Media decries Nemtsov murder
MOSCOW: Russia has been changed forever by the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, Russian media said yesterday, a day after thousands marched through central Moscow in his memory.
“The reaction to the murder of Boris Nemtsov turned out to be as extraordinary as the politician himself,” wrote the Kommersant business daily in a front page article that ran alongside a photo of Nemtsov carried at Sunday’s memorial march.
Organisers said that 70,000 people marched through central Moscow, crossing the bridge where Nemtsov was shot, a turnout that Kommersant said had not been reached since the mass opposition rallies of 2011 against President Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin.
Nemtsov’s murder within sight of the Kremlin walls “crossed a psychological boundary, after which Russia will inevitably be different”, wrote the business daily Vedomosti in a front-page editorial.
“After Nemtsov’s shocking murder, a lot of people have said that we woke up in a different country,” wrote the gazeta.ru website, calling the march in memory of Nemtsov “a march against fear”.
“In fact we have for at least a year lived in a country where thinking differently was equated with treachery, and some were ready to kill for this. It’s just that yesterday they were killing with words, and today they have started with bullets,” gazeta.ru wrote.
Opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta wrote that Nemtsov regularly received death threats but did not take them seriously.
“In recent years I have seen a huge number of provocations, threats and acts of meanness. And I’ve developed a certain immunity to this,” it quoted him as saying last April.
Commenting on pressure from Russia’s authorities, he said: “Well maybe they could kill me, I don’t know, but it’s more likely they would put me in prison.”