THE SUCCESSOR

Physicist Boris Nemtsov and former KGB officer Vladimir Putin stand at the center of this fascinating account of two men—and two irreconcilable visions—for Russia’s future.

Was Russia’s democratic experiment ever truly viable? Journalist Fishman revisits the chaotic decades following the Soviet collapse, portraying the nation’s transformation as a series of pivotal crossroads shaped by personality, ambition, and political will. With the perspective of a firsthand witness, he traces the transfer of power from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin and ultimately to Putin, while showing how Nemtsov—once seen as a plausible successor—was gradually sidelined in the turbulence of revolution and counterrevolution. Fishman frames the moment when multiple outcomes remained possible. Nemtsov, a physicist turned politician, embraced liberal, Western-oriented values, vowing, “I won’t promise anything, except one thing. I won’t lie.” Putin’s approach bent Russian systems toward “a mafia code of honour, the Stalinist relationship between the state and its subjects, and a fascist, militarized leadership.” Nemtsov ultimately lost both political influence and his life—he was assassinated in 2015—yet Fishman argues that history was not foreordained. By 1994, Nemtsov’s alliance with Yeltsin positioned him as a likely heir. Fishman chronicles his fall from favor and Yeltsin’s consequential pivot to Putin, a starkly different figure. “Nemtsov was tall, stately, imposing…Putin was small, with a quiet voice…Nemtsov was anti-Soviet; Putin had worked for the KGB.” One sought to be loved; the other feared. Putin’s consolidation of power included a calculated bargain: “The oligarchs would stay out of politics and pay taxes, and the government wouldn’t revise the results of privatization.” Surveying the Chechen wars, the likely poisoning of Alexei Navalny, Crimea, and the war in Ukraine, Fishman delivers a sobering chronicle of a democracy that might have been.

An intimate portrait of political rivals at the moment Russia’s fragile freedom gave way to authoritarian rule.