For years, mourners and members of Russia’s pro-democracy movement have flocked to a bridge near the Kremlin each February to remember Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician who was shot dead there in 2015.
This week, at the 10th anniversary of the killing, a far smaller crowd turned out, with the leading lights of the opposition either dead or driven into exile. Police officers rushed visitors along and at times blocked them from the bridge. City workers repeatedly tossed flowers set on the bridge into garbage bags, including some laid by Western ambassadors, according to attendees and reports from local media outlet RusNews.
The scenes from this year’s memorial reflected the near elimination of the Russian opposition under President Vladimir Putin and the collapsing space for public debate in a country that has muzzled and jailed journalists, banned protest and stamped out any whisper of dissent. The trend continues even as President Trump attempts to establish warm relations and revive economic ties with Russia.
“The brutality is growing. On the anniversary of Nemtsov’s murder, people were usually allowed to gather. The police did not interfere with the laying of flowers…a huge number of buckets with flowers piled up,” said Arkady Konikov, a longtime pro-democracy activist who left Russia for Israel in 2023 out of opposition to the Ukraine war.
Mourners held small ceremonies in several other Russian cities, including St. Petersburg, Ufa and Barnaul, where they were closely watched by police. Fifteen people in five cities were detained, according to the human-rights monitoring group OVD-Info. A RusNews journalist in Moscow was able to livestream mourners arriving for a while, but a police officer eventually escorted her off the bridge.
The turnout was a far cry from years past. The anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny joined the grieving in Moscow in 2017, marching alongside thousands of Russians carrying signs praising Nemtsov and condemning Putin. Pro-democracy politician Ilya Yashin was a regular participant in the annual mourning. So was Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian journalist and political activist.
Navalny collapsed and died in an Arctic prison a year ago while serving a harsh sentence that his supporters and Western governments said was punishment for his anti-Putin campaigns. Yashin and Kara-Murza were released from prison last year in an East-West swap and forced into exile. They held a memorial event for Nemtsov in Germany this week. Thousands of other activists and democracy supporters have fled Russia and its growing repression since Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The destruction has left few, if any, leaders for like-minded Russians to follow, though some brave individuals still turned out. One mourner, who declined to be named, said she attended because there are few places left in Russia where you can speak your mind. At the memorial, she could at least do that through her actions.
Nemtsov was a physicist who entered politics in the early 1990s, rising to become governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region. The charismatic and reform-minded leader reached the pinnacle of his power under Boris Yeltsin, who tapped him to become a deputy prime minister. He was gradually pushed into opposition under Putin, whom Nemtsov harshly and publicly criticized.
In private, he voiced worries that he could be assassinated. He was shot to death while walking home with his girlfriend in early 2015 within sight of the Kremlin. Nemtsov and other Putin critics had been planning a protest march to call for political liberalization and an end to the war in Ukraine. A jury in Moscow found five men guilty of the murder in a trial criticized by Nemtsov’s allies as failing to identify who ordered the killing.
Yashin this week shared on social media a video clip of Nemtsov urging Russians to action: “If you want to change something, fight for it. If you’re afraid to go out on the streets, write something online. If you’re afraid to write something online, whisper it in your wife’s ear…Just do something, everyone.”
Soon after Nemtsov’s murder, the spot where he fell became a permanent makeshift shrine, with mourners regularly bringing flowers and volunteers guarding the tributes round the clock. Konikov joined the volunteer ranks in the early years, wanting to branch out beyond antiwar protests and election monitoring. Police at times detained the volunteers, and city workers periodically cleared away the flowers. Pro-Kremlin thugs and random troublemakers sometimes harassed the guards and filmed themselves throwing out the flowers so they could share the clips on social media, Konikov said.
At first, there were enough volunteers to stand watch at all times, with guards working in pairs overnight, he said. Lately, their ranks are thinning, as many Russians leave the country and young men attempt to stay out of sight to avoid conscription, he said. Volunteers serve four days and two nights a week now.
“For me, being on duty at the bridge was the final piece of my opposition activities, since it was no longer possible to do anything else,” Konikov said, describing his last few years before leaving Russia.
Other volunteers have paid a steep price for their ties to the memorial or to the wider pro-democracy movement. Last month, a bridge volunteer was severely beaten while on duty, RusNews reported. And this week, a Moscow court sentenced bridge volunteer Viktor Levakov to 3½ years in prison, Mediazona reported—not for his work at the Nemtsov shrine, but for his $40 donation in 2021 to Navalny’s anticorruption foundation, which the government has declared an extremist organization.
In 2023, another bridge volunteer and antiwar activist, Mikhail Kriger, was sentenced to seven years in prison for Facebook posts that the court ruled justified terrorism and incited hatred.
Nemtsov allies this week petitioned the Moscow City Duma, the regional parliament, for a permanent memorial plaque to be installed on the bridge—a request the city has previously denied. Yet, even as the authorities veto an official shrine, they haven’t banned the unofficial memorial. Nemtsov supporters say they can only guess why.
“I don’t know. I think they thought people would get tired and stop themselves,” said Olga Shorina, who along with Nemtsov’s daughter co-founded the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom, a human-rights organization in Germany. Shutting the memorial down after so many years might give the project oxygen, she added. “They don’t want to bring a lot of attention to it.”
Write to Jeanne Whalen at Jeanne.Whalen@wsj.com