Russian liberal politician, born in 1957 in Sochi and raised in Nizhny Novgorod, 400km east of Moscow. Trained as a physicist. He entered politics almost by accident, joining a movement against a planned nuclear-powered heating plant to protect his mother, who feared arrest for protesting.
Nemtsov was a natural political talent. By 1990 he was standing for national office against the communist establishment. He sometimes arrived at meetings in a cheap Moskvich while opponents rode in official cars. In a television debate he wore a borrowed sweater rather than a suit and declared: "I won't promise anything, except one thing. I won't lie."
He caught Boris Yeltsin's eye as a legislator and won his affection by standing with him against an attempted coup in 1991. The Kremlin appointed him governor of Nizhny Novgorod, where he launched Russia's first privatisations, built roads, invested in phone networks, took on "red directors" who ran their companies as fiefs, and fostered a free press. Nizhny Novgorod became a showcase for how post-Soviet Russia could prosper, and Nemtsov became an international star. In 1994 Yeltsin suggested he could be the next president.
After Yeltsin lured Nemtsov to serve in Moscow, everything turned to ashes. He sponsored a presidential decree that officials should surrender foreign-made limousines for Russian Volgas, which happened to be made in his home town—but the Volgas were unreliable, and his own car reportedly broke down on the way to a cabinet colleague's party. Yeltsin's administration descended into chaos: miners went on strike, oil prices fell, the government could not finance its budget and foreign investors fled. After a default in August 1998, Nemtsov resigned.
In the late 1990s Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, two media barons, used their networks to wreck Nemtsov's reputation for refusing to grant them influence and assets. Once they had brought down Nemtsov and democratic politicians like him, there was nobody left to stop Vladimir Putin's forced march towards despotism.
Nemtsov was Putin in the negative: charismatic, attractive, flamboyant, open, tall and impulsive where Putin was grey, cold, cautious, private, short and calculating. He chose democracy; the other yearned for power. By the time of his assassination in 2015, Nemtsov was back in elected office, in the regional parliament of Yaroslavl. A few months after Putin annexed Crimea and fanned conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Nemtsov called Putin "fucked in the head" on live television. Chechen leaders, who had also been criticised by Nemtsov, saw a chance to prove their loyalty to the tsar. Ten months later he was gunned down near the Kremlin by a Chechen hit squad.
"The Successor", a chronicle of Russia's emergence from Soviet communism by journalist Mikhail Fishman, was published in Russia soon after the war with Ukraine began in 2022 and became a bestseller. Like Alexei Navalny, who built a movement by campaigning against corruption, Nemtsov was murdered because he was dangerous.
Ye've also got to remember that ... respectable people do the most astonishin' things to preserve their respectability. Thank God I'm not respectable.