29 September 1980. Ten poets performed polemical poems, romantic ones, inspirational, tedious, long-winded and frankly inane ones.
According to its originator Michael Horovitz, the aim of the Poetry Olympics is to encourage a rebirth of the spirit of Poetry and of the public's interest in it. By that criterion the first Olympics, held in the appropriate and splendid surroundings of Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, must qualify as a success. Ten poets performed (if performing is what poets do) and the pews were packed — a fact due in no small measure to the presence of Gregory Corso, the American Beat poet, and Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke, whose work in reggae and rock music contexts has opened up poetry to an audience who might otherwise keep it at more than arm's length.
The spirit of poetry aside, what the Olympics did show was the highly variegated and diversely shaped condition of the body. There were polemical poems, romantic ones, inspirational, tedious, long-winded and frankly inane ones. Russian emigre Edward Limonoz provided bitter-sweet comment on the state of the Russian Revolution; Dennis Lee from Canada, whose kaftan and beard actually gave him the impression of someone impersonating a poet, delivered whimsical nonsense about pixies; while the American Ann Stevenson gave us a poem called Swifts, perhaps the most quietly celebratory and life-affirming work to be heard all evening, in which simple truths surfaced with a natural and unforced elegance.
Perhaps in honour of the occasion there were a lot of paeans to the nobility of poetry and poets; earnest, self-congratulatory stuff of the sort which only serves to maintain the image of poetry as some sort of private club — on this occasion Gregory Corso was playing the reprobate with a sardonic attack on Ginsberg and Bob Dylan for selling out the Muse. A rumpled-looking man wearing patrician glasses and one gold-earring, Corso was greeted with thunderous applause but proceeded to understay his welcome, dropping only a few finely chiselled aphorisms and some wryly humorous verse before leaving the stage as if he had a bus to catch.
Gregory Corso, with Edward Limonov and Michael Horowitz, 1980. Photograph: Jane Bown
Linton Kwesi Johnson began by gently reprimanding Michael Horovitz for introducing him as «a spokesman of the black population» but delivered poems about the condition of life in the black community in Britain which rang with passion, anger and enormous dignity. Even without musical accompaniment Johnson's delivery, in Jamaican creole dialect, is hypnotically rhythmic.
If Johnson's contributions proved the most sobering, of the evening, John Cooper Clarke's were to be the most irreverent. With purple suit, sunglasses and a hair-cut that looked startled to find itself in such august surroundings, Clarke proved a specialist at the 100-metre dash which is a jumble of surrealist nonsense, wisecracks and disposable wrappers from the pop culture delivered in a lugubrious Mancunian cackle. The other poets looked a bit put out when he pulled a hate poem called Twat literally out of a plastic bag — «like a death at a birthday party you have to spoil the fun.» But it must he a long time since anything heard in Westminster Abbey has provoked so much laughter from a congregation.
Horovitz now plans to make the Olympics a regular event to be held at four-yearly intervals in Delphi, the legendary home of the Nine Muses. Cooper Clarke provided a strong argument for holding the next one in Salford.
What is a fictional memoir? In this case, it's the label attached to a book called «It's Me, Eddie,» by Edward Limonov, a Russian poet, about the life in New York of a Russian poet named Eddie. Set in 1976, when the narrator is thirty, the book was written in Russian and first published, in 1978, as «Eto ia, Edichka» (Ardis). The English version (Random House; $13.95) is a translation by S. L. Campbell. The book is presumably autobiographical; fictional, perhaps, in the alteration of certain names to avoid offense, and in the representation as real of certain sexual fantasies. It doesn't matter. There is no doubting the fictitious poet's allegiance to reality in his portrayal of emigre life or the fervor of his view of himself as a victim of cosmic injustice.
«It's Me, Eddie,» which begins and ends with a cry of distress, has the discursive shape and style of an informal monologue built up out of anecdotes, declamation, political and literary observation, and erotic confidences. The constant shifting of tone and topic makes plain the moodiness of the speaker and conceals, at first, the artfulness of his delivery. The distraught wretch whose lack of love and money is evidently the main subject of the memoir emerges from his diatribe as a lively, humorous character with an unshakable curiosity about the outside world and sympathy even for people he claims to despise. The fluctuation of hyperbole and qualification, obscenities and tender sentiments, self-pity and altruism exposes him as a purposeful madman.
Eddie introduces himself belligerently, as an ignoble savage, indifferent to anyone's notions of the acceptable. He flouts the presumed morality of the American taxpayer:
Twice a month I go to the clean, spacious welfare office at 1515 Broadway and receive my checks. I consider myself to be scum, the dregs of society, I have no shame or conscience, therefore my conscience doesn't bother me and I don't plan to look for work.
The expectations of the manager of his hotel:
Far more than the fact that I'm not a Jew, I think, Mrs. Rogoff dislikes the fact that I don't look unhappy. Only one thing is required of me to look unhappy, know my place, and not go around wearing first one suit and then another in sight of astonished spectators.
And the undiscriminating fellowship of other Russian exiles, with their «predilection for gypsy campfires» and preoccupation with misfortune:
You can recognize them from the back by a sort of anguished depression in their posture. Although I hardly associate with them, I always recognize them in the elevator.
Depressed himself, having lost his job as a proofreader at «Russkoe Delo», a Russian newspaper in New York, betrayed and deserted by his beautiful wife, Elena, Eddie tries suicide, «a week of life as a bum,» and homosexuality, which he claims, in retrospect, to be his true sexual calling: «A love for strong men. I confess, and I see it now.»
In scattered references to the past, Eddie reveals that he was born in Kharkov, an industrial city in the Ukraine, that his father is or was a career N.K.V.D. man («That's right, the secret police»), that his uncle and grandfathers died in the Second World War, and that he himself was a teen-age hoodlum who at twenty-one became «a poet and an intellectual.» He speaks of «poems and stories» he wrote in Russia, including a «poem-cycle» called «Three Long Songs.» Although he was an outsider there, not a member of the Soviet Writers' Union, and obliged to publish and circulate his work privately, he was a popular writer:
«The Russian people read me, they bought the eight thousand collections that I typed and distributed all those years, they knew them, recited them by heart.»
His flight «in search of artistic freedom,» which he defines bluntly as «the opportunity to publish my works here,» has landed him in familiar working conditions:
«The cheapest food, not always enough of it; dirty little rooms, wretched poor clothes, cold, vodka, nerves . . . Ten years of that life in Russia, and now the whole thing over again.»
Stranded in New York, without enough English to land a job as a waiter at the Hilton, Eddie cherishes the image of the Poet as a natural aristocrat in Russia, «something of a spiritual leader,» In an awkward social moment, he takes out some of his poems and reads them to company—a Russian friend, who «gravely [expresses] his opinion on each poem,» and an American acquaintance, who, though cultivated, «had unthinkingly assigned to art the role of a knickknack ornamenting life.»
Seeking friendship and recognition, Eddie becomes a man of the streets, «familiar with all of New York's blind men and their dogs.» He attends a lecture on anarchism at the Free Space Center on Lafayette Street, where he finds himself one of an audience of «five people, two of them Russian,» and several meetings of the Workers Party, whose «methods of struggle» strike him, he says, as «undynamic—they were mainly busy «supporting» everybody.» Vainly, he introduces himself by mail to Allen Ginsberg and to a «Very Attractive Lady, 39,» who has advertised in the «Village Voice» for a travelling companion. «I was sure she would jump at a Russian poet,» he says.
Unlike the idealized dissident of the moment, Eddie is a classic bohemian. In the throes of unrequited love, he is a worldlier soulmate of Young Werther, Goethe's philosophical extremist. «As a poet,» Eddie says, «I enjoyed shocking these old ladies. I love attention of any sort»—a chip off the old Baudelairean block. He is an adventurer in the city, like Henry Miller in Paris, revelling in the rhetorical possibilities of destitution and exile. Hardship reinforces his temperamental extremism.
Edward Limonov is identified as a poet and novelist in Edward J. Brown's book «Russian Literature Since the Revolution.» The Russian version of «It's Me, Eddie» is quoted with admiration, and Brown links its author with Joseph Brodsky as a «powerful artistic witness on the human predicament of exile.» In his fictional memoir, Eddie gives a brief account of a visit with Brodsky, whom he describes as «miserable here in your country.» Eddie is in no position to exercise noblesse oblige, however, and insists on the superiority of his own alienation, choosing to interpret a discrepancy in success as a measure of integrity. Elsewhere in the book, he describes other pillars of dissidence as deceivers:
It all started with Messrs. Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and company, who turned us against the Soviet world without ever having laid eyes on the Western world. They were prompted not only by specific purposes—the intelligentsia were demanding a part in governing the country, demanding their share—but also by pride, the desire to advertise themselves. As always in Russia, moderation was not observed. They may have been honestly deceived, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, but they deceived us too.
Underlying these uncharitable remarks are political differences—Eddie classifies himself as an «extreme leftist» and a potential terrorist—and a feeling that equal time is due. He and a fellow-poet petition and picket the «Times» in an attempt to publish an «Open Letter to Academician Sakharov»—an appeal «to cease destroying the Soviet intelligentsia . . . by inciting them to emigrate.»
Eddie sees images of his second thoughts about emigration in an assortment of former somebodies, not all poets and not all Russian: «Stout, slovenly, wheezing Alyoshka Shneerson . . . former dissident and former groom at the Moscow race track,» who «prides himself on having been the first Russian to master welfare;» «the savage Jew Marat Bagrov,» who «contrived to hold a counterdemonstration against a demonstration on Fifth Avenue on behalf of the free exit of Jews from the USSR» and «came out with the slogans «Stop demagoguery!» and «Help us here!;»» «a former Soviet cycling champion,» now a welder; «an ex-musician» and «an ex-wheeler-dealer,» both working as dishwashers; a cameraman, a philologist, and an economist, all unemployed; «the lanky red-coated doorman, who was well known to the whole hotel as Fidel Castro's schoolmate.»
One chapter covers Eddie's short career as a busboy at the Hilton, where his bitter daydreams force him «to hate our customers and to love the kitchen staff»:
«I'll blow up your world, and these lads will do it with me—the. underlings of this world! I thought passionately, my glance resting on one of my fellow busboys—the Chinaman Wong, or the dark-browed, criminal Patricio, or the Argentinian Carlos.»
In another chapter, he offers tender impressions of the students in his English class at a community center on Columbus Avenue near 100th Street—«Ten women from the Dominican Republic, one from Cuba, one from Colombia,» who have no «rabid desire to squeeze their names, at all costs, into their country's history, or better yet the world's.»
Toward the end of the book, Eddie goes shopping with Elena, «that lousy Russian tart,» «my dearest possession, my little Russian maiden,» who has developed under his obsessive attention into a substantial character. Again his anger yields to benevolent observation:
«Treat Elena, Eddie-baby, as Christ treated Mary Magdalene and all women who sinned . . .» I exhorted myself. «If you love her, this long, thin creature in faded little jeans who is browsing now among the perfumes, sniffing them with an important air and unscrewing the stoppers . . .»
He constructs an almost complete short story in the chapter «I Make Money,» based on his work for the «renowned Beautiful Moving Company.» The central figure is Eddie's boss, John, «formerly Ivan . . . a seaman who defected from a Soviet fishing vessel in the Straits of Japan,» «a Jack London character,» who refuses to speak Russian, and whose determination and suppressed nostalgia are the elements in a drama of secret resemblances.
Eddie has already noticed the plural pronoun encroaching on his first-person-singular history and is not unduly disturbed:
«We.» Although I think of myself as separate, I keep returning to this concept «we.» By now there are a great many of us here.
Edward Limonov, according to the book jacket, now lives in Paris, and has written, in addition to eight volumes of poetry, a book called «Diary of a Loser.»
«Edward Limonov» is the literary pseudonym of Edward Savenko, prose writer and poet (b. 1943). While still residing in the Soviet Union, Limonov belonged toa small, unofficial group of artists and writers, but his work remained unpublished. He emigrated in 1974 and settled in New York, later moving to Paris. In the relatively conservative atmosphere of Russian letters, his books are widely read but highly controversial because of their graphic sexual descriptions and often obscene language.
Books: «Eto ya—Edichka» (New York, 1979); «Russkoe» (Ann Arbor, 1979); «Dnevnik neudachnika, ili Sekretnaya tetrad'» (New York, 1982); «Podrostok Savenko» (Paris, 1983); «Palach» (Jerusalem, 1986); «Molodoi negodyai» (Paris, 1986).
English translations: «It's Me, Eddie», trans. S. Campbell (New York: Random House, 1983); «His Butler's Story», trans. Judson Rosengrant (New York: Grove Press, 1987); «Memoir of a Russian Punk», trans. Judson Rosengrant (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991).
Paris, December 20, 1989
— Let me be frank: people have asked me why I decided to interview you. I was talking to the German Slavist Wolfgang Kasack, the author of a dictionary of Russian literature. And he said: «I didn't include Limonov. Some like him, but I don't.» He complained about your use of obscenities and also that what you write is nothing more than traditional nineteenth-century realism.
— The comments of other émigrés are nothing but a case of dogs howling at the moon. As for Kasack, let him choose whomever he likes. It makes no difference to me. I don't take that seriously.
— How do émigré writers establish themselves?
— l established myself outside the émigré community. Nine of my books have been translated into French. I was first published at the end of 1980, and since then my books have been translated into eight languages.
— Why outside the émigré community? The émigrés probably read your books more than anyone else's. Or don't you feel that that is the real?
— I never tried to write for other émigrés. I wrote my first book for publication in English. Naturally, I couldn't write it in English, so I wrote it in Russian. But I never had Russian publishers in mind. It was only later that the American publishers began to put up serious resistance. It's hard to say why. They were resisting a new breed of Russian writer, who for some reason didn't depict America in a very positive light— who didn't write as he should have. I was supposed to be satisfied, like all the other writers.
— How many copies of «It's Me, Eddie» have been sold?
— There were at least two editions, but it's hard to check how many there were. With small publishers you never know. The first contract I signed was for about five thousand copies. Then I signed a second contract, which was also for about five thousand copies.
— What do you have to say about the criticism or, if you prefer, the comment that what you write is nothing more than «traditional realism.»
— I agree with that.
— You agree?
— Absolutely.
— Many people feel that realism is a thing of the past.
— I can't go along with that. Do you seriously believe this is the age of modernism? No, this is an era of postmodernism which rebels against all the fanciness of the 1930s. In the 1960s there was a second wave of formalism, and then the writing world—the writing universe—returned once more to the same old realism, which is, in fact, extremely diverse.
— Is that «writing world» Russian, French, or Western?
— I regard the Russian world with a great deal of contempt. The books of my acquaintances, friends, and countrymen don't move me in the least. It's possible that something valuable is now being written by young people, but I haven't seen it. I don't rule it out, but to this day I have not read a single book which has stopped me in my tracks and forced me to say: «God, this is good. I wish I had written this.» I haven't seen anything like that for the last thirty years. All that interests me, all that makes me feel at all envious, has been published not even by French, but by Anglo-Saxon writers.
— For example?
— I would like to have written some of Truman Capote's chapters or even certain of his short stories. Not everything, of course. I'm very picky. Or take Hemingway's later work. He has some unbelievable stylistic devices. I accept almost none of his novels, but I would gladly have written some passages out of them, as well as some of his short stories.
— What if I write in my book that you are the Truman Capote of Russian émigré literature?
— That would be untrue, because I am neither the Truman Capote nor the Henry Miller of Russian émigré literature, as the French press, as well as Americans, Germans, and whoever else, wrote after the publication of my first book. But they don't think that anymore. Now they write that Limonov has won the right to be who he is.
— Every writer claims that right.
— Everyone claims that right, but it has to be won. Since I live in France and am a French citizen, I make my judgments on what I read in the French press. After my first book they compared me to Henry Miller, then to Bukowski, Kerouac, and others.
— Vladimir Bukovsky?!
— No, Charles Bukowski. Thank God, no one has ever compared me to any Russian writers. I've been compared only to Big League writers, to those from the normal world, not émigrés or provincial Soviets.
— Did you begin to write in the Soviet Union or in the West?
— I began to write prose in New York. In the Soviet Union I wrote poetry. That's a part of my life and a part of my work that I don't deny. I think that I wrote unusual poems that have not faded with time. I don't know what place, if any, they should be given in Russian poetry. It's not my place to judge.
— You entitled your collection of poems «Topics Russian» (Russkoe).
— It was the title of a poem written in 1971. That poem was a collage of Russian literary clichés. It's an ironic title. It was also relevant because I published the collection again only in 1979, and all of the poems included in it were written in Russia. That was the reason for the title—the sense was one of great distance and humor. Of course, I use the Russian language, and I probably always will. There is still time to switch languages. On occasion I've written in English, and my first attempts weren't so bad. I could write in English. But I live in a country where French is spoken, so to write in English would be idiotic. I get translated in any case, so what's the sense of trying? I will probably never be able to write in French, since it's a difficult language for me. But my world view is mine and mine only. Let Russia do its own thing and Africa—its own. Who cares about Russian writers? They interest me so little that I'm sometimes ashamed to be associated with them. Evidently they realize that, and that realization is why we don't get along. I've remained isolated, in spite of short-lived friendships with certain Russian writers, including Sasha Sokolov. We were never friends in the true sense of the word. We were both literary outsiders of a sort. But he is, now, part of Russian literature. These days he is less and less of an outsider. In the future he will doubtless have an important place in society as the head of a certain school. But I remain an outsider.
— Your contemporaries don't see things that way. The New York émigré critics Pyotr Vail and Aleksandr Genis said that every small to medium-sized Russian town has a group of people like Limonov and his crowd—just as they have a post office or a cafeteria. If we ignore the critical thrust of that comment, it is interesting that they perceive you as one of their own, not as an outsider.
— That doesn't bother me much. Russia and the émigré community are a bit too provincial to evaluate and understand my work. My best reviews have always come from the foreign press—French, German, Dutch, Greek, and all the other eight languages in which I have been published. I rarely receive negative reviews in the West.
— But isn't it rather contradictory that a person who renounces Russian literature and the Russian tradition, and who from the very beginning wrote for the West, writes in Russian all the same? How long had you lived in the West before you wrote «It's Me, Eddie»?
— Less than two years.
— And how old were you when you left Russia?
— I was twenty-nine.
— That's two years as opposed to twenty-nine. The Russian experience should outweigh the Western.
— We're talking about the soul. Are we talking about where I belong, who I am? We may never be able to pin that down with any degree of certainty. I am telling you that I am not Russian. I was a born outsider. There are people who don't fit in with the mob, aren't there?
— Russia is a mob?
— There is always a crowd, even here. It doesn't matter whom it is made up of. It may be that there are several different in-groups. Some of these people know how to write books. Others do not. And then there are people like me. I write my books in Russian, but I will never belong to either Russian or French or American literature. People like us are always outsiders, walking among others, but not fitting in, bored with them in any case. And we should be gratified when they say they don't like us. Many people have not been liked, and they are always the best and brightest. As the saying goes: «you'll only get appreciated later.»
— This is not the first interview I've conducted, or even the twentieth, and everyone that I've interviewed considers himself an outsider. I interviewed Zinoviev and he said: «Oh, I was never appreciated. Everyone acknowledges me in the West. It's only the émigré community that doesn't.» Gorenstein said the same thing in his interview. Siniavsky also considers himself an outsider. If everyone is «out,» who is «in»?
— I can't answer that, John. I'm not a literary critic. I can only talk about myself, about how I feel and what I see. And I believe I have far better reasons for thinking I am an outsider than Gorenstein or anyone else. I think that Zinoviev has some grounds for considering himself an outsider, but far fewer than I. I am the pariah of Russian and Soviet literature for a multitude of reasons. But I am not God, and I can't look down from above and say that I am more or less of an outsider than they are. I insist on my outsiderness, or marginality, because it is evident.
— I'm not arguing with what you say. I am simply saying that this is true of others as well, albeit perhaps truer of you than most.
— Here we are going into the 1990s, when writers have great resources and opportunities. The publishing business is becoming more and more international. You can count the number of principal world-class authors on one hand—artists too. They are sold everywhere. At the Frankfurt Book Fair an author is marketed instantly in twenty or twenty-five countries at once. This is new and hitherto would even have been unbelievable. This system, this opportunity, sustains authors like me. And I'm not the only one. Take English writers, like Lawrence Durrell, who has lived for a decade in the south of France. Graham Greene also lives in the south of France. They don't call themselves émigrés. No one wonders why they live in France, but still write in English. Some authors are forty-five minutes by plane from London, and I am three hours by plane from Moscow. What's the difference? No one asks them: «Why do you still write in English? Why haven't you switched to French?» That would be absurd. I am convinced that that sort of thing is a remnant of the old perception of the Russian writer, who, like the Chinese writer, comes to a conference in a cap with a star on it. That's not me. I was born in Europe. I am a European writer. Turgenev lived in France all his life. Gogol lived in Rome for twenty years, but he was a Russian writer. It is a mystery to me how he could have written nothing about Rome, having lived there so long. But I live in France and write about what happens there.
A book of my short stories was just published by Ramsay. The book is entitled «Les incidents ordinaires» (Ordinary Occurrences). The action takes place in Nice, Paris, New York— everywhere but Russia. I chose those stories on purpose. But no one can take from people their understanding of the world in which they live. And the fact is that I have now lived in Paris longer than I lived in Moscow. Nabokov was once asked about his citizenship and who he considered himself to be. He answered that he was a ten-year-old American. By that he meant that he had lived in America for ten years. My life is now fifteen years removed from Russia. For fifteen years I have been a Westerner. And you can't take that away from me. There were some problems. I changed countries and readers twice. I had language problems here in France. But I never had problems with the New World. People are the same everywhere. Language is nothing. Big deal! There is something different, deeper problems of life and understanding, and these are not things that I fear in the New World.
— «Language is nothing»—that depends on the individual writer. We were talking about Sokolov. I can't imagine him in a different language.
— Well, I'm not like that. I'm not a folktale teller. With a great deal of energy it's possible to translate my work and preserve all its qualities.
— I absolutely must ask you whether all of your books are autobiographical. Is Eddie really 100 percent Limonov?
— Of course the book is autobiographical. I wrote it chapter by chapter. When I finished it, I still hadn't outgrown that stage. I was that Eddie for another year or year and a half. But we all know that for each of us every moment yields a multitude of personalities.
— But did everything described in «Eddie» and «The Adolescent Savenko» really happen?
— «Savenko» is more complicated because I wrote the book almost a quarter of a century after the events described. Yes, it is autobiographical, even to the extent that I preserved most of the names. At least those that I remembered. Some I simply forgot, so I had to change them. But «Savenko» is not a carbon copy of reality. It represented a version of reality that existed at the moment it was written.
— In that regard, other writers feel differently about their books. Take Nabokov, who was a rather private person. He was driven by a sense of play. One can say the same of Borges. Your books are confessions. There are readers or critics who would call them exhibitionism. What moved you to start writing at the age of thirty-one?
— To start writing prose? It's no coincidence that I wrote poetry for all those years. It was the only weapon I had with which to fight the world. I cannot explain that—it's the stuff of psychoanalysis. Poetry was the only way I could present myself to the world, the only thing I could sell in the way I wanted. It was something on which I could base my existence. My literary work was proof of my existence.
— An attempt at self-affirmation?
— Not an attempt, but an act.
— And what if you hadn't been able to emigrate?
— It's hard to imagine what my life would have been like. But I don't think it would have been ordinary. I left mostly because of a feeling of alienation from my homeland and countrymen. Out of a desire for a different lot.
— I understand that, but what if you hadn't been able to leave? Would you still have written?
— Of course.
— Was your switch from poetry to prose a result of emigration, or would it have happened anyway?
— The new conditions and the stress, the shock of a new reality, the troubles I encountered—although they weren't all that direct—might not have meant anything to a different person. It was the accumulation of a number of causes that made me switch to prose. You can see the roots of my change to prose in my poems of the late 1970s. The verse entitled «Russian» — not the book, but the poems that went into the collection—had whole chunks of prose in them. And the poem «We Are National Heroes,» which I wrote later, also contained a great deal of prose. In other words, my move to prose had obviously already begun earlier, but it was speeded up by the effect on me of my new surroundings, my new reality. I had to make room for my new experiences. The old genre was unable to accommodate them.
— Émigrés usually feel that they have been through something out of the ordinary. For them emigration is a shock, and they want to tell others about it. That's perfectly understandable. But it doesn't stop there. There is something about emigration that makes people write, and not just their memoirs. There are more émigré writers than one would have expected, and that is not only because many writers have emigrated. Many began to write only in the West, and that phenomenon is not limited to the Third Wave.
— I don't know anything about that. Since 1967, until I left in 1974, I had been fairly well-known in Moscow as a poet. I really began to write when I was fifteen. Writing was never my main activity. I would stop for a while, then return to it again. At times I wrote bad poems.
— But is writing now the main thing for you?
— Now it's not only a way to make a living, but a means of communication with the world. That's natural.
— Writers deprived of publishing opportunities in their homeland are, in an economic sense, like runners forced to run on one leg.
— I don't agree at all, because I have lived in France entirely on my royalties since my very first book came out in November 1980. Not many French writers do that. They teach in universities, work as journalists, etc. There are very few people in this country, literally only a few hundred, who can live on their royalties. But I do. And I am earning more and more. I think that my books interest people because they are three-dimensional from the start. They are about America, the Soviet Union, France. We live in a big world, the world of modern man. French books, for example, are rarely bought in the United States or other countries because, in most cases, they are aimed at French readers. Their interest rarely extends beyond the borders of France.
According to «Le Monde», only seven French books were sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Out of those seven, one was mine. I consider myself an international writer. Some of my books sell better than others, but almost all of them are translated into many other languages and sold in a lot of countries. Here, in France, my experiences in America were of interest as the experiences of a European in America. It was the shock resulting from the contact between European and American cultures. My first book was seen as a journey to the edge of night. It was, so to speak, «The Adventures of a European on a Different Part of the Planet.» So I can't complain.
I'm making more and more money. On the whole I'm still not sold often or paid much in the United States, although the press is getting better. For example, I've sold well in Germany since the publication of my first book, and I came out in paperback in both the States and England.
— In terms of royalties, what country and language earns you the most in sales?
— That depends on the book, but for the first few years most of the money came from Germany.
— And now?
— It depends. I just sold a new book to Flammarion for a lot of money, even by American standards. That's just for the French rights. Gradually I am earning a reputation. With each book my fame is growing.
— Can't the opposite happen? Being prolific can result in a kind of inflation. For example, Solzhenitsyn has written so much that it's a rare individual who has read everything he's written.
— His problem has to do with something entirely different. He has the megalomania of the historian or the philosopher. He wants to change the world. In his writing he tries to prove that his point of view is right, and in the attempt to substantiate his claims, he writes these crazy 1,500-page books. I have never done that and never will. None of my books in Russian exceeds two hundred pages. And they are getting shorter, which proves that I am able to say what I want in fewer words. But his books are getting larger. He has different goals. He is more like a sociologist or philosopher who, for some reason—in my opinion not a very intelligent one—tries to overextend his talent and put everything he has to say in a novel. He should write essays instead of absurd books like his «Knots» or «Wheels.» All of that is unbearably boring and stupid and could go as a footnote at the bottom of a page. When I write, I do not necessarily show the manuscript to a publisher. Only later do I submit my manuscripts. Once, when I had completed a book, I was asked if I couldn't give a bit of thought to a certain idea. The idea was not given to me in written form. It was just a couple of phrases tossed out in conversation. Using that idea, I wrote a pretty good book which, unfortunately, still hasn't come out.
Not all books are equally successful. I know which are better and which worse. I'm normal and don't suffer from any excessive manias. I think that as a writer I have developed normally. In other words, I started out with poetry and then switched to prose.
— How would you characterize your development as a writer?
— That's complicated. I'm not a literary scholar or a critic. I read the reviews of my books. Then I begin to understand what I do.
— Criticism helps?
— It doesn't help in the actual writing, but it does help you to define your path. It helps you to understand something, even if you do not use your understanding for many years or books ahead. But you can define who you are, at least for the time being. There was an article last year on «His Butler's Story», published by Grove Press. It was an article by Edward Brown, and it was a pleasure to read. It wasn't just a newspaper article.
— But Edward Brown is a Slavist, not your typical critic.
— He's not typical, and that's why the article was so interesting. And he didn't limit himself to Slavics. I got a lot out of that article. It interested me.
— For example?
— For example, his claim that both books in my American cycle—«It's Me, Eddie» and «His Butler's Story»—and those of the Russian cycle—«The Adolescent Savenko» and «The Young Scoundrel»—contain anti-establishment themes. I've known that for a long time, but he somehow brought it all together. And he really showed how the anti-establishment views of the fifteen-year-old hero of «The Adolescent Savenko» carry over to the thirty-year-old man living in New York and working as a butler for a multimillionaire.
— I remember Edward Brown at the conference in Los Angeles on Russian literature in emigration eight years ago called himself an internal émigré. Perhaps he was writing about himself, as well as about you.
Why did you decide to live in France and not America?
— Because I didn't get the chance to publish anything in America. My first publisher was French, and that's why I came here.
— Otherwise you would have stayed in America?
— I would have stayed in America without a doubt.
— In New York?
— Yes, in New York.
— Only in New York?
— No place else. I love New York.
«Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad»
/ edited by John Glad
/ interviews translated from the Russian
by Richard and Joanna Robin
// Durham and London: «Duke University Press», 1993,
hardcover, 328 p. (VIII+320),
ISBN 0-8223-1277-8,
dimensions: 235⨉152⨉25 mm;
paperback, 328 p. (VIII+320),
ISBN 0-8223-1298-o,
dimensions: 222⨉140⨉25 mm
Paul Pawlikowski, in his documentary film about Radovan Karadžić (BBC, 1992), uses meticulous editing to follow the evolution of the madness of disparate elements. The musical theme of that madness is song, and its representative is the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić. In the film we see the psychiatrist, a doctor of science, a poet and a murderer, holding a gusle and chanting monotonously («Thirteen captains sit down to drink wine…»), and then, gazing sorrowfully over half-ruined Sarajevo, he recites his own poem («It is still and clear as before death…»). We see an authentic highwaymen's lair in which, after a dance of knives (slaughtering sheep!), the intoxicated murderers stamp passionately in a Serbian ring-dance. We see a natural editorial juxtaposition: the Russian poet Eduard Limonov firing a few shots at Sarajevo, and a warm Serbo-Russian drinking bout. The two poets, Karadžić and Limonov, toast one another and their respective peoples. In one shot we see the fat fingers of another murderer, General Ratko Mladić, drumming on the table, in rhythmic accompaniment to Karadžić's stammering folk rhetoric («Secret suffering symbolizes Serbian faith…» says Karadžić poetically into the camera). In just such a «natural» musical combination we hear a blend of the sounds of gunfire and cheap Folksies («Who is the liar that says Serbia is small…?»), church bells and mortars.
Karadžić promotes personal madness almost as though it were a shared ideal at the end of the twentieth century. The murderer has himself photographed flying in a helicopter over the Bosnian mountains (with fashionable designer sun-glasses on his nose), telephoning ostentatiously («Hello, Eagle…»); he exchanges his highwaymen's lair naturally for a luxury clothes shop somewhere in Geneva («No,» says Karadžić, trying on a coat, «this one makes me look like a policeman.») The murderer exchanges the worn-out iconography of communist leaders at their desks, with the requisite pen or book in their hands, for a more attractive image: the image of the psychiatrist-leader, a doctor of science who does not read or write, but chants in Serbian, recites in English, drums his fingers, chews his own fingers till they bleed and brutally kills.
The ring dance in Pawlikowski's documentary film is a symbolic leitmotif of the Serbian siege of Sarajevo. Karadžić and his murderers—that brotherhood of emphatic rhythms—hold the city in a tight ring (
«Oh lovely Turkish lass
Monks will christen you
Sarajevo in the valley
Surrounded by the Serbs…»
) so that the stamping of their feet should wipe out all trace of other rhythms (Muslim, Jewish, Croatian, but also Serbian). In the end they will tread their ring dance to the glory of the «heavenly people». But in order for the people to rise, they will have to be able to liberate themselves from the heavy burden of other people's deaths. That is why the hypnotic gusle will be there to sing for the nth time of Serbian heroism and heroes on the smoking ruins. Among them will of course be Radovan Karadžić, king of all the gusle players2.
