Nemtsov supported the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine and then became an advisor to the liberal President Viktor Yushchenko – much to the annoyance of the Russian leadership around Putin.
Putin’s protégé, Viktor Yanukovych, lost to Viktor Yushchenko as a result of the Ukrainian mass protests. Nemtsov criticized the annexation of Crimea and described the undeclared war in eastern Ukraine as Moscow’s aggression against the neighboring country.
Client still unknown
The investigation into the murder of Boris Nemtsov quickly led to Chechnya: five people were arrested, one of whom killed himself with a grenade. 35-year-old Saur Dadayev, an officer in the Interior Ministry’s so-called domestic troops, admitted that he fired the shots. The shooter was sentenced to 20 years in a prison camp in 2017, while his four accomplices received prison sentences of between eleven and 19 years.
The alleged clients – there were two suspects from Chechnya – who are said to have promised the killers at least 15 million rubles (the equivalent of over 210,000 euros) were never found. Neither the people behind it nor the motive have been clarified to this day, said the daughter of the murdered politician, Zhanna Nemtsova.
The trail in an autocratic republic of Chechnya could lead further upwards, but it was not pursued, critics complained. The OSCE, like the Council of Europe before it, also criticized the results of the investigation in view of the fifth anniversary of Nemtsov’s murder and called for an independent international investigation into the case. However, the Russian authorities always strictly rejected these calls.
In general, the Kremlin hardly said a word to the former deputy prime minister and most recently a member of a regional Duma, Boris Nemtsov. Requests to establish a Nemtsov memorial in Moscow or to rename the Moskva Bridge “Nemtsov Bridge” were rejected.
The Moscow authorities repeatedly had the flowers removed from the site where the opposition politician was murdered, sometimes accompanied by violent clashes with activists. Nevertheless, fresh flowers have been put up there every day for five years. Only after much wrangling was private initiatives allowed to place memorial plaques on two buildings where the politician had lived.
Memorial march in Moscow
A Boris Nemtsov Square has been inaugurated in Prague. The official ceremony of renaming the square where the Embassy of the Russian Federation in the Czech Republic was held in February 27 2020. Zhanna Nemtsova welcomed the Prague authorities’ decision to keep her father’s memory alive, she said in an interview with DW. In her opinion, the international initiative “does have an impact on the Russian authorities, especially urban ones.”
“As political persecution increases in Russia, the authorities understand that they cannot resort to physical destruction of an opposition leader,” Nemtsova emphasized. The Russian leadership did not expect such a “wave of discontent and indignation” that her father’s murder triggered.
Boris Nemtsov is remembered today by places named after him in Washington, Vilnius and Kiev. There are similar considerations in other cities too. An approved memorial march for the murdered opposition politician took place in Moscow on February 29th 2020. In St. Petersburg, local authorities rejected two requests for a similar action. Only the organizers’ third application was approved on Thursday.
Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom
The Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom was founded in November, 2015 in Germany.
Its mission is to preserve the liberal legacy of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov.