Anna Nemtsova is a correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast based in Moscow. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Policy, nbcnews.com, Al Jazeera, Marie Claire and the Guardian.

When the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot and killed Friday, notes of condolences poured in on my Facebook account because we share a last name and a home town, and many thought we must be relatives.

In fact, I first met Nemtsov in 1985 when I was already a teenager, a year before the Chernobyl disaster. Our tiny living room was full of young intellectuals discussing the dangerous construction of a nuclear-powered water heating station in our city, called at the time Gorky, which translates as Bitter. The construction site of the nuclear station could be seen from the balcony of our apartment, where our friends, local reporters and physicists walked out to smoke cigarettes and talk about violations in the construction process. Looking at the cooling towers, everybody worried about a potential nuclear catastrophe.


One of the guests, a charismatic young physicist with crazy, curly hair had the same last name as my family. As a schoolgirl, I was curious to see a passionate orator in the room. His name was Boris Nemtsov. Since that day, I had always addressed him in a polite way, Boris Yefimovich. He was not a politician yet, officially, but he was to me: he was the first reforming politician and the first democrat I met.

Emotional and passionate, he constructed well-articulated arguments, often repeating words “to make changes” and “to prevent.” He talked about the ineffective Soviet system of management—the core issue causing troubles for the society, economy and science. That year, the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov was living in exile Gorky for his dissident activity. While people in Gorky had either no idea or were indifferent to Sakharov’s fate, Nemtsov sounded concerned: the famous scientist was being force-fed through a tube at one of local hospitals, something had to be done.

The ideas of free speech introduced by Nemtsov sounded extremely brave for our very much red and conservative city. For decades, Gorky was closed for foreign visitors in order to protect the security of Soviet military research. Most local scientists worked for “mail boxes,” secret scientific institutions with no publicly known physical address, and kept their mouths shut about state affairs. Locals believed that ears of secret agents were everywhere. Danger never stopped Nemtsov. He was a revolutionary, a walking storm, sometimes rude and rough in his comments, but always an optimist and a free thinker.

Six years later, in 1991, President Boris Yeltsyn appointed Nemtsov to be the first governor of Gorky. And my home city was immediately transformed into a fun place. Nemtsov opened it for the world, and gave Gorky its original name back—the city was founded in 1222, as Nizhny Novgorod.

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Last night, somebody sneaked behind his back and shot the 55-year-old politician dead—committing an act that was so opposite of Nemtsov in every way. If Nemtsov believed in something, he was never hiding behind anybody’s back. He shot his ideas out without any self-censorship, or demonstrated them with a banner in his hands out in the street, bravely, no matter how many times police arrested him for his anti-Putin protests, no matter how many death threats he received.

The tragic news caught up with me at a Moscow restaurant, Odessa Mama. “Nemtsov was killed, just now, near the Kremlin,” I heard somebody say at a long table in the corner, where about a dozen students celebrated a girl’s birthday. The group grew quiet. Nemtsov would have been amused to see the reaction of young people—they looked upset and confused. State television channels had not let him on air for about a decade now, but people still knew who he was. I asked one of the young guys who he thought the murderers were: “Clearly somebody who wanted to make a point, that nobody can be safe today, even by the Kremlin, even Putin cannot be safe now,” Aleksei, an 18-year-old student of Moscow State University, told me.

The same night Nemtsov’s friends and partners in the opposition declared in one voice: the Kremlin was to blame for the tragedy, as authorities allowed radicals to create “fifth column” lists of Putin’s critics. “Now nobody who says Putin started the war in Ukraine can feel safe. The Kremlin unleashed a dragon, anybody condemned as ‘enemy of people’ or ‘the fifth column’ can get murdered in the street,” Vladimir Ryzhkov, a prominent opposition leader told me soon after Nemtsov’s murder.

Years after we first met, Boris Yefmiovich remembered me as a schoolgirl. But now I was a journalist, and he a famous politician. In one of our recent interviews Boris Nemtsov, one of the toughest critics of president Vladimir Putin’s rule, told me in his usual kidding manner: “My friends and I decided to work out hard in the gym, build up huge muscles until we dry up, like butterflies pinned to the wall, and wait to outlive him, and eventually change Russia into a free, well-regarded country.” But the opposition leader who at earlier stages of his career was known as a lucky prodigy, fearless as he was, did not outlive President Putin.

Guns were never Nemtsov’s tool—he fought with love, with sharp examples, his independent investigations and with his powerful words. Nemtsov loved his four children dearly, he loved his mother who’d brought him up alone, in poverty. He loved women and lived several lives at the same time. “Why should I leave my country? I love Russia. Let them, the thieves and criminals, leave,” he told me once, after spending New Year’s night in jail. Nemtsov liked to joke that Yeltsin almost picked him as his successor but then changed his mind.

Reading the news last night about Nemtsov’s murder outside the Kremlin wall, I thought of the sad symbolism: he had devoted his entire life and career to ridding Russia of all sorts of walls and restrictions.

As a governor and as a Duma deputy, as a deputy prime minister and minister of energy under Yeltsin, Nemtsov always tried to be open and accessible for journalists. For two decades his critics condemned him for being too scandalous, too much of a womanizer, for being too snobbish sometimes and too distant from ordinary Russians, who were sincerely supporting Putin. But nobody can deny that Nemtsov was a true believer in freedom of speech. “We could ask our governor for a cigarette and get his comment on any topic any day, unlike today’s officials, who hide behind thick walls of press secretaries and never talk with us, Nemtsov was always brave and open,” Svetlana Kikina, a senior journalist based in Nizhny Novgorod, remembered in a phone conversation this morning.

Nemtsov’s strong spirit and powerful charisma that mesmerized me as a teenager was what everybody who knew him will miss. Many people bringing flowers to the murder scene on Saturday had tears in their eyes. Even those, who did not like Nemtsov, felt terrified today, having realized how criminal and hostile Moscow had become. Instead of a political spring, or the March of Spring, that Nemtsov had been organizing for Sunday to stop the crises in Russia and the war in Ukraine, the country saw Nemtsov’s dead body with the Kremlin walls as a backdrop.

On Sunday, thousands of his supporters and ordinary Muscovites are planning to march in the capital’s center towards the place where Boris was murdered, Moskvoretsky Bridge, now covered in flowers.

I will put a flower there myself.