⟨…⟩
«Out of Yugoslavia»
// Great Britain: «Storm», No.6, 1994
1 The gusle (pronounced gooslay) is a single-stringed lute played by folk singers to accompany heroic and epic song (translator's note).
2 Radovan Karadžić could not have chosen a more accurate instrument. In regions where the gusle symbolizes the very «heart of the people», especially in Serbia and Montenegro, Karadžić is, metaphorically speaking, a gusle player who plays on the aforementioned heart.
Today's gusle playing, which has been aimed from time immemorial at the illiterate—so-called «gusle journalism»—sings of contemporary events, summoning the memory of glorious forebears, with whom the new men have an unbroken necrophiliac connection. The heroic forebears are not, of course, anything other than a musical myth bank for «laundering dirty money». After gusle laundering, contemporary Serbian war criminals gleam with the pure glow of national heroes!
The process of undergoing this gusle laundering—i.e. the transformation of a murderer into hero—is most obvious in the gusle songs about Radovan Karadžić himself. Karadžić is presented as a man of steel («Oh Radovan, man of steel, first leader since Karadjordje»), who has defended freedom and the faith («You defended our freedom and our faith»). But where? The location has been changed on this occasion and defence is not currently carried out on the «field of Kosovo» but—«on the lake of Geneva»! (author's note).
Lapišnica is a hill overlooking the Old City of Sarajevo; actually, it's a slope whose existence, at least by that name, only a few people in town knew about. Now everyone knows, and they say: That's Lapišnica, since it's the first place the Chetniks began shelling the city from. Eduard Limonov is a Russian emigre, an avant-garde writer. His literary work, which certainly commands critical respect, consists of novels that privilege the position of the outsider envious of physical power and—to make things perfectly clear—prepared to demonstrate this envy at a moment's notice. Why has Limonov come to Pale to inspire the Chetniks? Certainly not because of sweet old time religion. He comes to Pale, primarily, for literary consistency. Serbia among the plums is also an outsider, unrecognized, subject to economic sanctions since everyone suddenly began to meddle in her fascist affairs. She shows such undeniable strength through shelling, bombing, missiles, and chemical weapons, but you never know, so now the school of surrealushes needs inspiration. That's why Eduard Limonov (Edička, the hero of his novels) has made the pilgrimmage to Lapišnica so that, from this already consecrated slope, he can spit on Sarajevo, a hick town somewhere in the vicinity of Pale.
«Sarjevo blues»
/ translated from the Bosnian and
with an Introduction by Ammiel Alcalay
// San Francisco: «City Lights Books», 1998,
paperback, 140 p. (XVIII+122),
ISBN: 0-87286-345-X, ISBN: 978-0-87286-345-3,
dimensions: 228⨉178⨉13 mm
— Hi, my name's Dave Emory, and it's my honor and privilege to present Martin A. Lee, the author of the just released «The Beast Reawakens», published in hardcover by «Little Brown Books». A seminal work and a landmark work, talking about the reemergence of fascism all around the globe. Martin, welcome back to our airwaves.
— Thank you very much.
⟨…⟩
— Now Frey's «Deutsche National-Zeitung» actually had some former SS officers and veterans of Goebbel's Propaganda Ministry on its editorial board. That name is familiar to many of our veteran listeners because it crops up in the context of President Kennedy's assassination. You mentioned that Vladimir Zhirinovsky was the best known of the Russian Fascists, but you write in «The Beast Reawakens» of other Russian Fascists, and beyond that, fascists in other parts of the former Soviet Union. Mr. Limonov.
— Well Eduard Limonov was quite interesting. He would deny that he's a fascist. He would say that he's a national bolshevik, which he'd say in different from fascism. And he spoke very frankly about this when I caught up with him in Paris a few years back. He's a novelist by profession, and he'd spent a lot of time as a dissident, living in both the United States, in New York City, and in Paris, while the Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union. It was only after its collapse that Limonov went back to his country, in Russia, and he began to be involved in politics there. He formed a group called the «National Bolshevik Front». He told me, when I asked him, well isn't that sort of a kind of fascism, he said no, no. Fascism in Russia is a dirty word. If you say you're a fascist you'll never get anywhere politically, because of what happened during World War II and the memory of that in Russia is still very, very strong. But I think that national bolshevism, as a tendency, as a political tendency in Russia, which is rather long-standing, in some ways is a kind of functional equivalent of a fascist movement or a fascist organization. In fact, Eduard Limonov made explicit alliances with overt neo-Nazis, such as Aleksandr Barkashov in Russia, who is probably the leading neo-Nazi in Russia, he runs a group called the Russian National Union, which is probably the most important outright neo-Nazi group. So even though Limonov claimed that he wasn't a fascist, and he claimed that fascism couldn't really get any political mileage in Russia, he still nevertheless former an alliance with outright fascists, outspoken Fascists such as Barkashov.
⟨…⟩
«MaximumRocknRoll» (San Francisco), #178, March 1998
7. The Furies of War Revisit Europe: Yugoslavia und Bosnia
Bosnia
⟨…⟩
Scene One: In the hills above Sarajevo, the Serb warriors are roasting a pig on a spit and singing lustily, «Oh, Turkish daughter, our priests will soon baptize you. Oh, Sarajevo in the valley, the Serbs have encircled you. . . .» One of them plays the gusle, a traditional, one-stringed, bowed instrument. The haunting sounds it produces are distinctly Eastern—one might even say «Turkish.»
«We own this country,» Radovan Karadžić is saying to Edouard Limonov, the famous Russian poet who has come here of his own volition, as together they cast their eyes over the destroyed rooftops of Sarajevo. «The Turks defeated us in 1389 and some of the Serbs here converted to Islam. They're the successors to the Turks, but we own this country. The world must understand that we are not besieging Sarajevo, but reclaiming Serb territory.»
Radovan is in an expansive mood, and as the red light on the BBC camera moves closer to his face, he confides a revealing little story. Twenty years ago he was writing premonitory poems about this very war in Sarajevo, he tells Limonov. Couldn't help it, the words just came out that way. «It was a prediction that sometimes frightens me,» he explains with a shrug and a helpless smile.
The camera zooms into the streets below. A middle-aged woman is rushing across the road, clutching a plastic bag.
There's a machine gun propped up on the site, with its barrel pointed towards the city. It's picnic-casual on the hill. No one pays any attention as Edouard Limonov approaches the gun and runs his hand along its surface with evident curiosity. He bends down from the waist and peers into the sights. Then pulls the trigger. Rat-tat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat, in quick succession. Limonov is thrilled. Smirking with boyish pleasure.
⟨…⟩
Erna Paris
«Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History»
// Toronto: «Alfred A. Knopf Canada», 2000,
hardcover, 496 p.,
ISBN: 0-676-97251-9
Eduard Limonov (born Eduard Savenko) is best known for his novel «It's Me, Eddie» (Eto ya, Editchka), emigrated to New York in 1975 after being expelled from the Soviet Union. He later became a French citizen, then returned to Russia in 1990. He is now 57, the chairman of the National Bolshevik Party and editor of the newspaper Limonka (Russian slang for «hand grenade»). He spoke with Alexander Bratersky about writing and politics.
— You are the author of more than 29 books and essays. Yet you are no longer interested in writing?
— Literature isn't cool anymore. [Joseph] Brodsky died. He should have died long before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The time when you could sit in a rocking chair and read Brodsky is gone. . . .
I became the winner in a never-openly declared war between me and dissident writers. To build your novels on your dislike of Soviet society and on your relationship with that society is a big risk.
Then the Soviet system disappeared; the opponent was gone. And all of those vulgar complaints from dissident writers about the Soviet system because it was not built the way they wanted are gone too. . . .
I built my books on deeper values: love, death, sexual desires.
Those values never get old; they are eternal.
And if my books have survived this storm, they will survive the next. As far as my literary activity, I have completed my program and it is not interesting for me anymore.
… During my first year abroad I tried to write articles relating to Russia. I offered them to The Village Voice and The New York Times. I wanted to present a different view of Russia. I wrote that Russia is a boring old country in a state of collapse — while in the West, the popular view was that it was a bloody dictatorship. It was a view influenced by the publishing of «The Gulag Archipelago,» which came 25 years late.
— Is it true that your radical political activity was the reason both Western and Russian publishers stopped publishing your books?
— That happened mostly in France after the local Socialist party, together, I think, with the security services, began a massive [smear] campaign against the National Bolsheviks [and other radicals] in the summer and fall of 1993. . . . The union between the right and left that could have taken place was killed at the very beginning. . . .
My last book, «Assassination of the Guardian,» was published in 1995 in France. I became involved in it out of despair. I understood that all of my political ideas, which I was trying to publicize, were not teaching anyone anything. I understood that new politicians are needed to create new politics, because those who exist are not able to see anything.
My first experience was involvement with Vladimir Zhirinovsky. I even became a minister in his shadow Cabinet in June 1992. But I soon distanced myself from him when I saw all the vices that brought him to the very minor role he plays today: dishonesty, lies, moneygrubbing.
That contributed to the fact that in November 1994, I, together with [nationalist philosopher] Alexander Dugin, [punk musician] Yegor Letov and many unknown young people, established our own paper, Limonka. And then in spring of 1995, the National Bolshevik Party was established.
— This new political party was created by a few intellectuals?
— It took long years of struggle and study. I learned everything from scratch: how to establish a paper, how to survive. Now I am only involved with politics. I have found that becoming a politician is a very difficult occupation. Not a politician like Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin, who sits on a bag full of money. He is allowed to be tongue-tied and to make idiotic statements. But I am not. For me, politics is labor, just like for someone loading trucks or a welder.
— How would you describe National Bolshevism?
— It is «red nationalism.» It has three main tasks.
The country has gone through the privatization of property, which was grabbed by a minority of former Communist Party bureaucrats. We are not satisfied with that. It is a revolutionary duty [to return the improperly privatized property].
… Russia must go through this in order to achieve prosperity. Let's hope that this process won't be that painful. But if necessary, it would be possible to use some violence against those who resist.
We also think that the current bureaucratic ruling class should be denied power. We are not saying that they should be killed; they should just go, because they have developed bad habits. They have become accustomed to stealing and lying.
Democracy hasn't had a victory in our country; communism has not returned; but bureaucrats are the ones who won the battle between the democrats and communists.
The third is a purely nationalistic task, to change Russia's borders since they do not include more then 25 million Russians living abroad.
Territories that have more than 50 percent Russian populations, like Narva [in Estonia] or Northern Kazakhastan or Sevastopol should become part of Russia. It can be done through a referendums in those territories.
Those actions sound rather shocking for the narrow-minded. But to sweep away the illusions of narrow-minded people is not our task. . . .
It was our party that first drew attention to the case of Vasily Kononov [a former Soviet partisan convicted in Latvia of World War II-era crimes against civilians].
Today everyone is talking about it, but when we started this action, nobody cared about it. We blocked Latvian government computers from the Gazprom server. Our people started to boycott Latvian goods. Accompanied by the TV 6 television crew, our party members visited shops to find out if they sold Latvian-made goods. We, of course, influence Russian politics.
For example, no one is paying attention to the situation in Kazakhstan. Putin smiled happily while meeting with [President] Nursultan Nazarbayev. But this is disgusting when 14 Russians accused of attempting a military coup in the city of Ust-Kamenogorsk are locked in prison there.
— How is your party funded?
— Our party, which has about 8,000 members, suffers from a lack of funding. There are no rich people in Russia who finance radical parties, so we depend on donations.
— Why did your party members throw eggs at film director Nikita Mikhalkov?
— It was because of Mikhalkov's support of Nazarbayev in the 1999 elections, when Nazarbayev extended his term to 2007. Almaty is still decorated with posters showing Mikhalkov standing with Nazarbayev. They made a mockery of voters, since [Mikhalkov] has a reputation as a cultural figure and patriot. This patriot has ignored the many people who have died in Nazarbayev's prisons.
— Why do you say Russia is turning into a police state?
— Today everyone is talking about it. NTV [television] started to talk about it, then their own tail was cut off. But they have fewer reasons to talk about this than we do.
When police searched our headquarters after the Mikhalkov incident, the papers didn't really cover this. Wasn't it a true violation of our rights? NTV doesn't like it when those things happen to them, but they don't really care about us. They don't misinform, they simply give out a very small amount of information about us. After that, they want freedom for everyone. I would have gone to the meeting [to defend NTV], but I didn't go because for years they haven't spoken up for us even though we write about the other side.
In our paper we wrote about Andrei Babitsky, and while we stated that we do not share his position [on the Chechen war], the way he was treated was an absolute violation of both human and journalistic rights in this country.
— But isn't the former NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria, whom you made a National-Bolshevik symbol, also a symbol of a police state?
— Beria was the creator of the country's military complex. He was also responsible for the development of Soviet atomic power. He saved many of our scientists from death, not because of some humanistic ideas, but because of pragmatism.
He knew that Russia needed their skills and genius. He was a man just like his time — tough and maybe not a very nice person — but we should give him credit for his energy. If not for the military complex and railways, Russia would have already collapsed.
Sooner or later society will understand his role in the state's achievements. Men like him simply couldn't be part of the stories invented during Khrushchev's time about how he picked up girls on the street. That is just as untrue as the stories that he was a British spy and it reminds me of stories about vampires.
— What do you think of the Young Beria Followers in Volgograd?
— [Their existence] is mainly due to their own initiative, with the help of our local party representative, Maxim Anokhin. But we are very interested in them. If we had money, we would start more groups like that.
. . . It is understandable that youngsters are joining the [National Bolshevik] party.
The party promises an exotic future, a future of struggle. Sometimes they will end up in prison, like many of our comrades today. We hope to win someday, and that is also an exotic future — while what they see at home is their parents working all day long to buy new wallpaper.
How dangerous is it to be a dissident in the post-Cold War era?
Judging by the case of Edward Limonov, a lot more dangerous than being a dissident during the Cold War.
Limonov has been sitting in Lefortovo Prison since April of last year. Initially he was charged with attempting to obtain illegal firearms and to form an illegal armed group. More charges were subsequently added. This past December, the FSB tacked on the amazing charge that Limonov was trying to overthrow the state of Kazakhstan! Altogether, according to Limonov's attorney Sergei Belyak, he faces up to nearly 30 years in prison.
In January of this year, a separate case was brought against Limonov's newspaper, «Limonka» (where I have previously published) as well as Limonov's political party, the extremist National-Bolshevik Party, on charges of terrorism. The case against «Limonka» and the NBP was reportedly thrown out on a technicality, but the Russian state's attack on one of its most famous cultural figures reached such hysterical proportions that it finally attracted the attention of the West. Or rather, one segment of one Western country: France's cultural elite.
«It finally became too obvious even to the French that this criminal case was purely political repression and not because Limonov posed some kind of real danger or threat to the Russian state or to Kazakhstan,» said Belyak, who previously defended Duma deputy Vladimir Zhirinovsky. «The authorities went too far in their repression.»
Limonov is a dual French and Russian citizen. Yet it has taken this long for his case to come to France's attention - and has yet to reach the ears of any other Western nation. In part this is due to Limonov's unsavory reputation and radical anti-Western politics, including a famous tour of duty over Sarajevo with indicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadjic. Limonov has done little to elicit the Western press and diplomatic corps's sympathy. Yet this does not detract from the story: a famous dissident writer jailed on trumped up charges in an increasingly authoritarian state.
In early January, Patrick Gofman, a Parisian writer and journalist who has known Limonov since he arrived in Paris in 1982, circulated a petition calling for Limonov's release from prison.
«When we heard that Limonov was facing 23 years in prison or perhaps even more, we realized that he was not involved in a petty quarrel with the Russian government, but rather that this was serious,» Gofman said. «We started a petition with three Parisian writers, and from there it snowballed into something very impressive.»
The «Free Limonov» petition is a Who's Who List of France's cultural and literary heavyweights, some 70 figures spanning the political spectrum from the left to the right, from Russian emigres such as Vladimir Boukovsky, Alexander Ginzberg, and the widow of Andrei Sinyavsky to such luminaries as author Bernard Frank and «Le Figaro» literary critic Patrick Besson, who called Limonov «the best living Russian writer.» It includes many leading publishers, including Vladimir Dimitrijevic, director of l'Age d'Homme in Lausanne, one of the West's oldest and largest publishers of Slavic literature.
«Limonov is one of Russia's greatest artists,» said Dimitrijevic, whose house publishes everyone from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn. «He is a great writer and a very courageous man. I will always stand by a man who suffers for the truth.»
In mid-January, Limonov's imprisonment became the subject of a France-1 television news feature, but since then there has been little news - and total silence from the French government.
When interviewed by the eXile, the French consul ostensibly handling Limonov's case, Olivier Aribe, forwarded our request for an interview to First Secretary D. Nemchinov.
«We have absolutely no comment,» Nemchinov said. He repeated it with a laugh even though Limonov is after all a French citizen in a Russian prison.
Gofman and others says they find this attitude particularly disturbing, given the official French diplomatic support extended to Zacharias Moussaoui, a Moroccan immigrant who was arrested in the United States and charged with terrorism after reportedly attending flight training school in order to learn to pilot jet liners. Moussaoui is thought to have been assigned to fly one of the hijacked jets on September 11, but he was apprehended a few weeks before the attacks after raising suspicions.
«On the very day that Moussaoui was charged by the Americans with terrorism, the French publicly expressed concern and support to a French citizen because of their concerns of the death penalty in America,» Gofman said. «It's not fair. Limonov hasn't killed anyone, raped anyone or stolen anything.»
It is undeniably counter-intuitive. One immigrant is accused of participating in one of the bloodiest attacks in almost 200 years against France's most important ally, America, and yet the government offers support due to concerns over America's judicial process; another citizen, in spite of being one of France's leading cultural figures, jailed on outrageous charges and subjected to a judicial system that the West has consistently attacked for its cruelty, arbitrariness, and corruption, is officially ignored by the government. Why?
Everyone interviewed for this article agreed that Limonov's anti-Western writings, which strike many as loathsome, as well as France's domestic politics, are responsible.
There is a presidential election this year in France, and the Socialist-led government of Lionel Jospin is keen to woo the roughly 10 percent immigrant vote, most of which is Muslim. Offering support to Moussaoui both shores up the immigrant vote and helps to satisfy the decades-old French desire to plant a bug up America's ass.
Supporting Limonov - a shock-politics critic of the West and Russian nationalist - appeals to a marginal French constituency, mostly on the right. There is some talk that the right-wing in France is pushing the French government to release Limonov and that there is some behind-the-scenes maneuvering - indeed Limonov wrote a letter from jail to conservative French President Jacques Chirac - but because the government is keeping silent, it is impossible to tell what, if any support, they are extending.
Is it more dangerous to be a dissident today than during the Cold War?
In 1974, Limonov, who had gained fame in Moscow's unofficial and underground art world as a leading avant-garde poet, was subjected to repeated KGB harassment and finally expelled from the Soviet Union, along with what became known as the «Third Wave» of Soviet dissidents. Back then, the Western media and diplomatic corps persistently fought for the right of Soviet citizens to publish and express themselves openly, and fought for the rights of anyone jailed or punished simply for the crime of disagreeing. The reason, we said then, was that we believed that freedom of expression was every human being's basic right-indeed that to differ and express was itself to be human-all the more so if that opinion or work of art upset the Powers That Be.
Cut to 2002. Edward Limonov, now one of Russia's most famous public figures after more than two decades as a leading emigre writer in America and France, is once again the target of the KGB, today renamed the FSB. This time, however, they have him in jail, in the KGB's infamous Lefortovo Prison - something even the Soviets would have been loath to do, given the negative press it would have attracted. And here is the difference between then and now - this time, the KGB is getting away with it. The West is officially silent. Most simply don't give a shit as Russia has fallen off America's map except in terms of how they can help us kill ragheads and how they can make a few of our oligarchs a little richer. The press is aggressively ignoring the Limonov story. Even Johnson's Russia List won't publish articles about Limonov's incarceration.
«I am sickened by how these left-leaning journalists are so willing to support the Chechens and criticize Russia,» Gofman said. «Yet when it comes to Limonov, they are deeply silent.»
What has changed? In the first place, a KGB officer now runs Russia, and he's the West's friend.
More importantly, the West - in spite of its previous pronouncements - only supports dissidents who support the West. Grigory Pasko, NTV, TV-6, even Chechen separatism all have found sympathetic ears in the Western press and diplomatic corps. And all are, not coincidentally, pro-Western (at least the non-Wahhabite Chechen guerrillas are).
Gusinsky and Berezovsky, owners of NTV and TV-6, are widely known to have been key figures in the plundering, impoverishment, and soaring death rate in Russia during the 1990s, not to mention being linked to high-profile gangland hits. Chechen separatists kidnapped thousands of innocent Russians during Chechnya's three years of de facto independence, and terrorized its own citizens. The present war was precipitated by a Chechen invasion of Russian territory. While the Russian state's response to all three has been brutal, at least there was some basis for it.
Limonov has harmed no one and has stolen nothing. He is a dissident against both Putin's emerging neo-liberal dictatorship and against Western hegemony. His views were extremist, but not linked to a single death or injury. He called for renationalizing property, boycotting Western goods, and attacked Western-leaning liberals as stooges. He managed to build a significant following among Russia's alternative youth, particularly artists and writers.
«It is not possible to put a man like this in jail and to separate it from his writings and what he is,» said Dmitrijevic.
Limonov arrived in New York in 1974. He quickly grew into the role of a dissident within the dissident movement, arguing that the West was in many ways just a more sophisticated version of the Soviet Union, with more sophisticated propaganda, and just as little tolerance for true dissent. America didn't want to hear that. He found it nearly impossible to publish his political writings in the United States, so he turned to novels.
The Americans were reluctant to publish his first three novels, including «It's Me, Eddie» and «His Butler's Story», both of which shunned standard anti-Soviet emigre literature in favor of a kind of debauched hyper-egoist anti-American stance. The books are funny, incisive, and vexing. This was not what America wanted to read about itself from an ungrateful Soviet emigre.
The positive reception his novels received in France inspired him to move from New York to Paris with his then-wife, singer Natalia Medvedeva, in 1982. He was granted French citizenship in 1987, after taking France's avant-garde literary scene by storm; in 1986, French «Cosmopolitan» even named him one of France's top 40 leading cultural figures. Limonov wrote for several radical French publications, first siding with the left, then with the right.
In 1991, after the first official publishing in the Soviet Union of his controversial 1979 novel «It's Me, Eddie» sold nearly 1.5 million copies, then-President Gorbachev re-instated Limonov's Russian citizenship.
And that was the year, from the point of view of the West, that Limonov went bad. He sided with Serbia during its wars with its neighbors and the West, fighting alongside the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia and publishing his war correspondence. He joined the shadow cabinet of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultra-nationalist, anti-Western LDPR in 1992 as its Minister of Interior, sided with the anti-Yeltsin rebels in 1993, and formed the National-Bolshevik Party in 1994 with radical-intellectual Alexander Dugin and Yegor Letov, lead singer of the punk group Grazhdanskaya Oborona, whose genius as a lyricist is matched only by his ability to attract wanton violence at his concerts on a level that would cause most Western punks to piss in their Dickeys.
Over the past decade, Limonov has been smeared with the fascist, racist, and anti-Semite labels, even though there is no substantive proof to support these accusations. (Similarly, even the eXile has been attacked as a fascist, pro-Nazi, and anti-Semitic newspaper by its many detractors ranging from goyim like former Clinton tool Michael McFaul and commentator Peter Ekman to leading members of the Western press corps. In spite of the fact that our staff is nearly 40% Jewish, this accusation has stuck in many influential circles.)
These smear tactics have gotten so irrational and out of hand that famed Russian privatization adviser Anders Aslund recently attacked Georgetown professor and Yeltsin-era critic Peter Reddaway in print as an «anti-Semite» in part because Reddaway had called Limonov an «enlightened radical». It was so outrageous that many usually urbane academics publicly came to Reddaway's defense. Sure these attacks are funny and insane, but multiply them by every foreign media correspondent, diplomat, and Russia watcher, and you begin to quantify Limonov's problem.
Many in the Western media and academia will say off the record that they think Limonov got what he deserved.
Limonov is an alien to such people. He was shaped by the avant-garde, in particular Russian avant-garde writers of the 1920s such as Daniil Kharms and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as the Anglo-American avant-garde of the 60s and 70s. He told me that the first English poetry he translated into Russian after moving to New York was the lyrics of Lou Reed. Reed, both as singer of The Velvet Underground and as a major figure in Andy Warhol's Factory scene, was aggressively anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal, taking much of his aesthetic from the sado-masochist underground, from the violent fringes of society, from fascism and revolutionary aesthetics, in order to confront contemporary Western culture. Soon after Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, Limonov fell in with the punk movement in New York, which also agitated against liberal middle-class culture and values, relying heavily on violence and the threat of violence, though more often than not outrageous humor. Limonov never changed his heart or tastes; indeed, much of his sympathy with the skinheads goes directly back to The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Lou Reed, a Jew from Long Island who carved a giant iron cross in his skull and strutted around stage in a black leather uniform singing «Kill Your Sons.»
Russian artists, going back to the Romantics like Lermontov and Pushkin, up through Dostoevsky and experimentalists like Kharms, have always had a way of borrowing their aesthetics from the West, Russifying them, and taking them one step too far, which is why they are generally superior to our Western artists. The same could be said of Limonov.
A conference-hopping American academic, a Volvo-chauffeured Western correspondent whose Moscow life consists in going from sushi bar to hotel lobby sucking up to sleazy oligarchs, an unscrupulous FSB agent who wouldn't bat an eye at extracting a bribe from a black-ass fruit trader but recoils in horror at Limonov's freak show and descriptions of homosexuality - all are equally incapable of placing Limonov in context. Through their simplistic moral lenses, he is repulsive. He's where he belongs. And no one is going to waste their time on him.
Last April, after completing a book on jailed Krasnoyarsk aluminum baron Anatoly Bykov, Limonov left for the Siberian region of Altai. On April 7, more than 50 counter-intelligence goons surrounded the dacha where Limonov and a few others were staying; at 4 a.m., they raided, dragged them out and made them lie face-down in the snow, and - failing to find anything besides the royalties Limonov received for his Bykov book - hauled him straight to Lefortovo Prison.
The case against Limonov rests on a sting against two teenagers busted in Saratov for trying to acquire illegal arms. After a few months of coercion, they changed their story and accused Limonov of putting them up to it. This is the basis for the case against Edward Limonov.
Since then, the case has snowballed, until just over the past two months, the accusations and attacks reached a boiling point. Today, with so many leading French figures lining up behind him, Limonov's supporters are hoping that the French government will work to free him.
Meanwhile, Limonov is running in the March 31 elections for a vacated seat in the state Duma in Dzherzhinsk, considered to be among the most polluted cities in Russia. He will face off against candidates from the Communist and pro-Kremlin Unity parties.
It is the kind of story that generally attracts the «bizarre-Russia-story» type of feature for most correspondents. Jailed writer and French citizen runs for Duma seat in most polluted city in Russia.
The foreign press corps may or may not pick it up. The fact is that many find Limonov loathsome, and as they find us nearly as hateful, and as Limonov wrote regular columns in this newspaper on themes ranging from why he hates the West to comparing the vaginas of different nationalities, he is doubly cursed. And he wrote them in intentionally broken English, just to take one last shit on his Western reader's face.
I can never get over the fact that a friend of mine is rotting in prison, someone with whom I spent every other Sunday afternoon for some five years, when I'd come to pick up his latest article. With his constant pacing, and a girl between half and one-third his age somewhere in the back of the apartment, it was never boring. Now he's confined to a small cell, working hard, according to his lawyer, on his memoirs. . .
Last Friday, June 7th, the Russian Supreme Court, in a closed hearing, ruled to move the pending trial of former eXile columnist Edward Limonov from Moscow to Saratov. The date of the trial has not been set, and is not expected to begin for at least another two to three months.
The trial's venue has been in dispute for several months now, having moved four times.
Limonov, one of Russia's most famous authors and head of the extremist National-Bolshevik Party, is facing charges of terrorism, possession of weapons and explosives, calling for the violent overthrow of the state and attempting to form an illegal militia, for which he faces a total of 20 years in prison. He has been held in remand in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison for over 14 months.
Saratov was proposed by the prosectution as the venue because an illegal purchase of machine guns, which the FSB blames on Limonov, took place there early last year.
At first, the FSB, which is conducting the investigation of Limonov, fought to have the trial to be held in a village in the distant Altai Republic, where he was arrested in April of last year during a raid by masked counter-intelligence operatives.
Sergei Belyak, Limonov's lawyer, fought to have the trial held in Moscow, in order allow for better access to witnesses and attorneys. In April of this year, it was announced that the trial would take place in Saratov. Belyak appealed the decision, as did the Saratov Oblast court, sending the trial venue back to Moscow.
An appeal by Vladimir Ustinov, the General Prosecutor of Russia, to the Supreme Court led to the decision last Friday to re-send Limonov's trial venue back to Saratov.
«It's clear why the FSB fought to move the trial outside of Moscow: they want to keep the trial away from the press and to control the outcome.»
Belyak has said that he will no longer appeal this decision, although he is now fighting to keep the trial from being closed to the press and public, which the FSB is demanding.
«They claim that the trial must be closed to the public because it deals with terrorism, yet all of their terrorism charges come from articles published by Limonov in his newspaper Limonka,» said Belyak. "Everyone can read the evidence, there's nothing to hide."
PEN International has written an open letter to Ustinov calling for Limonov's release pending trial, expressing concern about the conduct of the authorities and the political nature of the trial. Most of PEN's 97 clubs around the world, including PEN Russia, Israel, France and others, have joined in expressing support for Limonov. A group of publishers, writers and intellectuals in France, where Limonov holds dual citizenship, has also petitioned for his release.
Until last week, Belyak was barred from visiting Limonov for two months.
While in detention, Limonov has been actively writing. He has published one autobiography, My Political Biography and a novel, The Book of Water. Two more books are pending publication this summer, including one from Ad Marginum Press, whose publisher, Alexander Ivanov, is also the co-owner of Shakespeare Books in Moscow. In all, Limonov has written six books since his imprisonment.
«The eXile», #11(143), 12 June — 26 June 2002
[Author's Note: Limonov wrote me a letter from Lefortovo telling me that he had written a column for the eXile, under the Dr. Limonov name, for publication. However, the column was never received and is presumed to have been seized. In the future, we will begin publishing translated excerpts from Limonov's prison books. Limonov seems to be in good spirits all things considered. Belyak told me that Limonov was moved to a cell alone so that he could work more, but was recently moved back into a two-man cell.]
Jeremy and I were watching a television documentary about Radovan Karadžić — the self-styled poet, self-proclaimed «leader» of the Bosnian Serbs, and erstwhile psychologist to the Sarajevo football team — when a familiar figure came on the screen. Who was this clown in army fatigues pretending to be a soldier? «I know that man,» I said. And then, as he began to drool over Karadžić, telling his hero he was another Alexander the Great, but greater, I saw the dreaded name: Edward Limonov. It made sense to me that Limonov should be worshipping at the feet of a mass murderer.
In May 1989, I took part in a conference in Budapest attended by some of the world's finest writers. The event was sponsored by the Getty Foundation in America. We were put up in the Budapest Hilton and treated with lavish hospitality.
During that week, the body of Imre Nagy, one of the martyrs of the 1956 uprising, was reburied in his rightful grave. Hundreds of people were at the cemetery to witness this belated act of mercy. For all the evident grief and sadness on display, there was also a patent feeling of hope and renewal in the air. The sun was shining, and the city streets were thronged with young men and women who appeared to be happier and healthier and better dressed than their counterparts in Romania. It was almost as if the Wall had already crumbled.
