'The Successor' is a book about the Russia that could have been. Mikhail Fishman chooses Boris Nemtsov as the protagonist because his fate, in the author's words, 'proved inseparable from Russia's. They began their journey together and walked it together.' Nemtsov began his political career seemingly by accident, supporting his mother and opposing the construction of a nuclear power plant in his native Gorky. A scientist and physicist by training, Nemtsov never aspired to politics and entered it thanks to his charisma and lack of subservience to any authority. At the same time, Andrei Sakharov, the embodiment of dissidence, supported him in his anti-nuclear protests. Nemtsov later became a confidant of Yeltsin, who by the 1990s was already firmly associated among the liberal part of the population with a free, democratic, and sovereign Russia. This was precisely the Russia that the people who elected Yeltsin president wanted to see. This is how Nemtsov wanted it to be, believing that freedom was the only possible path, a finish line with a clear goal. So when did Russia say goodbye to these ideas? And did it say goodbye forever? Mikhail Fishman explores this in his book, which is both a biography of Boris Nemtsov and a history of Russia over the past 30 years.