Activists (Killed)

Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov (9 October 1959-27 February 2015) was the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia from 17 March 1997 to 28 August 1998, succeeding Vladimir Putin and preceding Sergey Kirienko. He was a liberal politician and opposed Putin’s aggressive policies, and he was killed in 2015 shortly before he was set to reveal Russia’s involvement in the Ukrainian Civil War.

Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov was born on 9 October 1959 in Sochi, Russian SFSR, in the Soviet Union (present-day Russia) to Jewish parents, although his paternal grandmother had him baptized as Russian Orthodox. In 1985 he earned his degree in physics and mathematics at the State University of Gorky, and after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, he protested against the construction of a new nuclear power plant in Sochi. Nemtsov entered politics and advocated the liberalization of foreign trade and agricultural reform, and from 1991 to 1997 he was Governor of Nizhny Novgorod. In 1997 he became the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia under Boris Yeltsin’s government, and he was the lead candidate for the 2000 presidential elections until the 1998 economic crisis after the stock market crash.

While Vladimir Putin was president, Nemtsov led opposition to his aggressive rule and supported Viktor Yushchenko in his power struggle against Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine before the 2004 Orange Revolution. He was an economic adviser to Yushchenko, and established friendly relations with Ukraine. He refused to run in the 2008 presidential elections because he did not want to draw away democratic votes from the other democratic candidate, Mikhail Kasyanov, so that the democrats had a better chance of winning. That same year, he founded the Solidarnost party, uniting opposition parties against Putin. In 2007, 2010, and 2011 he was arrested for leading protests against Putin.

At 11:40 PM on 27 February 2015, Nemtsov was attacked while he walked with his girlfriend (the Ukrainian model Anna Durytska) in the shadow of the Kremlin at the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge. Four men exited a white car and gunned him down with four shots to the back, shortly before he was set to prove Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian Civil War at a rally of anti-war activists. The police confiscated his computer, notes, and other belongings, which hinted that Putin was behind his assassination – on 10 February, less than 3 weeks before his murder, he said that he was afraid that Putin would kill him.