Boris Efimovich Nemtsov was killed just before midnight on February 27 2015. Nemtsov’s death was both the culmination and the continuation of his extraordinary political life.
I first encountered Nemtsov in 1992 at a meeting with a World Bank delegation in his office in the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, a few months after he had been appointed as provincial governor of that state by the new president, Boris Yeltsin.
Nemtsov clearly did not conform to the staid stereotype of a governor. He was only 32, a physicist with some experience in environmental activism and a brief period as a local councillor after the first democratic elections in 1990. He slouched at the table like a undergraduate, and spoke plainly, using neither the stock phrases of the traditional Soviet bureaucrat nor the jargon of the ideologue market reformer.
On the subject of the financial crisis – much worse than today’s – I remember him saying with disarming honesty: “Sometimes I just find myself looking out of the window and wonder what we are going to do, how will we look after people when the money runs out – and will the mob come for us?”
In the end, Nemtsov was to prove one of Russia’s most successful post-Communist governors. Upon taking office, he immediately declared that Nizhny Novgorod would be the “laboratory of reforms”.
Upstart
Usually, either Moscow or St Petersburg takes the lead on any major reform, but in 1992, the reformers in power in both capitals were mired in policy debates and political splits. Nemtsov saw his chance to lead the way and called in the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank. With their help, he instigated the first programme of privatisation in the former USSR.
But Nemtsov did not subscribe to the simplistic laissez-faire economic model then in vogue in reform circles. He initiated many programmes to try and save Nizhny Novgorod’s Soviet-era enterprises, and led innovations in the area of land reform, emphasising equity and redistribution as well as efficiency.
