Take it with a grain of salt as I'm from here and I can't be objective about him or local politics.

At the start of his political career before 2011 it was all over the place, including nationalistic marshes, pro-gun rhetoric and basic agitation against funding national republics of Caucasus (they have negative balance and are helped by dotations from the center). Not to the levels of actual fascist like NOD or Dugin fans, but still very shitty. It's still argued if he was opportunistic or genuinelly supported all of that, and it's pointless imho. I can see most average persons from some Volgograd or Tambov saying the same or worse. Yet - he was caught on camera and it's forever archived.

After co-triggering Bolotnaya and other demonstrations he dropped that pov and got onto the platform of fighting corruption, to get honest, legit elections and tried to elect himself and other oppositioners into power. Since that, he came to be pro-European and anti-Putin politician. His program was basically that — let's retire these old friends and partners, who in his opinion are a middle between a mafia and a late soviet nomenclature. and see if a peaceful transfer to some more liberal Russia is possible. He wasn't all that savvy about making an original program, but he was a talented organizer and public speaker that put a lot of orgs and people together for numerous protest actions, he became a face of a brand for all public anti-establishment talks, a man and a vehicle if you will.

The other bad thing many remember was in 2014, where he was asked about the faith of Crimea and he said 'it's not a sandwich for it to casually change hands' for what he had backlash for years to come, even though he tried to walk it back and explain many times after that. It too was a stain on his reputation, but imho after seeing how failing ratings of Putin jumped over Crimea's capture and how regular people celebrated it (and forgot that Luhansk and Donetsk were on fire at the same time), he could've thought he'd shoot himself in the foot by vouching against it – although Nemtsov, the soon-to-be-dead oppositioner I liked more, did just that.

I'd say he doesn't really have any politics, so he's probably a liberal europe-centric politician. If he could become the next pres, he wouldn't probably change anything but introducing democratisation and transparency of the government. His value for me and other angry russians is that he collected a lot of other oppositional persons who usually waste all their time arguing with each other and nitpicking each other's words. He's not the best, like mentioned Nemtsov or Novodvorskaya, but he was alive and he did something when most were passive.

I hope I answered your curiosity. If you held some vision of him asking that (I think you do, since you are from lemmy.ml) lay it there. This person was very complicated and there were many different opinions about him from a kremlin agent, to a fascist, to a savior, to a rubber duck. Whatever, I feel like he didn't deserve dying in prison like that, thus I was very displeased hearing he's dead.