Pod Save the World - Introducing: Another Russia

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

In 2015 Putin’s number one public enemy, Boris Nemtsov, was shot and killed in front of the Kremlin. He was a relentless critic of Putin, corruption, and war in Ukraine. Then, he was assassinated. His daughter, journalist Zhanna Nemtsova, and co-host Ben Rhodes tell his story to find out what happened to an entire country – and what happens next. Is another Russia possible? Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/another-russia/id1634279839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1edslXTCkkMFeN8htn1iAy?si=1G14a5slQ-uURxuxsTmbpA Crooked: https://crooked.com/podcast-series/another-russia/ For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Hey, everyone, Ben here. I'm so excited to share the first episode of my new podcast, Another Russia, with you. In 2015, Putin's number one public enemy, Boris Nemtsov, was shot and killed in front of the Kremlin. He was a relentless critic of Putin, corruption, and war in Ukraine. And then he was assassinated. I'm teaming up with his daughter, the journalist and activist Janemsova, to tell his story and uncover what happened to an entire country. and ask whether another Russia is possible. New episodes of Another Russia premiere every Monday. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast.

Okay. You ready? I am. Okay. So why don't we just start, like, introduce yourself, Jana? My name is Jana Nemtsova. I'm a Russian journalist and activist. I'm 38 years old.

I'm really old. No, that's not old. That's my friend, Jana Nemtsova. We're recording in the studio in Holland. It's a few weeks into Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine. She's Russian, but she hasn't lived in Russia for the last seven years. She had to leave her home because of who she is and who her father was. My father was Boris Nemtsov, a Russian liberal opposition politician.

He was assassinated in Russia in February 2015. So, Jana, at the time, you're living your life in Moscow. you're working as a journalist for RBC, a Russian broadcaster. Can you take us back to February 27, 2015? What were you doing that day? It was Friday. It was my last day in office before much anticipated holiday. I was planning to go to Italy to live with my mother to spend one week there.

One of my colleagues approached me and asked me, could you invite your father to take part in our program today? So we are going to discuss Ukraine. And I called my father. I said, you know, my colleague would like to invite you for the evening show, for the main evening show. I said, no, no, no, no. I don't want your airbc. It's not an important channel for me.

Nobody watches your channel at all. No. I am now organizing a major anti-war protest in. And today will appear on Echo of Mosque Radio Station. Everybody listens to Echo of Moscow radio station. No, RBC, bye-bye. That radio station, Echo of Moscow, was shut down by Putin's censorship laws earlier this year, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

But back in 2015, it was still on air. And Putin had just started chipping away at Ukraine by annexing an area called Crimea. With cheering crowds greeting him, Russian President Vladimir Putin made his first visit since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, turning a Russian holiday commemorating World War II into a celebration of Putin's new Russia. Boris was taking a risk in speaking out against this. But Jana says she couldn't have imagined what happened next. I came home and was waiting for my mother to come. She took a train to Moscow.

And she arrived really late at 11 p.m. probably. It was a one-bedroom apartment like a studio. My mother slept on the sofa in the living room. And I think at midnight, I heard her crying and yelling. And I thought, my immediate thought was that an intruder had broken into our apartment. and about to steal something. So you wake up... I woke up.

You're fast asleep. You wake up hearing your mother yelling. Yeah, and she just came into my room and she said, our father was killed and he is dead. I was shocked and I couldn't believe her words. I asked her, who said it? He said, I got a call from Olga, my friend, and she told me that.

And it's already in the news. So I turned on my phone. I read some Russian language news out. and I still could not believe it. And then I went directly to the CNN's website. It was on the front page. And then I believed. The breaking news coming in from Russia,

prominent Russian opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov has been shot and killed by an unknown assailant. What's going through your head? Like, what are you thinking? Putin. Putin did it. From Cooket Media, I'm Ben Rhodes. And this is another Russian.

I first met Jonna in the spring of 2017. I had just finished eight years working in the Obama White House as Deputy National Security Advisor. I was trying to understand why the world was moving in the direction of nationalism and authoritarianism. The opposite of what I'd worked for all those years. Jana was also searching for something, the truth about who killed her dad and why.

Both of us knew that the answers to those questions led, at least in part, to one man, Vladimir Putin. I had encountered what Putin had done from the perspective of the situation room, oval office phone calls, and many hours and meetings with the Russian government. But Jana and her family had lived the events that I'd experienced from a distance.

Jana's father was at the center of all the major turning points in Russia's modern history. He was an activist for democracy, as the Soviet Union collapsed. I am ceasing my activities in the post of the U.S.S.S.R. He took on the newly minted oligarchs as deputy prime minister. We call them oligarchs. They're buying up newspapers, airlines, oil companies.

