NIZHNY NOVGOROD – Sometimes it is good to be wrong. For the friends of Russia’s slain opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov – certainly including the author of this blog – it was difficult to believe that he could be commemorated on an official level while the current regime remains in power. Indeed, several public initiatives calling for a memorial to him in Moscow have been bluntly rejected by the authorities, who also continue to allow the ravaging of the unofficial “people’s memorial” on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge where the opposition leader was killed in February 2015. And while tens of thousands marched through the Russian capital in his memory, and while people continue to bring flowers and candles to the bridge, an official commemoration would surely have to wait for a change of government in Russia.
Apparently, not so – at least not in Nizhny Novgorod, a region on the Volga river where Nemtsov became governor on November 30, 1991 – twenty-five years ago this Wednesday – and which he transformed, in a few short years, from Russia’s industrial backwater into a hub of free market reforms that lifted it into the top ten of the country’s most developed regions and that leaders from across the globe, including Margaret Thatcher, came to see with their own eyes and praise as a rare economic success story in the 1990s Russia. Here, people remember Boris Nemtsov for who he was – not the caricature image created by recent Kremlin propaganda.