The conference began, as conferences do, with welcoming speeches from our hosts at a ceremonial dinner. Then, for the next five days, there were sessions every morning and afternoon. The Germans concentrated on the likely possibility of a united Germany and what it implied in literary terms; the French were philosophical, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, a mischievous wit and raconteur away from the podium, droned on at length on that unappealing subject, The Death of the Novel; the Indians were sweet-natured, and talked of many poets and storytellers — most of them Bengali — whose works had never been translated; the speakers from Eastern Europe, who included the remarkable Danilo Kiš, who was shortly to die of cancer, were sceptical rather than optimistic about the future; the Africans looked forward to the end of apartheid in South Africa, and Nadine Gordimer mentioned several promising black writers unknown in Europe and the United States, and the Americans seemed to agree that the days of the ubiquitous Great American Novel were over. The British contingent were ill at ease, because the author appointed to make the address, David Pryce-Jones, took the opportunity to trash contemporary English fiction for not being seriously involved with political issues. But our disapproval of Pryce-Jones was as nothing to that exhibited by the Arabs and Israelis for each other's points of view. Here was real drama — stormy exits from the conference hall, angry accusations from the floor, and desperate pleas for common sense and respect for literature to prevail.
Edward Limonov was a late arrival, taking his fellow Russians — who loathed him — by surprise. He had been living in Paris, where he had written the punk autobiographical novel «It's Me, Eddie». His reason for being in Budapest, it seemed, was to insult the Hungarians by praising the Russian soldiers who were sent in to thwart the possible revolution in 1956. He was unstoppable in his condemnation of all the countries in the Soviet bloc. He was not consistent, though. If he was attacking those nations for anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, why did he turn his venom on the Jews? And, indeed, the Arabs? He was playing the role of anarchist, antagonist and denigrator of the status quo up to, and beyond, the very hilt. He was twice evicted from meetings, when he was dragged out screaming.
On the last day of the conference a representative from each country was chosen to thank the hosts and to offer a few general comments. I was elected to speak on behalf of the British writers, and I said how moved we had been by the scenes at the cemetery and how much we had enjoyed the experience of seeing Budapest and meeting poets, novelists and historians we had hitherto admired from afar. There had been only one severely disruptive influence, but I would desist from naming him.
Limonov knew who I was referring to, as did everyone present. That night we had a party on a boat cruising up and down the Danube. I danced with Madame Robbe-Grillet, who was encased, as ever, in tight-fitting black leather. It was long after midnight when we returned to the hotel, where a small group of us — Angela Carter, Richard Ford, Amitav Ghosh, Gianni Celati, Christopher Hope and myself — decided to order champagne as a farewell nightcap. The Russians, minus Limonov, were seated nearby, drinking beer and vodka.
We were into the second bottle of Mumm when Limonov appeared, wild-eyed and spoiling for a fight with anyone. He clearly intended that I was to be that anyone. He strode over to my chair and looked down at me.
«Are you for or against capital punishment?»
«That's a strange question to ask at two in the morning,» I replied.
«Answer me,» he demanded. «For or against?»
«I'm against it, of course.»
«I thought so, you fucking Western liberal.»
I took a breath, and said, «What is it with you? You've been foul to everybody all week. Do you have a problem? Are you by any chance a closet transvestite?»
Hearing this, Limonov picked up the empty champagne bottle and struck me on the head.
I can't recall how long I was unconscious. There were scuffles. The Russians darted over to our table, grabbed Limonov and threw him into the lift. When I had come to, the biggest of the Russians asked me what I had done to annoy Limonov. I told him, and he thanked and embraced me.
«You were lucky it was a champagne bottle,» Angela remarked. «A wine bottle might have broken.»
Limonov reappeared, shouting, «Have I killed him? Have I killed him?» The Russians dispatched him again.
I had a sore head for weeks afterwards, and often had to lie down to ease the pain, with the ever-attentive Circe at my bedside.
So there was Limonov in the company of his hero, who invited him to use the machine-gun that had been strategically positioned to kill or injure as many innocents as possible in the city below. Limonov accepted the invitation fulsomely, spraying bullets indiscriminately, joyful at the prospect of polishing off a Muslim or two.
A decade after the incident in the Hilton, I visited Sarajevo. I met men and women and children with missing limbs, and several with a missing eye — the lasting mementoes of the gunfire that came at them from the surrounding hills, where Karadžić was now in hiding, protected by his private army. They all said how lucky they were to be alive.
In Banja Luka, two days later, I was shown Karadžić's office in the council building. His name was still on the door. Someone was expecting him back.
In the spring of 2002, Edward Limonov was in prison in Moscow, awaiting trial for drug-dealing and fraud.
«A dog's life»
// London, New York: «Hamish Hamilton», 2003,
hardcover, 192 p. (X+182),
ISBN: 978-0-241-14201-6,
dimensions: 225⨉145⨉21 mm
The decline and fall of a man who once seemed poised to become the next great émigré writer.
Limonov: It's just him—Eddie
Last week, in the provincial Russian city of Saratov, a judge heard final arguments in the case of writer Edward Limonov. Though Limonov stands accused of plotting to invade a large central Asian country, Kazakhstan, the trial has received zero attention in the United States — in no small part because Limonov is a disgusting nationalist who was once filmed firing off a few machine-gun rounds at the defenseless city of Sarajevo while visiting his pal Radovan Karadzic (the prosecution played the tape at Karadzic's trial at The Hague). And yet 25 years ago, Limonov was poised to become a great émigré writer — a wild-man antidote to all those high-mandarin Brodskys and Kunderas. His failure to become that writer is a telling chapter in the history of modern literature and post-Soviet confusion. It is also a stunning indictment of a certain now-familiar kind of literary narcissism.
Once upon a time, Edward Limonov was an American welfare queen. There was no place in the Soviet Union for his strange, deeply personal, and explicitly sexual poetry, and so he emigrated to the United States in 1974, just after Solzhenitsyn. But he was no Solzhenitsyn. His first and best novel, the profane and affecting «It's Me, Eddie», opens with Eddie sitting on the balcony of a Midtown residential hotel on Madison Avenue, eating cabbage soup and addressing the lawyers he hopes are watching him from across the street:
I receive Welfare. I live off your labor: you pay taxes and I don't do shit, twice a month I head down to the clean and spacious welfare office at 1515 Broadway and pick up my check. . . . What, you don't like me? You don't want to pay? It's not much — 278 dollars a month. You don't want to pay. Well then why the fuck did you get me to come here, me and a whole crowd of Jews? Take it up with your propaganda — it's too strong.
Dumped by his wife Elena, a despairing Eddie wanders the streets of New York searching for understanding, like a Soviet Céline. Only the most despised and dejected — homeless black street hustlers and members of the Trotskyist Workers Party — will take him in. After a number of back-alley homosexual escapades, the book ends with Eddie, in tears, telling everyone to go fuck themselves.
Eddie raised all sorts of hackles when it was published in 1979: The Soviet press found it filthy, while the more perceptive émigré establishment denounced Limonov for stating the awful truth: that for many of those who came over, America was just nasty, brutal, and expensive — and New York was no city on a hill. But Eddie had its admirers, Truman Capote among them; the Germans gleefully gave their translation the English-language title «Fuck Off Amerika», and the French went with «Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres». The book sold over a million copies when it was finally published in Russia in 1991.
In the hunt for bigger game, and unable to compete with his self-appointed archrival Joseph Brodsky, Limonov abandoned poetry and moved to Paris. He continued to write his peculiar brand of memoir-novels, some of which, particularly «The Teenager Savenko» (Limonov's real name), were excellent. And then the Soviet Union began to dissolve, and it was as if the thin layer of cloth that had separated Limonov's literary fantasies from his reality dissolved with it.
There had always been, even in his poetry, an intense fascination with violence. In the series of notes and semi-absurdist sketches that make up «Diary of a Loser» (1982), there is this short poem:
The pygmies have taken the city of Muchacha!
«They're four feet tall,» the radio intones.
And I'm thrilled, thrilled that the pygmies have taken the city of Muchacha.
I wonder — will they remember to rape all the big women and burn the place down?
And yet this is not a poem about violence or rape — it's a poem about the little people taking on the big people, about the poet's comic desire for revolution and his worry that the revolutionaries might louse it up. The Soviet Union, and the American empire that opposed it, are both going to last a thousand years; in the meantime, the poet is on the side of the pygmies.
But as things started to heat up back home, the violence in Limonov's writing became both more prevalent and more banal — braggadocio about his time in war zones, and his father's NKVD-issue pistol (the NKVD was the precursor to the KGB), about his affection for Russian ethnic separatists and Serb war criminals. As he later put it: «Enough walks in the park with red-cheeked girls, it was time to walk with loyal comrades underneath a red flag. That was my slogan for the 90s.» A terrible slogan — and it led to some terrible writing. He continued to compose his autobiography, but it was now under the guise of history. He wanted to be a man of action, a truth-teller in the post-Soviet time of troubles, but his self-involvement was prohibitive. The great self-explicators like Roth and Bellow had gazed inside their souls and seen the whole epic of human emotions; Limonov, closer to Dave Eggers, began to look at others and see only himself. His chief impression of Belgrade during the early '90s was that he went to some cool parties with the Milosevic gang and got laid. His description of Arkan, the leader of the Serbs' top ethnic-cleansing paramilitaries: «I've always loved bright and handsome gangsters.» In 1992 he returned to Russia for good. By then he had become, in politics, an extreme nationalist; and as a writer, an extreme narcissist.
Just as Eddie had been something of a parodic anti-dissident dissident, however, so Limonov became a parodic right-winger; a better poet than his friend Karadzic, he was a less successful fascist. He briefly joined the right-wing politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky and then founded his own National Bolshevik Party in 1993. The party's name and its iconography (a sort of retro-Stalinist chic) were a perfect avant-garde version of the ascendant Russian red-browns. But most of Limonov's early followers were urban hipsters and punks who were closer to a clown troupe than to Sturmtruppen. They dressed up like Nazis — and then threw vegetables at politicians. Their public pronouncements ranged from high satire to low nationalism. After Limonov received less than 2 percent of the vote in a bid for the Duma in 1995, he held a press conference promising to impose order on the party and set to work right away by administering a haircut to a «shaggy hipster.» He then promised to organize military camps in southern Russia to train for the recapture of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.
The authorities were not amused, and the party was increasingly harassed. Then, in early 2001, shortly after the NBP party newspaper published a plan for creating a «second Russia» in northern Kazakhstan (which had a significant Russian minority there, went the thinking, and sparsely patrolled borders), two NBP members were arrested while purchasing Kalashnikovs. In the wake of what must have been some very persuasive interrogation, the youths claimed they were acting under orders, and Limonov was promptly incarcerated; he has been in prison ever since. After serving for years as the court jester to an already clownish far right, whose leading denizens liked to call him a «fag,» at last Limonov has found someone to take him seriously. The state prosecutor asked that the writer receive 14 years. The judge will rule in mid-April.
Yet something about Limonov still haunts the mind. He is, without question, a real asshole — he called for press censorship during the first war in Chechnya, he struck the British writer Paul Bailey in the head with a champagne bottle at an international writers conference, he declared that what Russia's liberals needed was a dose of the gulag. He is not himself an anti-Semite, but, as the anti-Semites used to say, some of his best friends are. His arrival at this low point was certainly large parts stupidity, confusion, and just plain inferiority complex — Solzhenitsyn once called him «a little insect,» and how do you get over that? But there's more than foolishness here. All his writing is shot through with a curious mixture of self-pity and self-regard — the self, the self, the self. Perhaps every memoirist is already something of a fascist, the politics a logical extension of the idea that your life is more than other lives.
Which is why Limonov's prison writings are so interesting. At first he accelerated his production, writing seven books (mostly memoirs) in less than two years. And then, as he admits, he ran out of Limonoviana — and he began to look around. He saw Lefortovo, «the Russian Bastille,» and he saw his fellow prisoners, some of them Chechen rebels, and he listened to the awful radio programs pumped into their cells 10 hours a day. His last book, «V Plenu u Mertvetsov», or «Prisoner of the Walking Dead», includes a finely observed description of prison life, an imaginary dialogue with Joseph Brodsky, whom he knew («Holy shit!» Limonov tells Brodsky about Sept. 11), and an 80-page motion for his release. It's the best thing he's written in 20 years.
Russo TV scripter Alexander Veledinsky offers a sturdy feature debut, a serio-comic portrait of the artist as a young hooligan, adapted from the autobiographical writings of controversial scribe Eduard Limonov. Charismatic central perf by rising thesp Andrei Chadov merits a look, particularly by casting agents in search of young Slavic talent.
Established Russo TV scripter Alexander Veledinsky offers a sturdy feature debut in «Russkoye,» a serio-comic portrait of the artist as a young hooligan, adapted from the autobiographical writings of controversial scribe Eduard Limonov. Story of tough-but-soulful anti-hero who ends up in the loony bin after a suicide attempt is nothing new, but charismatic central perf by rising thesp Andrei Chadov (star of Alexei Balabanov's «War») merits a look, particularly by casting agents in search of young Slavic talent.
It's 1959, the time of Sputnik and Khrushchev's «thaw,» in the provincial town of Kharkov. Eduard, aka «Edichka» (Chadov), a wannabe teenage poet, spends more time hanging with his flyboy buddies, talking trash about Elvis Presley, and pining for pretty but snooty Sveta (Olga Arntgolts) than he does studying for his exams. Mom Raisa (Evdokiya Germanova) and her cop b.f., Mikhail (Mikhail Efpremov), who may or may not be Eduard's father, nag him and fret about his future.
Their worries are justified. Eduard is prone to get involved in street riots and one night breaks into a grocery story, searching for funds to help woo Sveta. When he spots the teenage temptress walking out with a rival, Eduard contemplates killing her, but instead makes a half-hearted attempt at slitting his wrists.
Mom has him committed to the infamous Savenko asylum, which in the past was a temporary home to several real-life poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov. The place becomes Eduard's university and proving ground, as he bonds with the likable, not-very-crazy nut mix.
Veledinsky, best known for co-penning popular TV shows like «Brigade» and «Law,» crafts a pleasingly coherent, albeit unavoidably episodic, narrative out of several of Limonov's Beat Generation-influenced books. Written in exile and banned for many years in the Soviet Union, these featured an expressive prose style and untranslatable, slang-stuffed banter — which Veledinsky has faithfully transposed here.
Helmer shows a real flair in key set pieces, such as a street riot that glides into slow-mo when a crazy old woman is attacked by the police, and an impressively staged fire at the asylum in pic's latter stages.
Pic is a showpiece for the talents of young Chadov, onscreen for nearly the entire film, and convincingly making the transition from callow youth to embittered, damaged young man. A touch cross-eyed but still fetchingly handsome, he has the strutting air of a young, slim Leonardo Di Caprio.
Lenser Pavel Ignatov manages to cast light glints in the actors' eyes, and favors glowering, darkly-lit compositions. Color palette tends toward sepia, with bright splashes of Communist red dotted around the clothes and sets.
For the record, the real Limonov, now back in his homeland, is a leading light of the kooky, ultra-nationalist National Bolshevik Party, and was recently imprisoned on terrorism charges, then released. Though pic features one rough-skinned thug who talks down Slavic courage but gets his comeuppance eventually, Veledinsky mostly keeps politics out of the film, apart from the obligatory potshots at the repressive ways of the former Soviet regime.
Title literally means «Russian.» An official English title has yet to be decided on.
Russkoye
Russia
Production: A Cinemafour Co., Trial-Bloch production. (International sales: Cinemafour, Moscow.) Produced by Maxim Lagashin, Alexander Robak, Alexei Alyakin. Directed, written by Alexander Veledinsky, based on stories by Eduard Limonov.
Crew: Camera (color), Pavel Ignatov; music, Alexei Zubarev; production designer, Ilya Amursky; art director, Yuri Osipenko; costumes, Alina Budnikova, Lyudmila Ilyutkina; sound (Dolby Digital), Grigory Pilshchik. Reviewed at Moscow Film Festival (Perspectives), June 24, 2004. Running time: 118 MIN.
With: With: Andrei Chadov, Olga Arntgolts, Evdokiya Germanova, Mikhail Efpremov, Galina Polskikh, Vladimir Steklov, Dmitri Dyuzhev, Viktor Rakov, Alexei Gorbunov, Maxim Lagashkin, Alexander Robak, Nelli Novedina, Anatoly Zalyubovsky, Yuri Vaksman, Oleg Lopukhov.
Eduard Limonov at an NBP rally (file photo) The National Bolshevik Party (NBP), which is Russia's oldest radical youth organization, was created in 1994 by radical writer Eduard Limonov, Eurasianism ideologue Aleksandr Dugin (who soon left the party), and rock musicians Yegor Letov and Sergei Kurikhin, as well as other counterculture personalities.
Although according to its own statistics the NBP has 30,000 to 50,000 members and has branches in 24 key Russian regions as well as in the Baltic states and other former Soviet states, the party has no official status, as the authorities persistently refuse to register it. It has a network of regional and international websites and requests that its new members possess Internet skills.
The NBP's leader and its cult figure is Eduard Limonov, 62, a man with an unusual history and one of the few Russian politicians with no links to the Soviet and post-Soviet ruling elite. Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Limonov was a member of the Soviet literary underground in the 1960s. In 1974 he emigrated to the United States, where he became close to American Trotskyites and anarchists. It was there that he wrote his best-selling novel «It is me, Eddie,» (Eto ya, Yedichka), which has been translated into 15 languages.
Limonov soon moved to Paris, where he became a member of the French avant-garde literary salons and joined forces with French and European leftist and neo-rightist political radicals, including French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the late 1980s he began to publish his articles in the national-patriotic press in the Soviet Union and in 1992 moved back to Russia. In 1994 Limonov launched the extremist ultranationalist newspaper «Limonka,» which quickly began to attract various groups of young people frustrated by the hardships of reforms and embittered at the West.
«It was an effort, and, a quite successful one, to mobilize the most passionate and intellectually dissatisfied part of society.»
Armed by his political experience in the West, Limonov proposed the creation of «revolutionary party of a new style» that could attract young people with a combination of extremist ultranationalist propaganda and «direct action» as practiced during the Maoist student protest in France and other European countries in 1968. Limonov suggested calling the new party the National Bolsheviks, as he believed that communism as a word has been compromised by the reactionary policy of the Communist Party, which he also blamed for «losing the USSR.»
While Limonov became the leader of the NBP, its chief ideologue was Aleksandr Dugin (see www.rferl.org/…), the main standard bearer of the neo-imperialistic doctrine of Eurasianism. Dugin was also a proponent of the idea of a «conservative revolution» pitting Eurasia against the Atlantic powers of Great Britain and the United States. Dugin was also an editor of the party newspaper, «Limonka.»
Looking back at the NBP's activities in the 1990s, the leader of the rival Communist Party-controlled Young Left Front, Ilya Ponamarev, told kreml.org on 4 April that «the organization never was or is a youth movement at all.»
«It is a postmodernist aesthetic project of intellectual provocateurs (in the positive meaning of the word) in which many bright and nontrivial personalities like Eduard Limonov, Aleksandr Dugin, Sergei Kurikhin, and [analyst] Stanislav Belkovskii were involved,» Ponamarev said. «It was an effort, and, a quite successful one, to mobilize the most passionate and intellectually dissatisfied part of society (in contrast to the Communist Party, which utilized the social and economic protests of the leftist electorate). For this mobilization, the NBP used a bizarre mixture of totalitarian and fascist symbols, geopolitical dogma, leftist ideas, and national-patriotic demagoguery.»
In 1998, Dugin and his followers left the NBP. After Dugin's exit, the NBP quickly moved to the left wing of Russia's political spectrum, accusing Dugin and his group of being fascists.
Since then, the NBP began having big problems with the Federal Security Service (FSB), since the special services always favored Dugin's Eurasianist philosophy. Or, as 102-year-old KGB foreign intelligence veteran Boris Gudz claimed in the 2004 book «Geniuses of Intelligence,» Eurasianism was invented in the 1920s by the OGPU, a predecessor of the KGB. Consequentially, the FSB regarded all opponents of Eurasianism, including the NBP, as enemies.
The conflict between the FSB and NBP was exacerbated by the tactics of «direct action,» in which NBP activists publicly attacked people they considered symbols of the regime or domestic or foreign allies of the Kremlin. The NBP's favorite tactics were throwing mayonnaise or tomatoes at prominent public figures. Since 1998, such people as former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, NATO Secretary-General Lord George Robertson, Central Election Commission Chairman Aleksandr Veshnyakov, and film director Nikita Mikhalkov were subjected to such attacks by the NBP, while former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Great Britain's Prince Charles were hit in face with bunches of flowers.
For these and other nonviolent actions, which the NBP calls «velvet terror,» many of its activists have been arrested and sentenced to serious prison terms. According to the NBP website (http://nbp-info.ru) since the party's creation over 100 of its members have been in Russian prisons, while 47 are still serving their sentences or are awaiting trial.
In April 2001 Limonov himself and a group of his followers were arrested by the FSB in Altai under accusations of terrorism and preparing an armed rebellion in Kazakhstan.
Limonov awaited trial in jail until February 2003, when he was sentenced to four years in prison. Limonov pled not guilty at his trial and asked for political-prisoner status.
«We do not deserve to be called extremists. In the West we would occupy a place between Greenpeace and Amnesty International, being a legal party and real political force,»
In prison, Limonov wrote the book «The Other Russia,» in which he dropped many of the radical dogmas of national bolshevism and changed his mind about the past and future of Russia. For example, in the mid-1990s NBP activists shocked people by chanting in public places «Stalin, Beria, Gulag,» but after personal experience with modern Russian prisons Limonov and his followers stopped romanticizing state-security organs and began calling President Vladimir Putin's Russia a «police state.»
Under pressure from State Duma deputies, Limonov was released in June 2003 and continued his political evolution toward a coalition with democratic forces and the left-wing opposition against the Kremlin. The product of this evolution was the new NBP political program released in 2004 containing almost the same points as Yabloko's, for example.
According to the program posted at http://nbp-info.ru, the new goals of the party should be the development of civil society and restriction of state interference in public and personal life, facilitation of the registration and activity of political parties, development of independent media and allowing criticism of the president and government on state-controlled television, civilian control over law enforcement and the FSB, restoration of the social-security network, curtailing of bureaucracy, and the end of the war in Chechnya.
Since late 2004, the NBP has protested the cancellation of the direct election of governors and the botched monetization reform and enthusiastically supported the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. On 11 April the NBP together with the Communist Party, Motherland, Sergei Glazev's For a Decent Life party, and supported by Yabloko, organized an initiative group for a national referendum on social and political reforms «with a human face,» Russian media reported.
If the political orientation of NBP in the last couple years changed visibly, the tactics of direct action remain unchanged and became even more provocative.
On 2 August 2004, a group of NBP activists broke into the office of Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov and occupied it for several hours, demanding Zurabov's resignation for his responsibility for the unpopular social-benefits reforms, the NBP's website announced. Using flash-mob tactics, the NBP called its followers to gather around the office to support the action. Eventually, FSB arrested most of the participants of the action and on 12 December seven NBP activist were each sentenced to five years in prison for the «seizure of a government office and mass disturbances.»
On 14 December 2004 an even bigger group of NBP members occupied the presidential-administration visitors' room in much the same manner, to protest Putin's political reforms, nbp-info.ru reported. Thirty-nine members of NBP have been arrested and are still awaiting trial. They have been accused of «attempting to seize power and organize a mass disturbance.» If convicted, they could face two to eight years in prison. They are scheduled to face trial in August.
Meanwhile, the NBP continues to defend the «right of the people to revolution.» The weekly «Limonka,» No.271, declared on 16 April that Russia is on the eve of revolution.
«The people awoke during perestroika, and fell asleep for a while, now they have awakened again to discover what kind of moral monsters are governing them. And they rebel against these monsters. Moral complaints against the authorities are the main engine of the colored revolution.»
Some political analysts believe that the only kind of revolution that can happen in Russian is a leftist-socialist and/or nationalist-patriotic revolution. If that is indeed the case, NBP, with its 10 years of experience of confrontation with government, its own list of political prisoners, and tactics of direct action, will certainly be at the eye of the revolutionary storm.
World View RUSSIA • From Mara Vladimirova for Antifa-Net in Moscow
A Moscow court has outlawed the revolutionary-nationalist National Bolshevik Party (NBP). The ruling, made on 29 June, awaits confirmation by Russia's Supreme Court of Justice.
The main reason given for the ban was that the extremist NBP failed to comply with legislation on the registration of political parties. The authorities claimed that the NBP failed to provide legally required information about its activities during 2001 to 2003 and illegally described itself as a party.
The legal grounds hide the fact that the prohibition was in reality a political decision made because of the NBP's support for «violent political change of the constitutional order» and the «creation of armed units». The prosecution authorities cited in particular the party's 2001 programme which called for the overthrow of the political system.
In the past two years, the police and security services have targeted the NBP as part of an anti-opposition drive by President Vladimir Putin. The party's Moscow headquarters was raided on 17 June by the internal security service, the FSB, which led three NBP members to slash their wrists in protest. The raid followed an earlier one on the building last December, when the FSB, successor to the KGB, arrived in force to arrest 11 party members and seize computers and archives.
The NBP's Moscow office was also invaded, in March, by «unknown persons» — believed to be supporters of the Kremlin-sponsored bogus anti-fascist movement Nashi (Ours) — who attacked office staff. A similar incident occurred in St Petersburg on 29 June when NBP members were attacked at the premises of the Russian Communist Party. Fifteen people were injured. Again the NBP pointed the finger at Nashi.
NBP leaders now claim that their party is «the most persecuted party in Russia» because members are arrested almost every time they do anything. They have been arrested when distributing their newspaper «Limonka» and were subjected to the police scrutiny when they participated in a meeting, organised by the Union of the Soviet Officers, against unpopular social reforms.
The mass media took a keen interest in the trial of the NBP activists who occupied several rooms of the Ministry of Health in the centre of Moscow on 2 August last year. During their protest, they broke furniture and threw their leaflets and a portrait of Putin out of windows.
At their trial in Moscow on 20 December, seven people aged 20 or less were sentenced to five years' imprisonment. The sentences seemed disproportionate to the value of the damage they caused. After public protests and letters to the authorities, the sentences were reduced to three years in March.
On 30 June, judges in Moscow postponed proceedings against 39 National Bolsheviks who occupied the reception hall of the presidential administration building last year and distributed leaflets urging Putin to stand down. The defendants could face eight years in prison. Nine of them, all young women, have begun a hunger strike.
Eduard Limonov, the NBP leader, told the radio station «Echo of Moscow» on 30 June that the ban on the NBP had been deliberately timed to coincide with the trial of «the 39» in an attempt to label the party as «extremist». He promised to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
Limonov, 62, an extremist who is himself no stranger to courts, said that his party now has an official reason to stay underground because «nobody can forbid that what was never permitted». A seasoned demagogue, he knows his party is in trouble and has been trying to give it a makeover. Last December, the NBP adopted a new and shorter programme totally different from its 1994 version, which led Russian democrats and human right activists to draw parallels between the NBP and Hitler's Nazis.
The new programme is an attempt to package the party's Russian national socialist radicalism more attractively by promoting «democratic revolution against the state capitalism of criminal oligarchs». The NBP says it wants to build and defend «civil society» in Russia, to enable small political parties to participate in elections, to oppose «the political creations» of the Kremlin and to defend the independence of its new friends in the mass media.
Social privileges, such as free medicine and free education, abandoned in Putin's reforms in January, would be restored and the NBP would end the war in Chechnya after discussion with all sides in the conflict. Finally, the party says it would stand up for the rights of the Russian minorities in Latvia, Estonia and Turkmenistan.
According to its programme, the NBP will participate actively in all campaigns against Putin's social reforms, not least because 47 of its members are currently behind bars and the NBP suddenly feels the need to expose the horrific and inhuman conditions in Russian prisons.
Its main enemy is what it calls «state plutocracy». To wage war on this enemy, Limonov has found new allies including the Taleban who like the NBP label the USA «the Great Satan».
Relations between Limonov's social-fascist warriors and Russia's other political parties are understandably quite difficult. Limonov still remembers bitterly how an erstwhile ally, Victor Anpilov of the antisemitic Troudovaya Rossia (Labour Russia), reneged on his agreements with the NBP and turned instead to Stanislav Terekhov's Union of Officers.
In 1999, the NBP also quarrelled with Alexander Barkashov, former leader of the nazi Russian National Unity (RNE), about plans for an electoral pact. Interestingly, the Vladivostok branch of the NBP recently defected to the RNE, accusing Limonov of «liberalism».
These days the NBP participates regularly in activities organised by the Vanguard of Red Youth and by Gennady Zuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) — even though Limonov has called this party a «political cadaver».
However, most leftist parties refuse to cooperate with the NBP. The Revolutionary Party of Workers correctly brands the NBP fascist. Liberals and democrats also refuse to be taken in by the NBP's latest con-trick programme but at the same condemn the heavy-handed methods used by the state to crush the NBP.
In the past, democrats campaigned for laws against extremists and even talked about banning the NBP. While everyone was happy when the RNE was outlawed in Moscow, the ban on the NBP is being viewed as a warning that a new period of political repression is under way in Russia.
Nazis arrested for Russian train bomb
Two activists of the nazi organisation, Russian National Unity (RNU), have been arrested in connection with the bombing of a Moscow-bound intercity sleeper on 12 June. The fact that the train was travelling from Grozny, capital of Chechnya, led to initial speculation that Chechen rebels were responsible.
Two Moscow residents, both in their mid-50s, are now believed to have planted the radio controlled bomb that derailed the train, injuring 43 people, five of them seriously. Because the train was travelling slowly at the time nobody was killed.
Both men were charged with terrorism and attempted murder after searches of their homes revealed extremist literature and evidence linking them to the attack. The fascist leader Alexander Barkashov denied that the suspects were members of his faction of the divided RNU.
Eduard Limonov, a writer and head of the radical National Bolshevik Party, walked free Monday after serving almost 25 months of a four-year sentence on an arms conviction — and immediately headed for the Volga River for a dip.
Four hours after his 9:20 a.m. release from the Engels correction colony — and after the swim — Limonov called a news conference in nearby Saratov to announce he will put writing on the backburner to focus on politics.
«I have not been corrected, and I have not abandoned my political beliefs,» said Limonov, 60.
«I will devote myself only to politics, trying to change the system altogether and uproot the traditional Russian servility,» he said, promising «to continue fighting by all legal means.»
He said he did not plan to run for public office but that his National Bolshevik Party should consider joining forces with a like-minded party to seek seats in the State Duma in December elections, local news agencies reported.
Limonov, a cult figure for thousands of teenagers, was released early on parole for good behavior after serving half of his sentence. A Saratov court in April convicted him of ordering National Bolshevik members to buy weapons, while clearing him of more serious charges of terrorism, forming a private army to invade Kazakhstan and plotting to overthrow the government.
Clad in a gray, double-breasted jacket, a black shirt and black jeans, Limonov said in televised remarks that he had not expected to get out Monday after seeing his release postponed from Saturday. He said he had just had a breakfast of porridge and boiled fish and was preparing to take a bath when the warden called for him and handed him the release papers.
Limonov, who shaved off his goatee and traded a ponytail for a crewcut about a week ago, promised the warden «not to get caught anymore,» Gazeta.ru reported.
He told reporters in Saratov that he was going to get serious about trying to make a difference in Russia. «I don't want to waste myself with lightweight ventures,» he said.
Limonov slammed rules requiring organizations to register as political parties with the Justice Ministry to participate in Duma elections and criticized the provision barring parties that get less than 5 percent of the vote from parliament.
The National Bolshevik Party submitted its registration papers to the Justice Ministry in May but has not heard back yet, acting party head Anatoly Tishin said.
The Justice Ministry said Monday that Limonov is free to pursue whatever political aspirations he wishes.
«Limonov, as any free citizen, has the right to travel freely and get involved in political activities. He can participate in elections and be elected,» Vladimir Logachyov, spokesman for the ministry's prisons directorate, was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Logachyov said Limonov can travel freely in Russia and abroad, but cautioned that he will be jailed if he breaks the law while on parole.
Limonov — who wrote eight books and numerous articles during his 815 days in pretrial detention and then prison — said writing will be of «secondary» interest for him and mainly a source of income. He also said he wants to draw more attention to the plight of inmates.
«There are new forms of violence in jails. Prisons look fresher now, but that doesn't mean inmates are no longer suffering emotionally, being subjected to torture and being beaten.»
The Federal Security Service arrested Limonov in the Altai region in April 2001, and he spent most of his time served awaiting trial in Moscow's Lefortovo prison. He was locked up in the Engels colony for only six weeks.