He went from being the heir apparent of the presidency to the president to the leader of the opposition, when Putin took power. When he protested in the street, he was thrown in prison. When Russia annexed Crimea, he raised the alarm bells about endless war and corruption. Russia and Ukraine without Putin. And, the last, the slav of Russia,

slav to Ukraine. Then, he was assassinated in the shadow of the Kremlin. Shot in the back, right out in the open, just blocks from the Kremlin. Boris Nemtsov on a bridge that Kremlin murdered where the opposite of the power Boris Nemtsoff shot four times from a passing car near the Kremlin, and what some say looked like a contract killing.

My life changed in one night, and there were two options for me, either to keep silent or to speak up. And I decided to speak up. On the day Jana's father was killed, it wasn't only her life that changed. So it would run. Russia. Boris Nemtsov was far from a perfect man, but he represented the future that Russia lost,

the road that was not taken. He was very unlike any Russian politician I've ever met. He was just so incredibly full of vitality, of life, of ideas. He was big, actually, not only physically, but also the energy around him. He was talking to this woman. He was talking to her as a real human being as kind of respecting as a voter. And she absolutely fell in love. He completely changed her mind. And I think that this love for my father is still the main driving force in my life. But once again, how can you explain that you love one person?

Yeah, yeah. You just love this person and that's it. This is a story of what happened to an entire country. But more than that, it's a story of one man. and one family, who was and still are fighting for another Russia. So we're at the beginning of this podcast, in a sense, kind of thinking about this project. Why do you think this is an important time to be doing this?

Like, what is the value in telling the story now? In the West, a discourse about Russia has been largely dominated by Vladimir Putin, and there is a notion, which is, I think, wrong, that Russia cannot be a democracy, that it's cursed to be an autocracy forever, nothing can be done, just give it up.

And yes, other European nations and the US gave up on Russia, you see? Yeah. So, of course, it's personal for me because I want more people know about Boris Nemtsov. Not all Russians are represented by Putin. There are Russians who are represented by Borisimtsov. and those Russians are proud.

At every step, Boris Nemtsov was fighting for a different kind of Russia, a different Russia that today looks like a distant dream. So we're going to tell Boris's story to learn from his fight, his successes, his failures, his big ideas, and his warnings. It can tell us how we got here. And maybe it can tell us something about what we should do next. This is episode one, my father's daughter. Well, I want to go back all the way to the beginning.

So tell us where was Boris Nemtsov born, when and where was he born, and what were the conditions like when he was born? His parents were from Gorky originally. His family was very poor, but my grandma was very serious about your children's education. So my father was a brilliant student, but he didn't want to have anything in common with the Soviet system. So my father chose a field that was not affected a lot by the Soviet system. So he decided to become a physicist. And he did pretty well.

During his 10 years working at the university in Gorky, he published over 60 papers. Then in the early 80s, he met John's mother. And in 1984, Jano was born. What are your early memories of Gorki and your early memories of that time? So the historic name of the city is Nizhny Novgorod. But in the Soviet times, it was renamed and they got the name of Gorki. Gorki was a talented Soviet writer. But Gorki actually has a second meaning in Russian.

It means bitter. And I thought, like, oh, this name is justified because life in our city is not happy at all. And we had food shortages. People spend up to three hours a day waiting in line. The longest lines are at the vodka shops. We lived in a wooden house in the center of Gorki. We didn't have a loo. We didn't have a shower.

We basically took a shower once a week, and it was normal. Yeah. I didn't have a babysitter. And my parents wanted to go out to party, and they would leave me alone, and they used one trick. They told me, so sit on this bed because there are wolves everywhere on the floor. And I was so much scared. When they left, I didn't move.

I truly believed that there were wolves all around they would eat me if I got out of the bed. In April 1986, when John was two, something happened that would change her family's life and the Soviet Union forever. With Trex, you get the most of everything, the most wood-inspired, the most eco-friendly, the most decking and railing designs, the most trusted.

Trex, performance engineered for your life outdoors. Visit trex.com today. A nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine. There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the Soviets have admitted that it happened. The Soviet version is this. One of the atomic reactors at the Chernobyl atomic power plant of the city of Kiev was damaged,

and there is speculation in Moscow that people were injured and may have died. The radiation started seeping out. endangering hundreds of thousands of people. But the government kept it under wraps. Tens of thousands of people will die as a result of Chernobyl, and the effects of its radioactive fallout are still being felt as far away as Britain. It was a cover-up, and people were scared. For 36 hours after the accident, there was still no warning.

