HE COULD have been president of Russia. So Boris Nemtsov’s supporters thought, and so Boris Yeltsin hoped when he groomed him as his successor. But that would need to have been the sort of Russia Mr Nemtsov dreamed of: free, enterprising, hard-working, proud, slightly disorganised, and open to the world. In such a country, he would have fitted right in.

Ideology puzzled him. In the 1980s he was a physicist in Gorky, where Andrei Sakharov was exiled, but no dissident himself. Nor was he a communist. He could never understand why people clung so fiercely to political dogma. The values of his adored Jewish mother, a skilled and caring paediatrician who struggled to bring him up, with his sister, in a tiny apartment, were good enough for him.

Nor did he understand why people needed the suffocating help of the party or the state. He could always live on his wits, as he did by tutoring schoolchildren. There were jobs if you looked, as there were always pretty women happy to be seen on his strong, chivalrous arm. Self-reliance was another quality the reformers, like him, were counting on when they started.

It was needed in politics, too. He won election in 1990 as a member of Russia’s first democratic parliament; and when Yeltsin later appointed him governor of Nizhny Novgorod (previously Gorky), he persuaded the president to make that job an elected office also. If Russians were allowed to vote freely they would, he believed, choose sensibly; and he would talk sense, and truth, back to them.

He remained Yeltsin’s golden boy. The president took him round the world, parading him as his successor, testing how well he could hold his drink, and even trying to marry him into the royal house of Sweden. At a reception in Stockholm Mr Nemtsov was seated, on Yeltsin’s orders, next to the 20-year-old Princess Victoria. As the dinner wore on, the tipsy order came down that he should kiss her.

In 1997 he was persuaded to leave Nizhny Novgorod, where he was hugely popular, to go to Moscow as Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister. He held the job with Anatoly Chubais, another reformer, and together they dazzled Yeltsin with the prospect of a new country. As a state official, though, Mr Nemtsov gave himself no airs. Gone was all that balderdash about the sacred mystique of the Russian state; journalists had his mobile number and called him Boris, without his patronymic. He used simple words, often so simple that he seemed naive and, with his bubbly frivolity, unserious. But this was a man who had done research on “acoustic lasers”; his world-view was crystal clear. Stealing, betraying and killing were wrong. Thinking, loving and living were good. Such moral clarity became almost unimaginable in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The tag “oligarch”, for Russia’s tycoons, was his coining. He took them on. In his dream of a “normal Russia” such men had no place. But nor did he fit into their world; and they were much more powerful. On the TV channels they controlled, prostitutes were hired to gossip about him and his gaffes were dramatised. At last Yeltsin dropped him, and in 1999 Mr Putin got the job he had been meant to have.

Mr Nemtsov’s opposition struggled. In 2003 his party, the Union of Right Forces, came nowhere in the elections. Suddenly, he had nothing to do. He had made no money while in government, a fact that seemed both irritating and eccentric to those who milked their time in office. With the oil price going up and the economy booming, the country no longer needed him, his ideas or his values. A passionate wind surfer, he knew there was no wave to ride—until, a year later, the first Orange revolution broke out on the Maidan in Kiev.

At once he became a target for groups mobilised by the Kremlin to forestall contagion from Ukraine. With his broad shoulders and casual air, he shrugged them off at first. He carried on writing reports about Mr Putin’s kleptocracy and, in December 2011, joined the protests in Moscow. A year before, the same thing had earned him two weeks in jail. He had wondered then how far he could go down this path. He was prepared to sacrifice the high life and making money. But he was not prepared to die.

In fascism’s face

Grassroots politics seemed the best course of action. In 2013 he got elected into a local parliament in Yaroslavl, not far from Nizhny Novgorod, where he handed out leaflets on the streets. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, however, he found himself in a different country. Suddenly he was dealing not just with corrupt government, but also with millions of people whipped into a state of patriotic frenzy. Russia, he fretted, was turning into a fascist state, complete with Nazi-style propaganda and assault brigades.

When he spoke out now against the war in Ukraine, he was almost a lone voice. A vast banner-portrait calling him a traitor hung outside a bookshop in Moscow. Cheerfully determined, he went on distributing his leaflets, most recently for a rally that became his memorial procession.

He was not born for hatred or heroics. He had dreams, but had never intended to become a fighter against state-sponsored fascism. He was simply a good man: too good, in the end, for the country and the times he lived in.