Death of a troublesome neo-liberal
Exactly a year to the day after Putin commenced his annexation of the Crimea, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered in Moscow on 27th February. Nemtsov was certainly no critic of Putin from the left. In the early 1990s he had been Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region. He pursued aggressive neo-liberal and privatisation policies, winning the admiration of Margaret Thatcher when she visited the region in 1993. In the late 1990s he served as Yeltsin’s First Deputy Prime Minister and oversaw the sweeping “free market” reforms which impoverished broad swathes of the Russian...