Yet each single hour, men, women and children were getting more radiation than it's safe to receive in a whole year. People were very much concerned about radiation. They were literally obsessed with the idea of radiation. And of course, my grandma, my grandma is my father's mother. She's a medical doctor. And she was very much concerned. She could spot radiation everywhere.

And then she made my mother by a gig counter to measure radiation. Whenever my mom went shopping to a farmer's market, she would take it with her to measure radiation, and she would also ask questions. She would ask, where did you bring those tomatoes from? Where did you cultivate those potatoes? So Russians were scared, but they were also angry. They were used to their government lying to them,

but this was a whole new level. This was a threat to their lives. This was a moment when it became clear just how broken and corrupt their government had become. Chernobyl became a turning point. President Gorbachev started to open things up. Because at the same time he's managed to breathe a little spring into Soviet society, people have more freedom now than ever.

People were given more freedoms. And with those freedoms, they began to express themselves. The young people, the next generation, who are remarkably candid about what's wrong and how to fix it. Everything is worse than it. It could be. Protests movements sprung up, including Injana's hometown, and in Jana's own home. In 1982, before Chernobyl, they started the construction of a nuclear plant near Gorki.

The condition of our infrastructure was very bad, so it was pretty dangerous. And of course, when Chernobyl happened, people didn't want a nuclear plant near Gorki to be constructed. My grandmother, she had never joined any public campaigns, was one of the active members of this environmental movement in Gorki. After her work, she would go to the Ministry of Gorki to collect signatures against the construction of the nuclear plant. And she got a lot of signatures, but there were a lot of questions, and she lacked knowledge, she lacked expertise, she couldn't answer all the questions. And then my grandmother turned to my father. My father was a physicist. I think that he shared his mother's anxiety about the nuclear plant.

He cared about his city. He was an eloquent person, a charismatic person, and she turned to him her help. So Nemtsov got to work. He organized protests. He built coalitions in the city. He gave a lot of public speeches. And, of course, people flocked to him, and we had. a lot of guests. Our house was full of guests every evening.

My mom was mad. She hated everybody because she had to work, and then she had to go to buy food, and then in the evening she had to cook. Eventually, Jana's father and grandmother won the battle. The nuclear plant was never built. After that, I think that he got a taste for politics because he, He understood that he could be a very good leader. When my father was asked, who brought you to politics, he would say, my mother. That is true. I think right now my grandma regrets this decision.

Yeah, yeah. In 1989, the Soviet Union held its first ever free elections. This meant that you could run as an independent. You didn't have to be affiliated with the Communist Party. So Boris Nemtsov ran for office. He took part in a televised debate. Those debates were not very popular because they were extremely dull.

Because people repeated the same things. And he was listening to other candidates promising everything on Earth. And he was the last one to speak. He had only two minutes or so. And he said, guys, I've been listening to you promising all kinds of things.

But I want to the last one. say one thing and I can promise one thing, I will not lie. Pause. That's it. And just like that, he won the election. Nemsov went on to become governor of their province in 1991 when he was only 30 years old. Just a month later, President Gorbachev resigned. Cameron Sickle is lord for the last time and an era comes to an end.

I am ceasing my activities in the post of President of the USSR. I was 13 when the Soviet Union collapsed. I remember watching the images on television. My parents couldn't believe it. They'd live most of their lives in the Cold War. Suddenly, that history was over. But our lives in New York didn't change that much. To work in equally constructive ways with his success.

For people in Russia, everything changed. The tricolor banner of the Russian Republic now flies over the Kremlin. The entire system they lived in collapsed. Soviet republics like Ukraine became independent nations. What was now called the Russian Federation began to move towards capitalism, something that Russians have been taught to hate their whole lives. In America, we assume that meant things would inevitably get better. But the truth is more complicated. Suddenly, people couldn't afford basic goods. Professors were selling

socks in the subway. But there were new freedoms. There was a new sense of possibility. For people like Boris Nemtsov, it was an exhilarating time. The future was up for grabs. What kind of country would Russia become? The answer to that question would shape the lives of people like Jana and the entire world. So it's 1991. Borse Dembson. now finds himself in a new country. Russia has gone from communism to capitalism. Even the name of his city has changed, from the Soviet Gorki to what it's now called,

Nizhny Novgorod. It was a very rare chance for young and energetic, enthusiastic people to do something, to make a change, to achieve a lot. And most of that change involved a wholesale uprooting of the economic system. Because in the Soviet Union, everything, almost everything belonged to the state.

