Boris Nemtsov was more than an opposition politician; he was once a rising star of the post-Soviet era and a symbol of Russia’s early democracy. In the 1990s, he was a reformer in President Boris Yeltsin’s government, serving as deputy prime minister and governor of Nizhny Novgorod. Jonathan Steele of The Guardian notes that Nemtsov was “a leading pro-market reformer in the first, tumultuous post-Soviet decade” and at one point “appeared to have been earmarked by President Boris Yeltsin as his successor.” An articulate and youthful figure, Nemtsov commanded national attention with his charisma and intellect. He helped introduce radical market reforms under Yeltsin and once even collected “a million signatures” against the First Chechen War, demonstrating courage on issues that many in power avoided. But when Vladimir Putin came to power around 2000, Nemtsov’s friendship with the Kremlin quickly soured. He co-founded the liberal Union of Right-Wing Forces and worked within Russia’s nascent multi-party system, but the party was shut out of the Duma in 2003. Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule left little room for principled dissent. Over the next decade, Nemtsov became one of the Kremlin’s most outspoken critics, a liberal alternative to Putin who urged open politics and free markets at home and opposed Vladimir Putin’s expansionism abroad.
In the years before his death, Nemtsov dedicated himself to exposing government corruption and mobilizing public protests. He spoke frequently against Putin’s domestic policies and especially condemned Russia’s military interventions, most notably the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war in eastern Ukraine. As NPR reported, Nemtsov “directed his wording against Putin himself,” refusing to be silenced by intimidation. His longtime friend, journalist Yevgenia Albats, noted that Nemtsov was “probably one of the most vocal leaders of the Russian opposition” precisely because he blamed Putin personally for Russia’s ills. By 2015, Nemtsov was organizing one-man protests in front of the Kremlin, and he had even begun drafting a major report titled Putin. War. An exposé of secret Russian military involvement in Ukraine. Nemtsov sketched out the report’s contents and collected documents linking Russian tanks and troops to the fighting in Donbas. On February 25, 2015; he came to colleague Ilya Yashin’s home to enlist help finalizing the investigation. Two days later, Nemtsov was dead, shot four times in the back on a bridge just steps from the Kremlin walls.
Nemtsov’s last days were marked by courage under very real threat. He was well aware of the danger he faced. Albats recalls asking Nemtsov if he was afraid of Putin’s reprisal; he brushed it off, joking that his service as a former deputy prime minister might protect him. But Albats also recalled that for four days straight before the shooting, Nemtsov was tailed by unknown vehicles. Russia’s state propaganda machine had already painted Nemtsov as a domestic traitor. Under Putin’s leadership, Russian television relentlessly labeled independent politicians “anti-Russian” and members of a “fifth column” seeking to overthrow the state. Nemtsov often appeared on online “lists of traitors” circulated by nationalist groups, and right-wing networks even planned a televised exposé of him. Nemtsov’s daughter later wrote that state TV personalities “cast him and other opposition leaders as ‘national traitors,’” and she blamed that torrent of official hate speech for creating “the hatred and intolerance that contributed to his killing.” Even President Putin himself had repeatedly implied that Nemtsov and others would “sell off the whole of Russia” if they returned to power. This atmosphere of vilification made Nemtsov a target in the eyes of hardliners, even as it allowed Putin plausible deniability: he could loudly condemn any political murder as “provocation” while ceding the dirty work to others.
On March 1, 2015, tens of thousands of Russians marched silently in Moscow under the banner “I am not afraid,” carrying Russian flags and photos of Nemtsov. The demonstration had been planned by Nemtsov himself as an antiwar protest called Vesna (Spring). Still, it was swiftly transformed into a memorial march after his killing. By that day, police estimated that there were over 20,000 people on the streets of Moscow (organizers claimed far more) in shocking, open defiance of the Kremlin. Many held signs protesting corruption and urging “Russia without Putin.” In contrast, others carried Nemtsov’s portrait. One organizer told The Moscow Times, “This is not only an opposition march… It is a march for all the people who have come to understand we have reached a dangerous point.” Nemtsov’s murder had, for one day at least, united even casual citizens in grief and fear, a stark contrast to the official line that day.