While he was in jail, a Moscow court last year closed down his party's newspaper, Limonka, a slang word for hand grenade. The court said the newspaper incited ethnic conflict and called for the violent overthrow of the government.
The National Bolshevik Party soon started publishing a new newspaper, Generalnaya Linia, with the same editorial content as Limonka.
Limonka's editor, Sergei Aksyonov, was convicted with Limonov on similar charges in April and is serving a 3½-year sentence at a penal colony in the Leningrad region.
Limonov and Aksyonov maintained their innocence during the trial, saying the charges against them were politically motivated and the evidence was fabricated by the FSB.
«Now, I will sew up my pockets to escape provocation — just to make sure bullets or explosives don't appear in them,» Limonov said Monday on NTV television.
Limonov, in interviews published Monday in Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Gazeta, said that in prison all he dreamed about was «leaving Saratov somewhat quicker, having a drink of cognac and tasting a woman.»
One of those dreams came true at 6 p.m. Monday, when he left Saratov on a train for Moscow. He was to arrive in the capital Tuesday morning.
And Boris Berezovsky, who is in self-imposed exile in London, sent Limonov a bottle of cognac Monday, Gazeta.ru reported.
Would-be Russian politician, Eduard Limonov, may have been jailed for terrorism in 1994, although this almost certainly had nothing to do with his activities in 1992 (Exiled Russian Dissident Makes Bid For Presidency — Oct. 18). That year the BBC filmed him on a hill above Sarajevo shooting at defenceless civilians below. He was there to support his friend Radovan Karadzic, who was pleased to offer an interview.
I laughed when I read his description of himself as someone who, in the West, «would occupy a place between Greenpeace and Amnesty International.» Mr. Limonov is a familiar type: an old-fashioned nationalist/anarchist/Trotksyist (and bad poet) who travels the world looking for high-profile adventure and a television camera to pose for.
It began inauspiciously. On a frozen afternoon in late November, as Moscow was draped with blocklong plastic billboards, banners and flags, each proclaiming a variation on a single theme — «POBEDA PUTINA — POBEDA ROSSII!» («A Victory for Putin Is a Victory for Russia») — a few thousand Russians converged on the city center for a rare act of political theater. It seemed, at first, like a tableau from the last days of the U.S.S.R., those heady months when glasnost swelled the streets with protesters. A handful of dissidents stood on a flatbed truck; a jumble of loudspeakers were stacked below; the crew of foreign reporters vastly outnumbered the local press; and across the way, the secret policemen with their unseen amplifiers were drowning the protest in canned laughter and Soviet waltzes.
That afternoon all eyes and lenses were fixed on Garry Kasparov, the valiant chess master trying in retirement to end the reign of Vladimir Putin. After Kasparov clapped his hands and shouted «Davai!» — «Let's go!» — he started toward the Central Election Commission, where he planned to deliver a list of complaints. As he marched, however, it was clear that he was not alone at the head of the demonstration. He had locked arms with his unlikely comrade in one of modern Russia's most quixotic quests — Edward Limonov, the 65-year-old poet-turned-populist who heads the National Bolshevik Party, or NBP.
After the presidential election in Russia, taking place today, not much is likely to change. Putin's anointed successor, the young lawyer Dmitri Medvedev, is little more than a proxy. But there remains one genuine opposition force, the Other Russia, a threadbare alliance comprising the remnants of the Westernizing camp led by Kasparov and the banned National Bolsheviks, the Nat-Bols, as Limonov's young followers call themselves. In the face of Kremlin control of the airwaves and the small army of police deployed to muzzle their protests, the alliance has proved more adept at internecine warfare than at grass-roots politicking.
Limonov, however, has not given up. With his bizarre, often half-baked yet latently sinister populism, he remains hellbent on ruining the Kremlin's party. And despite his strident nationalism and affinity for rogue youth, he works in close partnership with the liberal-minded Kasparov. «Russia is rich in generals without armies,» Kasparov told me last fall. «But Limonov has foot soldiers. He commands street power.»
The crowd at the rally was not large; in fact it was depressingly small to anyone who remembered the last days of the U.S.S.R. Yet at the fore stood a disciplined corps of 200 or 300 Nat-Bols — young men and women dressed in black whose faces beamed with unexpected joy. The march ended, as expected, nearly as soon as it began. The riot police formed walls on either end of the procession and closed the vise. When they roughed up Kasparov and threw him in a paddy wagon, the foreign press surrounded it. When they sent him to jail for five days, European leaders and even George W. Bush's spokesman issued peals of condemnation.
Limonov, however, also vanished. A babushka in the street swore he'd been hauled off, bag over his head. Ekho Moskvy, the liberal Moscow radio station and a last preserve of independent media in Russia, reported he had been arrested. No one, however, could find Limonov in the jails. Only days later, the truth emerged. «It was my boys,» Limonov told me. The Nat-Bols had forsworn their party flags — notoriously similar in color and design to the Nazis', only with a black hammer and sickle replacing the swastika — and executed their game plan. Before the police could reach Limonov, his supporters carted him off. «My boys saved me,» he said. «Just like they can save the country.»
«Russia is back,» they like to say in Moscow these days. What a difference a sea of oil and gas can make. Bentleys, Maseratis and Maybach 62s — those Bavarian chariots that set you back upward of $400,000 — rule the prospekty. At the Ritz-Carlton, a new marble palace erected on the remains of the old Intourist Hotel across from Red Square, the smallest singles run $1,200 a night.
Still, in Moscow, and out across the hinterland, there is something else — a new generation untouched by high-speed globalization and mired in uncertainty. Russia's youth ranges widely in its political sympathies — from the neo-Nazi thugs who posted the beheading of a dark-skinned man on the Internet to the neo-Soviet youth groups spawned by the Kremlin. But Limonov's National-Bolsheviks came first and now stand somewhere in the middle of Russia's odd political spectrum, part Merry Pranksters, part revolutionary vanguard. The party does not tally its membership, «for security reasons,» Limonov says, but claims to have 1,000 to 1,500 hardcore activists and some 56,000 loyalists. Unmoored by economic upheaval and unmoved by Putin's restoration project, they have found in the NBP a satisfyingly fierce ideology, often mediated by black humor, that can be refashioned, as Limonov readily admits, «to fit anyone and anything.»
Limonov founded the NBP in 1993 after returning to Russia from years abroad. Since then, his message has changed — from anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism to anti-Putinism and anti-fascism — though rabid nationalism has dominated. He has sought the mantle of everyone from Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century anarchist, to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French ultranationalist. He has shifted course so often that by now only the goal — revolution — and the means — young people — remain constants. «In the bureaucratic KGB-cop state, youth are expendable,» he has written. He maintains that young Russians, «physically the most powerful group in society,» are regarded by authorities as «the internal enemy,» just as the Chechens are seen as the external one. Disaffected youth are Russia's «most exploited class» in Limonov's view and, as he readily admits, his core supporters. There are young men with shaved heads in the party, though these days they are more likely to be left-wing punks than right-wing skinheads.
If the party's agenda remains murky, its targets — and methods — are well known. Since the summer of 2003, the NBP has escalated its campaign of «direct actions,» propaganda stunts that have often led to prison terms. The «velvet terrorism,» as Limonov has called it, picked up when a Nat-Bol shot a jet of mayonnaise at Alexander Veshnyakov, the chairman of the Central Election Commission. Then there was the pelting of the Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov with tomatoes, and the egging of Putin's first prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, on election day in 2003. The following summer, after a law cut subsidies to the poor and elderly, the Nat-Bols raided the Ministry of Health. Three dozen party members took over offices on two floors, including the minister's. For their participation in the action, seven Nat-Bols received jail sentences of 2.5 and 3 years.
The best-known stunt came just after May Day in 2005. Two young Nat-Bols rappelled down the face of the Rossiya Hotel, a Soviet monstrosity that until recently stood across from the Kremlin. From 11 stories up, Olga Kudrina, a 22-year-old Muscovite with long blond hair, and Yevgeny Logovsky, a 20-year-old from the small city of Arzamas, unfurled a 40-foot banner emblazoned with the words «PUTIN UIDI SAM!» (roughly, «Putin Retire Yourself!»). Kudrina and Logovsky also managed to drop leaflets offering the president further advice: «Dive After the Kursk!» — a reference to the submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, killing 118 sailors. The two smoked a couple of cigarettes and made a few cellphone calls before the police arrived with scissors and handcuffs. Logovsky got a suspended sentence. Kudrina, sentenced to three and a half years, went underground.
I first met Limonov last summer in a dimly lighted apartment in the center of Moscow. The apartment, which serves as the NBP chancellery, was tucked away on a grim side street in a concrete gulch below one of Moscow's most fetid locales, the Kursk train station. I was met on the street and escorted by a man in his 20s who had a shaved head and wore a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words NOT MADE IN CHINA. As many as 20 Nat-Bols serve as bodyguards for Limonov, whom they address as Vozhd', «the Leader.» It was the first time I had ever heard the word employed in speech, and I wondered if «the boys» knew the term was once reserved for Stalin.
The shtab — an officious term for headquarters — had the feel and all the comforts of an I.R.A. safe house. Limonov greeted me in all black — black jeans, black T-shirt, black narrow tie. With his glasses, thin mustache twisted to points at the ends and graying goatee, the Leader bears a striking resemblance to Leon Trotsky.
It was not always so. Back in the '70s, when Limonov emerged from the underground as the author of the autobiographical novel «Eto Ya Edichka» («It's Me, Eddie»), he more closely resembled an extra in «Godspell.» Tight jeans, floppy-collared shirts and pimp-high platform shoes were essentials of his costume. He did his best to taunt and tease, seduce and castigate, but in an émigré demimonde crowded with agents provocateurs, provocation alone did not suffice. Emulating one of his heroes, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet of the revolution, he wanted to lay down his life for a cause. Just what cause, at least back in the U.S.S.R., remained unclear.
Limonov was born Edward Veniaminovich Savenko in 1943, the only child of an officer in Stalin's secret police, in Dzerzhinsk, the most polluted town in the U.S.S.R. He grew up in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the Soviet Detroit, where he skirted the local institutes, opting instead, after a stint in the foundry of the local Hammer and Sickle motor plant, for a job in a bookstore. In the early 1960s he edged into the underground world of Kharkiv's fledgling bohemia. «We were all considered superfluous men and girls, and of this we were of course deeply proud,» says one of his closest friends at the time, Vagrich Bakhchanyan, invoking the traditional Russian literary conceit. It was Bakhchanyan, a painter, who christened Savenko «Limonov» — the name connotes «lemon.» («He was very pale, almost yellow,» he says by way of explanation.) To a Russian ear it sounds impossible and strange — «something punk, like Johnny Rotten,» Limonov says.
In 1967, Limonov moved to Moscow and acquired his first typewriter. «The capital was the dream of all poets in the U.S.S.R.,» he told me. «Not for publishing — impossible, but for women and glory.» He succeeded. Limonov self-published his poems samizdat-style, typing out copies and, unlike most of his comrades in the underground, hawking them for five rubles each. In 1974, the KGB called him in and offered him a choice — «rat out your degenerate friends or go into exile.» He left the U.S.S.R., first for Vienna, then Rome, before settling in New York. He did not go alone, but with «the beautiful Elena,» his second wife, who soon became, or so the legend goes, the first ex-Soviet fashion model to work in Manhattan.
Limonov says he has written «more than 44 books» — novels, poetry, prose and essays. For most Russian readers, however, he has written only one, his first — «Eto Ya Edichka,» published in New York in 1979. «Edichka» closes with a prediction that seems to have shaped his activities since:
«Whom shall I meet, what lies ahead, none can guess. I may happen upon a group of armed extremists, renegades like myself, and perish in an airplane hijacking or a bank robbery. I may not, and I'll go away somewhere, to the Palestinians, if they survive, or to Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, or someplace else — to lay down Eddie-baby's life for a people, for a nation.»
Completed in New York in 1976, and rife with profanity and graphic sex — all genders, all combinations — «Edichka» was rejected by three dozen U.S. publishers before it was accepted by an émigré Russian house. It later appeared in France as «Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres,» and in Germany, where it became a best seller. For many Russians, it stirred the biggest literary fuss since «One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.» In 1983, when Random House published an English translation, Americans got a sense of why. On the second page, Edichka celebrates his dependency on the U.S. welfare system: «I consider myself to be scum, the dregs of society, I have no shame or conscience, therefore my conscience doesn't bother me and I don't plan to look for work, I want to receive your money to the end of my days.» To date, more than a million copies of the book have been sold in Russia.
The walls of Limonov's office are lined with books — biographies of Mussolini and Che, a Russian edition of Leonard Cohen's «Flowers for Hitler,» an economics text by Robert Heilbroner and a shelf full of KGB exposés. Above the books are large photographs, souvenirs of his tour of the unlovely little war zones of the post-Soviet era — Bosnia, Tajikistan, Abkhazia, Trans-Dniester. The images record Limonov, whether on a tank or on foot, shoulder to shoulder with real warriors. One stop, above all, enhanced his infamy: he was filmed shooting a machine gun in the company of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader. When the Hague indicted Karadzic on war crimes, the footage — taken from a vantage overlooking the besieged city of Sarajevo — was shown in the courtroom. (It is now on YouTube.) To anyone who has read Limonov, the martial urge was not new. This is the man who wrote: «The love of weapons is in my blood. As far back as I can remember, when I was a little boy, I used to swoon at the mere sight of my father's pistol. I saw something holy in the dark metal.»
Limonov has helped to import a new word from English into the Russian political vernacular: luzer. As a politician, he is, to put it charitably, feckless. «He has no hope of gaining state power,» says Alexei Venediktov, the director of Ekho Moskvy and one of Russia's sharpest political journalists. «But that's not what motivates him. Limonov loves the street, and like any fighter he needs an arena.»
Alexander Dugin, a 46-year-old philosopher who founded the NBP with Limonov, would agree. He and Limonov parted ways nearly a decade ago. Today, Dugin is best known as the high priest of Eurasianism and as an ideologue favored among the state security organs. (He serves as an unofficial «youth adviser» to the Kremlin.)
«The name made no difference to Limonov,» Dugin told me. «He wanted to call it «National Socialism,» «National Fascism,» «National Communism» — whatever. Ideology was never his thing. . . . The scream in the wilderness — that was his goal.» Limonov, Dugin went on, is like «a clown in a little traveling circus, the kind that shuttled across America in the beginning of the 20th century, one of those guys in the freak show, a worm eater, or a bearded woman. The better he performs, the more attention he wins, the happier he is.»
The Kremlin, however, does not dismiss Limonov as a clown. In April 2001, the Leader was arrested for arms smuggling — «AK-47's and some explosives,» he told me. The plot, as described in court, read like a page ripped from a history of the Bolsheviks' earliest days: a terrorist takeover of a swath of northern Kazakhstan, the gold-mining region in Central Asia that, not coincidentally, is dominated by ethnic Russians. The judge, however, dropped the terrorism charge and sentenced Limonov to four years. He was released in the summer of 2003.
Four years later, Putin finally had enough. Russian authorities banned the NBP as an «extremist group.» «We are the first non-Muslim party to be banned,» Limonov said. «It is quite an honor.» The ruling has been challenged — and reaffirmed several times, most recently last month. At least 14 Nat-Bols are in jail — including three women. Several more remain in hiding.
The Kremlin has not only proved incapable of ignoring Limonov; it has also adopted his tactics. Putin's ideologues, led by his deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, have created a raft of «youth groups» like Nashi («Our Own») and Molodaya Gvardiya («the Young Guard»). As well financed, unyielding and patriotic as their patrons, they have earned the collective nickname «Putin Jugend.» While some discount their reach, and Nashi may soon lose its state financing, the British ambassador, Anthony Brenton, learned their power firsthand. Two years ago Nashi activists — Nashisty, as the Nat-Bols call them, with a deliberate ring of fashisty, fascists — began shadowing the diplomat in Moscow. For months, they leafleted his car, picketed his residence and heckled him in public, before the Russian foreign minister stepped in. Brenton's offense? He had attended an opposition conference, sitting in the company of Limonov.
The anti-Limonov campaign has only grown uglier. On Nov. 22, two days before the march in Moscow, Yuri Chervochkin, a young Nat-Bol activist, was attacked as he posted campaign notices near his home in the Moscow suburb of Serpukhov. (On the Other Russia list of 359 Duma candidates, Chervochkin had been No. 180.) Earlier that day, he called a journalist, reporting that he was being trailed by the police. He recognized the officers, he said, from previous encounters. Severely beaten, Chervochkin fell into a coma. On Dec. 10, three weeks shy of his 23rd birthday, he died.
«Edik was never political,» says Bakhchanyan, Limonov's old friend. «New York politicized him. This city was his awakening.» Five years older than Limonov, Bakhchanyan was a veteran of Kharkiv's bohemian circles when he brought the hopeful provincial to Moscow. In the capital, painter and poet roomed together. Then in the early 1970s, Bakhchanyan was the one who encouraged Limonov and Elena to join his wife and him in exile.
Limonov, who is not Jewish, left the U.S.S.R. on an exit visa intended for Soviet Jews, in 1974, following the departure of Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky and Baryshnikov. The poet loved to rail against those icons of the so-called Third Wave of Soviet emigration. But Brodsky, the greatest poet of his generation, was the one Limonov envied most. «He liked my poetry,» Limonov told me. «He really did.» (Others who knew both men second the claim.) Brodsky, Limonov went on to say, «was the one who took me to Tatiana Yakovleva and Alexander Liberman's» — the East 70th Street home of the Condé Nast editorial director and his wife. «Amazing, extraordinary personalities. Big people. Not only to me but the whole of the Russian émigré world. Brodsky introduced me to them — he wanted to help me.
«I was this underground poet,» he continued, «a freak in jeans and high heels. But Brodsky was a psychologist — he knew I knew Lilya Brik in Moscow, Mayakovsky's old mistress.» Tatiana Yakovleva had also been Mayakovsky's lover. Brodsky, Limonov recalls, «understood that Tatiana would like to hear about the woman who stole Mayakovsky from her.» Limonov inserted himself in the Libermans' circle. Having worked as a tailor in Moscow, he made clothes for Tatiana. He and Elena were invited to the Libermans' soirees. He made his way into Baryshnikov's world too. «Misha read «Edichka» between rehearsals,» Limonov claims. «And loved it!»
Limonov arrived in New York in 1975, at the dawn of punk. He discovered CBGB, fell for Patti Smith and Richard Hell and knew everyone from Steve Rubell to the local members of the Socialist Workers Party. «Edichka» oozes with bodily fluids — the hero, abandoned by his wife, Elena, goes on «nocturnal rambles on the West Side» that feature serial sexual encounters with homeless black men. The thin plot lines, however, thread two dominant leitmotifs: self-indulgence and condescension. «Edichka» may have been cast as a postmodern Underground Man — debauched and self-pitying, prickly in his pride and scornful of others. But his creator comes off like a cross between Mailer, the public brawler and political freelancer, and Mayakovsky, the restive and ultimately self-destructive literary revolutionary. «I did something no other Russian writer ever did,» Limonov says. «I broke down the wall. There were only two types of literature at the time: Soviet and anti-Soviet. My books were just books, about my life first and foremost.»
Late in 1978, Limonov found the émigré's ultimate sinecure. He moved into 6 Sutton Square, a 17-room mansion at the dead end of 58th Street. The U.N. secretary general's residence was around the corner. Limonov had entered the employ of Peter Sprague, at the time the chairman of National Semiconductor and co-chairman of Aston Martin, the English sports-car maker. Limonov later wrote a novel, «His Butler's Story,» chronicling those years.
Sprague insists the novel does not record reality. «It was as if Hunter Thompson had written «The Nanny Diaries,»» he told me over drinks in Midtown Manhattan. «I know from butlers. Edward seems to have never understood the difference between «housekeeper» and «butler.»»
The two made an intriguing match. An entrepreneur and onetime New York Congressional candidate (he ran as a Republican against the incumbent, Ed Koch), Sprague had quit working on a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia to start a chicken farm in Iran. He also had his own ties to the Russian literary world. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a friend, as was another poet, Bella Akhmadulina. «For a time, my house was a crash pad for a wide slice of Russia's cultural minority,» Sprague said.
Asked why he hired Limonov, Sprague drew a blank. «Hardly spoke to the guy, I was traveling so much,» he said. «Edward made borscht and he made coffee. And he drank his way through a fine wine cellar. What else he did, beats me.» The cellar held more than a thousand bottles, but to Sprague what lingers is Limonov's portrayal of him as a Gatsby-like figure. «He got it all wrong,» Sprague says. «At the time I was bottoming out, and before long I lost everything, including the house.» Limonov remained in Sprague's employ until 1980, but by 1982 he was living in Paris with Natalya Medvedeva, a model and singer who would become his new wife. In France, Limonov basked in the critics' spotlight, but with the Soviet collapse and the restoration of his citizenship, he returned to Moscow. Within months he entered the fray; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the Liberal Democrats — who were neither liberal nor democratic — invited Limonov to join his shadow cabinet.
It has been an eventful winter in Russia — one of those periods when the fatalists among the locals, which is to say nearly everyone, cock an eye and forecast a «Smutnoe vremya», a «time of troubles.» In the wake of the November march and Kasparov's arrest, the Other Russia coalition was all but dead. Kasyanov, the former prime minister who was once egged by the NBP, reawakened hopes when he broke sharply with Putin and joined the opposition — but he and Kasparov feuded. «Two giant egos in a single room,» Limonov told me, explaining the problem with a Russian proverb: «They tried to divide the bearskin before the bear was dead.»
On Dec. 2, Putin got the Duma he ordered. In elections that the West condemned as a sham, United Russia, the Kremlin's party, increased its share of the Duma's 450 seats to 315. Even Andrei Lugovoi, wanted by British authorities for the murder of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, won a seat, running as a liberal Democrat. Then on Dec. 10, Putin named Medvedev his favored heir, and the next day, Medvedev named Putin his favorite for prime minister. On Dec. 13, Kasparov, at the funeral for Chervochkin, the murdered Nat-Bol, ended his bid for the presidency. Kasyanov, hoping to run on his own, was denied access to the ballot.
But if the Other Russia hasn't amounted to much, it is just about all that Putin's foes have. In a recent conversation, Kasparov told me that his alliance with Limonov has borne fruit: «We helped dismantle the democratic aura of Putin's regime.» Limonov and Kasparov plan to hold marches the day after election day and are thinking boldly of convening some kind of «alternative parliament» later this month. Yet state power in Russia, it seems, will play on, like an infinite loop, in the same hands.
One Friday afternoon in late November, I returned to the shtab. It was early, but the Moscow sky was gray-black. The streets sloping away from the train station were filled with icy swales and the cast of old — a trio of grizzled men who'd spent the morning drinking their pensions; two boys, no gloves, no hats, no older than 14, drinking Czech beer from large bottles, hands welded to the green glass; a line of women swaddled in woolens, selling herbs from the countryside. Limonov operates, I realized, out of a corner of the city that reveals no sign of the changes of the last two decades. The skies continued to darken. The only brightness came from a giant illuminated billboard: «A Victory for Putin Is a Victory for Russia!» it read, but no one took note of the victory promise. Everyone, whether climbing the hill or dodging the streetcars, moved slowly, in silence.
This time, as I entered, the bodyguards took their leave, and the Leader dead-bolted the iron door. Though the office was dark, he did not turn on a light. Limonov seemed unnerved. He kept taking his wristwatch off and putting it on, turning it over in his hands. He swiveled time and again toward the windows, clouded with dirt and the cold, to scan the courtyard outside.
A fat manuscript dominated the desk. «Just finished,» Limonov said, packing it up with care. «It's something completely insane, which of course makes me insanely happy.» We spoke of a Putin speech (he'd referred to opposition leaders as «jackals») and Kasparov's stubbornness (the chess master called twice during our talk).
Again, Limonov was wearing black: black turtleneck, black jeans, black dress shoes. In the gray light seeping in, he looked almost spectral. He was wearing his usual pinkie ring, but now I also noticed a wedding band. He married for the sixth time two years ago. (Limonov enjoys marriage. Two former wives, however, have died, the first by suicide. «That one,» Limonov said, «had nothing to do with me.») Katya Volkova, his new wife, is an actress and a singer. At 33, she is a stunning woman, at the height of her career and recently radicalized. When I noted in an earlier talk that Katya is nearly half his age, Limonov sighed. «That's nothing. I was with a 16- or 17-year-old before prison.»
The two and a half years Limonov spent behind bars earlier in the decade proved a boon to his writing; it was his most prolific time since his days in New York welfare hotels. In prison, he finished eight books — «nearly 2,000 pages,» he said, measuring his output like a Soviet shock worker. The guards left him alone to write. He only had «to push a button and ask to go to work,» he said. Limonov emerged from jail, in the Russian tradition, with a manifesto, «a series of lectures for NBP members»: «Drugaya Rossiya» («the Other Russia»). Kasparov liked the title; it became the name of their coalition. An inchoate wide-ranging treatise, the book calls for a «new civilization,» a collection of «armed communes» to replace the evils of urban Russia and restore the insulted and injured to their rural roots. To reverse Russia's dismal birth rate, polygamy will be permitted, free love encouraged and childbirth required, «like military service for men.» Abortion will be outlawed, and all women, before they reach 35, must have «no fewer than four children for the motherland.» Limonov, however, wants to have it all. «One should not view the new civilization as a leap backward,» he wrote. «The newly civilized shall not wage war against science, against the useful and intelligent achievements of technological progress. Not at all. We will develop the Internet and genetics and HDTV. TV and the Internet will unite the armed communes as one in the unified civilization of free citizens.» The takeover of power, Limonov promised, will not come from an external force, as it did in Afghanistan when the Taliban swept in from refugee camps in Pakistan. «It will come from within.»
Limonov sleeps in three different locales. Lately he'd been sleeping here, in the party office. He does not want his family disturbed. (His first child, a boy named Bogdan — «God-given» — was born to him and Katya on Revolution Day, 2006.) There may be «slozhnosti» — «difficulties,» the Soviet euphemism for trouble with the state. The police were sleeping here, too. He nodded toward the dvor, the courtyard now filled with parked cars. «They sleep in their Zhigulis. Poor guys.»
Limonov spoke of the revolution to come, the need for Russians to cast off the yoke of «Putinism» and liberate themselves from the KGB state. It was a monologue oft rehearsed, but when a dog outside barked loudly, he stumbled. He tried again: running down the list of Nat-Bols who will soon get out of prison and ticking off the schedule for «street actions,» with or without Kasparov, Kasyanov or any other leaders of the deflated opposition. Yet somehow he seemed lost, a performance artist who could not perform.
Edichka, I realized, was drifting. Not just away from the interview, but from Kasparov, the evil Putin, the Nat-Bols, even his newfound familial bliss. A man in a long dark coat entered the courtyard with his back to us. «The Ramones,» Limonov said, watching the figure move amid the cars. «I knew them. Not just Joey. All of them. It was a rich life then. Never knew Warhol but I did see him, more than once, at Tatiana's parties. I always felt inferior. You see, I had a complex of inferiority. Avedon was there, too. And Dali. And Warhol. Capote, too. Tatiana gave «Edichka» to him. Capote read one chapter. He was very enthusiastic. He was. We met only once, on the East Side, when he lived at the U.N. Plaza. Capote always came to Tatiana's. It was always an enormous crowd. Once I stood near Vladimir Kirillovich — the Romanov heir. It was a great time, a legendary time. I have now a certain nostalgia.»
For a moment, Limonov fell quiet, studying the watch in his hands. After a time, he lifted his head sharply and, averting my eyes, looked out to the dvor. The man was still there, whether cop or secret policeman or parking attendant, no one could say. «It's exciting, and dangerous of course, what we're doing now,» he said. «But to have lived in the '70s in New York, it means a lot. Still.»
«The New York Times», March 2, 2008
An article on Page 32 of The Times Magazine this weekend about Edward Limonov, a Russian novelist and political dissident, misspells the name of a city he spent time in during the early '60s. It is Kharkiv, not Kharkov.
Backed by an army of punked-out teens, cult Russian novelist Eduard Limonov dedicated himself to taking on Vladimir Putin. Will death threats and nutty supermodels derail his democratic revolution?
It's 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning in June when I arrive at the home of Russian opposition leader Eduard Limonov. It's shaping up to be another grimy, humid summer day in Moscow. We need to get an early start if we're going to make our flight to St. Petersburg, where Garry Kasparov, the chess legend who recently joined the political fray, and Limonov, Russia's most infamous literary celebrity, are planning to lead a protest against the country's autocratic president, Vladimir Putin. Together the two head up a ragtag coalition of anti-Kremlin parties known as Other Russia.
The last two times Limonov went to St. Petersburg, things got ugly. In April, an Other Russia protest ended with cops attacking throngs of marchers while Putin's paramilitary goons hunted down and detained Limonov and then brutally stomped his bodyguards. Six weeks before that, another anti-Kremlin rally in Russia's «second city» devolved into truncheon thrashings and unlawful arrests. Limonov was taken into custody in an operation that looked like something out of the Peloponnesian War: Black-clad Kremlin shock troops charged in formation into a phalanx of Limonov supporters, mercilessly beating anyone in their path until they reached their target.
Limonov buzzes me into his building. I climb up a couple flights of stairs, and then wait while he looks out at me through the peephole of his black steel door. We've known each other for more than a decade, during which he has been a controversial and high-profile columnist for the English-language alternative newspaper I run in Moscow, the «eXile». I'm no threat, but Limonov is one of the most marked men in Russia today, and if any of his enemies ever decide to whack him, chances are they'll do it right here. A wide array of politicians, journalists, and businessmen have been gunned down while entering or leaving their apartments or offices — including the high-profile cases of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and «Forbes» Russia editor Paul Klebnikov. The only time I've ever seen Limonov betray something like hunted mammalian unease is when he enters the invisible red zone outside his front door — which is why he almost never travels without bodyguards.
He unlocks a series of dead bolts and opens the door. «Come in,» he says, then quickly shuts it behind me. His muscle hasn't arrived yet.
The writer, now 65, is sharp-featured, lean, and energetic. With his flamboyant haircut and Trotsky-like goatee, he looks like an aging Marxist rock star. Since returning to Russia in 1992, after living in exile in France and the United States for nearly two decades, he has been pursuing his lifelong fascination with revolutionary politics. In 1993, he founded the National Bolshevik Party, which encompasses a strange and evolving mixture of nationalism, left-wing economics, punk-rock aesthetics, and a constant desire to shock. Politics has always been a blood sport in Russia, and ever since he started the party, Limonov has lived under threat. He spent two years in jail during Putin's first term in office.
But things didn't get really bad until a little over two years ago, when a gang of youths went after his followers with baseball bats, cracking skulls, ribs, and limbs. Some of the perpetrators later caught by local cops were wearing T-shirts from the Kremlin youth organization Nashi, or «Ours.»
A few of Limonov's more vocal supporters in the Russian provinces have died under mysterious, violent circumstances. Not so long ago, a well-connected friend warned me to stay away from him if I didn't want something bad to happen to me. (I decided to take my chances.)
This year, the writer has received his two most serious death threats to date. One was passed on by a powerful Duma deputy closely tied to the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB and the beast that spawned Putin. The other came from former FSB operative Andrei Lugovoi, Scotland Yard's chief suspect in the high-profile polonium poisoning of Putin foe Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. At a press conference last spring in Moscow, Lugovoi — who, like a Russian O.J., has been basking in his guilty-‘n'-gettin'-away-with-it fame — told reporters, «I think something is being prepared for [Limonov].» Lugovoi then claimed that the murder plot was a clever ruse by exiled billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky, intended to discredit President Putin.
The threat simply added to the general sense in Russia that anyone who opposes Putin should expect to be the target of violence or persecution. At this point the serious competition has been jailed, exiled, or otherwise brought to heel, and Putin's hold on political power appears to be absolute. While he's obliged by Russian law to step down in March after his second term ends, Putin has found a way to circumvent his term limit and retain power. He anointed a successor, Dmitry Medvedev, as his proxy in the country's upcoming presidential elections. Now Putin will slide into the prime minister's chair with Medvedev as his executive puppet. «He clearly will be supreme leader, maybe leader for life,» declared a «Time» editor shortly after the magazine named Putin Person of the Year for 2007. The only glimmer of popular opposition against the increasingly authoritarian regime is a handful of eccentric radicals like Limonov and Kasparov. That they're still around suggests the Kremlin considers them a safer brand of adversary than Berezovsky or Yukos oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly one of the world's richest men, who today sits in a Siberian prison on various charges, including tax evasion.
