Mikhail Fishman, one of Russia’s most prominent independent journalists and a longtime anchor for the now-exiled broadcaster TV Rain, did not set out to write a wartime epitaph when he started working on his book, “The Successor.”
But when he submitted the final manuscript for the Russian edition in mid-February 2022, the political world he had documented was about to take a dark turn.
By the time “The Successor” hit Russian shelves in April 2022, less than two months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Fishman had already fled the country amid the Kremlin’s crackdown on independent media, and the war had transformed his meticulous historical account into a poignant post-mortem.
The book centers on Boris Nemtsov, the charismatic “golden boy” of the 1990s who was once seen as Boris Yeltsin’s chosen successor but later became one of Vladimir Putin’s most formidable opponents. He was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.
While the Russian edition of “The Successor” saw three successful printings, the state’s tightening grip eventually caught up with it. Designated a “foreign agent” in late 2022, Fishman saw his work slowly disappear from sale in Russia as bookstores grew wary of running afoul of tightening censorship laws. Today, “The Successor” is nearly impossible to find in the country.
