Nemtsov had been sounding the alarm about the Russian state’s mounting debt. The government’s misleading laissez-faire attitude, which masqueraded as freedom, was, Nemtsov believed, simply failure to accept responsibility for an economy headed for implosion. Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, looking at the issue through the prism of his own experience as a member of the Soviet leadership, saw the triumph of the group he had found most intractable during the perestroika era.