The Kremlin may be right about Kasparov — after all, the former world chess champion has been relentlessly building a future for himself and his family (including his American-born child) in the United States, where a series of speaking gigs have helped make him the biggest stateside Russian sensation since Mikhail Gorbachev. It's Limonov who is the real wildcard. His organization provides the bodies in the Other Russia coalition. And the last time he was jailed for his political activities, he emerged stronger and more determined than ever in his opposition to Putin.
As we stand in the kitchen and wait for his bodyguards to arrive, Limonov runs through the day's itinerary: He, Kasparov, and their respective entourages are supposed to convene at Mayakovsky Square and then caravan to Sheremetyevo airport to fly to St. Petersburg. The two opposition leaders always try to travel together to rallies so that one or the other isn't individually detained — appearing in tandem at Other Russia events is key to keeping the coalition energized and unified. Everywhere they go, they are trailed by intelligence agents, who no longer even bother to be discreet.
At an opposition protest in the capital last spring, security forces managed to physically separate the two men, which created disarray among the protesters. In the melee, Kasparov was detained and thrown in jail while Limonov slipped away and did an end-run around the police with an all-night drive on back roads, arriving in St. Petersburg in time for the next rally, where he was then also detained. (Unexpectedly, though, having Limonov held in St. Petersburg and Kasparov in Moscow became a major publicity boon for Other Russia.)
«What do you think the authorities have planned for you today?» I ask him as he paces around his modest kitchen. The room is austere and clean, with simple Brezhnev-era furnishings and an old bathtub just a few feet from the stove. A wooden plank laid widthwise across it holds his soap, shampoo, and toothbrush. It seems to reflect not only Limonov's contempt for middle-class consumerism and clutter, but also his Spartan, disciplined mentality, which has kept him focused on his impossible, lifelong dream: to lead a political revolution in Russia. Only a small-minded sucker would waste his money on some built-in IKEA kitchen — junk for «the goat herd,» as Limonov calls the bourgeoisie in an early autobiographical novel, «Memoir of a Russian Punk».
«I have no idea what will happen today,» he replies. «Anyway, I don't give a shit. It's a waste of time trying to guess what the Kremlin has planned for us. We have to worry about our own plans for ourselves.» The very notion that he should expend energy guessing what his Kremlin foes are thinking irritates Limonov on some basic level. It implies subservience. «They may do what they did a few weeks ago, this «soft authoritarianism» bullshit, and not let us go to Petersburg.»
Three weeks earlier, Kasparov, Limonov, their aides, and about a dozen Western journalists, including myself, were detained at Sheremetyevo. We were supposed to fly to Samara for a protest rally, but the woman at the Aeroflot check-in desk claimed that everyone's tickets were possibly counterfeit, so we all had to stick around for questioning. Kasparov pounced on her, relentlessly dissecting her claim. A border guard relieved her, but the poor bastard quickly regretted it: Kasparov was immediately on him, too — something like that face-sucking creature in «Alien». The chess champion scoffed, threw up his hands, and mocked the man. «You're not serious! You can't be! It's shameful, a parody, theater of the absurd! You're breaking the law! Do you realize that you, a law enforcement official, are breaking your own laws? It's just unbelievable!» Kasparov then turned to a captain in Russia's Ministry of the Interior who had joined the fray: «Bring my passport back to me. You have no right! Bring me my passport!»
Limonov, meanwhile, withdrew to the other side of the airport lobby with his bodyguards, where they squatted Central Asian style, looking around with bored and contemptuous expressions. The writer and his crew were dressed in black, while Kasparov wore dowdy blue jeans, a baseball cap, and a tan, Eddie Bauer–style windbreaker. He took a series of cell phone calls from the media and continued his arguments with the authorities, without missing a beat.
«You don't want to bitch everyone out, the way Garry is?» I asked, as Kasparov demanded to see the identification of one of the agents, and then let out a savage laugh.
«You know, I have 13 years' political experience,» Limonov said, smiling. «I don't give a fuck about these schmucks. I don't get so excited about little things as I used to. I'll answer their questions, yes, yes, and then get the hell out of here. This isn't my style.»
We were detained until the last plane for Samara took off, ensuring that Kasparov and Limonov would miss the protest rally. Putin was in Samara that day, hosting German chancellor Angela Merkel. It was supposed to be a routine photo op, but when news hit that the Other Russia leaders had been barred from coming, Merkel went about as ballistic as a dour middle-age German bureaucrat possibly can. At their joint news conference, she scolded Putin: «I can understand if you arrest people throwing stones or threatening the right of the state to enforce order … But it is altogether a different thing if you hold people up on the way to a demonstration.»
Putin didn't fancy being lectured and struck back with a list of countercomplaints, leading the BBC to conclude that Russian–EU relations had «reached a new low.»
The discord was another publicity coup for the opposition. When we finally left the airport, a mob of mostly foreign reporters, television crews, and photographers swarmed Kasparov, while Limonov slipped away with his bodyguards. «Garry has the patience for their idiotic questions, which is good for me,» he said, an inkling of a smile on his face. «Anyway, the Western journalists are mostly afraid of me.»
Before his career in politics forced him to adopt disciplined habits, Limonov led a wild, decadent existence — much of which became the raw material for his early novels and poems. He hung out with rock icons like Marky Ramone and punk legend Richard Hell, and the last three of his four wives have been stars in their own right.
«I think this life he lives now, spending so much time locked inside his apartment or in meetings, causes Limonov some pain,» says Thierry Marignac, a French author who was one of Limonov's closest friends while Limonov was living in exile in Paris in the '80s. «He was very social and he liked partying. He saw himself as a kind of Elvis Presley of poetry.»
Limonov wrote the first sexually explicit, brutally amoral novels that the Russian language had ever seen. His debut effort, «It's Me, Eddie» — which has been compared to the work of Henry Miller by some critics — was banned by the Soviet government but has sold more than a million copies in Russia since it was published there. The book chronicled his breakup with his wife Elena, a fashion model who was also a flamboyant luminary in Moscow's beau monde. They moved to New York in 1975, where she ditched him for an Italian count. Limonov went on welfare, drank prodigiously, and — if his autobiographical novel is to be believed — had sex with anyone he could, sampling the gamut from beautiful young women to scabrous homeless guys. He poured his bitterness against Americans into the book: «I scorn you because you lead dull lives, sell yourselves into the slavery of work, because of your vulgar plaid pants, because you make money and have never seen the world. You're shit!» He also raged against the West's propaganda about its freedoms: «They've got no freedom here, just try to say anything bold at work . . . You're out on your ear.»
Limonov crawled out of obscurity after his novels became celebrated in France in the years that followed. Leveraging his return to fame, he married another larger-than-life Russian model, Natalya Medvedeva, a strikingly tall, sharp-boned woman built like a praying mantis. (If you've seen the cover of the first «Cars» album, then you've seen Natalya Medvedeva; she also posed for «Playboy».) Together, they moved to Paris and had a famously cruel, public relationship, replete with affairs and scandal.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the couple moved home so Limonov could pursue his dream of getting involved in Russian politics. Limonov's vision for his life was something on the order of a modern Lord Byron: a writer who undertakes political projects so grand and strange that they would seem to have sprung from the pages of a novel (or an epic poem, in the case of Byron, who led a rebel army and became a national hero in the Greek War of Independence). But Medvedeva's hard-partying lifestyle didn't jibe with his new ambitions, and they split up in 1994. She hooked up with a famous metal guitarist and later died of an apparent drug overdose, while Limonov began a series of affairs with ever-younger fans of his bad-boy politics and art.
The writer's youthful paramours in those years often shaved their heads as a show of loyalty to the dark prince of Russia's underground. Before he was jailed by Putin in 2001 — convicted on a weapons charge related to a bizarre scheme to raise a private army and invade Kazakhstan — his last girlfriend had been a feral teenage punk named Nastya. She was bald and uncontrollable and enjoyed vandalizing his apartment, which was a source of great amusement to him. But after his release from prison in 2003 transformed Limonov into an opposition icon, he lost interest in adolescent lovers.
In 2006, at age 63, he married his fourth wife, Ekaterina Volkova, then a 31-year-old pinup model and Russian television star who bears a much-noted resemblance to Angelina Jolie. She shaved her head and bore him his first child — a son.
She is now pregnant again, a development that seems to have saved the couple's marriage. «I got sick of everything,» Limonov tells me, recalling a recent fight with Volkova that ended with a short separation. «I threw my vodka glass at her, and it almost hit my mother-in-law in the head. Anyway, a couple of weeks later, I find out that she is pregnant with my second child, so that brought us back together again.»
In late September, the Other Russia coalition holds their national convention in a renovated theater hall in Izmailovsky Park, on Moscow's eastern fringe, to nominate a presidential candidate for the upcoming election. Their choice will stand zero chance of winning, but will be symbolically important in flying the flag of opposition to the Kremlin's increasingly authoritarian rule. Delegates come from all over the country and are an eclectic mix: Kasparov-allied liberal intelligentsia mingling with hardcore nationalists, broke war veterans, and — most of all — droves of Limonov's punk-rock kids. Though Kasparov is eventually named the presidential candidate, he actually has relatively few supporters in the hall. Instead, his nomination comes as the result of an agreement worked out with Limonov, whose followers could swing the vote in any direction.
Kasparov, whose name is far better known in the West than Limonov's, hit international democracy-activist superstardom this year. Not only is he the neocons' Nelson Mandela (the «Wall Street Journal»‘s nutty op-ed page has named him contributing editor), but American liberals love him for his wit and charm, and because he criticized the Bush administration for backtracking on promoting democracy in Russia.
But in reality, Limonov provides most of the organizational force behind Other Russia: His 15,000 or so loyalists consist largely of young artists, intellectuals, skinheads, anarchists, and other outsiders. In the past, the group incorporated fascist and ultranationalist elements into both its platform and presentation, and embraced some questionable allies — one of Limonov's most despicable episodes came during the Balkan conflict when he fired automatic weapons down on the city of Sarajevo from a mountain encampment shared with accused Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic. But the party now hews to a straight leftist political line on most issues, playing down its aggressively nationalistic stances. Putin's cynical use of nationalist rhetoric to manipulate public sentiment was partly responsible for the shift. «We live in a truly despotic regime,» Limonov says. «This government is cruel to the poor and the vulnerable. Its only ideology is nationalism. Our left-wing views are much closer to those of the masses. If we were allowed to operate in a free society, I am sure that we would become the most popular party.»
But what seems to animate Limonov's legions of loyal followers most is his philosophy of «Russian Maximalism»: going for broke to free oneself and one's nation from all forms of oppression. For the young punks, this means raging not only at the Kremlin, but also at the out-of-control consumerism that has taken root in this newly rich nation. You can see their fanatical enthusiasm in their suicidal political stunts, like the time they egged a prime minister while he was voting in an election, or when they took over the Health Ministry office and trashed portraits of Putin until FSB commandos arrived and kicked the shit out of them. Hundreds of them have seen the inside of Russia's jails.
Limonov's opposition to Putin is not new. When Putin took power in late 1999, the writer became one of his earliest and fiercest critics. «We were practically the only group to oppose him from the start,» he says. «Why would I support this KGB schmuck who weaseled his way into power? It was obvious for us, but at the time, many liberals supported him.» Within two years Limonov was in jail and being vilified on state television. The state's case grew out of a series of unbylined articles in Limonov's party newspaper advocating occupation of northern Kazakhstan with a private army to set up an ultranationalist Russian state.
In the summer of 2003, he was unexpectedly paroled, thanks to the intervention of some powerful friends in parliament. Shortly after his release, my mobile phone rang: «Mark! It's Eduard! I'm out of that fucking prison and back in Moscow. So let's meet! It's been a long time!» He was as cheerful as ever and full of fighting energy — as if he hadn't been stuck inside one of Russia's infamous overcrowded, tuberculosis-infested cells for two and a half years. During his incarceration, he had written eight books.
His release was an important moment for Russia's underground opposition. He'd fought the czar and won. The National Bolshevik Party's ranks suddenly swelled with thousands of young followers, across Russia's 11 time zones. To them, Limonov was a real-life «Fight Club» rebel, always ready to put everything on the line. Violence and incarceration seemed only to fuel his sense of purpose.
But this morning, in June, bound for St. Petersburg, everyone is nervous as we climb into a black Volga and head off toward Mayakovsky Square. Limonov is sandwiched between two hefty bodyguards in the backseat, while I ride shotgun. At 7 a.m., we link up with Kasparov and his entourage, who are rolling in expensive white SUVs. The traffic looks bad and the chess champ wonders aloud whether it's a sign — or even a Kremlin plot to make us miss the plane. But there will be nothing like that. This time, I'm the only one detained, while the two leaders of Other Russia are waved onto the airplane with their bodyguards, a film crew from «60 Minutes» trailing behind. (They're working on a profile of Kasparov, which in its final form will not even mention Limonov.) In the end, I'm allowed to join them just minutes before the plane takes off.
The protest in St. Petersburg goes off without incident. When the speeches and chants are finished, there's a palpable sense of letdown. Democracy protests are supposed to lead to evermore dramatic confrontations with authorities — culminating either in martial law or popular revolution. But in Russia's case, the dynamics have already changed too much, and that narrative simply doesn't fit.
Kasparov's rhetoric about a Ronald Reagan–inspired liberal revolution seems downright silly in a nation where Putin enjoys more than 70 percent approval and anti-Americanism and anti-liberalism run deep. His candidacy for president will fall apart in December 2007, when the Kremlin requires that Other Russia hold an officially sanctioned nomination in a large public event hall — an impossible requirement since the owners of every such facility in Moscow are too frightened to rent to the party.
Limonov, by contrast, has always shown his mettle as a political activist by quickly adjusting to real-world circumstances.
Over the course of several conversations in November and December, he describes to me an incredibly audacious and media-savvy scheme to expose Putin and Russia's subordinate parliament. It's the kind of stunt that will make the capillaries in Putin's eyes pop in anger and give a jolt of energy to the opposition movement. But he makes me promise not to disclose any details, fearing what the Kremlin will do to stop him. Kasparov's press spokesperson slips up and gives a hint while her boss is still in jail in November, saying that since Putin's legislature won't pass democratic laws, a united opposition front will pass them instead.
It's not clear if Putin is even aware of this mysterious plan, but — coincidence or not — a new crackdown seems to be underway with the arrival of winter. Shortly before a major Other Russia protest in Moscow on November 24, a 22-year-old activist is bludgeoned to death near his home. Shortly before, he had called another opposition activist from his mobile phone and reported that he was being followed by secret police. At the protest itself, Kasparov is arrested and held for five days. («I wouldn't recommend Russian jails to anyone,» he tells me darkly when I reach him after his release.) Meanwhile, Limonov is the target of a new court order. A criminal case seems to be in the works, alleging that the writer continues to operate the now-banned National Bolsheviks.
I ask Limonov what he thinks the Kremlin's reaction will be when he goes public with this mysterious and provocative new plan. «I don't think they'll be too pleased,» he says, not betraying much emotion. «Maybe they won't kill me, maybe they'll just arrest me. Anyway, we'll find out soon.»
Eduard Limonov was born Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko in Dzerzhinsk in 1943. He originally made his mark as a writer in emigration in New York but after the collapse of the Soviet Union he returned to Russia where he has thrown himself into politics as the leader of the opposition National Bolshevik party. Thus, his life trajectory provides an illustration of at least one writer's frustration with the limits of literature in post-Communist Russia.
Limonov spent his youth in Kharkov where his father was an officer in the local KGB. A rebel all his life, he says that between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one «[I was] a real criminal, breaking into stores and apartments. I stopped only when my close friend Konstantin B. was arrested and sentenced to death.»9 In 1967, he moved to Moscow where he rapidly made a name for himself among unofficial poets and writers. A glance at the poetry from that period published subsequently in emigration indicates just how restrictive the Soviet post-thaw censorship had become, for there is nothing in either form or content that is particularly dissident. Rather, most of his work is quite lyrical and, other than a youthful restlessness and arrogance, lacks any hint of an oppositionist political stance.
Having broken with the shadows of his family
why does he run from his homeland
Why doesn't he just head to the store with a shopping bag
Strolling unhurriedly
A genius among dolts?
But then his soul would fall silent.10
Nevertheless, as he was not willing to let his soul fall silent in the years of Brezhnevian stagnation, Limonov took the opportunity to leave the USSR when it was offered in 1974. He himself, however, has said: «I was never a dissident . . . I never expressed any opposition to the politics of the USSR or against its ideology. I simply struggled for the expansion of artistic freedom.»11
There is some evidence that Limonov expected to be welcomed as a kind of savior in the West, at least if his poem «My — natsionalnyi geroi» (We are the National Hero) published only in 1977 but written earlier, can be taken as evidence of the author's own point of view. Here, Limonov imagines the ecstatic reception that he and his then-wife, the Moscow poet Elena Shchapova, will receive in the West. By 1975, having failed to make much of an impression in the «free world,» Limonov was living in New York, where he developed a deep revulsion to the American way of life. Unlike such dissidents as Solzhenitsyn, however, who walled themselves off from day- to-day life in the United States and whose distaste for American civilization was based more on theoretical than observational grounds, Limonov lived among the poor Russian and other emigres of New York, and he frequently and brilliantly wrote about that life in his pseudo-autobiographical novels and stories.
A polemical essay that Limonov wrote against fellow-immigrant Iosif Brodsky helps to define his position in the West. Brodsky, in Limonov's self-proclaimed non-conformist vision, should be seen as «a charlatan.» Limonov attacks Brodsky's poetry as well as his life style in a series of provocative slaps: More and more his poems recall catalogues . . . He is a poetic bureaucrat, a poetic bookkeeper . . . Brodsky's exile is the imposing, elegant, decadent exile of monied people. Geographically speaking, it encompasses Venice, Rome, and London, it includes museums, churches, and the streets of Europe's capitals, excellent hotels. Of the hundreds of Russian immigrant poets only Brodsky has managed to achieve a lifestyle that allows him to think and travel . . . Brodsky's poetry is destined to be the subject of doctoral dissertations written by conformists in the Slavic departments of American universities.»12
By contrast one could define Limonov's entire literary output during his Western exile as an exercise in non-conformist self-fashioning. A Limonov alter-ego, generally called Edichka, appears as the main character in much of his work, some of which is narrated in the first person, and some in the third. It is impossible and unnecessary to know whether all the descriptions in the novels and stories are in fact autobiographical, but there is no question that readers are meant to see the whole package as a portrait of the artist as the hero of an on-going story. That is, Limonov's central topic is the creation of himself as a larger than life hero. His self-image is that of an iconoclast, a rebel with or without a cause, and a misunderstood genius. In the Soviet Union, that hero could be an anti-establishment bohemian. In the United States he was an individualistic Russian who refused to succumb to the blandishments of Western-style capitalism. Until the beginning of the 1990s, readers could easily imagine that this was merely Limonov's literary persona, and that some other Limonov could conceivably be hiding behind it. However, events of the past decade would seem to indicate that Limonov took this posing seriously.
Limonov achieved lasting notoriety among Russian readers with the publication of his pseudo-autobiography «It's Me, Eddie» (Eto ia, Edichka) in New York in 1979. The book opens with a stunning scene describing a half-naked Edichka sitting on the balcony of his cheap long-term sixteenthfloor hotel room in Manhattan cooking cabbage soup, and musing on himself and his own unrecognized genius, the venality and stupidity of Americans, and the disappointment of a Russian emigre (and through him of all Russian emigres) with American life. The tone is raw, the language a brilliant idiolect of Americanized Russian, and the book seems precisely designed to be as scandalous as possible. Russian emigre readers were horrified by its negativity and ingratitude toward the United States, its frank portrayal of the narrator's/author's bisexuality, and the implication that in escaping the USSR they had merely exchanged one form of exploitation for another. Limonov's raw hatred of those who have made it (in the Soviet, American, or post-Soviet Russian establishment) characterizes his life and work, and helps to explain the extreme political position he would eventually espouse in post-Soviet Russia.
Limonov's literary career continued with a string of novels and stories, two set in his native Ukraine (including his masterpiece «Adolescent Savenko», 1983 (Podrostok Savenko), and others set in the United States and Europe. A few were translated into English, but perhaps not surprisingly given his negative view of the United States, he never became as well known as some other emigre novelists. He did, however, make an impact in France, where he became a citizen in 1987 and began to spend the majority of his time in Europe. After the collapse of the USSR, however, Limonov became more and more active in the political life of post-Communist Russia.
As was the case with «Eddie», what is most striking in the Kharkov-based autobiographical novels is the extravagant, epic, and theatrical nature of the self that Limonov projects. Limonov's persona is Mayakovskian in his grandeur and conceit. What is important, what is foregrounded is the transgressive, and this is flouted as publicly as possible. As Patricia Carden noted in an insightful essay on Limonov's Kharkov novels, «At fifteen he prides himself that «he has fucked them all over,» that he has established his specialness and his dominance.»13
Limonov's motivations for turning from literary work to politics are worth considering. His own public view, as expressed in interviews, is that the switch was not surprising. Political work is the natural continuation of what I did when I was a writer. The writing of pamphlets and revolutionary articles provides just as much passionate pleasure as I once got writing poetry. Then and now I serve Russia. Don't forget, my first book of poems was called «Russianness.»14 His claim, then, is that in the days of the Soviet Union the best way to serve his country was as a writer of literature, but in conditions of post-communism direct political action is more necessary and appropriate. Less sympathetic observers agree that Limonov's post-Soviet political adventure is in a sense a natural continuation of his earlier work, but they view the work in progress in more personal and less altruistic terms. Thus, Evgeny Bunimovich, Moscow Duma deputy and poet said in a 1999 interview: Limonov is connected not to the creation of a Russian national idea, but to the creation of a personal literary myth.15 An even more cynical observer might suspect that, given the falling visibility of literature in post-Communist times, the switch to politics was motivated first and foremost by Limonov's ongoing desire to be in the public eye, to be a hero, and to shock. This desire, one might guess, was one of the motivations for taking up the most extreme positions he could find, regardless of whether they had the support of a significant portion of the population. The uncalculating nature of Limonov's politics can be gauged by his abject failure at the ballot box, where, for example, he received exactly 1.84 percent of the votes cast for a seat in the State Duma in the 1995 elections.
It took a while for Limonov to find his place in political life. Rather than beginning immediately, he edged into politics through journalism. As he puts it in his 2002 «political biography the goal of his immediate post-Soviet articles was to explain to my countrymen that they were insane and that they should stop the insanity. That European prosperity had been achieved gradually, over hundreds of years, at the cost of the pitiless exploitation of colonies. That projects like «Five Hundred Days» were completely unrealistic.»16 At the same time he began to travel to Russia and renewed his Russian citizenship in 1992. From the beginning, he sided with Russian nationalist political forces, at first joining Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) where for a time he was announced as a member of its shadow cabinet. Quite quickly, however, he fell out with Zhirinovsky and attempted to form his own party. He burnished his credentials as a defender of Russia's historical interests by traveling to the former Yugoslavia where he had himself photographed with Bosnian Serb forces in a variety of warlike poses.
In 1994, after returning once again to Russia, he became one of the founders of the National Bolshevik Party. The party's program, couched in highly inflammatory rhetoric, can be characterized as communitarian, conservative, authoritarian, and nationalist, a mix of fascist and Communist ideologies. The preamble announces that «the basis of national-bolshevism is a fiery hatred to the anti-human trinity of liberalism / democracy / capitalism,» and it promises to «construct a traditional, hierarchical society.»17 This will be realized in an empire that stretches from Vladivostok to Gibraltar on the foundation of Russian civilization. The party s economic policy is one of strict economic autarchy Within the country the NBP promises to realize the Soviet ideals of collective ownership of all the major means of production, along with guaranteed minimum living standards.
Limonov's own heroes are a curious amalgam of Russian conservatives like Konstantin Leontiev, anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin, and leftists such as Lenin. Describing the men and women who joined the party, Limonov writes: You are young. You are disgusted by the Russia of priests, moneybags, and the KGB. You experience a feeling of protest, your heroes are Che, or Mussolini, or Lenin, or Baader, or even Timothy McVeigh (he got his revenge on the system!), you are a nats-bol.»18 The only trace of the irony and humor that once characterized Limonov's literary work is the National Bolshevik Party symbol, an apparently about-to-explode grenade of a type called «Limonka» (little lemon) in Russian, which is simultaneously a play on the author's literary pseudonym.
When Limonov first entered politics, it is safe to say that many saw his engagement as a kind of stunt, the actions of a publicity-seeking writer who could no longer attract attention through his literary work. Limonov's fate since Vladimir Putin took over as President of Russia indicates that, whatever his initial motivations, he has come to take himself seriously, at least if a willingness to suffer for the cause can be understood as seriousness of purpose. Limonov and his Party had already run into a certain amount of legal hot water during the later years of Yeltsin's presidential term. Thus, in 1996 his newspaper was accused of fanning hatred against various nations, which is a crime in Russia. Much more serious, however, were the accusations brought against Limonov in October, 2001, when he was arrested and accused of «organizing an illegal armed formation.» On February 3, 2003 (the wheels of justice in Russia turn slowly), in Saratov district court, Limonov was found guilty of most of the charges brought against him and the state prosecutor recommended a fourteen-year prison sentence for the writer turned politician. According to the «RFE/RL Newsline», in a subsequent interview with a Saratov television station, «Limonov said that he is being prosecuted in the same way as the nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Chernyshevskii. «After Soviet power, after seventy years of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we see that our valiant special services have turned to the methods of 140 years ago and the time of Chernyshevskii.»»19 Perhaps Limonov's invocation of the famous Russian radical novelist and literary critic is an indication that he will eventually return to literature. Whether or not he chooses that path, he has certainly come to understand that one difference between literature and politics is that powerful enemies in the latter sphere have far more power than those of the former. Limonov's life story, then, illustrates the high risks of attempting to transpose a literary mode of being directly into a political, and his fate indicates that farce can indeed turn into tragedy.20
16 Limonov, «Moia politicheskaia biografia», 19. The «five hundred days' project» was touted by the early shock therapy economists as a quick fix for the economic problems of the country.
Marc Bennetts meets Eduard Limonov, the 1970s New York punk, incendiary novelist and possible future leader of Russia.
I first became aware of Eduard Limonov, modern Russia's most uncompromising writer and politician, during an extended visit to Moscow in the mid-1990s. Back then he was the firebrand head of the National Bolshevik Party, a direct-action movement that sought to fuse the ultra-left and the ultra-right in opposition to the catastrophic reign of President Boris Yeltsin. Addressed by his young, streetwise followers as «vozhd», or «leader» — the term used by Stalinists for Uncle Joe — his party's instantly recognisable flag was an explosive mix of Nazi and communist imagery.
The National Bolshevik Party was outlawed in 2007 after a series of spectacular political stunts, including the seizure of the Kremlin's reception office. Limonov, who turned 67 this spring, is today one of the leaders of the country's tiny opposition movement, part of an uneasy, on-off alliance with a handful of liberal reformers and veteran human-rights activists. He also plans to run for the presidency in 2012, when Vladimir Putin is widely expected to seek a third term.
I meet the taciturn youth who will take me to see Limonov at the entrance to one of Moscow's many branches of Mothercare. It's an incongruous start to our meeting, but for a man who embodies much of the chaos and contradictions of his post-Soviet homeland, it somehow seems apt.
Limonov opens the door to the sparsely decorated apartment he uses as a base and ushers me through the corridor into a white-walled room. With his glasses, greying moustache and goatee, he resembles no one so much as Leon Trotsky. In keeping with the «dress code for the future» he outlined in one of his more than 40 books, he is clad in black from head to toe.
My notebook contains a sprawling list of questions (I forced myself to stop after the sixth page), but I am unsure where to start. Limonov has, quite simply, seen it all.
An avant-garde poet forced out of the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s after refusing to inform for the KGB, Limonov ended up in New York, where he hung out with the Ramones and Richard Hell & the Voidoids at the legendary CBGB punk club. «In New York I found the same kind of people — non-conformists, painters, poets, crazy underground musicians — that I had left in Moscow. I even wore Richard Hell's ripped T-shirt for a long time,» he recalls, when I ask him about his punk past. «I still listen to that music, of course. Everyone likes to hear the music of their youth.»
But he laughs away the suggestion that punk has influenced his confrontational political philosophies and strategies. «I am wiser now, I have matured — and anyway, how can one be a punk after 60? That would be silly.»
It was during his stay in the States that he penned It's Me, Eddie, the fictional memoir of deviant immigrant life that would earn him international acclaim. Not to mention everlasting notoriety at home for its depictions of gay sex with a homeless black man, an unthinkable thing for a Soviet writer to have written. A massive success in Europe, Limonov eventually moved to France, where he was granted citizenship in 1987.
He returned to Russia shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union and has been getting into or causing trouble ever since. In 2001, he was jailed for four years on weapons charges after being initially accused of organising an armed uprising among the Russian-speaking population of eastern Kazakhstan. The evidence against him — the testimony of two youths caught buying guns in central Russia — was widely viewed as flimsy, but there was little international coverage of the trial. Limonov's politics were simply too extreme to allow his case to become a cause célèbre.
«I was a non-conformist from birth,» Limonov shrugs. He insists on speaking English throughout the interview, only switching to Russian when he wants to be absolutely sure he has got his point across, and litters his speech liberally with his favourite oaths — «fuck» and «Jesus Christ».
Limonov may insist that his pogo-ing days are far behind him, but when I ask him if he believes he has a real chance of becoming president there is something distinctly punk rock about his answer. «I have a chance to become a conflict,» he tells me, staring out at the impressively urban south Moscow skyline.
The authorities here have a habit of refusing to register inconvenient candidates for polls, usually citing «technicalities». But Limonov is not fazed — in fact I get the impression he is looking forward to the upcoming struggle.
«Right now, if you look at the situation, I have no chance,» Limonov admits. «But if we apply some pressure, this will change. We aim to create a great upheaval in society.»
Limonov's latest «pressure» involves a battle of attrition with the Russian authorities over the freedom of assembly, a right enshrined in article 31 of the country's constitution. Accordingly, earlier this year he and his opposition allies began organising unsanctioned demonstrations at central Moscow's Triumfalnaya Square on the 31st day of every month that has one. The Kremlin is ever wary of expressions of dissent, and the tiny rallies were invariably dispersed by riot police, with many of the demonstrators receiving, in line with Putin's recommendation, «a whack around the head with a baton».
But amid the fallout of long-serving Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov's dismissal, the protests were unexpectedly given the green light in late October. «We are stubborn, and they are embarrassed,» Limonov says of the U-turn. «In modern Russian history there is no such example of this sort of persistence and continued strikes in the same place… The authorities are very, very nervous.»
Typically, he will later refuse to attend the first official protest, organising an illegal rally nearby. Riot police make repeated attempts to drag him to a waiting van, but the youths who act as his bodyguards do their job well and the two demonstrations eventually merge.
But Limonov has been accused by his many critics of sacrificing his young supporters, of encouraging them to commit acts of resistance that, while serving to maintain his high-profile image, see them end up behind bars. Or worse. Limonov himself claims that nine of his followers have been killed by the security forces in recent years. «I can prove it in a fair trial,» he says.
He visibly bristles when I suggest that the human cost of political change in his homeland is too high. After all, by his own admission, the situation in Russia is «bearable».
«You can't change the world without losing some of the buttons on your jacket,» he tells me. «These young people, they are sane, and they know what they are doing. They are strong, and ruled by passion. Prison is nothing in comparison with the freedom of the country.»
Limonov speaks a lot about «freedom», and I can't help but point out that his words are at odds with much of his earlier writing and actions. As an example, just one of many, I mention an extract from his 2003 book The Other Russia, a series of essays for his followers subtitled Outlines for the Future. In it, he proposes solving Russia's demographic crisis by forcing «every woman between 25 and 35 to have four children». The children would then be taken away from their parents when they begin to walk, and educated in a House of Childhood.
