Moscow’s city council will consider a memorial plaque dedicated to Nemtsov
The Moscow City Council has agreed to consider the installation of a memorial plaque in honor of Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister who was gunned down in last February. The review will take place on July 14, according to architect Lev Lavrenov.
“We’ll definitely discuss the idea, but only if there is funding. As you know, any monument costs something,” Lavrenov told the newspaper Kommersant.
Duma deputy Dmitri Gudkov, who formally requested that the Moscow mayor’s office consider building a monument to Nemtsov, says activists are ready to pay for the installation of a plaque. “We just need permission,” he told Kommersant.
When he appealed to the city, Gudkov says he didn’t specify where the memorial should be built, but there is a public campaign now underway to install a plaque at the bridge in Moscow where Nemtsov was shot and killed.
“They’re not just giving us the runaround. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, apparently, doesn’t want to go against the will of a large number of Muscovites,” Gudkov said.
- On May 11, the news agency RBC reported that the Moscow mayor’s office had refused Gudkov’s request to establish a monument to Nemtsov, saying that too little time had passed since his death.
- Boris Nemtsov was shot and killed in Moscow on February 27. At the site of his murder (a bridge not far from the Kremlin), Muscovites erected a shrine of flowers and other items in honor of Nemtsov, leaving small signs renaming the place “Nemtsov Bridge.” On several occasions—most recently at night on March 28—unknown men cleared out the flowers and removed the makeshift memorial. Each time, people have returned to the bridge and reconstituted the shrine.