TO THE DISSIDENT
Russian merits honour
In February 2012, at the height of the protests that swept Russia following a rigged parliamentary election, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov came to Toronto and Ottawa to make an appeal to Canada’s political leaders.
Contrary to customary slurs by Kremlin propaganda, he did not ask Canada (or anyone else in the West) for help in fighting for democracy in Russia.
What he and other Russian democracy activists wanted Canada to do was to stop, in effect, enabling corruption and human rights abuses in Russia by providing their perpetrators with access to its real estate and banks. “It is hardly a secret that senior Russian officials and oligarchs … are opting for the West when it comes to their bank deposits, vacation homes, or schooling for their children,” Nemtsov wrote in a 2012 opinion piece. “This double standard must end: It is time for personal responsibility for those who continue to violate the rights and freedoms — and plunder the resources — of Russian citizens.”
Nemtsov was speaking in support of the proposed legislation — named after the anticorruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in a Moscow prison, and modelled after a similar law in the U.S. — that would ban human-rights abusers from receiving visas and holding assets in Canada. “Canada has an opportunity to lead — just as it has led on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — by adopting the Magnitsky legislation,” Nemtsov wrote. “This is a pro-Russian law that strikes at the heart of the Kremlin’s mafia-like system.”
In October 2017, as a result of principled co-operation between the government and the opposition, Parliament passed the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (Sergei Magnitsky Law), placing targeted sanctions on individuals “responsible for, or complicit in, extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The law passed the House of Commons and the Senate unanimously, making Canada only the second G7 country to adopt such legislation. On Nov. 1, MPs rose to give a standing ovation to Sergei Magnitsky’s widow and son who were in attendance in the gallery to mark the passage of the law.
Nemtsov wasn’t there: Two years earlier, on the evening of Feb. 27, 2015, he was gunned down, by five bullets in the back, as he walked home across a bridge near the Kremlin.
A four-term member of Parliament, former regional governor and deputy prime minister, Nemtsov was the most prominent political opponent of Vladimir Putin’s regime, exposing its corruption and leading the protests against its abuses, including the war on Ukraine.
An officer of the Russian Interior Ministry with ties to the Kremlin-appointed governor of Chechnya was convicted of pulling the trigger. No organizers or masterminds were identified or brought to justice, and the authorities are not really looking. Russia’s top investigative official, Gen. Alexander Bastrykin (designated by Canada as a human-rights violator under the Magnitsky Law), has declared the case “solved.”
The Russian authorities have been busy with something else, though. For the three years that passed since Nemtsov’s murder, they have been trying to erase his memory. While thousands march through the streets of Moscow every February to mark the anniversary of his death, and while Russians continue to leave fresh flowers and light candles in what has become a makeshift memorial on the bridge where he was killed, the authorities have been preventing any official commemoration.
Petitions calling for a plaque on the bridge have been rejected; private signs installed by citizens have been removed; the decision by the city council in Nizhny Novgorod (where Nemtsov was governor in the 1990s) to place a plaque on his home remains unimplemented. On nearly 80 occasions, the Moscow authorities have dispatched municipal services to pillage and destroy the makeshift memorial on the bridge; grown men in uniforms stealing flowers under the cover of darkness. It was being made abundantly clear that the authorities would not permit Russian citizens to commemorate a Russian statesman in Russia.
So lawmakers in free countries have stepped in. Earlier this year, the Washington, D.C., city council unanimously designated the block in front of the Russian Embassy as Boris Nemtsov Plaza. On Feb. 27 — the third anniversary of Nemtsov’s assassination — his family and friends were joined by the leaders of Washington, D.C., members of Congress, U.S. government officials, and diplomats and dignitaries from other countries, including Canada, at the unveiling ceremony for the world’s first official tribute to the Russian opposition leader.
Nemtsov’s daughter, Zhanna Nemtsova, thanked Washington lawmakers “for making this happen.” One speaker after another expressed certainty that, one day, Russia will be proud to have its embassy in Washington standing on a street named after Boris Nemtsov.
It is not only in Washington, but is now a growing international initiative. In Kyiv, municipal legislators have initiated hearings on naming a park near the Russian embassy after Nemtsov. Likewise, just last week, the Vilnius city council overwhelmingly voted to commemorate the Russian opposition leader in Lithuania’s capital, calling it an enduring “symbol of the struggle for democracy.” Similar initiatives have been proposed in other cities. Apparently realizing how the contrast would look, days before the unveiling of Washington’s Nemtsov Plaza, the Moscow city government has reversed its position and indicated that it will allow the installation of a small sign on the apartment building where Nemtsov lived.
It is time for Canada to lead, as Boris Nemtsov urged six years ago — this time, tragically, on honouring his memory. Both Ottawa and Toronto have a noble tradition of commemorating international champions of human dignity, including Nelson Mandela and Raoul Wallenberg, in street and park designations.
Adding Boris Nemtsov’s name to the map would send an important message to Russia’s democrats that their fight and sacrifices are not forgotten; to Russian Canadians who support democratic change in their native country that Canada stands with them; and to the Kremlin that the murders of political opponents will not erase their legacy.
And one day, there will be a Russian government that is grateful to Canadians for commemorating one of Russia’s finest citizens.