Boris Nemtsov is a Russian politician, statesman and public figure, businessman. During his career, he achieved success in Russian domestic politics, and in the foreign policy arena, many foreign leaders were surprised by his resilience and desire for change. In 2015, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called Boris Nemtsov “a connecting bridge between Ukraine and Russia.”
Childhood[]
Boris Nemtsov was born on October 9, 1959 in the city of Sochi. Father Efim Davydovich was an official, mother Dina Yakovlevna Eidman was a pediatrician. The politician had only one Russian grandmother on his father’s side; the rest of his relatives were Jewish by nationality. Boris spent the first eight years of his life in his hometown, but then went with his mother and sister Yulia to Gorky (modern Nizhny Novgorod).
Despite the separation of his parents, the boy continued to communicate with his father, visited him in Moscow and was friendly with his half-brother Yuri. At the same time, in an interview, the politician mentioned that as a child he and his mother lived poorly, and Boris had a “passionate dream of breaking out of poverty.”
The future politician graduated from school with a gold medal and entered Gorky State University at the Faculty of Radiophysics. After graduation, Nemtsov continued to engage in science and worked at various research institutes. By 1985, Boris became a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences and the author of dozens of scientific papers on physics, acoustics and thermodynamics.
It was assumed that interest in scientific activity would become the basis for his further professional growth in this area, but in the second half of the 80s, Nemtsov, together with his mother, joined the environmental movement, which was prompted by the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The members of the association opposed the construction of the Gorky Nuclear Heat Supply Plant (as a result, the construction of the facility was stopped).
Political career[]
The fight against the construction of a large strategic facility was the beginning of Boris Nemtsov’s political career. In 1989, the aspiring politician was nominated as a candidate for people's deputies of the USSR from the regional society "For Atomic Safety", but representatives of the election commission did not register him.
In 1990, Nemtsov entered the election campaign, taking an active part in the creation of a new political association, “Candidates for Democracy.” As a result, he managed to win the elections and became a people's deputy of the RSFSR. The activist was a member of the parliamentary groups “Russian Union”, “Non-Party Deputies” and “Smena”.
1991 turned out to be a breakthrough year in the career of Boris Efimovich. He became a confidant of Russian presidential candidate Boris Yeltsin. The powers of the new representative of the head of the Russian Federation extended to the territory of the entire Nizhny Novgorod region. In August of the same year, a well-known official, while on vacation with his family in the Russian capital, participated in the defense of the White House.
On November 30, 1991, Nemtsov was appointed head of the administration of the Nizhny Novgorod region, becoming the youngest leader of such a high level in the country. During his tenure as governor, he managed to implement quite successful projects. In particular, the list of Boris Efimovich’s implemented initiatives includes the “Meter by Meter” program to improve the living conditions of military personnel, as well as “People’s Telephone”, “Gasification of Villages” and “Grain”.
As governor, Boris Efimovich repeatedly criticized the economic program of the Chairman of the Government of the RSFSR Yegor Gaidar, but in the future the politician still appreciated the efforts of the reformer, who tried to stop the process of destruction of the economic sectors of the not so long ago all-powerful Soviet Union.
Nemtsov argued that the reforms were not carried out fully, and considered the government's inaction to be a sign of weakness. In December 1991, he decided to invite Grigory Yavlinsky to the Nizhny Novgorod region to organize economic transformations in the region. The following year, Yavlinsky, heading the research institute “Center for Economic and Political Research” (“EPIcenter”), together with Nemtsov, developed a large-scale program of regional reforms.
In December 1993, residents of the Nizhny Novgorod region elected their governor to the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, and in February 1994 he became a member of the Federation Council Committee on Currency and Credit Regulation.
At the gubernatorial elections in the Nizhny Novgorod region in 1995, Nemtsov was re-elected to a second term. At that time, Boris Efimovich had a reputation as a progressive reformer, and the government recommended introducing his significant experience in structural restructuring of the economic sectors of a particular region in all municipalities of the state.
The Nizhny Novgorod governor became a well-known media character due to an altercation with Vladimir Zhirinovsky live on ORT in 1995. During the “One on One” program, the permanent chairman of the LDPR poured juice on his opponent, Nemtsov tried to respond in kind - the host Alexander Lyubimov urgently interrupted the broadcast. The story is mentioned in many books and articles, and was also included in the textbook of the Harvard University Journalism Department as a textbook case of the popularization of television shows. Boris Efimovich himself recalled this incident in an interview “Visiting Dmitry Gordon” (Dmitry Gordon was included in the register of foreign agents by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation).
In 1996, Nemtsov, taking the initiative, organized a collection of signatures in the Nizhny Novgorod region for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. These signatures were submitted to President Yeltsin for consideration.
The very next year, Boris Efimovich took the position of first deputy prime minister in the government of Viktor Chernomyrdin. In his new position, Nemtsov began to oversee the social block, housing and communal services, housing policy, energy, and also exercised control in the field of natural monopolies. But, according to many media outlets, what was most remembered was not the politician’s projects, but his unprotocol light trousers at the meeting of Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev at the airport.
