Audio content: Moscow residents describing what motivates them to watch over the memorial at the site where Boris Nemtsov was murdered.
Visual content: Images of the bridge memorial and of the procession on the one-year anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Main videos at TV Rain (interviews with the guardians of the memorial)
Additional video at TV Rain (anniversary procession)
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On the evening of February 27, 2015, the Russian politician and activist Boris Nemtsov was shot to death as he was crossing the Большой Москворецкий Мост (Large “Moscow River” Bridge), located right next to the Moscow Kremlin. Nemtsov was a charismatic figure known for his commitment to freedom in both the political and personal realms. He remained consistent in his political beliefs (classically liberal, pro-democracy and pro-free market), regardless of whether those beliefs brought him a high post in the federal government or temporarily landed him in a jail cell. Nemtsov rose to positions of political responsibility at a relatively young age. In the mid-1990s, he was governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast; by the late 1990s he was a Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and then a leading figure in the Duma as a member of the free-market-oriented party Союз правых сил (Union of Right Forces).
After Putin came to power in 2000, Nemtsov’s party gradually lost its standing, as was the case for most factions not affiliated with Putin’s Единая Россия (United Russia) party. Nemtsov had briefly voiced support for Putin’s presidential candidacy in 2000, but from the mid-2000s became one of Putin’s most outspoken critics. In 2008 he co-founded the pro-democracy movement Солидарность (Solidarity) and in 2012 joined the opposition party РПР-Парнас (RPR-Parnas). Working with allies in these movements, Nemtsov published a series of reports sharply criticizing Putin’s leadership, such as “Путин. Итоги. 10 лет” (“Summing Up Putin: 10 years”) (2010) and “Путин. Коррупция” (Putin – Corruption”) (2011). During this period he also participated in numerous anti-regime street protests and was occasionally detained by the police. Another controversial stance in the later part of his life was his support for the Western Europe-oriented factions in Ukraine; as a result, he criticized Russia’s annexation of Crimea and at the time of his death was working on an investigative report gathering evidence of Russia’s involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine.
All of this meant that Nemtsov had many political enemies at the time of his death.
