Boris Nemtsov: Death of a Russian Liberal
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Nemtsov was a very different kind of liberal or “ultra-liberal” than what we think of as liberals. In the best sense, that means he was never a mealy-mouthed coward. But as one of the leaders of the 1990s liberalization catastrophe, Nemtsov was much more the problem than the solution to that problem. And even when he was in power in the late Yeltsin Era, serving as the half-dead boozer’s first deputy prime minister and heir-apparent, Nemtsov represented the very worst and shallowest in liberal Russia’s “virtual politics,” a kind of precursor to the manufactured PR-as-politics that was perfected under Nemtsov’s choice for Russia’s president in 2000: Vladimir Putin.
Boris Nemtsov first crossed my radar screen in early 1997, a few months after I launched The eXile in Moscow. He was hailed as the Second Coming of Liberal Jesus by the cream of Moscow’s foreign correspondent community, back when the American media still had the money to pack places like Moscow with full-staffed local bureaus. Not that all that staffing made their reporting any better—most of the reporting was regurgitated neoliberal pamphleteering and Peak Clinton jingoism; a case study in mass journalism malpractice. Every single western reporter was completely blindsided by the 1998 financial collapse, at the time the most catastrophic and complete financial collapse in modern history — all except our annoying satirical rag.
Which brings me back to Nemtsov, whom Yeltsin appointed as his first deputy prime minister in March 1997, just a couple of months after the The eXile came to life. Everyone in the west went ga-ga over Nemtsov, the young handsome free-market governor of Nizhny Novogorod. Larry Summers, who ran Clinton’s Russia policy from his post as deputy Treasury Secretary, hailed Nemtsov’s appointment sharing the first deputy premiership with Anatoly “Bonecracker” Chubais as the “an economic Dream Team.” When Nemtsov traveled to Japan, he wowed the world media by telling a meeting of Japanese businessmen he’d give them his personal cell phone number to call him if they were having any problems doing business in Russia.
Typical of the Anglo-American Nemtsovophilia we were up against was LA Times correspondent Carol Williams, who cheered him on in language that reads like a cheap parody of Soviet propaganda:
In the four months since he left the helm of this prosperous Volga river reform showcase to become first deputy prime minister in Moscow, the charismatic crusader has taken aim at the corrupt and the greedy who have made post-Soviet Russia a vast and terrifying gangland…
The 37-year-old former physicist has presided over the first promising signs of economic recovery since Russia jettisoned communism and, to the cheers of the struggling masses [yes, you read that right: cheering struggling masses—M.A.], has waged war against government fat cats junketing in imported luxury cars and chartered planes…
http://pando.com/2015/03/02/boris-nemtsov-death-of-a-russian-liberal/
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That's done it, now you've gone and made me sad.
