Remembering Boris Nemtsov / Keith Gessen

[Demeter]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n06/keith-gessen/remembering-boris-nemtsov?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3706&utm_content=usca_nonsubs&hq_e=el&hq_m=3661896&hq_l=11&hq_v=e477429728

It would be hard to imagine a less likely political martyr than Boris Nemtsov. He was loud, brash, boastful, vain and a tireless womaniser. My favourite story about him came from a Moscow journalist who once shared a cab with Nemtsov and a photographer whom he’d been wooing to no avail. It was late at night and he fell asleep. The photographer was the first to be dropped off, and Nemtsov suddenly woke up. ‘So what do you say?’ he asked. Receiving another no, he went back to sleep.

Nemtsov was a young physicist in Nizhny Novgorod when perestroika began. He got involved in protest politics and was elected to the first democratic Supreme Soviet in 1990, associating himself with the anti-Soviet, ‘democratic’ wing. He caught Boris Yeltsin’s eye and was appointed governor of Nizhny Novgorod. After six years with mixed results, he was called back to the Kremlin to join the cabinet of ‘young reformers’ who, it was claimed, would renew economic progress for Yeltsin’s second term. Nemtsov was the most handsome among them, and a physicist, and Jewish! Looking at photos of him with Yeltsin, who sometimes presented Nemtsov as his successor, one couldn’t help but be filled with hope. Then Nemtsov opened his mouth. The first time I saw him on TV was during a celebration of the ageing pop singer Alla Pugacheva; he reminded her that she’d once said she liked sleeping with her husband because he reminded her of Nemtsov. It was a strange performance for the future hope of Russian democracy.

I spent a week with Nemtsov many years later, in 2009, when he was running for mayor of Sochi. He was still amazing. It was early spring in Russia and yet Nemtsov had a full tan. Everywhere we went he wore blue jeans, a black jacket and a white shirt with the top three buttons undone. He addressed everyone he met with the familiar ty, which was rude, and he hit on all the women journalists. But he was totally committed to what he was doing, and bizarrely, bull-headedly, fearless. By this point he had started publishing short, well-researched reports about corruption in both the presidential administration and the Moscow mayoralty. Later he would publish one about construction of the various Olympic sites in Sochi. Whoever he was speaking to he would say: ‘Have you read my book about that? You need to read my book about that.’ And he would start making arrangements to send them a pamphlet.

His campaign in Sochi was quixotic. This former governor and deputy prime minister, ten years out of government, was travelling around in a rented yellow minivan, trying to get people on the street to talk to him. Most of them recognised him, he was a celebrity, but they weren’t about to stick their necks out for him. His rallies were poorly attended. His volunteers put up posters with his handsome face only to find they’d been torn down overnight. (The Kremlin had agreed to let him register his candidacy but had no intention of letting him win.) He was subjected to relentless attacks on his character in the local and national media. A group of young men, who for some reason were wearing dresses, splashed ammonia on him before a press conference....

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[MBS]

1. Wow, this is really good.

It describes the complexity of the man, and the complexity of the political situation.

The later paragraphs address the relationship of Nemstsov (his life and his murder) to the situation in Ukraine:

The biggest difference between this killing and the many others that preceded it was Nemtsov’s prominence. The journalists Dmitry Kholodov, Paul Klebnikov, Politkovskaya, the human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, the Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova: none was so immediately recognisable to so many people; none had once been so high up in government. None had been labelled enemy number one by the nationalists and other pro-Kremlin activists who have emerged as if from a time warp to take up the banner of the war against Ukraine. That war was Nemtsov’s finest moment. On 2 March 2014, when it first became clear what was happening, Nemtsov wrote a furious article which the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy refused to post on its site unless he took out some of the more inflammatory language. So he posted it on Facebook instead: " Putin has declared a war of brother against brother in Ukraine. This bloody folly by a crazed KGB man will cost Russia and Ukraine dear … The ghoul needs a war. He needs the blood of the people. Russia can look forward to international isolation, the impoverishment of its people, and repressions. . ."

It was a remarkable performance from someone who could long since have retired from politics. . . . He could have moved to New York like his friend Kasparov. Ukraine has been the question hanging over the Putin administration since 2004. In the minds of Putin and his people, it’s the final battle. If Ukraine can be kept out of the hands of the West, Russia wins. If it joins the EU and Nato, Russia is effectively reduced to borders not seen since the time of Peter the Great. What’s puzzling is that Nemtsov’s murder took place just two weeks after Russia to all intents and purposes won the war. At the negotiations in Minsk, Ukraine effectively surrendered. It had already fallen into chaos. The government is unpopular, the volunteer battalions have minds of their own, and the economy is in ruins . . . If, as most believe, Putin’s goal, if he couldn’t have Ukraine, was to destabilise it, he’s achieved it. But the price appears to have been Russia’s domestic tranquillity. The general mobilisation in support of the president has taken increasingly ugly forms. In December, in the stadium in Grozny in front of thousands of armed men, Ramzan Kadyrov put himself and his troops forward as the president’s special volunteer battalion. ‘We know that the country has an army, a navy, an airforce and nuclear capabilities,’ he said, ‘but we also know that there are some missions that can only be accomplished by volunteers.’ Two months later, a week before Nemtsov’s murder, a biker gang called the Night Wolves led a big meeting in Moscow called Anti-Maidan, with the slogan, ‘There won’t be a Maidan in Russia.’ . . Ukraine has lost the war, but what the war has done to Russia may be even worse.

For years now there has been speculation about a ‘party of war’, which periodically stages provocations in order to push the president into decisive action. . . But does the party of war actually exist? We’re unlikely ever to know, even after all the archives have been opened and all the email accounts hacked. It is, however, a useful concept, even if its only function is to describe one part of Putin’s mind that’s in dialogue or competition with another. It would explain why Putin sometimes goes forward and sometimes steps back. And it gives at least a small space for hope, since if there’s a party of war there is also, presumably, a party of peace, and it might just win.

I always thought that Nemtsov would make it, that he would be shielded from the vengeance of the system in part because he was Nemtsov. He had a PhD in physics, but he wasn’t a serious thinker, nor did he pretend to be one. You could never tell if he was speaking out because he believed what he was saying or because he couldn’t stand being ignored. . . Did he hate Putin because of what he’d done to the country, or because he felt cheated out of his birthright by their shared mercurial surrogate father, Boris Yeltsin? He was a narcissist, and there was his way with young women. . .
Who knows why people do the things they do? . .. neither do we know exactly why they killed him. But it’s clear that it wasn’t for his human flaws, or for his contribution to the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. He was killed for his opposition to the war. Since the start, critics have been warning that the war in Ukraine would eventually come home to Moscow. No matter who pulled the trigger on the bridge, it has.