So we are now in the studio. If we had recorded this podcast in the Soviet Union, it would have belonged to the state, everything. So his main goal was to transform a state-run economy into a market-led economy. But he hadn't had any previous experience in governance. and back then their World Bank helped the government to transform our economy, and there were a bunch of consultants. And some of those consultants were sent to Nizhny Novgorod. My name is Alan Bigman.

I worked for the International Finance Corporation in Nizhny Novgorod in the early 90s with Boris Nemtso, who was governor at the time. Alan is an all-American kind of guy. But when he was a kid growing up during the Cold War, he got obsessed with this idea. The idea that there was this other out there, this country that considered us to be an enemy that had a completely different system.

And so when he was at college, he decided to study as an exchange student in the Soviet Union. And I had been traveling back and forth trying to see if there were some things that I could do there. And then watching on TV while they lowered the red flag from the Kremlin the last time and hoisted the Russian tricolor, I was thinking this just changes.

Everything. Bigman was thinking, how can I get in the mix here? At the time, the International Finance Corporation was getting ready to provide assistance to the new Russian government. Bigman was a young economist. He knew about Eastern Europe. So the IFC called him up and said, can you help us? And he was like, hell yes. I want to teach the Russians about good old American capitalism and private enterprise. And that is how Alan found himself traveling in early 1992 to Nizhny Novgorod. because there was a young reform-minded governor, Boris Nemtsov, who was very, very eager to start the reforms immediately.

He saw the problems, and he saw that there needed to be immediate solutions. Despite Allen's youth and excitement about meeting the great Nemtsov, he also quickly realized he was very much an outsider in this new city. I was walking with two of my colleagues, one American, one Russian. we were walking back to our hotel and we had taken some bottles of what the Russians call mineral water. Unfortunately for us,

those bottles look a lot like vodka bottles. So there were two large men that clearly had not had enough vodka, although probably already had too much, and wanted hours. So they came up to us, took it, and then started fighting with us. I got my hand pretty badly cut up

and wound up in the emergency room. So this was sort of our welcome to Nizhny Novgorod. Alan's running with these vodka enthusiasts became the stuff of legend. He laughs about it now, but it was a lawless, chaotic time, a time where you always felt on the cusp of danger. Soon after this encounter, Alan met the young governor, Boris Nemtsov, for the first time, and he found out that his reputation preceded him. and I was translating, and Boris looked at me, fixed me with his eyes, and said, you must be Bigman.

I said, yes, Boris Simovich, using the patronymic, the polite form of address in Russian, I am Alan Bigman. He said, you are the one who goes to our collective farms, drinks vodka, and then sniffs black bread afterwards. I said, yes, Borisifimich, that would be me. And he said, I think you're going to go very far in Nizhny Novgorid, Mr. Bigman. Alan says from the minute he met Boris, he just knew there was something about this guy. He had that charisma, he had that ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the room. But it wasn't just his political chops that set him apart. It was also what he was doing to the economic system.

Some Westerners referred to Nizhny Novgorod as a laboratory of reform, because Boris Nemtsov gave a unique opportunity to try things faster and more radical than in a other places in Russia, a radically new way of looking at the economy for them. We were trying to push forward as quickly as possible, but it was a way to show in at least one place what it could look like. They were basically trying to answer this one simple question. How do we get assets out of public hands and into private hands? Land, shops, factories, everything.

Just think about the challenge here. after 74 years of communism. 74 years of pinning capitalism is the enemy, they suddenly had to figure out how to make a capitalist economy work, almost overnight. I remember when I had been studying the Soviet economy in college, thinking, well, this could be done better, this is clearly wrong. And now we're faced with the task of,

okay, you're so smart, figure out a way to fix it. I think if I had been any older or more experienced, I would have walked away. But Allen stuck around, and they came up with a straightforward solution to the problem. The way the IFC principally privatized these small enterprises was through auctions. This basically meant that everything that used to be owned by the state, all those shops, laundries, grocery stores, they were auctioned off. The rules were clear. People came, and whoever made the biggest bid won the prize. Bit by bit, Nemsov and Bigman started to take businesses out of the state's hands

and put them into the hands of private individuals. And it was successful. In fact, it was so successful that even the Queen of Free Markets herself came to pay her respects. I stand before you tonight in my red star chiffon evening guy. He's the Iron Lady of the Western World. Margaret Thatcher was very impressed with what was happening in Nizhji Novgrid. She had, I think, similar instincts to Boris Nemtsov. She was not from a political family.

She was the daughter of a grocer. She understood what hard work and free enterprise meant. And she was very impressed that Boris Nemtsov did as well. And that's what he was trying to bring to Nizdineovgred. Yes, of course. They were fearful to make the first place. She wanted to see what was going in New Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She could have gone to St. Petersburg.

