Boris Nemtsov

On the night of 27 February 2015, assassins gunned down Boris Nemtsov as he crossed the Bolshoi Moskvoretskii Bridge. Shock quickly spread throughout Russia, particularly among its political opposition. Not because Nemtsov was so brazenly gunned down. Such are the risks of being politically active in Putin’s Russia. Nemtsov had been a fixture in the movement since its earliest days, and in many ways one of its founders. That such an internationally well-connected figure could be wiped out in central Moscow signaled a grim turning point. Hindsight has proven this correct. A decade later, Russia is a very different place. But it always wasn’t like that. In the 1990s, Nemtsov was a young liberal darling, the charismatic hope to succeed Boris Yeltsin. That didn’t happen, as we all know. And another, totally different figure became President. As Mikhail Fishman writes in his political biography, The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin, and the Decline of Modern Russia, Nemtsov’s life a