In the spring of 1998, a large-scale reorganization of the government took place, and Sergei Kiriyenko became the head of the Cabinet. Despite significant reshuffles, Nemtsov continued to oversee the financial and economic block; he was still entrusted with the most important tasks in the financial sector. After the default in August 1998, the Russian Cabinet of Ministers resigned, and Boris Efimovich left the post of Deputy Prime Minister.
Opposition[]
As deputy chairman of the government, Boris Efimovich was remembered by citizens for his call to transfer all Russian officials to domestically produced vehicles. 13 years later, Dmitry Medvedev, who served as President of the Russian Federation, made a similar proposal, but Nemtsov, already the main oppositionist to the current government, called this idea “stale and unpromising.”
Having said goodbye to the executive branch, Nemtsov created the “Young Russia” movement, which six months later became part of the “Union of Right Forces” electoral bloc. In 1999, the activist was on the electoral lists of the Union of Right Forces, but became a deputy of the State Duma as a single-mandate candidate. On March 1, 2000, Boris Efimovich was elected deputy chairman of the Russian parliament.
In December 2003, the Union of Right Forces did not receive the necessary support from voters in the elections and did not get into the State Duma of the fourth convocation. In 2004, Nemtsov resigned along with other co-chairs of the political council, explaining this step by failure in the elections.
Even before resigning from the post of co-chairman of the Union of Right Forces, the politician was one of the main founders of the organization “Committee 2008: Free Choice”; chess player Garry Kasparov became its leader. The purpose of the organization was to consolidate all liberal forces. Boris Efimovich assumed that such an initiative would help change the vector of development of the state precisely thanks to radical changes in the structure of government at the highest level.
In the fall of 2004, Nemtsov supported supporters of the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine. He took part in protests on Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv. The Russian politician welcomed the victory of the Ukrainian right and expressed his readiness to support them in their efforts to spread their vision of change to Russia. On the main square of the country, Ukrainian citizens welcomed the speeches of Boris Efimovich.
In his speeches, Nemtsov repeatedly stated his readiness to carry out similar actions in the Russian Federation. Many did not accept his vision of the development of the Russian state in his homeland. This often became a reason for criticism of the activist in the Russian Federation, but the politician continued to work, trying to implement his own ambitious plans. From 2005 to 2006, he served as a freelance adviser to the President of Ukraine. Viktor Yushchenko, who was the head of the Ukrainian state, then said that “Nemtsov’s advice was not fateful, but he did everything he could.”
In March 2007, Boris Efimovich celebrated the results of the next parliamentary elections with the participation of the Union of Right Forces, since the party was able to overcome the 7 percent barrier in six of nine regions. In September 2007, Nemtsov entered the top three on the list of political forces, but did not become a State Duma deputy, since the party received only 0.96% of the votes.
In 2007, Nemtsov ran for the post of head of the Russian Federation, but according to the voting results, the politician was unable to gain even 1% of the citizen vote. After this, harsh criticism of the results of his work poured into the politician. In the same year, Boris Nemtsov’s book “Confession of a Rebel” was published.
In February of the following year, Nemtsov announced that he had suspended his membership in the Union of Right Forces. The politician did not explain this decision, but clarified that he did not refuse to cooperate with the party in various areas. Yet, despite his efforts, the political association ceased to exist.
In April, a famous politician and his colleagues decided to create a new democratic movement, Solidarity. The decision to organize a political force was made at the St. Petersburg conference “A New Agenda for the Democratic Movement.” Boris Efimovich participated in Solidarity conferences in Moscow, Krasnodar, Irkutsk, Ufa and Nizhny Novgorod. Kasparov and Nemtsov became the leaders of the union.
In 2009, Nemtsov was announced as a candidate for mayor of the future capital of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Sochi. The politician lost the elections in April, finishing second.
In 2010, the Solidarity movement joined the opposition coalition “For Russia without arbitrariness and corruption.” Based on the new political platform, it was decided to organize an effective party to win the parliamentary elections. It was established in December 2010 as the People's Freedom Party (PARNAS). The opposition had high hopes for the new political force, but PARNAS was denied registration in 2011.
On December 31, 2010, Boris Yakovlevich, together with Ilya Yashin, were detained by police officers on Triumfalnaya Square after speaking at a rally, the holding of which had previously been agreed upon with the capital’s mayor’s office without much confrontation. Law enforcement officers accused Nemtsov of violating public order; he served 15 days of arrest.
The last years of Nemtsov’s life were remembered for constant criminal proceedings. In 2012, he was charged with beating blogger Maxim Perevalov, but the trial of the case was completed, and the video in which the oppositionist allegedly beats Perevalov in Domodedovo turned out to be irrelevant, since the blogger confused the politician at the airport with another person.
In 2013, Nemtsov stated that he was a supporter of the Kyiv Euromaidan, and subsequently sharply criticized Russia’s policy towards Ukraine. On March 1, 2015, he was going to take part in the opposition protest march “Spring” in the Russian Federation.
Death[]
The night from February 27 to 28, 2015 was the last for the Russian oppositionist. Nemtsov's murder took place on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge in the center of Moscow.