‘He couldn’t be bought. So they killed him.’ Vladimir Kara-Murza reflects on the tenth anniversary of his mentor Boris Nemtsov’s assassination
On the night of February 27, 2015, Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was shot four times in the back on Moscow’s Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, just a few hundred meters from the Kremlin. Two years later, five men from Chechnya were convicted of his murder and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 11 to 20 years. Yet those who orchestrated and ordered the assassination have never been identified. For the past decade, Nemtsov’s longtime friend and ally, Vladimir Kara-Murza, has carried on his work, fighting for democracy in Russia and speaking out against Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine — a mission that led to his imprisonment for more than two years, ending with the Ankara prisoner exchange in August 2024. To mark the tenth anniversary of Nemtsov’s murder, Kara-Murza shared a reflection on his legacy in a social media post. Meduza has translated it into English.
Russia has faced many historical crossroads, but never one so personal.
Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Putin entered the highest ranks of federal power in the same month — March 1997 — with Nemtsov as first deputy prime minister and Putin as deputy head of the presidential administration.
Nemtsov, a gifted physicist (“on the verge of genius,” as his fellow scientists described him), was a bright and charismatic public politician with multiple election campaigns behind him, experience in parliamentary debate, and a reputation as the most successful governor in modern Russia. Putin, a former KGB officer who had once been involved in the arrests and searches of Leningrad dissidents, was an unremarkable bureaucrat who avoided the public eye and climbed the career ladder slowly.
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By the summer of 1997, according to VTsIOM polling, Boris Nemtsov was the most popular politician in the country, easily outpacing all potential rivals — Gennady Zyuganov, Yuri Luzhkov, and others — in a hypothetical second round of presidential elections. His bold initiatives — from mandatory income and property declarations for officials (Decree No. 484) to his campaign to curb oligarchic influence — dominated TV screens and newspaper headlines. Few doubted that when Boris Yeltsin’s second term ended, Nemtsov would be the one to take his place in the Kremlin.
But the oligarchs struck back. Everyone who was around back then remembers the infamous TV smear campaign about his “white pants.” Nemtsov’s approval ratings began to slip, and the final blow came with the 1998 financial default — news of which the then-deputy prime minister learned from the media. Although Yeltsin offered him a chance to stay in the government, for Nemtsov, that was out of the question.
For Putin and his network, on the other hand, the default marked the beginning of their political ascent. After August 1998, Yeltsin appointed only former KGB officers as heads of government. And as we now know all too well, there’s no such thing as a “former” KGB officer.
After Putin assumed the presidency, many who had once been considered liberals quickly adapted to the new order. Some retreated into private life; others left the country. Nemtsov stayed — and chose to fight. Contrary to the myth, he opposed Putin from the very start of his presidency — and even earlier: in March 2000, he refused to support the Kremlin’s handpicked successor when the SPS party leadership debated it. He fiercely and vividly criticized the creeping authoritarianism — first from the State Duma’s podium and later, when real opposition was driven out of parliament, from the stages of street protests. He organized massive demonstrations (the last one, in September 2014, was against the war in Ukraine), compiled and distributed reports on the corruption of Putin’s regime, and successfully lobbied for the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which imposed personal sanctions on Putin’s inner circle. And in 2013, he achieved what seemed impossible for an opposition figure in Putin’s Russia: winning regional elections in Yaroslavl and becoming a deputy once again. He had begun preparing for the 2016 parliamentary elections.
Nemtsov couldn’t be bought. He couldn’t be intimidated. He couldn’t be forced into exile. So they killed him.
On the night of February 27, 2015, he was shot five times in the back on Moscow’s Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge.
Historians are often wary of asking “what if,” but it’s hard to resist wondering how different our world might have been if the leader of its largest country had been not a secret police officer obsessed with the “greatness” of a long-dead Soviet empire, but a man whose steadfast goal — in his own words — was “to live in a free, European, democratic Russia.”
For 10 years now, I have hated February. Every year at this time, I take out the books Nemtsov gave me and signed for me over the course of our friendship and work together. One of them bears this inscription: “With confidence that we’ll break through.”
I still want to believe in that.
