In the summer of 1994 Boris Nemtsov was a frequent telephone caller to our house in Washington DC as his 10-year-old daughter Zhanna was staying with us on her way to and from summer camp in Virginia.
A few years before, when I was Moscow correspondent of the Irish Times, Boris Nemtsov had emerged as one of the perestroika generation of reformers.
He began his political activism in 1988 in a successful campaign to prevent a nuclear power station being built in Gorky, since renamed Nizhny Novgorod.
Aged just 32, he was elected to the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1990 in the dying days of the Soviet Union. After the collapse of communism, President Boris Yeltsin appointed him first governor of Nizhny Novgorod.
He was tall, charming and good-looking, with an integrity and an exuberance for change that made him known as the “golden boy” of the fledging Russian democracy.
Yeltsin put him in charge of the first attempt at dismantling the communist system of state ownership in an orderly fashion. It was a pilot programme involving the privatisation of six state-owned farms in the Nizhny-Novgorod region.
The model for this was constructed by the International Finance Corporation, in Washington, an off-shoot of the World bank.
As a consultant on a team under Anthony Doran, manager of IFC’s Russia division, which conceived and executed the project, my wife (also called Zhanna) came in contact with Nemtsov (hence his daughter staying with us).
Farm employees
The dining table in our house in the Washington suburb of Bethesda in those days was often strewn with documents translated into Russian on how to create entitlement certificates to give farm employees the purchasing power to buy land and property.
It was a complicated process based on fairness. Land entitlement certificates had to be equal in value but property certificates were calculated according to seniority, and pensioners and service providers had to be accommodated.
Much of the work involved legal terminology and components, and the production of Russian-language manuals.
Russian prime minister Victor Chernomyrdin endorsed the pilot programme and it became the template for privatising business, industry and property throughout Russia.
Nemtsov’s achievements as a reformer were recognised by Yeltsin who appointed him a deputy prime minister in 1997. Nemtsov began a campaign against what he called “bandit capitalism”. He insisted on top bureaucrats disclosing their incomes and using Russian-made cars.
However the idealistic Nemtsov was unable to prevent the rapid development of a culture of quick profits, corruption and oligarch capitalism.
The voucher system worked out at the IFC was overwhelmed with corrupt auctions. Loans for shares gave former party officials and bureaucrats the means to grab enormous parcels of property.
Before stepping down in 1999, Yeltsin spoke of Nemtsov as his successor but in the end nominated former KGB official Vladimir Putin, who could be trusted not to pursue corruption charges against Yeltsin's family circle.
Neither wanted a reformer in the Kremlin who would pursue a vision of a transparent, free and competitive society based on the rule of law. That this happened is Russia’s tragedy.
We got Zhanna Nemtsova safely back on the plane to Russia after her stay in the US. Today she is a journalist working in Moscow for RBC-TV.
Conor O'Clery is a former Moscow and Washington correspondent of The Irish Times