«Boys and girls will be taught to shoot from grenade launchers, to jump from helicopters, to besiege villages and cities, to skin sheep and pigs, to cook good hot food and to write poetry,» he wrote, adding ominously: «Many types of people will have to disappear.»
«Fuck,» Limonov replies. «I even forgot I wrote that. This book was written while I was waiting to be sentenced on the Kazakhstan charges. I was already 60 and I was looking at 15 years behind bars. I didn't think I would be able to make it — so these are lectures, some ideas to my supporters.
«I feel free to use dreams and thinking in my work,» he goes on. «I may be as wrong as hell, but if so, I'll say, «OK, don't do it.» It's a different genre from my politics… It's not dogma.»
It's true that while Limonov's election pledges are radical, there is no mention of the House of Childhood or forcing women to give birth. Instead, he promises to introduce the concept of the «professional» mother, with the state picking up the bill. «It's unheard of,» he writes. «But people will get used to it.»
One of the great mysteries for Russia-watchers in recent years is Limonov's political alliance with chess grandmaster and pro-western liberal Garry Kasparov. It is difficult to imagine two politicians more diametrically opposed, and I ask the former head of the National Bolsheviks what draws them together.
«He has his charms and his qualities,» Limonov says, choosing his words carefully. «I need him. But he also has his weak points, like a lack of experience. He is also not a team player. That probably comes from his days as a chess champion. I always try to keep myself separate from Kasparov when he is being strongly pro-American. I leave the press conferences. I want to look pure for my people; I don't even want the shadow of the west to fall upon me.
«Westerners are not our enemies,» he continues, «but I have no reason to look for support from them. If, for example, the US president or even a senator said they supported Limonov at the elections, this would damage me so much. So please, fuck, don't do it!»
Inspired, Limonov launches into an anti-west diatribe. It is the most animated he has been during the interview.
«Europeans are so timid they remind me of sick and elderly people,» he begins. «And Europe is like one big old people's home. There is so much political correctness and conformity there that you can't open your mouth. It's worse than prison. That's why there is no culture in the west anymore. Just dying screams.
«In Russia, fortunately, the people still have some barbarian spirit. But Europeans and Americans are just dying, sick invalids.» He looks across the table at me for a reaction. I sympathise with what he is saying: while life in Russia may not be easy, it is, at least, never dull. But something stops me agreeing with him, and instead I voice an ironic, «Thanks.»
«That's how it is!» Limonov laughs. «That's the reality! They want to dominate the world with their high-tech military devices, but there is no individual collective might and spirit. Look what they did to Iraq, they come with their fucking boots and…» he shakes his head in exasperation. «It's criminal negligence at the very least.»
Limonov's dislike of the west is mutual. He has been persona non grata in western literary circles since he was filmed shooting a machine gun into a besieged Sarajevo in the company of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. The incident, captured by Bafta award-winning director Pawel Pawlikowski in his Serbian Epics documentary and shown at Karadzic's trial at the Hague, cost Limonov publishing contracts in both Europe and the US.
But he reacts furiously when I bring up the issue.
«That schmuck,» he says. «I was shooting at a firing range, and that guy put in an extra frame to make it look like I was firing at buildings. I've been saying this for 15 years.»
I'm unsure of how to react to this, as well as to his assertion that he was «always a freelance journalist» during the conflict in Bosnia. I later dig up an extract from his 2001 Book of the Dead where he appears to admit — the sentence is ambiguously phrased — spraying the city with machine-gun fire. I then come across an article where he explicitly states that he «fought» in Bosnia from «February to May 1993». I send him the quotes and call later for a comment. He is beside himself with rage and barks down the phone that he regrets having had anything to do with me. «It wouldn't have been a Limonov interview without a bit of shouting,» a fellow journalist comments.
It is an odd incident. Limonov claims not to «give a shit» about his image in the west. But could it be that his earlier writings, designed to embellish and boost his public profile at home, have begun to get in the way of his policy of, as he puts it, «winning the hearts of the liberals»?
Many of the things he says during the interview are in stark comparison to his previous statements. His comment that he respects Islam and believes the people of the country's troubled North Caucasus region should be «free to practise even Sharia law if they want» are, for example, difficult to reconcile with his 1990s declaration that «it is a pity that Stalin didn't go all the way» with his oppression of the Chechen nation. Even if the National Bolshevik Party did renounce all forms of xenophobia in a 2000 statement that resulted in disaffected members splitting off to form a rival movement, the remark has and will continue to haunt him.
Or is Limonov, as an artist drawn irresistibly to provocation and shock tactics, simply gloriously misunderstood? Mark Ames, the editor of the English-language Moscow-based paper the Exile which Limonov wrote for until it was forced to close down in 2008, has drawn a comparison between his former columnist and Lou Reed, «the Jew from Long Island who carved a giant iron cross in his skull and strutted around stage in a black leather uniform singing «Kill Your Sons». Sex Pistol-era Johnny Rotten's use of the swastika to unnerve middle England also springs to mind, but neither musician has yet to enter politics. And both would undoubtedly be grilled on their choice of imagery if they ever did.
«You have too square a view of me,» Limonov says at one point, refusing to draw a line between his work as an experimental writer and his political career.
I wonder, as our interview draws to a close, if his enmity towards his arch-nemesis Putin is personal, as well as political. For the author of a book entitled Limonov versus Putin, the question seems a fair one.
«No,» Limonov replies, dismissing the thought with a wave of the hand. «To dislike someone you have to know them. I've never met him. Don't let all this talk of his KGB past impress you,» he goes on. «His sinister, macabre image is so exaggerated. He was a minor official, that's all. He's a very dull, very square man. Still he's not as boring as [President Dmitry] Medvedev,» he says, warming to his theme. «You know, the most exciting thing Medvedev has done in his life — and it's so significant for him that it's even highlighted on the official presidential website — is to go and help harvest potatoes when he was a student in Soviet times. Can you imagine such a guy?» he laughs, unable to contemplate such a strait-laced approach to life.
As I leave, I'm still not sure what to make of Limonov. As an artist and politician, he is certainly unique and complex. There is one thing I am certain of — he is a very Russian phenomenon, a reflection of the breathtaking intensity that distinguishes life here. And, just like his homeland, it is his contradictions that make him so vital.
I had a typical first experience with famed Russian emigre-turned auteur-turned neo-fascist revolutionary Edward Limonov: I misunderstood him.
Everybody misunderstands Edward at least once. Usually, they underestimate this slight, bearded man with the mild manners.
I knew him in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he wrote a column for «the eXile», a punk/anarchist English-language paper Mark Ames and I edited in Moscow. (He'd been brought in by Ames, who was a fan.) Edward back then was the chief of an aesthetically cool but literarily tedious revolutionary rag called «Limonka».
He was also the would-be leader of a would-be rightist revolutionary group called the National-Bolsheviki. His few hundred bomber-jacketed followers were known as the «Nats-Bols,» which they gleefully pronounced «Nuts-Balls.»
I had Edward figured wrong. I thought he was a clown-memoirist who was using real-world stunts to capture the attention of the literary community. But he ended up doing real time for his revolutionary "acts," which included a real takeover of a military base in Latvia using fake grenades (called, appropriately, "Limonki" in Russian). What was he up to? You could never tell with Edward.
Some of his books, like the stunning diary of his poverty-stricken youth in Ukraine, «Podrostok Savenko» («Diary of a Russian Punk»), are full of gorgeously raw, painful, true writing that he clearly suffered over. Other books he just flat-out mailed in. And in the same way, sometimes he really was a revolutionary, and sometimes he appeared to be playing at it — it was hard to tell.
All of these thoughts came rushing back when I read the new biography of Edward, «Limonov», by French author and filmmaker Emmanuel Carrere, translated by John Lambert.
It's a sweeping account of Edward's unmistakably epic life, from the cruelty and poverty of his youth in Ukraine, to his conquest of the Western literary scene as an emigre writer in the 1980s, and finally to his return to Russia first as the most minor of rightist revolutionaries, then as a prisoner (locked up in the worst Russian prisons for faux-fomenting real revolution, or really fomenting faux revolution — it's hard to explain). The last chapter involves his bizarre re-emergence as a mainstream political figure, playing at being a respectable supporter of peaceful change.
Carrere begins by being dazzled by the Limonov of the '80s, a self-styled punk writer who called Johnny Rotten a hero and «didn't think twice about calling Solzhenitsyn an old fart.»
He ends up puzzled to see the punk hero sharing a stage with chess champion Garry Kasparov as a titular leader of «Drugaya Rossiya» (Another Russia), a polite, socially acceptable, Orange Revolution-style mainstream movement that the rhetorically bomb-tossing Edward of the '90s would have dismissed as a pathetic bourgeois affectation.
Carrere wonders: What could Limonov be thinking? «Does it amuse him,» he writes, «the outlaw, the mad dog, to play the virtuous Democrat?» He spends the rest of the book trying to answer the question: Is this last part the act? Or was it the earlier part?
Carrere struggles with that theme throughout, and in the end toys with a horrifying surprise conclusion: Limonov is above all else a failure. "Edik" played his cards dramatically right at times (his truly steely, heroic endurance of Russian prison life made even his harshest critics take note), and very wrong at others. (Fighting and presumably killing with the Serbs in their ethnic massacres of the '90s? Really?)
But in the end, Limonov did not take over Russia. He became neither the next Lenin (his '90s ambition) nor the next Vaclav Havel (his 21st-century ambition), but is instead living out his days in his ultimate version of hell, if one goes by the punked-out ethos of his early books: approaching his senior years as a respectable quasi-celebrity and defender of virtue, sustained by the comforts of — of all things — family (well, his two children).
Edward Limonov is one of the most amazing people on Earth, the author of a few truly great books, a man who has lived a fuller life than any 10 of your most interesting friends combined. That would be more than enough, for someone who was only out to do just that. But for someone who sincerely wanted to rule over hundreds of millions, change the very lines on the map of the world, perhaps die gloriously in battle, and take a seat next to Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky upon his death — not so much.
Deep down, what does Edward want? We'll never know, and Carrere doesn't pretend to, either. Which makes his book as fascinating as its subject.
Just as Emmanuel Carrère's earlier book «The Adversary» was an «In Cold Blood»-style «nonfiction novel» about a man who murders his wife, children and parents, so his latest, «Limonov,» might be called a novelized biography. While tracking the amazing, improbable life of Ukrainian writer, adventurer and would-be revolutionary Eduard Limonov, the book interweaves a social and political history of post-Stalinist Russia, chunks of Carrère's autobiography and a hodgepodge of reflections on art, sex, ambition, the punk aesthetic, fascism, mysticism and old age.
Because Carrère — celebrated in France as a journalist, screenwriter and novelist — possesses such an intimately engaging narrative voice, «Limonov» feels almost nonchalant yet is, in fact, quite artfully orchestrated and completely riveting. The first sentence of John Lambert's superb English translation immediately hooks the reader: «Until Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her elevator on October 7, 2006, only those who had been closely watching the Chechen wars knew the name of this courageous journalist and declared opponent of Vladimir Putin's politics.»
Asked to write a magazine piece about Politkovskaya's life, Carrère first visits the opposition newspaper where she worked, and in one sentence he captures its forlorn hopelessness: «The offices were tiny, poorly lit, and equipped with old computers.» A few days later, he attends the annual memorial service for those who died during the 2002 terrorist siege of the Dubrovka Theater. In the crowd, writes Carrère, «I recognized Limonov.»
At that time, Limonov was the leader of the National Bolshevik Party, whose skinhead members marched to reactionary slogans like «Stalin! Beria! Gulag!» A few years earlier, Limonov had supported the brutal Serbs in their war against the equally brutal Croats and Bosnians. He'd also spent time in Russian prisons for alleged terrorist activities. Nonetheless, Limonov's books, such as «Diary of a Loser,» were bestsellers, and his sexy young wife was the star of a Russian soap opera. Still vigorous and energetic in his late 60s, with a steel-trap memory, a wispy goatee and a hard, muscular frame, he resembled the rare-book scout played by Johnny Depp in «The Ninth Gate.» Or Trotsky.
But, as Carrère tells us, the arch-nationalist Limonov had had many other lives before that of «fighter and professional revolutionary.» The son of a low-ranking officer in the secret police, he was born in 1943 and grew up in the town of Kharkov yearning to be famous. Early on, the boy concluded that «there are two kinds of people, those you can hit and those you can't — not because they're stronger or better trained, but because they're ready to kill. That's the secret, the only one.» As Carrère writes: «He will become someone you don't hit because you know he can kill.»
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Nonetheless, there's more to young Eddie than ruthlessness, iron self-control and an ability to down vast amounts of vodka. For instance, he composes prize-winning poetry, dresses like a mod dandy and, to pay the bills, works as a talented, self-taught tailor. When he moves to Moscow in 1967, however, Limonov meets a «lanky twenty-year-old brunette dressed in a leather miniskirt.» The gorgeous Tanya beds him, but she shares her favors with other men, and so one night — crazed with jealousy and Russian despair — Limonov slits his wrists on her doorstep. Naturally, Tanya is deeply impressed by this gesture, and the pair soon marry, becoming the Scott and Zelda of the Soviet glam scene of the 1970s.
Still, Limonov the writer resents all the attention paid to poet Joseph Brodsky and novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. As Carrère remarks, «the only living legend that interests him is himself.» When an opportunity arises to emigrate to the West, the handsome couple seize it, and in 1975 arrive in New York.
For a while, they are feted and petted by the local Russophiles, notably Alexander Liberman, artistic director of Conde Nast, and his wife, Tatiana. But soon Limonov is working for a depressing Russian-language newspaper, and Tanya is just another failed would-be model — as well as the plaything of a photographer heavily into sadomasochism. One day Limonov comes back to their apartment, and his beautiful wife is gone.
Broken-hearted, the youthful-looking 33-year-old decides to give up women in favor of men. He has sex with vagrants in parks, lives in a squalid hotel and spends his days working on «It's Me, Eddie,» the first in a series of autobiographical books. No American publisher wants it.
Following this gay interlude, Limonov next becomes the lover of a housemaid and, after a while, her rich employer's butler. As it happens, he turns out to be the perfect servant — trustworthy, obsequious and polite. But as he later reveals in «His Butler's Story,» when left alone, he would drink his boss's best champagne and bring in hookers for romps in the master bedroom. Then, unexpectedly, everything changes again: «It's Me, Eddie» is published in France under the provocative title «The Russian Poet Prefers Big Blacks.» Limonov moves to Paris, where he finds himself an acclaimed writer, a minor celebrity.
At this point, Carrère opens up about his own privileged and often unhappy youth. Compared with Limonov, «I felt that I was made of dull and mediocre stuff, and that I was doomed in this world to play the role of a walk-on, and a bitter, envious walk-on at that.» Fortunately, Carrère eventually recognizes, in the words of a Buddhist sutra, that «a man who judges himself superior, inferior, or even equal to another does not understand reality.»
Unlike most of the Western world, the Paris-based Limonov doesn't welcome perestroika. Why? Because it implies that 70 years of Russian history were nothing but a mistake and a nightmare, thus denigrating the millions of ordinary people who worked and sacrificed for a noble idea. Still, Limonov's writing does become available in the Soviet Union. As result, when stopping in Belgrade on a book tour in the late 1980s, the celebrated author is invited to visit the recently liberated — that is, demolished — city of Vukovar. Like Gabriele D'Annunzio, T.E. Lawrence and other writers, Limonov is thrilled by this glimpse of war; Soon he throws himself into the Serbian cause, much to the consternation of his Parisian friends. The Johnny Rotten of Russian literature appears to have joined the fascist thugs. But, to use one of Carrère's catch phrases, «Things are more complicated than they seem.»
After moving back to Russia permanently in the 1990s, Limonov reinvents himself once more, this time as a leading ultra-nationalist. He even publishes an incendiary newspaper called Limonka, «The Grenade.» But in the wide-open Wild West Russia of those Yeltsin years, Limonov and his National Bolshevik Party are no match for the ruthless multibillionaires who now pull the strings. For a while, however, freedom thrives despite political and financial chaos — until a former taxi driver named Vladimir Putin comes to power.
One man in his time plays many parts, and Eduard Limonov — now in his 70s — isn't off the stage yet. Whatever you think of his actions and beliefs, Limonov has lived faithfully by the rule of «no hypocrisy, no embarrassment, no excuses.» It's been a spectacular roller coaster life, and Emmanuel Carrère has turned it into an equally spectacular book.
Emmanuel Carrère, one of the best known and most inventive French writers, has found a perfect subject in Edward Limonov, the self-described Johnny Rotten of Soviet dissident writers. The result is a picaresque gonzo biography, «Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia.»
Emmanuel Carrère, known for nuanced portrayals of troubled men, has profiled Edward Limonov.
In «Limonov,» published last week in the United States, Mr. Carrère focuses his distinctive blend of reportage, memoir and fiction, and his affinity for the big questions, on this uncategorizable Russian: at once a rebel and a totalitarian, a salacious writer of semifictionalized memoirs who, after years in the West, stood with the Serbs in the Bosnian war and then returned to Russia to become an ultranationalist political agitator.
Mr. Carrère, whose mother's family is Russian, said he saw in Mr. Limonov something emblematic about the post-Soviet world. The two met in Paris in the early 1980s, and Mr. Carrère rekindled the acquaintance in 2008, spending two weeks with Mr. Limonov in Moscow when he was trying, unsuccessfully, to get his National Bolshevik Party, made up of people ranging from ultranationalist skinheads to countercultural misfits, into Parliament.
«After two weeks, I knew even less than before what I thought about him — first, if I liked him or disliked him, and if I thought he was quite a good guy or a villain,» Mr. Carrère, 56, said in a recent conversation in his minimalist apartment here. «It made the story far more interesting.»
The book opens with a citation from Russian President Vladimir V. Putin: «Whoever wants the Soviet Union back has no brain. Whoever doesn't miss it has no heart.» That complex nostalgia is a central theme in «Limonov,» as is the interplay between radicalism and revanchism; the lure, even among the creative class, of fascism; and the naïveté of the Western intelligentsia to think that history, or at least nationalism, would end after the Cold War.
Known for his nuanced portrayals of troubled men, Mr. Carrère has a résumé that includes novels, memoirs, a true-crime story and a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. In France, «he is pretty universally celebrated, and his books always get front-page treatment,» said Jean Birnbaum, editor in chief of Le Monde's book supplement. «But, on the other hand, he doesn't really belong in the literary establishment,» perhaps because his books are considered too journalistic, Mr. Birnbaum added.
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in a crackling translation by John Lambert, «Limonov» is written in a galloping third person and based largely on Mr. Limonov's semifictionalized memoirs. After all, how would Mr. Carrère know what went through Mr. Limonov's mind when he was making love to one of his troubled wives or many girlfriends? Or that he had a kind of nirvana experience while in prison?
«I made no fact-checking,» Mr. Carrère said. «If I am wrong, I don't care. I know, it's not very American.»
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Mr. Limonov, now 71, was born Edward Savenko in a Ukrainian backwater, the son of a low-level official in the secret service. He changed his name to Limonov as «a tribute to his acidic and bellicose humor, because «limon» means lemon, and «limonka» is slang for a kind of hand grenade,» Mr. Carrère writes. After stints as a menial laborer and petty thug, he turned to poetry writing. In 1974 he defected from Moscow to New York, where he lived in fleabag hotels and eventually worked as a butler to a multimillionaire, the subject of «His Butler's Story,» a fictionalized memoir published by Grove Press in 1987.
Unlike Joseph Brodsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, respectable dissident poets whom Mr. Limonov envied and despised, he lived a New York life full of drugs, violence, sex with women and, in one phase, with black men he met in city parks. (Decades later, he would try to hide this chapter from the ultranationalists in his cohort.)
Mr. Limonov arrived in France in 1980, riding on the success of «It's Me, Eddie,» a fictionalized memoir about his life in New York, translated into French as «The Russian Poet Prefers Big Blacks.» Mr. Carrère found a copy in the Paris home of his mother, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, an esteemed historian of Russia whose 1978 book, «The Decline of Empire,» predicted the end of the Soviet Union. Mr. Carrère wrote about his mother's family in «My Life as a Russian Novel» (2010), in which he revealed that his maternal grandfather, a White Russian, had worked as a translator for the Germans during World War II, and was probably executed as a collaborator.
Mr. Carrère was drawn to Mr. Limonov's paradoxes and his prose. «What he's got in his head is ghastly, but you've got to admire the honesty with which he unloads it: resentment, envy, class hatred, sadistic fantasies, but no hypocrisy, no embarrassment, no excuses,» he writes.
He interviewed Mr. Limonov for a magazine. They fell out of touch. Then came the war in Bosnia. Mr. Limonov, attracted, as always, by adventure and the idea that neutrality is akin to cowardice, went to Croatia and supported the Serb side, «which was the most terrible thing that we could imagine,» Mr. Carrère said.
He set the book aside for a year and nearly dropped it after watching «Serbian Epics,» a 1992 BBC documentary that shows Mr. Limonov shooting rounds of a machine gun into Sarajevo with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who is now on trial for war crimes. «It's not only that I disapprove,» Mr. Carrère said, «it's morally and politically that he's ridiculous.»
Under Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Limonov returned to Russia. «He was convinced that Perestroika was a disaster,» Mr. Carrère said. Mr. Limonov started his National Bolshevik Party, whose platform was hazy, violent and nostalgic, and the government banned the group. From 2001 to 2003, he was jailed on charges of terrorism and participating in an illegal armed group, an essential chapter, Mr. Carrère writes, for a man who considers himself a romantic antihero, and a period when he wrote mystical books.
Some critics have found «Limonov» too flattering a portrait, though Mr. Carrère says he finds Mr. Limonov's politics unpalatable. «We are not on the same side of the barricades,» he said, adding that Mr. Limonov told him, «If I were in power, I would send you to the gulag.»
Mr. Limonov is now living modestly in Moscow. He writes sometimes for the Russian editions of Playboy and GQ. Even though his party has been banned, he still holds monthly meetings. He defends Russia's annexation of Crimea and is critical of Mr. Putin for not going further.
Even if many in the Russian intelligentsia are at odds with Mr. Limonov's politics, they admire both Mr. Limonov and «Limonov.»
«I think that to be a troublemaker is something that's very important for a Russian writer,» said Victor Erofeyev, a Russian author. «It's not necessarily to fight against the state, but it's necessary to fight against human nature. This is a very good beginning.»
A compelling chronicle of the life of the notorious Russian writer and political activist Eduard Limonov.
«Limonov», by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 340 pp., $30 (cloth).
Despite stylistic and methodological lapses in Emmanuel Carrère's «Limonov», this biography of the notorious Russian writer and political activist Eduard Limonov (b. 1943) is a good read.
How could it not be? Limonov's life is full of extravagant ups and downs. The man's curriculum vitae, as summed up by Carrère (b. 1957), is that of «a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground, a bum, and then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan, a fashionable writer in Paris, a lost soldier in the Balkans, and now, in the fantastic shambles of post-communism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes.» Carrère relates all these phases of Limonov's life in graphic detail.
This is not the first time that Carrère has sought to grasp a controversial individual whose behavior is at antipodes from respectable bourgeois morality or whose ideas surpass even the most liberal definitions of political correctness. Jean-Claude Romand, the real-life «anti-hero» of «The Adversary» (2000), for example, claimed to be a medical doctor who worked for the World Health Organization in Geneva. Yet Romand had concocted a professional screen and had hoodwinked his own family for some eighteen years. This «normal man» had no job whatsoever. When his family at last suspected that something was up, he killed them all: his wife, his two small children, and his parents. He set fire to his house, out of shame for what he had done, His suicide attempt failed; he was revived from an overdose of barbiturates. Carrère acknowledged his fascination for the story when it appeared in the French news, contacted Romand, gained his confidence, attended his trial (at which Romand was sentenced to life imprisonment), corresponded with him, and then wrote his book.
Combining information from Romand's letters, documentary evidence, and his own personal anecdotes related to his investigation and the very drafting of the manuscript, «The Adversary» marked Carrère's departure from the stylish fictional vein that had distinguished his first novels, «Gothic Romance» (1984) and «The Mustache» (1986), both of which are also available in English. Yet in his hands, the autobiographically tinged nonfiction genre typified by «The Adversary» and now Limonov still explores the same types of subject matter as his fiction. (Here is the «Arts Fuse» review of Carrère's memoir «Lives Other Than My Own».) «Gothic Romance», for instance, had delved into how fact and fantasy play roles in Mary Shelley's drafting of her novel «Frankenstein». For Carrère's Shelley, Frankenstein is more «normal» a monster than one might have fantasized, with philosophical implications that she astutely develops. «Gothic Romance» stakes out uncomfortable psychological territories not unlike those inhabited by Romand and Limonov. By the way, another book by Carrère, «The Behring Strait» (1986), is based on the notion of «uchrony,» the chronicle of what might have happened in the past but did not.
Because the Romand tragedy takes place in the present (and, analogously, because Limonov is still very much alive), questions of narrative vantage point are raised for the author. In «The Adversary», he gropes (in front of his reader, as it were) for a legitimate approach to this unbelievable imposter-cum-family-murder tale that long remained hot news in France. After some experimentation, he abandons third-person storytelling and brings his own life into the book. He speaks about himself in relation to Romand's story, ponders why he is attracted to it, questions how his investigation should be recounted, and candidly expresses his doubts and conjectures. A sort of literary variant of the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty is at stake: the biographer discloses how subjectivity enters into his analysis. Most importantly, Carrère states that he will not «judge» Romand and merely wants to «understand» this uncanny double life.
Anglo-American readers might be inclined to impugn this autobiographical, or «auto-fictional,» slant to Carrère's recent biographical writing. To be sure, it remains at a remove from the fact-checking methodology inherent to our conception of nonfiction and objectivity. But is «objectivity» all that unassailable? Let's don't dismiss the French so readily: for centuries now, their writers have skillfully overturned literary fundamentals while reinventing autobiography, that is, while giving new spins to the Cartesian «I think therefore I am.»
«Limonov», which was published in France in 2011, proceeds similarly. Carrère explains how he had become acquainted with the Russian writer at the beginning of the 1980s in Paris and unexpectedly came across him two decades later at a human rights rally in Moscow. But by 2002–2006, during the time Carrère first spots Limonov in Moscow and then resolves to interview him, the writer is no longer just the hip Henry-Miller-like memoirist who had written the scandalous «It's Me, Eddie» about his life in New York (1975–1980) and whom «le tout Paris» kept inviting to literary cocktail parties. Now he is also the would-be pro-Serb soldier who had been filmed, on Pawel Pawlikowski's BBC documentary film «Serbian Epics» (1992), firing a machine gun at least in the direction of (if not directly at) Bosnian civilians scrambling down the besieged streets of Sarajevo and who had co-founded (also in 1992) the National Bolshevik Party, the members of which march with a closed fist thrust out at an angle recalling the Nazi salute. By the way, Limonov's real name is Savenko. His penname derives from the word limon «lemon» and the slang term limonka, a kind of «hand grenade.»
After their encounter in Russia, Carrère's initial project of writing an article about Limonov grows into this book. As in «The Adversary», he declares that he won't judge Limonov's acts morally, but rather attempt to comprehend «his romantic, dangerous life.» He observes: «[It] says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about everything that's happened since the end of the Second World War. Something, yes, but what? I'm writing this book to find out.»
Modern Russian history also fills out Carrère's chronicle. This is sometimes beneficial to the reader, sometimes tedious. Long passages leave Limonov on the sidelines and detail the political background in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the present. Carrère draws on the news we all heard during those years as well as on the opinions of specialists, notably his mother, the historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Stylistically, some of these digressions have a cut-and-paste quality to them, as does a similar passage on post-Communist Romania and the execution of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena on Christmas Day, 1989.
However, while offering little more than a refresher course on Eastern European and especially Russian history, such passages do contextualize Limonov's involvement with the National Bolshevik Party and show how this «hideous fascist leading a militia of skinheads,» as Carrère ironizes with respect to the writer's reputation in France, could end up joining forces, at least for anti-Putin demonstrations, with Yelena Bonner (the widow of Andrei Sakharov), Gary Kasparov's Drugaya Rossiya Party, and human rights activists. Carrère demonstrates that Russian political culture is much more complicated than it looks. This is a particularly troubling part of that «something» that he pins down.
Oddly enough, the chapter on Limonov and Paris is comparatively weak. Is this because, to Carrère's mind, the elusive «something» has much more to do with Russia and its unfathomable nature? It would have been easy to interview more Parisians than he does in order to obtain different perspectives on the writer's personality. His involvement with the journal «L'Idiot international» is telltale, but I wonder how some of the erstwhile regular contributors, and not just the equally controversial editor-in chief, Jean-Édern Hallier (1936–1997), recall him.
During the 1980s, I also knew Limonov a little. Not long after his arrival in Paris, we met at a recording session for Bertrand Jérôme's playful talk show, «Les Papous dans la tête», on France Culture (the national cultural radio station). With a few other foreign writers, we were asked to talk, in French, about funny expressions in our respective languages. At the time, Limonov had little command of spoken French, a fact that discomforted Jérôme at the onset of our session. But Limonov's English was fluent, so I filled in as his interpreter during the session and then afterwards, at the Café «Les Ondes,» where we all had a drink. He was already a literary legend. «It's Me, Eddie» had been published in French in 1980 under the provocative title «Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres», an allusion to a homoerotic scene in a New York City park with an Afro-American man. However, nothing in Limonov's words or behavior that evening, at the Café «Les Ondes,» revealed this fame.
He was even somewhat reserved, as he was during the next two or three times that we chatted after similar encounters. On another occasion, in front of the Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop, he mentioned that more of his work was going to be translated into English—but he mentioned this only because I had asked him. I never heard him bragging about his books. In fact, I never heard him talking about literature.
A few years later (probably around 1986), as my wife and I were leaving the metro station one evening at the place d'Italie, we came across him once again, this time with a map in his hand, trying to figure out where the place des Alpes was. «I'm supposed to meet some Russians at a café there,» he explained. We walked with him for a while and then pointed him in the right direction. Long afterwards, I read in the «Times Literary Supplement» that Limonov had gotten into fistfights in Parisian cafés because of arguments with other Russians about the Soviet Union. (And Carrère describes him «slugging a British writer in the face after the writer badmouthed the Soviet Union» at an international writers' conference in Budapest.) Could there also have been a fistfight that night at the café in the place des Alpes?
Let me recount one last anecdote, going back to 1989 or 1990, when Limonov and I met at the Short Story Festival in the town of Saint-Quentin. He didn't seem to have much contact with the other writers who had been invited. And were those French short-story writers keeping their distance from him? This was my impression. He sat down next to me in the local auditorium while Antonín Liehm, the dissident Czech francophone editor-in-chief of a well known publication, «La Lettre internationale», was explaining that most European writers didn't know how to write stories and that he would «edit and rewrite, just as in «The New Yorker»,» whatever texts he accepted. Hearing these words, Limonov bounded from his seat and shouted «but we are craftsmen!» Some uneasy applause followed, but, luckily, no fistfights. We agreed to meet for breakfast the next morning. When he failed to show up, I learned that, instead of staying for the rest of the conference, he had taken the earliest train back to Paris. Carrère mentions that Limonov is an early riser, his alcohol-fuelled pugnacious nights notwithstanding. By seven a.m. the next morning, he is at work on a manuscript.
And yet Carrère also emphasizes that writing, for Limonov, «had never been a goal in itself; merely the only way he could conceive of attaining his real aim: namely, become rich and famous—above all, famous.» The biographer adds:
After five or six years in Paris, he realized it might not happen. He might just grow old as a second-rate writer with a pleasantly fiery reputation, whose colleagues look at him with envy at book fairs because he attracts pretty, somewhat trashy girls who make his life more colorful than theirs. But in fact he lives in a cubbyhole with an alcoholic singer, empties his pockets to buy a slice of ham, and worries over what memories he'll mine for his next book, because the truth is he's running out, he's told practically everything about his past, all that's left is the present.
