On Saturday, April 11th, a bit after ten in the morning, people began bringing flowers to the spot on Moscow's Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge where the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was shot on February 27th. A group of people brought several large portraits of Nemtsov, a strikingly handsome man with dark, curly hair. A young man brought a homemade blue sign fashioned to look like a Moscow street sign; it said “Nemtsov Bridge”—the name by which the bridge has increasingly become known among a certain subset of Russians. Around 11:30, two men brought a larger blue sign bearing that name, one that looked indistinguishable from something furnished by the city. At noon, a car pulled up, bringing hundreds of flowers.
The monument to the slain pro-democracy politician was being reconstituted for the fourth time. The first memorial had been spontaneous. Nemtsov was shot just before midnight, and the first flowers showed up the following morning. People kept coming in droves that first day, and the day after, and, in a trickle, in those that followed. They also brought portraits, placards, and candles. Then, one night, the makeshift memorial was dismantled, according to a (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phMVAQdgdPk), by several men who took a few minutes to stuff its component parts into trash bags and haul them off.
The following morning, people brought flowers again. What had started as a spontaneous outpouring of grief now became a matter of principle. Muscovites were joined in this effort by people in other cities and other countries; at least one florist offered full-service delivery to the bridge, complete with a picture of the bouquet e-mailed to the customer. New portraits and placards were printed and drawn, and the monument grew larger than before. Until, one night, a couple of men once again stuffed all the component parts into trash bags and hauled them off. Information that leaked during the next couple of days seemed to indicate that, this time, it had been dismantled on orders from someone in the Moscow government, which had not taken any official position on the monument.
After this, the monument turned into a Sisyphean effort—and an organized one. Maxim Katz, a young municipal activist, began to coördinate the procurement and delivery of some of the flowers. This turned out to be a timely move because florists soon began balking at requests to deliver to the bridge. One shop, which had been getting so much bridge business that it had briefly added the Nemtsov memorial delivery service to its home page, suddenly stopped taking bridge orders. Still, between Katz and many other mourners, the monument was quickly reconstructed, complete with portraits, placards, candles, and new “Nemtsov Bridge” signs. On the night of April 9th, a couple of men stuffed all of it into trash bags and removed it.
Katz proposed a new strategy: the thirty-six-hour memorial. Flowers, portraits, and the rest would be brought to the bridge beginning on Saturday morning, and the memorial would live through the weekend, with someone always standing guard. On Sunday night, activists would remove the portraits and leave the flowers to wilt—or, more likely, to be removed. The following weekend, the memorial would be restored, again only for thirty-six hours.
The person standing guard on Saturday morning was Nadezhda Mityushkina, a fifty-one-year-old social worker and veteran pro-democracy activist. She had worked closely with Nemtsov and last spoke to him a few hours before his death. Her grief was personal, intense, and familiar to anyone who has lost a constant companion: “I keep wanting to pick up the phone to discuss something with him,” she told me. She also lamented the fact that the organization Nemtsov ran, Solidarity, will likely lose its work space after Nemtsov's estate is settled: it operates, informally, out of an apartment that belonged to him.
By Sunday afternoon, the memorial looked much like it had before its last dismantling. Its centerpiece was formed by two Russian flags and lavish bouquets in baskets or plastic five-litre jugs: white roses, red roses, pink roses, and a few bouquets of wildflowers. For about ten yards in either direction of the centerpiece, the sidewalk was lined with carnations that were laid flat on the ground, in the traditional Russian way that they would be placed on a grave or in a coffin before burial. The memorial was also made up of several dozen candles in identical red glass holders, portraits of Nemtsov, and placards that said things like “Struggle” (the Russian word is a near-homonym of Nemtsov's first name, Boris) and “He fought for a free Russia.”
It was Orthodox Easter Sunday, the warmest day of the year so far, and people were walking across the bridge in a dense flow: tourists, teen-agers who'd come in from the suburbs to hang out in the city center, Muscovites out for a stroll in the sun. Many, perhaps most, paused or stopped. Some turned to one another to ask about or to explain the spectacle. Others began reminiscing about where they had been when they heard the news. A cab came to a stop so that its passenger, a middle-aged woman with elaborate hair, could survey the memorial out the window. A young woman awkwardly reversed her selfie stick to take a picture of the memorial.
A straight couple in their thirties, with a girl of about seven, came walking from the direction of Red Square. The mother and daughter were carrying three carnations each, for a total of six: in the Russian tradition, the dead are given even numbers of flowers. The little girl was also carrying a giant flower-shaped helium balloon with red petals and a yellow smiley face in the center. The family laid the flowers down among the carnations and kept walking without pause, the yellow, helium smiley face bopping above them.
That evening Katz's crew collected all but one of the portraits, along with the placards and the “Nemtsov Bridge” signs, and took them away for safekeeping until the next weekend. But on Monday afternoon the memorial, with its many flowers, was still intact. The bridge was sparsely populated on a workday. An expensively dressed woman in her late thirties was talking to an older man in a well-worn coat. The two had clearly just met, and the woman was now trying to convince the man that Nemtsov's murder had been ordered by the Kremlin.
“What would be the use of that?” asked the man. Meaning, Nemtsov was no threat to Putin: he was no longer popular or even known, and his party had been effectively destroyed.
“And what is the use of fighting the flowers?” asked the woman, gesturing at the memorial. Meaning, we know it's the government that keeps destroying it—and surely flowers are even less of a threat than Nemtsov ever was.
But it was clear what the point of fighting the flowers was: the memorial had turned into a sort of public square, a place where two strangers could have this kind of discussion. Public space frightens the Putin regime, which has worked hard, and effectively, to destroy it.
That night, a couple of large men stuffed the memorial into garbage bags and hauled it off.
On Tuesday morning, a single bouquet of carnations lay on the ground. It was not clear whether the men had missed it or if someone had brought it just that morning.
