The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin and the Decline of Modern Russia

by Mikhail Fishman, Michele A. Berdy (Translator)

Overview

BEFORE NAVALNY: A landmark work of political history detailing the decline of modern Russia, told through the tumultuous life and brutal assassination of Boris Nemtsov (1959-2015)

When Russia emerged from the debris of 70 years of Communist party rule, the country offered signs of hope it would become a democracy and a respected player on the international scene. Instead, it turned into a dictatorship, one which has no respect for human rights, murders and imprisons its political opponents, and launched a war on a scale not seen in Europe since the end of World War II.

How did this happen?

The Successor explores recent Russian history through the life of the Russian liberal leader Boris Nemtsov, who started his political career in the late 80s—at the height of Gorbachev’s Perestroika—and was assassinated in early 2015 beside his Ukrainian partner Anna Durytska, on a bridge near the Kremlin.

Nemtsov took part in or witnessed all the landmark events that shaped Russia and its political trajectory, from the first free national elections and the coup attempt of 1991 to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Nemtsov’s fate reflects Russia’s fate. At the time of his assassination, Nemtsov was helping to organize a rally against the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and the Russian financial crisis.

Drawing on vast numbers of archival materials and off-the-record interviews with figures such as Alexey Navalny, exiled Russian journalist constructs a comprehensive, landmark work of political journalism. As engrossing as it is disturbing, The Successor is both a biography of Nemtsov and of Russia itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782277255
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	05/05/2026
Pages:	800
Product dimensions:	6.94(w) x 9.22(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mikhail Fishman is one of Russia’s leading political journalists. Active since the late 1990s, he has chronicled Russia's dramatic political life. He served as editor-in-chief of Russian Newsweek and The Moscow Times, as well as hosting the Friday night news round-up at TV Rain, Russia's leading independent news network. In 2017, Fishman and Vera Krichevskaya released The Man Who Was Too Free, a documentary feature on Boris Nemtsov. It was the highest-grossing documentary in Russia in at least a decade and laid the groundwork for this book, which was an instant bestseller on Russian publication in 2022. Fishman faced increasing intimidation and suppression from the state; when Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he left for Amsterdam, where he now lives and works in exile with his family.

Michele A Berdy is a writer, translator and journalist who lived in Russia for over 40 years.

Read an Excerpt

I was working at TV Rain and finishing this book when Alexei Navalny announced that he was returning to Russia from several months in Germany after being successfully treated for Novichok poisoning. My first thought was: “What, already?” It was clear that he would return at some point—this was Navalny, after all—but why the rush? He hadn’t fully recovered from being poisoned. What would a few months change?

I’d been writing this book for several years and had recorded an interview with Navalny a few years earlier. There was something I wanted to clarify—and then I caught myself. No, I won’t bother him. He only has a few more days of freedom. I had no doubt that Navalny would be arrested as soon as he returned.

The TV Rain channel first peaked in popularity when it broadcast live reports during the Bolotnaya Square protests in 2011–12. Three weeks before the annexation of Crimea, TV Rain was prohibited from airing on Russian cable networks for its broadcasts from Kyiv during Euromaidan. But by the time that Navalny was returning, it was already at its second peak of success. The independent TV channel, still resist- ing state ideological pressure, was rapidly growing in popularity, no longer on cable but accessible on YouTube.

On 17 January, TV Rain broadcast live coverage of Navalny’s return, showing him and his wife Yulia getting on a plane in Berlin and turn- ing on Rick and Morty; tens of thousands of people coming to meet him at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow and then their arrest when the plane was diverted to another airport; Navalny saying he was happy to be back home and not afraid of anything at an impromptu press conference before going through border control; and a few minutes later showing him giving Yulia a quick hug before the police took him away for ever. It was the most popular broadcast in the history of TV Rain. The live coverage was watched by a record half-million concurrent viewers.

Of course, Navalny was counting on people coming out to protest his arrest. If millions had come out, Russia might have had a chance to get off its destructive path, but only about 150,000 people took to the streets across the country—far fewer than during the protests in winter 2011–12. Fear had enveloped the country. Protesters were beaten and detained, thousands of demonstrators received several days of detention, and there were soon more than one hundred criminal charges. Protesters were tracked through security cameras and then expelled from universities and fired from their jobs for “committing an immoral act”.

I had been detained before—no rallies had been authorized in Russia since the Covid era—but I’d recently had a chance to see how the system worked. In early February, my eldest daughter, Anya, was detained. She and her boyfriend had protested outside the court when Navalny’s sentence was announced. The police released her on the same day since she was a minor—she was seventeen years old—but she was registered at the police department and had to go to the district office so that the commission on juvenile affairs could consider our case. The commission wasn’t made up of police or FSB officers. It was made up of ordinary Moscow civil servants, mostly teachers and directors of neighbourhood schools. They had to punish us; otherwise, they would have broken the rules of the game and would have come under suspicion themselves. But I saw how easily they slipped into the role of inquisitors. This must have been how party trials were conducted in the Brezhnev era.

The Soviet power structure was built on a clear-cut party hierarchy. Since Stalin’s death, power in the Soviet Union had never depended on the will of just one man; it was the power of the corporation. Putin’s system of one-man rule seemed more vulnerable. Polls showed that his approval rating was continuing to decline gradually, while Navalny’s popularity was growing even though he was under arrest. When he returned to Russia, he posted on YouTube about Putin’s palace, a huge estate built for him on the Black Sea. It was viewed by more than 100 million people—still a record for non-entertainment videos on Russian YouTube. Navalny’s team found procurement documents for the palace interiors: one toilet brush had cost €700.

