article_snippet: (CNN)Boris Nemtsov, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov slain Friday night a stone's throw from the Kremlin, was a true original, one of the towering figures of Russia's post-communist political odyssey.
article_snippet: We do not know yet who it was who shot Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov four times in the back.
article_snippet: But by far the most plausible is that Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov killers wanted to silence one of the most determined and courageous Russian campaigners for personal and political freedoms.
article_snippet: (Unfortunately, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was not the last.)
article_snippet: Soon disillusioned, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov became one of Vladimir Putin's's most biting critics.
article_snippet: Yet it is also true that, by the mid-2000s, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was widely viewed as a spent force.
article_snippet: Along with all other Russian liberals of the 1990s, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov failed to forge a connection to the discontented groups outside Moscow.
article_snippet: By the wave of protests in 2011-12, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov generation's day had passed.
article_snippet: On the stage before the anti-Putin demonstrators, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov often bombed.
article_snippet: But the dwindling appeal of Western-style liberalism did not stop Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.
article_snippet: Having been chauffeured to Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov government office in the 1990s, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov marched in the rain among bedraggled crowds in the 2000s as police wheeled out noise-making machinery to drown out the sound of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov bullhorn.
article_snippet: Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov endured the eggs and ammonia hurled at Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov by pro-Kremlin hooligans.
article_snippet: Even as the boyish charmer turned into a graying baby boomer with reading glasses that slipped down Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov nose,
article_snippet: (Even had the election been fair, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov would probably have lost.)
article_snippet: Nemtsov was almost certainly under surveillance at the time.
article_snippet: Nemtsov in Nemtsov later years was never a threat to Putin's regime.
article_snippet: Having come to symbolize for most Russians the disorder of the 1990s, Nemtsov had little chance of rising to the top again.
article_snippet: Indeed, Nemtsov was the kind of liberal -- unbowed, unabashedly pro-Western, unpopular -- whom the Kremlin loved to hate.
highlights_snippet: Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down near the Kremlin .
  