The Living Memorial to Boris Nemtsov Is the Most Radical Political Statement in Russia

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

01 March 18

otalitarianism works in three ways: it kills people, it kills will, and it kills memory. Vladimir Putin’s regime is more selective about its targets than its Soviet predecessor was, but it uses the same old tools to exert control. To oppose its core is to assert life, will, and memory. This is the project of a group of activists who have been keeping vigil on a Moscow bridge for three years.

On this bridge, on February 27, 2015, Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician, was shot and killed, in plain view of the Kremlin. Nemtsov, who was fifty-five, had lived several lives. He had been a promising physicist—so much so that his relatives were certain that he would win the Nobel Prize one day. Instead, when perestroika started, he became involved in politics and, at the age of thirty-one, was appointed the first post-Soviet governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, on the Volga River. For much of the nineteen-nineties, he was the favorite to succeed Boris Yeltsin as President.

As the Yeltsin Presidency unravelled, Nemtsov fell out of favor, and an entirely different successor, the secret-police chief Vladimir Putin, emerged. Within a few years, Nemtsov had lost his seat in parliament along with many of his old political allies, who had chosen to support the new President. After a short stint in the private sector, Nemtsov returned to politics as an opposition activist and started losing personal friends, as well.

In 2008, Nemtsov, Garry Kasparov, the chess champion turned political activist, and several other opposition figures co-founded a movement they called Solidarity, after the labor-union movement that rose up against the Soviet government in Poland, in 1980. Nemtsov compiled a series of reports on corruption and abuse of power, and the organization published and distributed them by handing them out in the streets, near Moscow subway stations. Though it called itself a movement, Solidarity was really a small organization of diehard activists: they distributed the reports and organized occasional street protests, which usually drew no more than a couple of hundred people. In 2009, a woman named Nadezhda Mityushkina became the executive director of Solidarity. Mityushkina and Nemtsov made an odd pair. She was younger than he but looked older. He worked out obsessively, maintained a year-round tan, and favored tight jeans and unbuttoned shirts; Mityushkina was the opposite of all that. They talked all the time, and most of Solidarity’s projects were things that Nemtsov and Mityushkina did together.

In December, 2011, a rally organized by Solidarity unexpectedly drew about ten thousand participants. This marked the beginning of a wave of mass protests that lasted until May 6, 2012, when, on the eve of Putin’s third Presidential inauguration, the police brutally broke up a peaceful, legal march. During the political crackdown that followed, Solidarity reverted to being a tiny movement. Kasparov and many other prominent activists left the country. Nemtsov continued to publish reports and organize protests. On February 27, 2015, just before midnight, he was killed.

By morning, people had begun laying flowers at the site of the shooting. Then they brought flags, signs, and portraits of Nemtsov, creating a makeshift memorial. After a few weeks, the city removed the memorial, and it was around then that Mityushkina took charge of maintaining it; it seemed like the thing to do. By mid-April, 2015, the memorial had been removed and reconstituted four times. Mityushkina and her Solidarity comrades decided that they needed an around-the-clock vigil. They initially assumed that they would be able to staff the site only on weekends, and the memorial would have to be created anew every week. But a second group of volunteers—many of them people who didn’t have day jobs—formed to keep vigil during the week. All together, around a hundred activists keep the memorial protected.

On February 28th, the living memorial to Boris Nemtsov will enter its fourth year of continuous existence. The city sends workers to dismantle it irregularly: sometimes they come several times a week, Mityushkina told me, and sometimes they leave the memorial alone for several weeks. Then, there is the non-governmental violence: vandals who attack the memorial and, with some regularity, thugs who attack the activists. Last week, a Solidarity volunteer was hospitalized with minor injuries. In August, 2017, a weekday volunteer died after he was beaten on the bridge.

Reconstituting the memorial has become almost routine; there is even a Web site that people can use to order flowers to be delivered to the bridge. Indeed, many aspects of memorializing Namtsov have become routine, Mityushkina said. Because Nemtsov’s daughter Zhanna, who used to tend to his grave, has had to leave the country, so the task has fallen to the volunteers. They also organize an annual march to commemorate the killing; this past weekend, it drew about eight thousand participants—the lowest number yet. Solidarity also organized a one-day exhibit on the anniversary of the murder. The activists took the name for the exhibit from something Nemtsov said in his last interview, given a few hours before his death: “The Price of Freedom Is High.”

The price of maintaining the memorial can seem awfully high, too, what with the flowers, and the portraits that must be printed and framed anew every time, and the hours logged by volunteers who work six-hour shifts in all kinds of Moscow weather. It may seem quixotic to risk death to protect a constellation of flowers, photographs, and flags. But it is perhaps the most radical political statement possible in Russia today, and it is being made, around the clock, by a bunch of ragtag volunteers standing a stone’s throw from the Kremlin: there lived a man named Boris Nemtsov, he fought to the death, and he will not be forgotten.