The killing itself was as brazen as it was gruesome. At 11:30 pm on February 27, 2015, Nemtsov and his Ukrainian girlfriend, Anna Duritskaya, walked across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge near the Kremlin. Suddenly, shots rang out: at least six bullets struck Nemtsov from close range, four of them hitting his back, chest, and head. He collapsed instantly; by the time police and an ambulance arrived, he was dead. The precision of the hit, four bullets to vital areas, and the location of the murder (under the Kremlin walls, in one of the most heavily surveilled areas of Moscow) alarmed even Kremlin critics. As The Moscow Times reported: “In what appears to have been a carefully planned assassination, the suspects fired at least six bullets at Nemtsov… four of which hit him in the back and heart.” There was one known witness (Duritskaya), but she could not positively identify the killers in the darkness, and all video surveillance of the scene was mysteriously missing or inconclusive. Within hours, the Kremlin condemned the killing as a “provocation,” and President Putin himself sent condolences (saying only that Nemtsov had argued his points “directly and honestly” with him). Still, the message from official spokesmen was that Nemtsov was no threat to the state. Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, was quoted the next day saying that in political terms Nemtsov “did not pose any threat to the current Russian leadership,” implying that the top could not have ordered the murder since Nemtsov was just “a little more than an average citizen” with no profound influence.
The authorities quickly announced a theory of the crime, but it was riddled with contradictions. Within days, police arrested five suspects, all Chechen nationals from Russia’s North Caucasus region, accusing them of killing Nemtsov for hire (allegedly in exchange for 15 million rubles.) The prime suspect was Zaur Dadayev, a former Chechen police major, described by the Kremlin’s side as the “triggerman.” Russian state media eagerly pushed a questionable motive: they reported that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov (Putin’s ally) knew Dadayev and had posted on Instagram that Dadayev was angry Nemtsov defended Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of Muhammad, implying an Islamist revenge angle. Within days. However, that story unraveled: surveillance photos showed Dadayev following Nemtsov months before the Charlie Hebdo incident, raising the question why a personal Islamist motive would wait so long. Moreover, Dadayev soon retracted his confession, telling investigators he had only said he was guilty after being promised the other suspects would be freed. Even a member of the Kremlin’s own Human Rights Council reported that Dadayev had “probably been tortured” in detention. With official investigators offering dismissive explanations (suggesting the murder might be a setup by the opposition, or personal quarrel, or even by “Ukrainian radicals”), Nemtsov’s allies were furious. They pointed out that Russian TV networks had been building a campaign portraying him as a “national traitor,” yet not one investigator or prosecutor would consider that obvious political context. As The Guardian observed at the time, the investigators’ list of theories never once mentioned the five years of televised hate, and the “lists of traitors” that targeted Nemtsov and his colleagues. One veteran Kremlin-watcher remarked, “This is not the way the Kremlin has tended to deal with its internal political enemies. Thuggish intimidation, not murder, has been the usual method,” making this killing all the more suspicious.
When the trial finally came in 2017, it cemented doubts rather than answers. A Moscow military court did convict Dadayev, and four other men (Temirlan Eskerkhanov, Shadid and Anzor Gubashev, and Khadzhikurbanov) of carrying out Nemtsov’s murder for money. Dadayev was said to have fired the shots. But Nemtsov’s family and many observers immediately denounced the verdict as a sham. The Guardian reported that Nemtsov’s family lawyer said they were “not satisfied.” As Nemtsov’s daughter Zhanna put it bluntly, it was “impossible to forgive” a murder that had no justice. Even as the suspects denied guilt, Zhanna wrote on social media that “people are convinced the murder… had a political subtext, but our investigators and court deny the obvious.” The trial never established a clear motive beyond money; neither the organizers nor those who ordered the killing were ever identified or charged. The verdict explicitly says “unidentified others” hired the men. The family’s calls to question Kadyrov or others in his circle were ignored, though, as one adviser remarked, if Nemtsov was a Charlie Hebdo advocate, even Kadyrov’s team would have had no idea about it since he never publicized those views. In any case, Nemtsov’s relatives were far more interested in political motives than personal ones. Vadim Prokhorov, the family’s lawyer, noted after the verdict that “the main thing is neither the organizers nor those who ordered [the killing] have been found.” The family continued to argue that people close to Chechnya’s leader should have been questioned, saying “Kadyrov’s close circle was involved in the crime.” They even appealed to Europe, urging sanctions on those who “cast [Nemtsov] as a traitor” on state TV.