Similar commentary unveils the hidden layers beneath Lemonov's harsh surface. Carrère intelligently uses less spectacular incidents to round out his portrait. The description of a visit to his parents in Slatov (near Kharkov), in 1989, is one of these:
The train gets in a 7:00 a.m., the taxi drops him off in Saltov in front of the prefab concrete building where he spent his adolescence. His duffel bag slung over his shoulder, he climbs naked concrete steps that wouldn't be out of place in a prison. [. . .] His inner voice tells him to take the train back to Moscow that very evening, but that would be too cruel. It's the first time he's seen his parents in years and will no doubt be the last, so he decides to spend a week with them. . . He's found his old weights and exercises for an hour each morning. Lying on his childhood bed he rereads his old copies of Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, eats three heavy meals a day, and forces himself to have prickly conversations with his mother—his father doesn't say a thing.
Carrère views Limonov as possessing positive qualities such as being neither «vile [n]or a liar,» of being «loyal and honor[ing] the vanquished,» of being unjudgmental. «He's got no illusions, no compassion,» writes Carrère, «but he's attentive, curious, even helpful at times.» Describing Limonov on a trip to Central Asia, he notes:
After being so dead set against Islam under the influence of his Serbian friends, by the time he comes back [from Central Asia] he's swearing by nothing but Muslims, extending this newfound infatuation to include the Chechens, whose frugality, brilliant guerrilla tactics, and elegant cruelty he now extols. You've got to say one thing for this fascist: he only likes, and has only ever liked, the underdogs. The skinny against the fat, the poor against the rich, the self-confessed assholes—who are rare—against the legion of the virtuous.
Yet the more stunning incidents in this biography seemingly stem from Limonov's own written accounts. The extent to which his books, many of which are available only in Russian, are drawn upon in «Limonov» is not entirely clear. Carrère doesn't always state his sources. This methodology, which gives precedence to storytelling over rigor, is especially unsatisfactory in some passages. One would like to know who is detailing the extraordinary event, Carrère, Limonov, or both, or neither. Imagine a biographical account of Ernest Hemingway's life in Paris that would borrow heavily from «A Moveable Feast». We know the degree to which the author of «In Our Time» aggrandized himself or simply lied. This is likely not the case with Limonov, yet I wonder what events are left out of his books and whether they, or additional outside testimony, would have opened up different perspectives on his assuredly complex personality. Carrère insists on the man's truthfulness, with one disturbing exception:
Eduard remains in this wild, mountainous region [of Serbian Krajina, during the Yugoslav Wars] for two months. He participates—he says this himself and I believe him—in a number of guerrilla actions: raids on villages, ambushes, skirmishes. He risks his life. One thing I've often wondered while writing this book is whether he killed anyone. For a long time I didn't dare ask, and when I finally did he shrugged and said that was a typically civvy question. «I've shot, often. I've seen men fall. Did I hit them? Hard to say. War's not cut and dried.» I rarely suspect him of lying; here I do a bit. He knows I'm writing a book about him, for a French readership—that is to say, righteous and quick to take offence—and perhaps he didn't want to pat himself on the back for an experience he himself must consider enriching. I think that in his philosophy, killing a man in hand-to-hand combat is like getting screwed from behind: something to try at least once. If he did, which I don't know, the chances are good that he did it during these two months in Krajina, where there are practically no witnesses.
The gravity and scope of Carrère's «Limonov» shines forth in such passages. And so do the benefits of Carrère's autobiographical approach: we hear him thinking about what Limonov is thinking, and in the process we hear Limonov thinking. Personally, I was shocked when I first heard about Limonov's behavior in the Yugoslav Wars. I hadn't known him very well, but he had always been perfectly cordial in his dealings with me. I had no reason to suspect that this could be otherwise. I couldn't believe my eyes when I watched him shooting at Bosnians in Pawlikowski's film. Carrère's book puts such acts in perspective, not in any moral sense (this is not his intention), but rather in a psychological one that is often convincing but that must necessarily remain hypothetical. Ultimately, that «something» that the biographer is seeking to delineate probably concerns much more the unfathomable depths of, for the better or worse, exceptional human beings such as Limonov than «everything that's happened since the end of the Second World War.»
Emanuele Carrère's fictionalized biography of «Limonov» — the Russian poet, activist and agitator Eduard Limonov — brilliantly encapsulates his misfit subject's rollercoaster life. As a teaser, the American edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) adds the rollicking subtitle: «The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia.»
This fictionalized version of Limonov, while boosted by the real Limonov's agit-prop past, is very much a Carrère creation. Limonov's
«…romantic dangerous life says something. Not just about him… (or) Russia, but about everything that's happened since the end of the Second World War.»
Carrère's novel does in fact span decades and geography. It even suggests a paradigm for the economic and technological changes that Western societies have faced since the war's end.
But the political focus here is Russian upheaval, which is Limonov's oxygen. His life is in a permanent state of flux that ratchets up the tension as he roams the globe (including stints in New York and Paris).
Born Édouard Veniaminovitch Savenko in war-torn 1943 Ukraine, Eduard grew up poor, amid Soviet repression and violence. His family was relocated first to the industrial city of Kharkov and later to its hardscrabble Saltov outskirts, where abandoned children roamed streets in gangland style. At eight he carried a knife. He wrote poetry in his teens. He then needed a catchier name. From the Russian «limon,» for bitter lemon, and «limonka,» slang for hand grenade, he created «Limonov.» He made the switch in much the same way as he invented the rest of his life, molding himself into an iconic survivor.
Carrère, a French writer and filmmaker, plays both narrator and a character in what amounts to a tale of a thug, writer, political dissident and sometime Gulag prisoner. Carrère stays true to his movie roots. He keeps the pace fast and cinematic, with strikingly muscular and agile prose punctuated with sharp irony.
How does Carrère know so much about Limonov? Well, he's studied — and excerpted — the Russian's own, prolific autobiographies (his sexually explicit, New York City-centered 1980 pseudo-autobiography was titled «The Russian Poet Prefers Big Blacks.»)
Limonov
«wasn't a novelist,»
Carrère explains in a conspiratorial aside,
«all he could write about was his life — but his life was captivating…»
And Limonov illuminated every aspect of it as he rose from a destitute and dangerous youth to a man in search of heroic status. Though Carrère seldom mentions his sources, it's clear he's done his homework on both man and homeland. It's also clear he identifies strongly with Limonov's life. He confesses to having undertaken the book as part of an effort to understand his own Russian heritage, and
«what it means to be a Russian after World War II and the end of the Cold War.»
He also notes resemblances.
«Like Eduard, I, too, began wearing eyeglasses when I was eight.»
And,
«In his teens, Limonov had a passion for reading Jack London. Me, too.»
These devices help insert the reader into Limonov's timeline, which of course reveals the true genius of Carrère's work — namely that he never was «in» Eduard's life. Yes, Carrère knew of Limonov's existence over the years, but only as a bizarre and pornographically inclined figure who supported Serbian ethnic cleansing and later led a neo-Bolshevik movement in Moscow. He did briefly interview Limonov in 2009, but by then the book's first draft had already been written.
Yet Carrère blurs the lines deftly. In a prologue that covers the years 2006 and 2007, he casts himself as attentive observer of the details of Limonov's life, reworking episodes from the Russian's own writings as if he'd discovered some new and vital pieces of biographical information. So it is that the book becomes an enthralling adaptation of Limonov's overwrought confessions.
«This is not a biography,»
Carrère clarifies,
«there've been lots of changes to identifying characteristics of… persons… dates, places, other details…»
Yet it is those changes, and the fiction, that makes the story worthwhile.
Though something of a sideline figure, Limonov serves as indelible guide through decades of spasmodic Russian history. His life — real and imagined — is horrific proof of the way a totalitarian society can «format» a man's existence.
Carrère's clearly sympathizes with Limonov. While knowing his protagonist's fascist preferences, he seeks to place him on the side of the victim. Some might label this facile and insist such distinctions depend on who's the victim and who's the victimizer. It's certainly not easy to applaud Limonov's pro-Serb phase, as he cheerleads the brutal bombardment of Sarajevo.
«The difference between [Vladimir Putin] and Eduard,»
writes Carrère,
«is that [Putin] succeeded. He's the boss.»
And being a boss is never nice.
But being nice was never Eduard's goal. He just wanted to be the hero of his own explosive story. And Carrère's brilliant tour de force, translated from French to English by John Lambert, does justice to that wish.
«The American | In Italia», September 21, 2015
Part III. Chapter ten. Satan's ball
Charles Clover
Moscow's Central House of Writers is, for both good and bad reasons, one of the most written-about buildings in Russian literature of the twentieth century. Built on leafy Herzen Street (now Bolshaya Nikitskaya) in 1934 by Stalin to house the USSR's Writers» Union, membership was a bauble awarded to the loyal, denoting membership of the elite club of the purveyors of official culture.
One of the few proper functioning restaurants in Moscow in hard times, the Central House of Writers (Tsentralny Dom Literatov — TsDL) was endlessly hagiographed by favour-seeking hacks who spun its rather bland official atmosphere as an incubator of literary genius. But it was just as large a bull's eye for dissident writers and satirists such as Mikhail Bulgakov, who featured it as the «House of Griboedov» in The Master and Margarita (from which the reputation of the building never recovered). The TsDL was the slightly adjusted «old, two-storeyed, cream-coloured house» with an asphalt veranda into which the novel's poet Ivan Bezdomny bursts, half-crazed having witnessed Satan and a giant pistol-toting housecat decapitate the head of the Writers» Union, carrying a wedding candle and wearing only his underwear (and causing a major ruckus).
There was a certain symmetrical and slightly demonic surrealism in the air in December 1992 when Prokhanov, chairman of the Russian Writers» Union, threw a gala dinner there for opposition nationalists. One of these happened to be Eduard Limonov, a wiry, goateed dissident, recently arrived back from exile in France, having decided, according to his own account, «that it was time to interfere in history as it was unfolding in Russia». Another attendee happened to be Dugin, sporting his pudding-bowl skobka haircut («à la a young Alexey Tolstoy», as Limonov recollected). He had clearly been drinking before he arrived.
There, at tables festooned with fine food and endless bottles of liquor, were assembled the beau monde of hardline nationalism in Russia. At one table was Prokhanov. The Day was the nerve centre of the patriotic opposition, the «ship of dignity in the midst of an ocean of shamelessness and hyper conformism», according to Dugin, who called Prokhanov the «Russian Don Quixote» for his continued idealistic loyalty to the lost cause. Across the room sat Zyuganov, the potato-faced chairman of the rejuvenated Communist Party, with whom Dugin was currently feuding, accusing him (justifiably) of stealing his ideas.
By 1992, the «Red Brown» opposition was a pastiche of contradictions: Orthodox monks carrying portraits of Stalin and retired Soviet Army political officers alongside atamans of refounded Cossack troops; appeals to proletarian internationalism vying with the darkest anti-Semitism in the same speeches. New opposition organizations sprang up like mushrooms, mostly on the model of the old ultra-nationalist gang Pamyat. These mainly consisted of a rabid, polyphonic leader, some armbands and a bit of money from who knew where.
The evening featured a host of other nationalist political and cultural figures, such as deputy speaker of the Duma, Sergey Baburin; Stanislav Kunyayev, chief editor of the nationalist «thick journal» Nash Sovremennik; Valentin Rasputin, the acclaimed nationalist author; and the mathematician Igor Shafarevich, author of famous samizdat essays.
Limonov himself was a recent convert to the nationalist cause. A former dissident writer, like Solzhenitsyn he was exiled in the early 1970s. (Or, as he put it: «I was detained by the KGB in 1973 and they suggested I emigrate.») He had lived for years in the US and France before returning to Russia following the collapse of communism. Unlike other exiles who came back to a life of slippers, tea and occasional quotes in the newspaper decrying the state of the country for an audience that barely remembered them, Limonov was determined to make his mark once again.
He had not had the average dissident's life in the US. He was no Joseph Brodsky or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, retiring to the rural perfection of Vermont. Nor did he stay in the nostalgic lap of the Russian émigré community in Brighton Beach. Instead Limonov took to 1970s America like a fish to water: sex, drugs, rock'n'roll. Limonov's world revolved around Manhattan's Lower East Side — the drugs, the punk scene of the CBGB music club, the Ramones and plenty of heroin. His first and most famous book, It's Me, Eddie, was completed in New York in 1976 and managed to shock the jaded US literary establishment with the tale of «Eddie», a Russian émigré writer, who (one only hopes) was not based entirely on Limonov himself. Solzhenitsyn famously called it «pornographic». «I am on welfare. I live at your expense, you pay taxes and I don't do a fucking thing», wrote Limonov in one of the most oft-quoted portions of the book. «I consider myself to be scum, the dregs of society, I have no shame or conscience.» The book was an account of the disintegration of Limonov's first marriage soon after he emigrated to New York with his wife Elena Shapova, a stunning Russian beauty who left him for an Italian aristocrat. It records his feelings of betrayal by both his native Soviet Union and the ugly American capitalism that confronted him. In agony over his divorce, Eddie turns to homosexuality, while Elena overdoses on sex and drugs — exploits recorded by Limonov in several rather graphic passages. She is «typically Russian, throwing herself into the very thick of life without reflection».1
Limonov managed to catch the American zeitgeist at just the right time. An edgy beatnik, he was more a personality than a writer, trading on his mysterious, unhinged Russianness, which still had scarcity value on the New York literary scene. He played to the crowd, with stereotypical Russian temper and drunken exploits, dating a succession of models after Shapova. He also married another striking model, Natalya Medvedeva, who posed for Playboy and whose face adorns the cover of The Cars» first album.
Limonov collided with the typical immigrant's emotional response to living in the United States, with its vast wealth, its impersonal and arm's-length social culture, and its intolerance of emotion. «I scorn you because you lead dull lives, sell yourselves into the slavery of work», he addresses US readers in a characteristic passage. Limonov's feelings of provincial inadequacy, nostalgia for the vanished motherland and unvanquished resurgent pride in his nation show through in his writings. He loved and hated his boring, hidebound country, his cobwebbed and creaking Russian culture living on the achievements of a century ago:
I think vicious thoughts about the whole of my loathsome native Russian literature, which has been largely responsible for my life. Dull green bastards, Chekhov languishing in boredom, his eternal students, people who don't know how to get themselves going, who vegetate through this life, they lurk in these pages like diaphanous husks . . . I hate the past, as I always have, the name of the present.2
In the United States, Limonov confronted the inferiority complex that is often the wellspring of radicalism, driven inwards by the agoraphobia of modern America. He became a nationalist who had no real use for the nation, a loose cannon looking for a cause. Nation for him wasn't a value, it was a purpose. As he put it in Eddie :
Whom shall I meet, what lies ahead, none can guess. I may happen upon a group of armed extremists, renegades like myself, and perish in an airplane hijacking or a bank robbery. I may not, and I'll go away somewhere, to the Palestinians, if they survive, or to Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, or someplace else — to lay down Eddie-baby's life for a people, for a nation.
It was in this vein that he found the perfect outlet for his intellectual energy in the cause of Serbia, where he witnessed (and some say participated in) the shelling of besieged Sarajevo in 1992.3
The fighting in Yugoslavia had become a magnet for many Russian nationalists, who saw in Serbia a fellow Orthodox Slavic civilization under siege, and in the break-up of Yugoslavia a microcosm of Russia's humiliation following the collapse of the USSR. Russian state television broadcast sympathetic portrayals of the Serbs, even as they proceeded to commit the worst genocide Europe had seen since 1945. Russian volunteers organized into two battalions, one Cossack-led, the other led by a former Russian general.
Limonov's pro-Serbian sympathies fit the bad-boy image he had worked so hard to cultivate in polite Parisian literary society. He has been persona non grata in Western literary circles ever since he was filmed shooting a machine gun into a besieged Sarajevo, in the company of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić. He claims he was only shooting at a practice target range. The incident — captured by Bafta award-winning director Pawel Pawlikowski in his Serbian Epics documentary and shown at Karadžić's trial at The Hague — cost Limonov publishing contracts in both Europe and the US.
In Belgrade he had met Vojislav Šešelj, head of the Serbian Radical Party, who convinced Limonov that there was a political future in hardline nationalism. Back in Russia, Limonov began to hang around nationalist salons. And now, at the dinner, Limonov was seated next to Gennady Zyuganov, talking about the future of Russian patriotism. Many toasts had been drunk, first to Russia, then to the future and great endeavours, when suddenly Dugin walked up to both of them, obviously very drunk. «Hey, Limonov, what are you doing with this shit?» he asked, slurring and wavering a bit.
Zyuganov was startled, but then his expression turned to sympathetic fatherly concern when he saw it was Dugin. He broke in and introduced the newcomer: «This is our Alexander Dugin, a very talented young philosopher.» «And you're shit, Gennady Andreevich, what do you know?» said Dugin, wobbling and turning back to Limonov. «Why are you with them, these mediocre shits?'
Dugin's relationship with Zyuganov was complicated, to say the least. The two men had been close collaborators, developing an ideology for the opposition Communist Party until their recent falling out had put an end to their cooperation. Dugin was quick to anger when he felt he wasn't given credit for ideas (surely a major flaw in a ghost writer). He had broken off communication with Zyuganov for this reason. «When he got into the Duma, he acted arrogantly. We fell out», says Dugin.
Limonov tried valiantly to defuse the situation. «Why? Why are you with these mediocre shits?» the very drunk Dugin continued to complain. Finally, in frustration, Limonov retorted: «Why are you?» This only made Dugin more belligerent. Soon Prokhanov, editor of The Day and patron of the evening, came over and interceded to avoid a scandal.
Limonov had never met Dugin, but this encounter was to be the start of a friendship that would see them through most of the decade as partners in an exotic political project known as the National Bolshevik Party. Limonov was struck by Dugin's imposing physical stature combined with a certain gracefulness: Dugin was a big man with heavy thighs, but when he walked he took small ballet steps, lending him a poise almost «inappropriate for the massive figure of this young man».
They left the party, very drunk, the two of them and Prokhanov. Crossing Tverskoy Boulevard, near the Kremlin, a car screeched to a halt: Dugin had drunkenly kicked in its taillight after the driver had turned too close to them. The driver got out, pulled a gun and pointed it at Dugin's head. In an instant the situation had grown decidedly dangerous, but Dugin seemed amused by the whole thing. The gunman looked like he knew how to handle a weapon.
Limonov looked at Dugin helplessly. Suddenly, Dugin blurted out: «Hey, I'm Eduard Limonov!» and smiled drunkenly. The gunman looked confused, but clearly had never heard of Limonov. Limonov stepped in: «Actually, I'm Limonov. My friend didn't want to . . . just excuse us?» The driver finally lowered the gun, spat, and with a final «Fuck you!» got in the car and drove off.
Limonov wasn't the first person to notice Dugin's drinking. The latter also had a fearsome temper — «exaggerated emotions», as Limonov would put it. «It was a spot on the reputation of a philosopher — that's all. Not even a speck, if you look at Dugin in the context of the Russian tradition.» And indeed, for a Russian philosopher, alcohol abuse was practically the sine qua non of the profession. Dugin and Limonov got on like a house on fire, and were practically inseparable for the next five years.
The year after they met, in May 1993, Limonov was by his own account returning from the fighting in Knin Krajina, near Sarajevo, when he decided it was time to create his own national radical party, the National Bolshevik Front, together with a group of teenage gang members from a Moscow suburb. The experiment ended farcically after his gang beat up their allies, the Communist Youth League of Zyuganov's party. «It became clear that we had to start again, from zero», he writes in his autobiography. He remembered Dugin, got in touch and, despite the latter's bruising experience in Pamyat, after which he had forsworn politics, Dugin decided he liked Limonov enough to give it another try. The two created the National Bolshevik Front in June, just three months before the constitutional crisis between Yeltsin and the State Duma nearly led to civil war.
Each man found in the other something he lacked. Limonov sensed in Dugin a Russia that he had missed during his 20-year sojourn in the West, while Dugin envied Limonov's Western experience, writing credentials and fluency. Limonov may not have been far off the mark when he wrote in his biography about the drunken scene on Tverskoy Boulevard, when Dugin introduced himself to the gun-toting Mercedes driver as Limonov: «The scene in the street was symbolic — Dugin sometimes mistook himself for me. I think he really genuinely wanted to be Limonov.» In Dugin, Limonov had found a cause, at least temporarily. As Dugin told me: «Limonov as a writer was incapable of invention, and so he only wrote about what happened to him. He needed events to write about.» In Limonov, Dugin had found a publicist: «Dugin always needed a director, he couldn't function on his own», according to Limonov.
As Limonov gradually got to know Dugin, he found he was materially better-off than he let on. He had a vaulted Stalin-era apartment in the centre of Moscow, rare books and a computer. As Limonov wrote: «I think Dugin exaggerated his poverty because he was embarrassed. I think when I left they threw the sausages in the trash and ate meat.» Dugin's relative wealth is perhaps an indication that the writer received funding beyond what can be explained by his book sales.
Dugin, according to Limonov, was an impossible romantic, but otherwise had no real strict beliefs: «Dugin was like a chameleon or an octopus, who can mimic the colours of whatever environment it is put in. He lived in a fascist environment, and so he assumed fascist colours.» He also brought a «bright spirit of megalomania» to the party, and an indifference to traditional ideas of right and left. «Unconditionally, as an intellectual, Dugin surpassed practically any other single figure in the Russian world at the time», said Limonov, even after their acrimonious break-up in 1998.
«Operation Crematorium»
In 1993, amid economic shock therapy that plunged Russia into crisis, the situations of the democrats and the patriotic opposition were reversed. Once ascendant, Yeltsin's camp very rapidly lost support to a growing opposition nationalist mood, stoked by hardliners in the system.
The economy was mostly to blame. Yeltsin had come to power on the promise that democracy would usher in an era of Western-style economic prosperity; instead, in 1992 the economy collapsed. In January of that year came the first market reforms, which saw prices rise by 245 per cent that month alone, creating widespread panic. Hyperinflation wiped out the savings of the university professors, bureaucrats and intellectuals who, just a few months before, had been the strongest bulwark of liberal reforms. The balance of opinion in the Supreme Soviet shifted fast. Hundreds of deputies who had once backed Yeltsin drifted into the opposition camp.
The nationalists, whose initial experiences at the ballot box had been farcical, began to gain popular support, becoming a political threat to Yeltsin. And it was he — the selfsame politician who, just two years before, had faced down tanks — who ultimately would be forced to rely on armed force to secure his power.
Politically, the reformers were in trouble. There were mass defections from the democratic camp to the side of the patriotic opposition. Ruslan Khasbulatov, an economist who was speaker of the Supreme Soviet, and even Yeltsin's own vice-president, former fighter pilot Alexander Rutskoy, joined the opposition against him.
Yeltsin deftly managed to shed most of the blame for the dislocation caused by economic reforms and push it onto his prime minister, the 35-year-old whiz-kid Egor Gaidar (who was in and out of power according to Yeltsin's mood), and his privatization chief, the enigmatic economist Anatoly Chubais. Yeltsin was still popular: when parliament threatened to impeach him, he held a referendum and won 59 per cent of the vote. But his influence was nonetheless waning, and Russia's political system slid towards conflict once again. Throughout the summer of 1993, Yeltsin plotted to dissolve parliament and hold fresh elections, while his opponents still planned to try again to impeach him. But neither could garner the political support to finish the other off.
The events of September–October 1993 would lead to armed conflict in the centre of Moscow, the worst fighting there since 1917, and very nearly to full-scale civil war. The motives and behaviour of both sides remain extremely puzzling to this day. After the conflict was over, US President Bill Clinton said Yeltsin had «bent over backwards» to avoid bloodshed; however, there is accumulating evidence that bloodshed is exactly what he wanted — to do militarily what he could not do politically: destroy the opposition, suspend the constitution, and unilaterally redress the balance between executive and legislative powers to create a super-presidency. That is exactly what he got.
On 21 September, Yeltsin struck, signing «Decree 1400» dissolving parliament. He freely admits in his memoirs that this was an unconstitutional measure, but ironically it was the only way to defend democracy in Russia, he claimed: «Formally the president was violating the constitution, going the route of antidemocratic measures, and dispersing the parliament — all for the sake of establishing democracy and rule of law in the country.»
Again, at the centre of the stand-off was the famed White House, which was a familiar symbol of freedom to Western television viewers — the very place where Yeltsin had stood stalwart and called for resistance to the generals» coup in August 1991. This time the tables were turned: Rutskoy and Khasbulatov were ready and they barricaded themselves in the White House. The political confrontation turned increasingly ugly with each passing day, as the city of Moscow turned off the electricity and water to the building. But parliament held firm, voting to impeach Yeltsin, who was on thin legal ice in dissolving parliament. For days the confrontation hung in the balance. The army did not want to become involved in politics, as it had been in 1991 and during the various independence struggles around the Soviet Union which had preceded its break-up. However, it became clear that only the army could eventually decide the outcome.
Curiously, while electricity to parliament was cut off immediately, it took a week before the Interior Ministry put a cordon of razor wire and police around the building — a delay that allowed political leaders, ex-generals, thrill-seeking teenagers, disgruntled pensioners and everyone in between to flood in. They all milled around inside the building, meeting by candlelight, with no one visibly in charge.
Vladislav Achalov, a former tank commander who was drummed out of the army for supporting the August 1991 coup, was the acting defence minister, appointed by Rutskoy. He made the fateful decision — in retrospect a bad miscalculation — to appeal to paramilitary patriotic opposition groups to join the defenders. Thus Dugin, Prokhanov, Limonov and other nationalists joined the parliamentary defenders in the gloomy candlelit darkness. Dugin was deeply unimpressed: «There was chaos. Everyone was wandering around, they thought they would receive new government posts, that they would rule the country. Nobody thought they would simply be shot.»
The arrival of fighters and radical extremists was welcomed by Khasbulatov and Rutskoy as an extra show of muscle. But throwing in their lot with the nationalist opposition would ultimately prove a gigantic mistake. They were out of their depth. They thought they would be fighting for control of buildings and neighbourhoods, when the real battle was for television screens and world opinion.
That was the only thing constraining Yeltsin. He did not lack muscle — he used only a handful of the 6,000 riot police during the crisis.4 He had army Special Forces units, tough-eyed commandos under the command of the Federal Security Service (FSB — the successor to the KGB) and the Interior Ministry; and although it remained officially neutral, he also controlled the army. The Taman Motor Rifle Division, which had roared into Moscow two years previously, was based an hour away, as was the Kantemirov Tank Division. The only thing Yeltsin lacked was the legitimacy to use the force arrayed at his disposal. Had he declared a state of emergency and fired on parliament during the first day, there would have been an outcry worldwide and probably a mutiny within the armed forces. But the appearance of gangs of communists, mercenaries, crypto-fascists and neo-Nazis may have provided the spectacle he needed to justify the use of force, and to call parliament a «fascist communist armed rebellion», which he did on 4 October, an hour before tanks opened fire.
Ilya Konstantinov, a former boiler-room worker who was head of the opposition National Salvation Front, recalls:
It was obvious that [the paramilitary groups] were compromising the whole parliament. I don't even think they were aware they were doing it. But by the time they were in the building, we couldn't get them out. We couldn't eject them without a fight, and no one wanted this.
International public opinion, initially wavering and unwilling to tolerate violent repression of parliament by the Yeltsin administration, gradually swung in the president's favour as Khasbulatov and Rutskoy faltered and erred.
For two weeks, the siege was static, as parliamentarians and protesters milled around the darkened White House, meeting by candlelight, going home every day to take showers and shave. Rebel leaders tried to whip up support in the streets, and gangs of opposition protesters clashed frequently with police. Yeltsin, meanwhile, used the airwaves to coax the population over to his side.
There was little bloodshed until 3 October, when the momentum seemed suddenly to shift in favour of the mutineers. A massive crowd gathered in Moscow's October Square, under a statue of Lenin, and began marching north along the ring road, towards parliament, in a bold attempt to break the police blockade of the building. They overwhelmed an outnumbered detachment of riot police on the Krymsky Bridge, capturing weapons and ten military trucks; and then, to their utter astonishment, police surrounding parliament gave way after a small scuffle, surrendering to protesters. The crowd then broke through the police lines surrounding parliament, breaking the blockade.
In the euphoria, as they massed in front of the building, the protesters waited to be told what to do next by the very confused leaders of the revolt. From the balcony of the White House, Khasbulatov said to move on the Kremlin; Rutskoy said to go to Ostankino — the needle of a tower from where the city's radio and television signals are broadcast and which houses the offices of the main national broadcasters. As the crowd decided on Ostankino, the battle appeared to hang in the balance. No loyal military units barred the way of the 700-odd protesters who set out on the ring road towards the television tower, driving in captured military trucks and school buses. Dugin, Limonov and Prokhanov were among them, hanging off the backs of trucks or crammed into buses. «The city seemed to be ours», said Limonov. «But it only seemed that way.»
The man leading the protesters to take the TV tower was General Albert Makashov. Riding in a jeep with a few heavily armed bodyguards, he led the motley motorcade around the ring road and towards Ostankino. As they drove, he looked out at the road and saw ten armoured personnel carriers (APCs) roaring alongside. «Our guys», he assured his men. He appeared to believe that the APCs were carrying mutinous forces that had switched sides to join the protesters. But he was wrong. They were, in fact, transporting a unit of 80 commandos from the elite Vityaz battalion of the Interior Ministry's Dzerzhinsky Division, still under Yeltsin's control, that had been scrambled to defend the TV centre. Their vehicles drove alongside those of the protesters for most of the way.5 One account of the day, albeit on a pro-rebel website known only as Anathema-2, deserves some attention. It (and numerous witnesses) reported, fairly plausibly, that the Moscow ring road at Mayakovsky Square was blocked by Vityaz APCs, and that, more incredibly, the column of armed demonstrators in vehicles had stopped in front of it, but was allowed to continue.6
The protesters and the Vityaz commandos arrived at Ostankino at roughly the same time. Sergey Lisyuk, the Vityaz commander, says he was given the order via radio to return fire if fired upon. «I made them repeat it twice, so those riding next to me also heard it.»7 The soldiers, arrayed in body armour and clinking with weaponry, ran through the same underpass as the protesters and entered the building. Meanwhile the protesters set up outside with megaphones and heavy trucks. Nightfall was drawing near. The protesters were jubilant, toting truncheons and riot shields captured from police. Eighteen of them had assault rifles and one had an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Makashov, the former general who commanded the armed men, ordered the vehicles to turn around and ferry more demonstrators, until the crowd outside the TV centre numbered over a thousand. Journalists arrived in vans and jeeps, dragging tripods and hurriedly unwinding cables. Inside, the Vityaz men, in grey camouflage with black balaclavas, could be seen scurrying around erecting barricades and taking up firing positions.
Night fell. It was around 19:20 when General Makashov, wearing a black leather overcoat and black paratrooper beret, addressed the Vityaz defenders inside Ostankino: «You have ten minutes to lay down your arms and surrender, or we will begin storming the building!» The Vityaz men made no public response, though negotiations between Makashov and Lisyuk were ongoing via radio, according to numerous accounts.
At 19:30 a group of protesters brought in a heavy military truck, captured that day from riot police, to try to break into the television compound. Over and over, it battered against the glass and steel entrance, trying to smash through; but it was unable to get through the concrete building supports. Near the truck squatted the man toting the grenade launcher. Details of this man, including his last name, are scant, though Alexander Barkashov told me his name was «Kostya» and he was a veteran of the Trans-Dniester conflict of 1990. Other witnesses say that he was a civilian, and did not know how to fire the grenade launcher until a policeman who had joined the parliamentary mutiny showed him how. What happened next is still the subject of a great deal of controversy.
To this day, the specific actions that led to the carnage at the TV centre are still debated, but what can be established is that as the truck was smashing its way into the compound, snipers on the upper floors of the building opened fire. Simultaneously, an explosion reverberated on the lower floors of the TV centre, and a Vityaz private named Nikolay Sitnikov was killed. Colonel Lisyuk said he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired from the crowd. He said his men opened fire in self-defence, and only after Private Sitnikov's death.
Every witness has a slightly different memory. Dugin recalls that a Vityaz soldier fired a shot which hit the leg of the man with the grenade launcher, who accidentally triggered his weapon: «The Vityaz men started shooting people, unarmed people. At first some started shooting back, three or four machine-gun rounds, and that was it, later the shooting was only from Vityaz.» Prokhanov saw the grenade man fall. He «suddenly began to sit, to slip along a wall. Nearby the twilight flashed and a small cloud of concrete debris was lifted into the air by a bullet strike.» That was his description of the scene, taken from Red Brown, his (very) semi-autobiographical novel about the events, published the following year.
