Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled former Russian oligarch who was arrested by Putin’s police in 2003 and languished in prison for ten years, observed of Boris Nemtsov’s murder: “I think Boris would have wanted to die this way…on the bridge leading to the Kremlin, shot by a real enemy, not by accident. It’s a good death.” But above all, Nemtsov, who so valued the truth, would have wanted the persons who ordered the murder brought to justice, and clearly this will not happen with Putin in the Kremlin, analyst Amy Knight writes for the New York Review of Books:
On February 27, 2018, the Washington, D.C., City Council named a block of Wisconsin Avenue in front of the Russian embassy Boris Nemtsov Plaza. Along with members of Congress, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Nemtsov’s former close colleague and the director of the film Nemtsov, spoke at the ceremony. An active Russian opposition politician, Kara-Murza has been the victim of two near-fatal poisonings that he attributes to the Kremlin. Yet he remains optimistic: “The best possible tribute to [Nemtsov] and to his legacy will be a free and democratic Russia, and that day will come.”
When that day arrives, it will be because of Russians like Kara-Murza, who so courageously follow in the footsteps of Boris Nemtsov, Knight writes in a review of The February 2015 Assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Flawed Trial of His Alleged Killers: An Exploration of Russia’s “Crime of the 21st Century”, by John B. Dunlop; Nemtsov, a documentary film written and directed by Vladimir V. Kara-Murza; and The Man Who Was Too Free, a documentary film written by Mikhail Fishman and directed by Vera Krichevskaya.
