The family of Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader gunned down in Moscow 10 years ago, has shared with Current Time an intimate video in which his mother shares memories of her son.
The video was recorded by Nemtsov’s daughter, Zhanna, in 2023, in the final months of his mother’s life. It provides a unique insight into a man who rose close to the summit of Russian politics under Boris Yeltsin, before becoming a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin.
'The Important One'
“The teachers at school loved him. The girls called him ‘the important one,’” Dina Nemtsova says in the video. She herself died aged 96 in February 2024.
She paints a picture of a talented boy who rose from humble beginnings.
“It was very hard for him to work at home. He had a small place in the kitchen, but someone would always interrupt his work. Sometimes, when he needed to find space to work, he would lock himself in the bathroom.”
Nemtsov was raised in Gorky, which was renamed Nizhny Novogorod after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and studied physics at the city’s university.
“He was critical about what was happening in the country,” Dina says. “It was during [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev's time when Boris was already aware that things were happening.”
But it was under a later Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that Nemtsov became politically active. Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) changed the political climate in the country, making it easier to speak out.
Political Awakening
“We started following politics when perestroika started. I can say it was that moment when he entered politics.”
Nemtsov had a successful career in the chaotic conditions of 1990s post-Soviet Russia, eventually rising to be deputy prime minister under Yeltsin.
But when Yeltsin appointed Putin as his successor, Nemtsov became a regular face at street protests against the Kremlin’s new, authoritarian turn.
“Putin is a KGB man full of Soviet manners,” he said in one interview.
Nemtsov was a major figure who gave Russia’s increasingly beleaguered opposition a face with global recognition and respect. In Western capitals, he was associated with the brief promise of a new, democratic Russia after decades of communism.
When he was gunned down in 2015, it was widely seen as a political assassination. Five Chechens were convicted for a contract killing, but Russian law enforcement never prosecuted anyone for ordering it.
In 2016, his mother wrote that she had last seen him in December 2014.
“He looked thin and distracted….” she said. “It just never occurred to me that everything was so dangerous.”
