The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, a Russian road not taken and its legacy

By David Kortava

 

THE SUCCESSOR: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin and the Decline of Modern Russia

by Mikhail Fishman Translated by Michele A Berdy

Published by Pushkin Press

778 pages 

$40

The lurking question behind this searching, propulsive, 778-page biography of an internationally obscure Russian politician is this: What kind of world would exist today if the cosmopolitan liberal democrat Boris Nemtsov, and not Vladimir Putin, had succeeded Boris Yeltsin to run the country?

 

These are the stakes set out by the veteran Russian journalist Mikhail Fishman in  The Successor, translated into English with a new prologue. For Fishman, Nemtsov embodies the promise of the free, democratic Russia. Had he fulfilled his destiny, there might not be fighting in Ukraine, with the spectre of World War III.

 

 

Nemtsov was “a tall, sexy, curly-haired, handsome playboy,” Fishman writes, seven years younger than Putin and a physicist by training. He developed a taste for politics in the 1980s when his mother began attending antinuclear protests in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster.

 

By 1991, he had become the 32-year-old governor of Nizhny Novgorod, transforming the province by privatising collective farms, giving free rein to reporters and spurring a boom in new housing and road construction.

 

By 37, he was one of Yeltsin’s first deputy prime ministers and an heir apparent to the presidency. Several factors converged to check Nemtsov’s ascent, but the main reason was the 1998 financial crisis, when the Russian state, unable to collect taxes to offset a drop in oil revenues, defaulted on its debt. Inflation devastated the country and brought ’90s optimism to a screeching halt.

 

Facing a public disillusioned with reforms and a resurgent Communist Party, Yeltsin changed direction. With two years until the presidential election, he sought out a different kind of successor, someone seen as tough and untainted by the policy missteps of the “wild ’90s.” The very conditions that pushed Nemtsov out of the limelight drew in a little-known bureaucrat and former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin.

 

Some, including Nemtsov, initially believed that Putin would stay the course, toward the West. Many more viewed Putin through the prism of national redemption, the iron hand that would restore the country to greatness. Nemtsov never again found his footing in national politics, except as a thorn in Putin’s side. He started a reformist electoral bloc that never

 

quite took off, organised rallies, documented the Kremlin’s crimes, filed complaints with the European Court of Human Rights and lobbied Western governments to sanction Russian propagandists.

 

In 2013, he ran for a seat in a provincial legislature, and won the seat, a modest perch for a former deputy prime minister, kindling the dying embers of liberalism in Russia.

 

For his impudence, state media insinuated that Nemtsov was an agent of the US State Department. Pro-Kremlin youth activists pelted his car with dildos, stink-bombed his public appearances and threw Coke mixed with ammonia in his face. The authorities detained him repeatedly, and Putin’s allies subjected him to spurious lawsuits.

 

In 2014, he felt so dejected that he abandoned Russia for Israel, only to return after a few weeks. The next year, Nemtsov was murdered at the hands of assassins with ties to Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and Putin loyalist.

 

So had Yeltsin kept his nerve and stood by Nemtsov, a protégé he once regarded “like a son,” would Russia now be a fully-fledged liberal democracy, a normal European country on good terms with its neighbours?

 

Almost certainly not. It’s the larger forces that propel individuals to positions of power, and the currents of history favoured a despot. “Nemtsov probably would not have become president of Russia,” he writes. “He was carried aloft by the revolution at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. A few years later, he was already too free and too idealistic for the times.”

 

He ended the Russian edition of The Successor, which was published two weeks before the Ukraine war, on an optimistic note. “The ideals underpinning Nemtsov’s Russia will be in demand at the next turn of history — and they will help ensure that the story has a good ending.”

 

That hopeful coda has been struck from the English edition. “Is this other future still possible?” Fishman writes in a new prologue. “I still believe that today, although I am not sure that I will still be here when it happens.”

 

After a quarter-century of escalating repression, any democratic alternative to Putin has been jailed, killed or hounded out of the country. And the Russian public, subjected to relentless propaganda, doesn’t appear to think a different kind of politics is possible, or even desirable.

 

And yet, as Russians know well, political change often happens gradually, and then all at once. Fishman struggles to conjure his brighter counterfactual, even as a fantasy. Still, he was right before: Putin can physically rid the country of Nemtsov, Navalny and indeed Fishman, but ideas can’t be shot, poisoned or forced into exile. The seeds Nemtsov and Navalny planted may yet mature, in their own time.

 

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The reviewer is an editor at Foreign Affairs

 

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