Was Vladimir Putin’s tyranny inevitable?
Culture | An alternative history of Russia and the world
Was Vladimir Putin’s tyranny inevitable?
A new book about Boris Nemtsov, a Putin critic, makes you wonder
The Successor. By Mikhail Fishman. Translated by Michele Berdy. Pushkin Press; 800 pages; £35. To be published in America in May; $40
FORMALLY, THE successor to Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, was Vladimir Putin. In every other sense—ideologically, morally, temperamentally—Yeltsin’s successor was a liberal politician, Boris Nemtsov (pictured). Yet instead of governing Russia, Nemtsov became a champion of Russia’s increasingly beleaguered opposition, before being gunned down in 2015 near the Kremlin, the victim of a Chechen hit squad.
Reading “The Successor”, a chronicle of Russia’s emergence from Soviet communism and its subsequent collapse into dictatorship, you cannot escape an unsettling question. Yeltsin had once wanted the presidency to go to Nemtsov, a preternaturally gifted statesman and a committed, pro-Western believer in capitalism and liberal democracy. Where would Russia and the world be today if only the old man had stuck with him, instead of shifting to the former KGB officer from St Petersburg?
Nemtsov is still a hero to plenty of Russians. “The Successor” was published in Russia soon after the war with Ukraine began in 2022 and became a bestseller. (Mikhail Fishman, one of Russia’s leading independent journalists, wrote his book after he made a popular documentary about Nemtsov.) Born in 1957 in Sochi, on the Black Sea, Nemtsov grew up in Nizhny Novgorod, 400km east of Moscow. He trained as a physicist and became interested in politics almost by accident, after his mother started to protest against the city’s plans for a nuclear-powered heating plant. Fearing that she would be arrested, he joined the movement so that he would be able to protect her.
Nemtsov was a natural. By 1990 he was standing for national office against the communist establishment. While they rode about in official cars, he sometimes arrived at meetings in a cheap Moskvich. In a television debate, instead of wearing a suit, he borrowed a friend’s sweater. In answer to other candidates’ overblown promises, he declared: “I won’t promise anything, except one thing. I won’t lie.”
Nemtsov caught Yeltsin’s eye as a legislator. He won his affection by standing with him against an attempted coup in 1991. The Kremlin appointed him governor of Nizhny Novgorod, where he launched Russia’s first privatisations. He built roads, invested in phone networks and took on “red directors”, who ran their companies as fiefs. He even fostered a free press. Nizhny Novgorod became a showcase for how post-Soviet Russia could prosper—and its governor, reaffirmed by a popular vote, became an international star. In 1994 Yeltsin suggested that he could be the next president of Russia.
However, after Yeltsin lured Nemtsov to serve in Moscow, everything turned to ashes. His stunts irritated the political classes and blew up in his face. He sponsored a presidential decree that officials should surrender their foreign-made limousines for Russian Volgas, which just happened to be made in his home town. But the Volgas were unreliable. His own car supposedly broke down on the way to a cabinet colleague’s party—and he was left marooned at the side of the road as officials passed by, hooting with laughter.
The graver problem was that Yeltsin’s administration descended into chaos. Miners went on strike. Oil prices fell. The government could not finance its budget, and foreign investors fled. After a default in August 1998, Nemtsov resigned. And that cleared the way for a very different sort of operator.
Mr Putin is Nemtsov in the negative. One man was charismatic, attractive, flamboyant, open, tall and impulsive. The other grey, cold, cautious, private, short and calculating. One wanted to be loved; the other to be feared. One chose democracy; the other yearned for power. Although some of Yeltsin’s people were nervous about Mr Putin and his KGB past, few saw his potential to dominate Russia. One reason he succeeded was luck. The price of Urals crude oil rocketed from $18 a barrel in August 1999, when he became prime minister, to $130 a barrel in the summer of 2008. For the first time, Russians felt rich.
Mr Putin was also competent. He reined in regional barons. He proved his loyalty by using kompromat (compromising information) to see off a zealous prosecutor who was pursuing the Yeltsin family. During the second Chechen war, he delighted ordinary Russians by talking tough. People had had enough of chaos, and he was someone with whom different interest groups thought they could live.
First they came for Nemtsov
That explains how Mr Putin outmanoeuvred Russia’s oligarchs. In the late 1990s Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, two media barons, used their networks to wreck the reputation of Nemtsov for refusing to grant them influence and assets. By contrast, Mr Putin accepted Berezovsky’s help to get him into power—and, when the oligarch presumed to claim a kingmaker’s privileges, he destroyed him.
Like Yeltsin, the oligarchs believed the tyranny of one-man rule was over. Filthy rich and puffed up by hubris, they thought they could pull strings in the Kremlin. In fact, once they had brought down Nemtsov and democratic politicians like him, there was nobody left to stop the forced march towards despotism.
By the time of his assassination, Nemtsov was back in office, elected to the regional parliament of Yaroslavl, a city north-east of Moscow. Russians were becoming unhappy at Mr Putin’s endless, repressive rule. Nemtsov had a purpose again—and an important part to play, too.
It was not to be. A few months after Putin annexed Crimea and fanned conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Nemtsov let rip on live television, calling Mr Putin “fucked in the head”. Chechen leaders, who had also been criticised by Nemtsov, saw a chance to prove their absolute loyalty to the tsar. Ten months later they struck.
Russia produces plenty of tyrants and henchmen who do their bidding. It also produces gifted men and women of extraordinary courage. Nemtsov lost, but he could have triumphed. Indeed, like Alexei Navalny, who built a movement by campaigning against corruption, he was murdered because he was dangerous. ■
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