Most of the demonstrators Saturday were veterans of the protest movement, bearing posters with portraits of Nemtsov or placards urging demonstrators to “struggle”.
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In a huge outpouring of support for the slain opposition leader, and anger aimed at President Vladimir Putin, about 30,000 people marched through central Moscow chanting “Russia will be free” and “Russia without Putin”.
The 55-year-old Nemtsov was a deputy prime minister during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency in the 1990s and a charismatic critic of the Kremlin’s increasingly authoritarian rule.
The US ambassador to Russia, John Tefft, laid a wreath at Nemtsov’s memorial, with a message reading: “From the American people”.
“I don’t think it was really a message to the Kremlin, I think it was a message to ourselves – it’s a message that we’re not afraid, we’re not going to hide, we’re not going to stop doing what we’re doing, we’re not going to run away, and we’re going to continue what Boris did”.
A line of flowers can be seen on the bridge near the Kremlin, where one year ago, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was assassinated.
And in a word addressed to FSB officers said Putin “You [the FSB] should do everything to cut short the activities of those who attempt or can attempt to use nationalist, xenophobic and extremist slogans to bring discord into our society,”. Activists also circulated a petition to have the bridge named after Nemtsov. He said Kislitsin suffered a heart attack and a broken rib and has been hospitalized.
“The assassination of Nemtsov is not solved”, Kasyanov said earlier in the week. “It’s going on but it’s ineffective in terms of organizers and those who ordered this crime”.
But Nemtsov’s supporters say the suspects are just low-level operatives who were paid to kill the prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin.
Many opposition supporters say that even if Putin had no direct hand in Nemtsov’s killing, he bears responsibility for encouraging a truculent authoritarianism.
German ambassador to Russia Rudiger Von Fritsch lays flowers at the place where Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down, to mark the anniversary of his killing in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Feb. 28, 2016. “And it is very important for us to demonstrate terrorists, murderers, those villains that they will not succeed in trying to intimidate us”.
On the eve of the anniversary, lawmaker Dmitry Gudkov, one of the few independent voices in Russian parliament, said he suggested that deputies observe a moment of silence in Nemtsov’s memory but most of his colleagues refused.
Some former members of a Chechen special-forces unit believed to be under Kadyrov’s control have been arrested for the killing, while investigators have complained that others have disappeared or are being shielded from answering questions.
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But Nemtsov’s family and allies insist the authorities have failed to bring the masterminds to justice and point the finger of blame at Chechnya’s Moscow-backed strongman Ramzan Kadyrov – and the Kremlin itself.
