Lithuania has honored Boris Nemtsov, the great Russian democrat who was murdered within sight of the Kremlin in 2015. They have done so by renaming a park in Vilnius “Boris Nemtsov Square.” The park is in front of the Russian embassy.
Vladimir Kara-Murza wrote about this in a column, here. He is the democracy leader who once worked alongside Nemtsov. Twice, Kara-Murza has been poisoned, and twice, he has survived. (The latest victim of poisoning is Pyotr Verzilov, whom you can read about here.)
At the ceremony in Vilnius, the Lithuanian foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, spoke. He said, “This is not only a tribute to Boris Nemtsov, whom I was honored to know personally, but also an expression of gratitude to those political forces in Russia that helped us when times were difficult for us, when we were fighting for our independence.” Yes. There have always been liberals and illiberals in Russia, as in most countries.
The mayor of Vilnius, Remigijus Simasius, spoke as well. He said, “The values that [Nemtsov] fought for — freedom, democracy, peace, human rights — are universal. The people who are fighting for these values in Russia will, I believe, one day prevail.” There are people fighting for those values in China, Cuba, and elsewhere, too.
When the U.S. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012 — this is the law that imposes sanctions on Russian human-rights abusers — Nemtsov and Kara-Murza were sitting in the gallery. Nemtsov observed, “This is the most pro-Russian law ever enacted by a foreign government.”
I have quoted this several times. And readers have asked me, “What does it mean? I am confused.” By “pro-Russian,” Nemtsov did not mean pro-Putin, obviously. He did not mean pro-Kremlin. He was hailing a law that penalizes people who torture, murder, swindle, and otherwise abuse Russians.
During the Cold War, leftists would sometimes accuse us anti-Communists of being “anti-Russian.” That was a neat trick, or a dirty one. We were anti-Kremlin. The people we admired — Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Bukovsky, et al. — were just as Russian as Brezhnev (more so, you could argue).
Today, I sometimes get “anti-Russian” from the Right. And people such as Orbán, Salvini, and Le Pen are called “pro-Russian.” They are, in a way. But, more accurately, they are pro-Putin and pro-Kremlin. Oyub Titiev, Alexei Pichugin, Yuri Dmitriev, Stanislav Zimovets, Alexander Shpakov? I have named some political prisoners. And they are Russian too, you know.
I was once talking with Václav Klaus, who had been president of the Czech Republic. I said that his country had long been the most pro-Cuban in Europe. He was startled — but I quickly explained, “I mean, you have been the most supportive of the Cuban people, against the dictatorship that rules them.”
In his column, Kara-Murza wrote that “the loudest protest” against the tribute to Nemtsov in Vilnius had come from the Russian ambassador to Lithuania. But guess what? “The ambassador’s nephew, Sergei Udaltsov, is an opposition activist who has served 4.5 years in prison for organizing anti-Kremlin rallies; one of the first things he did after his release was to lay flowers at the site where Boris Nemtsov was killed.” Who is Russian? The ambassador or his nephew? Both, of course (but I know which one I admire).
One could go on, but you get the point. And I’ll leave the last word to Kara-Murza, a wonderful word, or paragraph:
Russian history has been known to make sharp turns. In 1984, when the authorities in Washington named the street in front of the then-Soviet Embassy after the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, the Politburo was not pleased. Seven years later, there was a Sakharov Avenue in Moscow and there was no longer a Politburo. There will come a time when Nemtsov streets will be designated in cities across Russia — and when Russian embassies in Washington, Vilnius, and other world capitals will be proud to be standing on squares and in parks named for a Russian statesman.