“Let’s look inside, and you’ll see that Vladimir Putin is mentally ill: he is obsessed with wealth and luxury,” Navalny said in the film’s narra- tion. The extravagant but tasteless palace instantly became a symbol of caste and corruption. At rallies for Navalny, people came out waving toilet brushes.

It wasn’t just Navalny. The public atmosphere was reminiscent of the period nine years before when the Bolotnaya Square protests were broken up. Repression was growing, but it didn’t produce love for the regime. On the contrary, discontent was growing. I could see it myself. The TV Rain channel was growing increasingly popular, and the other anchors and I were recognized on the streets more frequently and thanked for our work.

And so I sat in the district office, watching the members of the juvenile affairs commission zealously denounce my daughter and me as alienated, unworthy members of society—they apparently didn’t recognize me—and thinking that Putin’s power might be stronger than I’d thought. Yes, the corporate rule of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been replaced by the tyranny of one-man rule, but it still relied on a vast army of clerks and bureaucrats who enthusiastically carried out the will of the government.

After Navalny’s return and arrest, it quickly became clear that things would never be the same again. In the past the authorities hadn’t felt the need to justify their persecution of dissidents, but now they took another step. In the spring they simply outlawed all Navalny’s support- ers. The court declared that his headquarters throughout the country were extremist, and the parliament passed a special law banning anyone who had publicly supported or sympathized with Navalny over the past few years. A social media post was enough to break the law. The gov- ernment now deemed it “association with the activities of an extremist organization”.

At the snap of a finger, the government crushed a peaceful politi- cal organization and deprived tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Russian citizens of their civil rights—simply for a like on Facebook. The zeal to destroy the entire sphere of lawful political expression—any dissent against the regime—was breathtaking. It was swift, brazen—a blatant misuse of power. And journalists were next in line.

Previously, the label “foreign agent”—someone who is paid by or under the influence of a foreign government, i.e. an enemy of Russia—had been applied to non-profit organizations. Now it was being applied to the press. Putin began his reign in Russia with the arrest of media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, and censorship had increased over the twenty-odd years he had been in power. Now it had reached a new height. Meduza, the most popular independent online news media outlet in Russia, had been operating out of Latvia since 2014 when the first harsh wave of censorship hit the Russian press during Euromaidan and the annexation of Crimea. In late April, it was declared a foreign agent. TV Rain was named a foreign agent in August.

But that wasn’t all. The Kremlin got personal: it began to label indi- vidual journalists as foreign agents—journalists like me, who was put on the list in December 2022. I knew almost all of them personally, and I had worked with many of them for years in the same newsrooms. Now they were officially recognized as second-class citizens. They had to put humiliating disclaimers under their posts on social networks: “This material has been created, disseminated and/or sent by foreign agent Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, who is registered as a foreign agent, or concerns the activities of foreign agent Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, who is registered as a foreign agent.” They also were required to submit reports to the state on all their spending. It was outrageous. I suppressed a sharp pang of anger and, like everyone else, realized that this did not bode well for us journalists.

It still wasn’t clear that a war was imminent, but since the beginning of the fall, I was quite aware that the finale was near: soon my usual life would be over, and I would no longer be able to continue working as I had done for more than twenty years under Putin. Nor would my colleagues.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 1987-89: How it all Began
Chapter 2 1989-1990: Great Expectations
Chapter 3 1991: The Last Battle
Chapter 4 1991: A New Country
Chapter 5 1992-1993: The Capital of Reform
Chapter 6 Winter 1992 - Spring 1993: Two Centres of Power
Chapter 7 Summer-Autumn 1993: Breaking the Deadlock
Chapter 8 1993-1995: The Successor
Chapter 9 1991-1994: Chechnya and the Unnecessary War
Chapter 10 1995-1996: Peacemaker
Chapter 11 1996: Communism or Democracy
Chapter 12 1997: First Deputy Prime Minister Nemtsov
Chapter 13 1997: A Boat Going Over a Waterfall
Chapter 14 1998: The Emperor's Last Journey
Chapter 15 1998: The point of no return
Chapter 16 1996-1998: Putin
Chapter 17 1998-1999: President-2000
Chapter 18 1999-2000: Successor 2.0
Chapter 19 2000-200: First Blood
Chapter 20 2002: Nord-Ost
Chapter 21 2003: The Other Russia
Chapter 22 2004: Life on the Sidelines
Chapter 23 2004: The Orange Revolution
Chapter 24 2005-2009: The End of the Revolution
Chapter 25 2005-2008: Sovereign Democracy
Chapter 26 2004-2008: Putin's Warrior
Chapter 27 2008-2010: The Thaw
Chapter 28 2010: Arrest
Chapter 29 2010-2011: The rook and King Change Places
Chapter 30 2007-2011: The Dude from Marino Who Reinvented Politics
Chapter 31 2011: Bolotnaya Square
Chapter 32 2012: The Rout of the Bolotnaya Square Movement
Chapter 33 2013: Two campaigns
Chapter 34 2013-2014: Euromaidan
Chapter 35 2014: Russia after Crimea
Chapter 36 27 February 2015: The Last Chapter
Chapter 37 Five Years Later: 2020
Epilogue