![]() ![]() By privatizing the vast wealth of the Soviet state in just six months, shock therapy gave the advantage to people already in positions of power - former communist party bosses, KGB officers (especially in the agency’s financial wing) and enterprise directors. We now know it was the speed of the mass drive to privatize and the promises of a painful but quick shock therapy that paved the way for what a recent Russian film calls the “Leviathan.” That is the establishment, locally and nationally, of oligarchs who control business, finance and political power. He also transformed the fairground, built in the 18th century, into a local mercantile exchange and founded a land bank to carry out land reform to enable small stakeholders to buy farms and private property. Realizing that independent businesses could not get goods, he devised an auction to sell off trucks not in use from the state-owned trucking firm. With the help of an international NGO, Nemtsov and his colleagues started microlending programs to gradually privatize small state-owned enterprises, such as stores, beauty parlors and auto shops. The bonds, which locals called nemtsovtsi, after their creator, could be cashed at local stores or held as investments. When the central government seized up in 1992 and could not pay state workers, Nemtsov devised a program in which new local banks issued bonds, which workers could accept as wages instead of rubles. They essentially invented the transition from socialism as they went along. Nemtsov led a small posse of local technocrats-turned-politicians, most of whom were his college chums. He pointed out the renovations underway and described his larger plans. He led me out to his car, asked his driver to slide over and drove us through the surprisingly clean and orderly Nizhny Novgorod, formerly Gorky, Russia’s third-largest city at the time. He found an hour to meet me for an interview after midnight at the city TV studio where he gave his monthly televised address to the province. In 1992, Nemtsov had little time to spare. ![]() He got his start in politics, in other words, before “democrat” in Russia became a dirty word and “capitalism” became synonymous with corruption, graft and theft. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Nemtsov quit his job teaching physics and entered politics as a democratic, economically liberal reformer. I met Nemtsov once, in 1992, when he was the 33-year-old appointed governor of the large and arms-producing Nizhny Novgorod province, a region formerly closed to foreign travelers, where the dissident Andrei Sakharov had been kept under house arrest. ![]() Amid the finger-pointing, few commentators reflected on Nemtsov’s career and what its tragic end means for Russia. Western bloggers fingered their own universal bad guy: Vladimir Putin. The state-sponsored media blamed the usual suspects - provocateurs from the political opposition, Islamic extremists and Ukrainian fascists. The assassin’s seven bullets briskly ended Nemtsov’s life and, with it, the aspirations he had since the early 1990s to build a confident and financially independent Russian middle class. At that moment, a salt truck pulled up, obscuring the camera’s view and leaving the murder of this handsome, charismatic politician to the viewer’s imagination. The pastel lights of the Kremlin glowed in the background as a pedestrian overtook them from behind. A remote security camera recorded the pair walking hand in hand over the Moscow River Bridge. 27, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was enjoying a stroll with his girlfriend, the Ukrainian supermodel Anna Duritskaya. On an unseasonably warm Friday night, Feb. ![]()
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