Independent observers and international bodies have expressed deep skepticism of the official story. In 2018, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) unanimously condemned the investigation as “severely flawed” and incomplete. Its report noted that the trial’s narrow focus, blaming only the low-level shooters, was “inconsistent with the available evidence on numerous fundamental points,” and that all “alternative versions” of the crime, which Russian authorities had refused to explore, fit the evidence better. PACE urged Russian authorities to reopen the case, review surveillance footage, question all witnesses and officials named by Nemtsov’s lawyers, and specifically to clarify why only a handful of suspects were tried while the broader context remained ignored. Similarly, organizations like Human Rights Watch and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly have described the official verdict as a cover-up.
The U.S. Congressional Research Service even notes that Nemtsov’s killing “illustrates the negative trend in Russia” of using murder to silence dissent. In short, every impartial analysis suggests that Nemtsov could not have been assassinated in central Moscow without some level of complicity or at least acquiescence from authorities, whether through direct orders or through creating a climate of hate that enabled radicals to act with impunity.
Among the many voices echoing this skepticism is analyst Leonid Bershidsky. In Bloomberg View he wrote that “in recent months, Putin’s propaganda machine has been vigorously inciting Russians against the ‘fifth column,’ those who protested against the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin-instigated war in eastern Ukraine” and that “Nemtsov was on every list of traitors published on the Internet and aired on state TV.” In other words, Nemtsov’s murder did not happen in a vacuum: it took place at the height of an official campaign branding opponents “national traitors” and “tools of the West.” Veteran journalist Brian Whitmore noted that by killing Nemtsov, a former Yeltsin confidant whom Putin had once touted the regime sent a chilling message akin to Stalin’s Great Terror: nobody was now immune. Whitmore and others pointed out that “nothing Boris Nemtsov did was bugged, tailed, filmed or monitored by the secret police,” so it was “quite simply impossible that this man could have been shot dead without the Kremlin knowing there was a plot afoot to kill him.” In their view, whether through explicit orders or the atmosphere of encouragement, the highest levels of government must at least have allowed it. As human rights activist Garry Kasparov tweeted, “If Putin gave [the] order to murder Boris Nemtsov is not the point. It is…” the climate and system that made it possible.
Despite all this, the Russian state narrative remains that Nemtsov’s death was a simple contract killing with no broader implications, a version that few informed observers outside Russia take at face value. The timing was too telling. Nemtsov was about to publish evidence tying President Putin to hidden military operations in Ukraine; two days later he was silenced. On the anniversary of his murder, Reporters Without Borders and other groups argued that the killers (and those who hired them) had effectively gotten away with it since critical lines of inquiry, who profited from silencing Nemtsov and who had been stalking him, were never pursued. Even domestic critics of the regime, including the late opposition leader Ilya Yashin, have urged that Nemtsov’s work on Ukraine be recognized as a possible motive for his murder. Yashin and others speculate that Nemtsov’s intimate knowledge of Russian involvement in Ukraine, and his connections with Ukrainian activists, made him especially dangerous to Kremlin interests. The official claim that Chechen hitmen acted alone for money strains credulity when set against the mountain of political context that was entirely ignored.
To a Western audience unfamiliar with the man, Boris Nemtsov embodied what Russia lost: a genuine liberal alternative to Putin. He was an insider, an architect of Russia’s 1990s reforms, and a truth-teller. In his final years, he never wavered from speaking truth to power, even when the risks were evident to everyone around him. Yevgenia Albats called him “beautiful, very well-educated…totally uncorrupt,” a physicist turned politician who “did what he believed in, and that’s what will be most missed in this country.” Ksenia Sobchak, a fellow opposition figure, wrote that it would “be in some way less worrying if Putin had ordered Nemtsov’s killing,” because then it would at least show the existence of a system, however awful. Instead, she concluded, Russia appears to have “an appalling terminator” loose that its leaders cannot control. Nemtsov’s assassination, which stunned liberal Russians and observers worldwide, remains a stark example of that peril. Whether the gunmen acted on direct orders or took revenge after years of state-sponsored vilification, it is now clear that Nemtsov’s death was no ordinary crime. As members of the international community have recognized, this was a political killing in the most literal sense, one whose whole truth the authorities have yet to uncover and one whose echoes are felt in the continuing crackdown on dissent in Russia. For all these reasons, Boris Nemtsov’s murder must be seen as deeply political, a crime that removed a potent voice against war and autocracy in Russia, and a warning that in Putin’s Russia, even the most high-profile opposition figures can be eliminated when they cross specific red lines.
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