She could have gone to Moscow. But she landed at the airport of Njjjjny Novgor because she wanted to meet Boris Nemtsov. At the time, you're describing in the late 80s, you know, you guys are very poor, you know, don't own your own apartment, you're standing in breadlines. and then just, you know, two or three years later, your father's meeting Margaret Thatcher, and he's just kind of globally known figure. I mean, how did that impact your parents? Like, how did they feel about it? My mother and me, we could not understand how popular my father was.

For me, he was my father. There was one televised interview. It was conducted by Nina Zvereva. Nina Zverro was a very prominent journalist in Nijninovgorod. She supported my father and she was a friend of our family and she got an idea to do an interview with this little kid. How old are you? Seven years old.

She came at our apartment and she asked what the governor should do. The answer was the governor should resign. Well, yes. I mean, I wanted to say, I would like to spend more time with my father and I don't like his new job. So please resign. Somebody else will take care of everything here. Well, this interview was broadcasted and Nina started to get very critical letters. And those letters like said, why on earth did you interview this stupid girl?

She is silly. She does not understand anything. We don't want to listen to her. And I was so much offended. And I said, okay, guys. So from now on, I will not do any interviews, except from Ben Rhodes. No, no, no, no, I'm joking.

I'll not do any interviews unless I have my own achievements. Jeanna was reacting to the fact that her father's stature just kept growing and growing. He wasn't just making friends abroad. He was also making alliances with some of the most powerful people in Russia. People like the president, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, he needed a coalition of like-minded people. And that's why Yeltsin approached him and asked,

Boris, are you from Gorky? He said, yes, do you know how to build the beautiful Russia of tomorrow? Do you have any ideas? He said, yes, I have some ideas. Okay, let's discuss them. So, and that's how he got to know Boris Yeltsin. In 1994, Boris Yeltsin took an impromptory trip to Nizh Novgorod to visit Nemsov. Little did Jana or her father know at the time, but that visit would change their lives.

Yeltsin loved to play tennis. He was not really good at it, but he loved to play tennis. My father was much better, was a better tennis player. I don't know exactly who came up with the idea to organize this tennis mode. But it was quite a weird scene. So they came to the tennis court in the center of Nizhny Novgorod. There was a big park and there was one big tennis court. It had a name, the presidential tennis court.

I think it had been built for this great match between my father. So they came there. There were people sitting everywhere. There were crowds. There were journalists, reporters. It was not looking like a real tennis match, but something really strange. My father was young and healthy. He looked quite athletic.

He played tennis a lot. Yelten, he was old. It was evident that he had severe health problems. Even though it lasted only for 10 minutes, it was evident my father was much stronger as a player than Boris Yeltsin. Then, after this match, then a journalist approached Yeltsin, she wanted to ask a couple of questions. And she asked him, it was a very simple question. What do you make of Boris Nemtsov? Is he a good governor?

And he said, I just want to say that he was so very much of his president to meet. I think that he has made a huge progress. and I can see it. I think that he is experienced enough to have an ambition to become Russia's next president. And it was the breaking use. Because nobody expected Yalton to say that.

In our culture, that means that Boris Niemtsov will be Russia's next president. So after this statement, he was regarded as Boris Yeltsin's successor. What did your dad think about that? Well, I think that he was flattered. But also, it was a burden for him. Because now all those guys, crocodiles in Moscow, known as oligarchs, would keep a watchful eye on this young governor.

So Boris Nemtsov, the physicist, who was born in the Soviet Union, now finds himself an elected governor in the Russian Federation and the potential error parent to the president. But those crocodiles that John mentioned, the oligarchs, they had other ideas about who should be in charge.

If we are the smartest, and if we are the richest, then we are the elite, and we are the ones who are going to decide how the country is run. And whether we're elected or not, we are the barons. We are the elite. We will decide.

That's next time on Another Russia. Another Russia is an original podcast from Crooked Media. It is produced by Samizdat Audio. I'm Ben Rhodes, your co-host, writer, and executive producer. And I'm Jeanne Nemtsova, your co-host and executive producer. From Crooked Media, our executive producers are Sarah Geismer and Katie Long, with special thanks to Alison Falzetta. From Samizdat, our executive producers are Dasha, Lissetina, and Joe Sykes.

Asia Fuchs is our producer. All three also helped with writing on the series. Fact-checking by Amy Tardiff, archival by Molly Schwartz, the series of sound design by Jeff Entman, and Martin Orswick composed our theme music and school. If you want to learn more about the stories of Russians who are standing up to autocracy and how you can help support their work,

Check out Names offund.org slash Russians for Change. We will also put a link in our show notes.