Boris Efimovich Nemtsov (9 October 1959 – 27 February 2015), liberal politician and civil society activist, was born in Sochi. From 1976 he studied physics in Nizhny Novgorod where in 1985 he obtained his PhD in Physics and Mathematics and worked at the Radiophysical Research Institute until 1990. After becoming a political activist in the late 1980s, he was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1990. A charismatic individual, his rise in politics was meteoric. In 1991 he was appointed governor of Nizhny Novgorod by Boris Yeltsin, a posts to which he was elected in 1995. He later became a deputy in the State Duma and served as a reformist minister and deputy prime minister under President Yeltsin, becoming at one time Yeltsin's preferred candidate as his successor. After leaving government in 1998 Boris Nemtsov remained faithful to his liberal ideals and went on to lead a number of political parties and groupings, including Right Cause, Union of Right Forces, Solidarity, and RPR-PARNAS. In 2013 he was elected a deputy of Yaroslavl region legislative assembly. Boris Nemtsov became a strong opponent of the authoritarian trends in Russian politics, and became latterly a fierce critic of President Putin, corruption, and the war in Ukraine. An active campaigner and polemicist, he took a leading role in many public demonstrations and published a large number of political pamphlets and articles, many of which were devoted to exposing corruption. He was shot dead on 27 February 2015 on Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge in central Moscow, a few hundred yards from the Kremlin, in a highly-organized assassination. As yet, the investigation into his murder is ongoing. Amnesty International has called for a prompt, impartial and effective investigation of his killing.