Boris Nemtsov

It was nearing midnight on 27 February 2015, and the stars atop the Kremlin towers shone with their characteristic bright-red light. Boris Nemtsov and his partner, Anna Duritskaya, were walking along Bolshoy Moskovoretsky Bridge. It was a cold night, and the view from the bridge would have been breathtaking.

A snowplough passed slowly by the couple, obscuring the scene and probably muffling the sound of the gunshots fired from a side stairway to the bridge. The 55-year-old Nemtsov, a well-known Russian politician, anti-corruption activist and a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, fell to the ground with four bullets in his back. Blurry video-camera footage, later released by the Russian government, captured in silence the screams of Duritskaya.

Nemtsov had become known in Russia in the 1990s when he was appointed as governor of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast by Boris Yeltsin. The country was mired in corruption after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Nemtsov had used his position to begin fighting the problem. Hoping to eliminate fraud in the road-construction business in his region, he launched a new system in which construction companies would be paid only if they agreed to maintain the roads they built. As a result, it became unprofitable for contractors to cheat on their commitments.

Nemtsov became especially eager to expose the crimes committed by Putin, then prime minister, and his associates. In the early 2000s, when Nemtsov became one of the leaders of the Russian opposition, he devoted his life to the fight against corruption, embezzlement and fraud, claiming that the whole system built by Putin was akin to a mafia.

In 2009, he discovered that one of Putin’s allies, Mayor of Moscow City Yury Luzhkov, and his wife, Yelena Baturina, were engaged in fraudulent business practices. According to the results of his investigation, Baturina had become a billionaire with the help of her husband’s connections. Her real-estate development company, Inteco, had invested in the construction of dozens of housing complexes in Moscow. Other investors were keen to partner with Baturina because she was able to use her networks to secure permission from the Moscow government to build apartment buildings, which were the most problematic and expensive construction projects for developers. 

Nemtsov’s report revealed the success of Baturina’s business empire to be related to the tax benefits she received directly from Moscow City government and from lucrative government tenders won by Inteco.

In a separate investigation, the results of which were released between 2008 and 2012, Nemtsov accused Putin of building an organized-crime syndicate, whose goal was to syphon money from the Russian budget and keep him in power for as long as possible. According to this investigation, Putin had accumulated great wealth as the president of Russia, becoming one of the richest people in the world. Nemtsov linked Putin to billionaire businessmen Gennady Timchenko, Yury Kovalchuk and Arkady and Boris Rotenburg, all revealed to be his close and long-time friends.

Nemtsov declared war against criminals in the Russian government and security forces by promoting the Magnitsky Act, which was adopted by the United States Congress in December 2012. The act, named after a Russian lawyer who was tortured and killed for exposing the corruption of high-level police officials, allowed the US to freeze the assets of any Russian authorities who were implicated in crimes in Russia; it is one of the harshest laws so far implemented by the US government against Putin’s regime. The act means that any person who has committed a crime in Russia, and avoided prosecution because of their loyalty to the regime, would be unable to spend their money in Western countries. A consequence of the act was the targeted persecution of the law’s supporters; after Nemtsov was murdered, one of the law’s other lobbyists, Nemtsov’s friend Vladimir Kara-Murza, was poisoned.