Tracers flew out of the TV centre. Bullets cracked overhead and thudded into bodies. «A wave of heavy red explosions covered us all», according to Limonov. He dropped to his belly and crawled away. At one point he looked back to where he had been standing, near the truck, and saw 20 bodies, «some of them were groaning, most said nothing». Tracer bullets rained down on the crowd for over an hour. At least 62 people were killed in the mêlée, mainly bystanders, but also several journalists.
Dugin wrote movingly about the tragedy, finding esoteric meaning in the events. In one account of the chaos he described how he had «felt the breath of spirit» during the massacre, when, seeking cover, he dived behind a car and accidentally pushed someone who had already taken cover there into the open. Instead of shoving him angrily «as a live human body should involuntarily do», the man simply embraced him, exposing himself to fire and shielding Dugin from the shots. Dugin wrote of the transcendent spiritual feeling «above the flesh and above life» which he felt, being under fire for the first time.
«It was a day of severe defeat», he wrote seven years later, «when it seemed that not only our brothers and sisters and our children, but also the huge structure of Russian history had fallen.»8 He spent most of the night under the car, and finally crawled away into the nearby stand of trees after the shooting subsided, finding Oleg Bakhtiyarov, one of Makashov's bodyguards, who had been shot in the leg. Dugin flagged a car down, took Oleg to hospital, and went back to the Duma at about 3 a.m. The mood was sombre, as news of the scale of the catastrophe at Ostankino filtered back. «That's when I understood that our leaders were bastards, that they started this war, they started this confrontation, they sent people with no weapons, no instructions, to die. They simply committed a crime.» Knowing the end was coming, Dugin left parliament in the small hours of the morning.
To this day Lisyuk defends the actions of his men: «The firing was aimed only at those who were armed, or who tried to obtain arms», he said in a 2003 interview. However, he added:
Try yourself to figure out, in the dark, who is a journalist and who is a fighter . . . I don't have any guilt — I followed orders. Of course, I feel very sorry for the ones who died, especially the ones who were innocent. We were all victims of a political crisis. But I want to say the following: the price would be high if the military did not follow orders.9
However, Colonel Lisyuk's version is disputed, and a number of inconsistencies add to the mystery of exactly what, and who, caused the massacre. Leonid Proshkin, the head of a special investigative team from the Russian general prosecutor's office, spent months investigating the parliamentary uprising. He found no evidence that a rocket-propelled grenade had hit the building because there was no damage found that was consistent with such an explosion:
Such a grenade can burn through half a metre of concrete, the grenade from an RPG-7. And all that was there were marks from a large-calibre machine gun, from an APC. It all boiled down to this: if Sitnikov had been killed by an RPG, it would have looked completely different.10
Proshkin determined that the wounds received by Sitnikov, and the damage to his bullet-proof vest, were not consistent with an RPG-7, which is designed to penetrate tank armour. Rather, it was likely caused by a simple hand grenade:
Sitnikov died not from the firing of the grenade launcher from the direction of Supreme Soviet supporters standing near the entrance, but as a result of the explosion of some sort of device located inside the building, that is, in the possession of the defenders.11
It remains possible, therefore, that Sitnikov's death was either an accidental grenade detonation or, more ominously, the result of a provocation aimed at goading the building's nervous defenders into massacring the crowd.
For Yeltsin, Ostankino was a tragedy, but a tactical success in his duel with parliament. It was portrayed on TV screens and newspapers across the world as an armed attack by protesters on the TV station, coming in the wake of the successful seizure of the mayor's office. It was possible (and partly true) for the Kremlin to say that, rather than massacring dozens of nearly defenceless demonstrators, they had repelled an armed attack.
After Ostankino, the end of the conflict was no longer in doubt. At 7 a.m. on 4 October, several T-80 tanks positioned themselves across the Moscow River from the White House. They were manned entirely by officers. Meanwhile, commandos from Alpha Group reluctantly took up positions around the building, waiting for the order to storm it.
It was during the lead-up to the operation that another mysterious tragedy occurred. As the Alpha detachment was exiting their APCs, one of the soldiers was hit by a sniper and mortally wounded. Korzhakov — Yeltsin's former KGB bodyguard, who took a leading role in managing the 1993 parliamentary crisis — writes of this incident in his biography. Seeing one of their own killed, he said, had brought Alpha's fighting spirit back: «Suddenly their military instincts returned, and their doubts vanished.»12 To this day, however, the mysterious shooting is debated. After his retirement, Gennady Zaytsev, the Alpha commander at the time, gave an interview saying that the shot did not come from the White House, but rather from forces loyal to President Yeltsin in the Mir Hotel.13 He made the incendiary accusation that the shot had been a deliberate attempt to provoke his forces: «It did not come from the White House. That's a lie. That was done with one goal in mind, to make Alpha angry, so that we rushed in there and cut everyone to pieces.»14 If true, it might cast new light on the killing of Private Sitnikov the previous day, which had provoked the massacre at Ostankino by the Vityaz commandos.
Korzhakov disputed this account, saying in an interview that Zaytsev was «in a bad psychological state» during the operation: «And how anyway is he able to tell where [the soldier] was shot from? Did he do proper police work? Did he line up the body and take measurements? No. They took the guy off the battlefield alive, it was only later he died.» Zaytsev said, however, that he understood the situation immediately, and despite what he believed to be a provocation that had cost a young soldier his life, he ordered the operation to go ahead: «I understood that, if we completely refuse the operation, Alpha would be disbanded. It would be the end.»15 However, he is sure in retrospect that the reason Alpha was transferred to the Ministry of Security's control after the conflict was that it did not perform its duties «using different methods» — i.e. taking the building by force and killing Rutskoy and Khasbulatov.
The identity of the sniper, the killer of the Alpha soldier, remains one of the key mysteries yet to be unravelled in the events of that October, just like the explosion at the Ostankino tower. If Alpha, the elite soldiers of Russia's intelligence service, were themselves merely rats in the maze of a broader conspiracy, it is chilling to think of who could have been higher up the food chain.
Shortly before 9 a.m., one of the T-80 tanks fired a 150mm shell at the White House, hitting the top floors. There followed several more shells, likewise aimed at the top floors in order to avoid killing the building's occupants. The shelling was mainly symbolic, to break the morale of the defenders. Nonetheless, some 70 people are believed to have been killed, including some bystanders. After the shelling, the Alpha commandos positioned around parliament moved in and led the mutineers out peacefully.
Ultimately, the snipers firing on the pro-Kremlin forces throughout the siege of the White House were never found or tried. Korzhakov suggested that they belonged to the Union of Officers and had escaped from the White House via tunnels, under the Moscow River and out of the Hotel Ukraine on the other side. Security Minister Nikolay Golushko was thought to have sealed these off but had not, according to Korzhakov.
The events of late 1993 were grist to the mill of conspiracy theorists, reflecting the overwhelming conviction of the parliamentary defenders that they had been the victims of a great deception, designed to lure them into a trap. The Red Brown protesters now believed that Ostankino had been a set-up — that the trucks they had captured from riot police (with keys still in the ignition!) were part of a grand strategy to goad them into the killing fields outside Ostankino, where they could provide their own pretext for getting massacred. They claimed to have been emboldened by specially planted disinformation concerning the supposed defection of army units to their side. They had — in the version described on Anathema — even been allowed through a roadblock on Moscow's ring road, all for the sole purpose of providing a provocation aimed at giving Yeltsin the excuse to use tanks against parliament.
Prokhanov's account of the events is encased in his surrealistic fantasy novel Red Brown, which described the fictional «Operation Crematorium': a conspiracy by Yeltsin and his American puppeteers aimed at trapping the patriotic opposition in the kill-zone of Ostankino and the smoking tomb of the White House. But the use of provocateurs by the regime may not simply have been a figment of Prokhanov's vivid imagination. This became apparent when I interviewed Alexander Barkashov about his role in the 1993 confrontation.
I had to drive for three hours to his dacha outside Moscow, where he keeps fighting dogs and a collection of hunting bows. As the evening wore on, he became more and more conspiratorial, until eventually I asked him why he had taken part on the side of the parliamentary defenders. He dumbfounded me by replying that he had been acting under the orders of his commander in the «active reserve», by which he meant the retired chain of command of the former KGB. He identified his commander as acting Defence Minister Achalov, the same man who had originally issued the call for armed nationalist gangs to come to the aid of the White House defenders: «If Achalov had told me to shoot Khasbulatov or Rutskoy, I would have.» If his claim is true, it would explain a great deal. Barkashov played the role of a provocateur in the parliamentary siege, discrediting the defenders in the eyes of world opinion by publicly aligning them with neo-Nazis. Curiously, Barkashov's forces from Russian National Unity (RNU) did not take part in the Ostankino siege, and the party lost only two members killed in the fighting.
Achalov, whom I interviewed about Barkashov's claim, flatly denied the accusations: «I'm just a tank soldier, nothing more. I don't know what Barkashov is talking about.» If Barkashov, in his own words, was acting not according to the convictions of an ideologue, but on the orders of a state structure, then the goals of that structure must be wondered at. The rise of nationalism in post-communist Russia may have been a far more complicated event than first meets the eye.
* * *
Dugin had left the White House in the small hours of the morning, knowing what would come. He went back to his apartment and, his belongings packed, waited to be arrested. «I was one of the ideologists, I was sure they would arrest me, but they didn't. We were all waiting for the repressions, but they never came.» Instead, there arrived an invitation to appear on Red Square, at the time a popular talk show, where he was asked about his role in the attempted coup.
Clearly, the Kremlin was trying another tack. Instead of suffering repressions, which might have been expected, the rebels were by and large left untouched. Many were encouraged to return to political life. Prokhanov went into hiding in the forest for months, but it turned out that no one was actually looking for him. The Day was closed by the authorities, but Prokhanov was allowed almost immediately to open a successor newspaper, Zavtra (Tomorrow).
The remarkable turn of events showed how Yeltsin changed strategy: after killing a significant number of the opposition, he now moved to co-opt them, holding elections in which he allowed the Communist Party to participate, following which he allowed the rebel plotters to be amnestied. Yeltsin also pushed through a new constitution, creating in effect a super-presidency that emasculated parliament and gave the post-1993 status quo legal form. Following the October 1993 confrontation, the opposition was never again able (or inclined) to challenge Yeltsin on any matter of substance.
The terrible power of the state was reborn once again in the hands of the Kremlin. The old USSR had not been able to lift a finger to save itself in 1991, when Marshal Yazov could not think «in whose name» to give the order to fire on demonstrators. Now that state had revealed itself only too clearly outside Ostankino and the White House. It was every bit the unblinking methodical killer that the old Soviet Union had been. But the conflict of 1993 changed the ruling equation in Russia. The shelling of parliament both strengthened Yeltsin and crippled him at the same time. His approval rating plummeted from 59 per cent to 3 per cent, and the Communists and Liberal Democrats swept the next parliamentary elections to comprise the bulk of the opposition to Yeltsin.
Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats were rewarded for their decision to stay neutral in the uprising, enjoying the Kremlin's good offices and favourable TV coverage. He and his deputy Alexey Mitrofanov had weathered the crisis in Germany («like true Bolshevik revolutionaries», jokes Mitrofanov), and Zhirinovsky showed up at the White House in the aftermath with bottles of duty-free wine. «They are Molotov cocktails!» he scolded deputies who questioned his commitment to the patriotic cause. Winning a quarter of the votes cast for party lists, the LDPR won so many seats, in comparison to its small membership, that even bodyguards found themselves on the list of deputies; when even that was not enough, they took some Communist Party deputies from Zyuganov's election list. The new Duma elections were a considerable windfall — «a gift from the sky to the moderate-communist nomenklatura opposition», according to Limonov. «In a normal, non-parliamentary context of political struggle, what awaited them were their slippers and disputes over tea.»
That appeared to most observers to be part of some grand bargain by Yeltsin, allowing some nationalist parties to run in the election, in exchange for support in passing the new constitution. The February 1994 amnesty, which freed Rutskoy, Khasbulatov and other kingpins of the 1993 crisis, also seemed to be a political trade; soon afterwards, parliament ended its investigation into the official crisis death toll of 173, principally at Ostankino and as a result of the shelling of the White House.
But the strength of the nationalist message could already be seen in Yeltsin's eagerness to co-opt it. Yeltsin was forced to embrace his opponents» ideas in order to stay in power: his team had proved its fitness to rule through its cynicism and ruthlessness, its ideology steadily adapted to the reality of the country. Yeltsin once again stole his opponents» proposals. He had stolen Gorbachev's reform agenda, and now he began to co-opt the ideology of his nationalist opponents. He put out a barrage of new initiatives designed to outflank the nationalists from the right. He reinvigorated the Commonwealth of Independent States, and negotiated a Union Treaty with Belarus, whose new president, Alexander Lukashenko, elected in 1994, publicly advocated such a step. He championed nationalist causes, throwing the Kremlin's weight behind efforts to rebuild the Christ the Saviour cathedral in the centre of Moscow, which had been demolished and turned into a swimming pool by Stalin in 1932. He also allowed the Duma a largely free hand to legislate on nationalist and religious issues, creating a commission in 1996 to come up with a Russian «national idea».
Dugin and many other extremists said they sensed a sharp shift in the Kremlin's attitude towards nationalism and away from the West in the wake of the events of that October. «Yeltsin made a correction, a profound correction, after 1993», says Dugin today. «Politically he castrated the political opposition, but also he has corrected, improved and changed his own political course.»
Yeltsin's strategy of carrots and sticks split the nationalists — the Communists and the LDPR went into parliament, where they never again challenged the authority of the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Dugin and Limonov refused to join them. «We tried to remain radical and irreconcilable», wrote Dugin, though he admitted that, during the following six years of Yeltsin rule,
. . . we, the defeated, humiliated, crushed party, can hardly brag about anything . . . But we have kept the most important thing, and no matter how dispersed, scattered, divided and separated we are we have kept precisely the Spirit that breathed then [at the massacre of Ostankino]. It doesn't matter that it no longer burns, but it is obviously smouldering independently, it aches in us, torments us.
The shock of what he had seen, Dugin says, was profound. During his appearance on Red Square he was asked whether he bore responsibility for the killing that had taken place. The question shook him, but he handled matters skilfully, blurting out: «Yes, but your Yeltsin is a bloody assassin.» The answer came in a single breath and so nothing could be edited out. The interview was not used. Nonetheless, «It was a trauma.» Dugin withdrew temporarily from political life.
Limonov was just as demoralized, and disgusted with the nationalist movement in the wake of the 1993 disaster. He wanted to create a real opposition party, with an ideology «based not on ethnic emotions of bleating, primeval people, not based on some outdated ideology of orthodoxy, but on the concept of national interest».
The two men sat in Limonov's flat one day in the spring of 1994. Limonov proposed taking the National Bolshevik Front, which they had created the previous July, and turning it into a party. Dugin was none too keen on the idea. Since he had left Pamyat in 1988, he had vowed not to participate in political organizations, and the experience of October had even further decreased his appetite for politics. He said he would help in the organization of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), but he did not want a formal post. In time, Dugin came around. The two men discussed their project in a beer tent on Old Arbat Street in Moscow. Dugin leaned over and said: «Eduard, your task as a warrior and kshatriya is to lead people; and I am but a priest, magician, Merlin, I have a woman's role to explain and console.»16
In fact, the party was arguably Dugin's brainchild — the name was his idea, as was the flag: a black hammer and sickle in a white circle on a red background, evoking the Nazi swastika. It was not going to win them any elections, in a country that lost 20 million to Hitler's fascism; but that was not the NBP's goal. The official NBP salute was a straight arm raised with a fist, alongside a cry of «Da, Smert!» (Yes! Death!).17 Inside the group's headquarters, the highest-ranking party member present was always referred to as the Bunkerführer. The veneer of fascism was very much calculated — it was a bohemian «political art project», in Dugin's words. He, according to Limonov, «seemed to have deciphered and translated the bright shock that Soviet youth experience when they pronounce the initials «SS»».
The NBP's ironic stance towards fascism, though, was also a carefully calculated ploy. The salutes, the slogans («Stalin, Beria, Gulag!» was one) were so odd and over the top that they verged on parody. Equating their party with fascist symbols, however, was a pose — pioneered by Dugin — that would come to define Russia's image of authoritarian rule under Putin in the coming decade. The NBP was a «sight gag» that undercut criticism by making it seem — ever so slightly — as though it was missing the point. Calling the swastika-waving, goose-stepping NBP members «fascists» frankly sounded so odd that no one ever did it, for fear of looking ridiculous. Both men were instinctive haters of conventional wisdom. They loved to shock. And the movement they founded was a mélange of each man's upbringing: Dugin a product of the overly intellectual Moscow bohemia of the 1980s; Limonov, the pre-AIDS Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s transplanted to central Moscow.
The name of the party made no difference to Limonov, Dugin told American diplomats in 2008 (the cable was published in 2010 by Wikileaks): «He wanted to call it «National Socialism», «National Fascism», «National Communism» — whatever. Ideology was never his thing. The scream in the wilderness — that was his goal.»
Limonov, according to Dugin (they had had a bad falling-out by this point), was like «a clown in a little traveling circus. The better he performs, the more attention he wins, the happier he is».18 At around the same time, when he spoke to me in 2009, Limonov called Dugin «a degenerate servitor of the regime, and shameful conformist».
It would be a mistake to view the NBP as a serious political party with clear goals: the party's code of conduct includes «the right not to listen when your girlfriend is talking to you», and members were encouraged to vandalize Russian cinemas showing Western films (though no one in the party has any memory of this actually having happened). Instead, the NBP was designed to become the germ of a new counterculture, the core of what Andreas Umland, an expert on Russian nationalist groups, refers to as «uncivil society», whose goal is not necessarily conquest of executive and legislative power, but rather ideological subversion aimed at acquiring dominance over the cultural superstructure.19 The NBP quickly became an icon. «You had three choices if you were a teenager here in the 1990s», explained Andrey Karagodin, an NBP veteran. «You could get into rave, you could become a gangster, or you could join the NBP. That was it.»
Limonov enlisted his friend Egor Letov, lead singer with the popular band Civil Defence. His NBP membership card was number 4. He would routinely interrupt concerts with long diatribes against Yeltsin and in support of the NBP. Aside from Letov, ex-NBP members have distinguished themselves in some of the most creative professions in Russia. Zakhar Prilepin, who joined the movement later on, went on to become one of Russia's most interesting young authors, after a career that, oddly, began in the elite police force, the OMON. Alexey Belyayev-Gintovt went on to win the coveted Kandinsky Art Prize. And Karagodin himself is now editor of Russia's edition of Vogue.
The NBP was an exploration of the limits of freedom. In this Limonov and Dugin represented diametrically opposite poles: the anarchy of the Russian spirit on the one side; on the other, the ever-present totalitarian impulses that have gripped the Russian soul over five centuries of history. It was a party which espoused fascist ideas, yet simultaneously revelled in the libertine Moscow of the 1990s. It was a living demonstration of the paradox of freedom and a simultaneous suggestion of the authoritarian alternative. As Letov put it: «Everything which isn't anarchy is fascism, and there is no anarchy.» This dialectic of contradictory thesis and antithesis was played out in the playground of Yeltsin's Russia, and became the ruling synthesis of the next decade. The movement pioneered the creation of «youth leagues», which sprang up everywhere in the Putin era in a bid by the Kremlin to control the streets. «They stole all our ideas», complained Limonov to me in 2011. Limonov went on to become the shouting conscience of the Putin era — the highest-profile dissident of a new regime; while Dugin would become the ideologist of the new autocracy.
The first issue of their newspaper, created by Limonov and named Limonka (the nickname for a Second World War grenade), came out in 1994, with a front page denouncing the «old opposition» in favour of the new. Dugin presented the founding idea of the party, arguing that the difference between old and new opposition was not one of political ideology, but one of psychology and style. The «old patriots» were focused on restoring the old, while the new patriots were not reactionary «whatever their views, from communism to monarchism to Russian fascism, they think in terms of a new society, a revolutionary process . . . their goal is to create something principally new».
Funding was going to be difficult. «There was basically never any money», remembers Dugin. Without money to rent an office, they decided to try and extort one — with surprising results. In mid-December they wrote to the Moscow mayor, Yury Luzhkov, vaguely threatening that unspecified disturbances would befall the city of Moscow if they were denied. Luzhkov, a rotund, proletarian former chemical industry specialist who had arrived on Yeltsin's coat-tails to govern the city, was not in the mood for trouble and seemed to think that a free flat was a small price to pay for the good behaviour of yet another radical fringe group of sociopaths. Out of the blue, a few weeks later, someone from Luzhkov's office called and made an appointment for them with the Moscow Commission of State Property. The beaming city bureaucrat who received them assured them that «art and the state should work hand in hand». He offered them accommodation for 17 roubles per year per square metre — «that is basically free», Dugin assured a perplexed Limonov.
The apartment they chose was a basement on Frunzenskaya Street, not coincidentally located below a police station. The flat «had the notable quality that every so often, due to a cracked sewer pipe located in the wall, it would become covered in shit», according to Dugin. «The bunker», as it became known, was a focal point for the NBP. As Prilepin described it in his semi-autobiographical novel Sankya:
It was similar to a boarding school for sociopathic children, the workshop of a mad artist and a military headquarters for barbarians who had decided to go to war against God knows where . . . There were a lot of young people who cut their hair in all manner of ways — either letting it vegetate, or leaving a single bang, or a Mohawk, or even weird whiskers above the ears. However, there were unexpectedly also boys with perfect hair styles in suits, and ordinary workers with simple faces.
With their new premises, they began to coalesce. But not really. Limonov was a committed revolutionary who wanted to declare war on convention in all forms, an instinctive hater of the political establishment. Dugin, still lecturing at the General Staff Academy and not wanting to burn his bridges entirely with the political order, was more restrained. Dugin and Limonov more than once clashed over Dugin's lack of extremism. Dugin readily admits that he was gently putting the brake on the more radical tendencies of the NBP. As he told me in 2010: «During my period in the NBP, one could say under my supervision, there were no illegal acts, no criminal cases. Limonov would plan them, I would put the brakes on. I was opposed to violating the law for no reason.»
Limonka, meanwhile, was full of polemics and provocation. But the editorial line of the paper, again under Dugin's supervision, seemed to stick closely to the agenda of conservatives in the Kremlin clan led by Yeltsin's bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov, who was fighting constantly with liberal opponents in Yeltsin's entourage.
A close reading of Limonka, according to NBP veteran and former Dugin acolyte Arkady Maaler, was illuminating. Rather than straight opposition, Dugin's editorials (for he ran the editorial department of Limonka) were more nuanced, praising the line of Kremlin hardliners like Korzhakov, while criticizing the liberal lobby within the government (such as privatization chief Anatoly Chubais).20 Maaler believes that Dugin was actually working the whole time for Kremlin hardliners, a faction led until 1996 by Korzhakov, while Limonov was not — something that Dugin categorically denies.
Yeltsin's most fateful concession to the hardliner lobby was the December 1994 invasion of Chechnya, which had effectively seceded from the Russian Federation, declaring full independence from Moscow in 1993 under the leadership of former Soviet Air Force General Dzhokhar Dudaev. Russia had supported the anti-Dudaev opposition, but attempts to wrest control of the autonomous region from separatist forces had stalled. In December 1994, Yeltsin ordered Russian forces to «restore constitutional order» in Chechnya, and this sparked a wave of resignations among army generals. Instead of a quick, surgical strike aimed at regime change, the campaign was a botched, bloody affair, and the Russian army quickly became bogged down in the conflict, taking an estimated 5,500 dead until a ceasefire was declared in 1996. A horrific toll was inflicted on Chechen civilians.
Chechnya quickly became synonymous with Yeltsin's impotence as a leader, but it symbolized a «correction» in the Kremlin's attitude, as Dugin put it, away from liberalism and towards nationalism in the wake of the events of October 1993. The conflict inspired some singularly ghastly headlines in Limonka. When Russian forces invaded, the paper's headline blared: «Welcome, War!» And after the Chechen capital fell (and before Russian forces were routed the following year) another banner headline read: «Hooray! Grozny is Taken!'
It is telling that the line on Chechnya changed soon after Dugin and Limonov split, when Limonov took control of the paper's editorial line: the paper began to support Chechen independence from Russia. The attitude to revolution also changed — in 2001 Limonov would be arrested for plotting terrorist attacks in Northern Kazakhstan. A cursory reading of Limonka headlines appears to confirm Maaler's allegation (though neither Dugin nor Limonov will admit it) that the NBP was operating within strict political limits during Dugin's time there. While cultivating a reputation for anarchy, the party never strayed far from certain boundaries, and it seems these were set by Dugin.
If the NBP had an agenda other than uncompromising nihilism and radical revolution, however, it was not obvious to the rank and file. It became the political party of choice among Russia's counterculture musicians and artists — popularizing nationalism within a stratum of society uniquely predisposed to avoiding it. Limonka became something of a phenomenon, both in Moscow and in boring Russian provincial towns, where it gingered up the stale atmosphere. It united disparate youth countercultures in its readership. «They didn't join the NBP, but they read us», says Limonov. The paper was particularly strong for its cultural offerings, its reviews of avant-garde cinema, rock groups and underground poets.
For many provincial Russian youths, languishing in stultifying mining towns and crushing poverty, the NBP offered a rush of adrenaline. Valery Korovin was one such convert, joining the movement in 1995. I found him ten years later, still Dugin's disciple and one of the leaders of the Eurasian movement in the Putin years. He told me how he had arrived there.
Growing up in the far eastern city of Vladivostok in the 1980s, he was the quintessential target audience of the NBP: talented, young and bored. A self-described «head banger», he happened to see a TV interview with Letov calling for revolution against the «Yeltsin regime», at which point the programme suddenly cut away for a commercial break. As Korovin recalls: «I realized I was completely out of it, I was sitting in Vladivostok out in the middle of nowhere, and meanwhile in Moscow Letov and somebody I'd never heard of, Limonov, were planning a world revolution. I had to get there and be part of it.» He took a train to Moscow, enrolled on a university course at the Moscow State Construction Institute, and sought out Limonov, finding him with about ten followers in the basement on Frunzenskaya Street. «I was in a very radical mood, expecting I would be given a bomb or a grenade to throw somewhere. I was serious-minded. They started to calm me down, saying «Easy, we have to prepare first».» Dugin was sitting in the far room, half-naked, typing seriously, surrounded by books and beer bottles. It was Saturday, and they had to clean the place once a week. Korovin remembers Limonov called to Dugin: «Sasha! What are all these bottles for?» «They are required for my work», said Dugin flatly. Korovin remembers: «They worked well together. Dugin was a philosopher, a metaphysician, works with the mind. Limonov was all in public. He was for public actions. Radical revolution.»
But gradually, the two men drifted apart. Limonov was not the first collaborator with whom Dugin quarrelled. In his autobiography, Limonov described his «Merlin» as «vindictive, destructive, totally jealous».
In 1995, the NBP was thoroughly trounced in parliamentary elections, and the first serious rift appeared between Dugin and Limonov. Dugin evidently saw that Limonov was not serious about reaching the establishment, and began working with Zhirinovsky's LDPR, which made Limonov crazy with anger. «Merlin was looking into the forest, searching for a new King Arthur», related Limonov in his autobiography. Korovin noticed the tension. It was clear to everyone in the NBP that, «Staying with Limonov, Dugin could not reach the establishment, could not address the Duma, ministers. Limonov made the party marginal.» Limonov loved the counterculture, bohemian project, but as a permanent malcontent he was uncomfortable with any role other than die-hard opposition. Dugin had greater ambitions. «I was holding him back», concedes Limonov today.21
Tensions continued in the NBP. It was divided into the intellectuals, who were with Dugin, and on Limonov's side the «chess faction», described by Korovin as «lumpen youths» who mainly played chess and worked out with dumbbells in the Frunzenskaya basement.
In 1997, Dugin further exacerbated the divide when he joined the Old Believer sect — a sixteenth-century schismatic version of the Orthodox Church, preferred by the original Eurasianists because it was the faith of Russia at the time of the Golden Horde. It was also soon after the publication of Khlyst, a book by Alexander Etkind, a professor of history at Cambridge University, on the role of Orthodox Christian sects in moulding the eschatological worldviews of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. In fact, Limonov complained in his biography that Dugin had made the entire NBP buy the book and read it.
Whatever the cause of Dugin's conversion, he convinced nine members of the NBP to convert as well, and even took the unusual step of inviting monks from the Preobrazhensky Old Believers monastery in Moscow to come and sew traditional black kosovorotki, or peasant blouses, for the entire NBP. According to Korovin, who followed Dugin into the Old Believers and still wears a long flowing beard to prove it: «Dugin's embrace of Old Belief irritated Limonov, even more so when most active members of the party followed this idea and started to fast, grow beards, sew shirts and go to church.» Limonov criticized Dugin openly. «Dugin's going mad», Limonov told one meeting. «He has zombified you and you follow him like blind moles. You have forgotten about the party, the revolution. It's necessary to give up all this crap.»
Dugin's faction started cultivating beards and dressing in black. «I thought it was a phase, a hobby, it would pass», wrote Limonov. «But the party was not made to serve the intellectual dalliances of our Merlin.» Dugin also stopped drinking — a step that was seen as intensely disloyal among the «chess faction» of his party. He even gave a lecture in 1997 on the need to delay revolution, saying that before any bloodshed they must first create a new type of human being — the «philosophical Russian».22 «Only after this, sometime in the far distant future could we have a revolution», related Limonov in his memoirs, describing Dugin's speech. After Dugin left the bunker to host a radio show, Limonov immediately countermanded him: «The party is not a circle for the study of art and literature», he told members. «The party has political goals and self-improvement is not one of them. I am all for self-improvement, but you can do this in your own time.»23
The movement split along theological lines. The final straw was an argument over 248 roubles which disappeared from the party's cash box, with the two groups pointing the finger at each other. Dugin wrote a long-winded article in Limonka pouring bile on «useless beer-swilling, chess-playing half dolts» in the NBP. Limonov's libelled loyalists demanded an apology. Dugin left in a huff, taking his nine followers, including Korovin. He settled in an office in a library across from the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow, hung with postmodern art nouveau posters. Weeks before the split, Dugin had already begun his journey towards the political establishment, with the publication of a new book that would change his fate — and arguably that of Russia as well. «Dugin requalified as the guru of geopolitics in Russia», as Limonov put it.
Charles Clover
«Black Wind, White Snow:
The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism»
// New Haven: «Yale University Press», 2016,
hardcover, 384 pp.,
ISBN: 978-0-300-12070-7,
dimentions: 235⨉159⨉32 mm
Notes:
1 Shapova retaliated two decades later with an autobiographical It's Me, Elena: «I'm writing this story about how much I hate you», she writes on the second page, without naming Limonov. «Here is a story for your kids, if you ever have any. If you don't, so much the better.»
2 Edward Limonov, It's Me, Eddie: A fictional memoir, Pan Books, 1983.
3 Eduard Limonov, Anatomiya Geroya, Rusich, 1997.
4 Bruce Clark, The Empire's New Clothes: The end of Russia's liberal dream, Vintage, 1995.
«Were I in the place of the emperor; I should not be content with forbidding my subjects to complain; I should also forbid them to sing, which is a disguised mode of complaining. These accents of lament are avowals, and may become accusations».— The Marquis de Custine
«The gentle reader cannot know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad».— Mark Twain
Contents
Introduction
Part I
I. The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (Ukraine)
II. Party for Everybody (Rostov-on-Don to Saint Petersburg)
III. A Real Lenin of Our Time (Moscow)
IV. God-Forget-It House (Trans-Siberian)
V. The Knout and the Pierogi (Tomsk to Baikal)
VI. The Hall of Sufficient Looking (Trans-Mongolian)
Part II
I. Drunk Nihilists Make a Good Audience (Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia)
II. A Fur Coat with Morsels (Hungary, Poland)
III. Poor, but They Have Style (Romania)
IV. You Are an Asshole Big Time (Bulgaria)
V. Don't Bring Your Beer in Church (Bucharest to Vienna)
Part III
I. Changing the Country, We Apologize for the Inconvenience (Ukraine After the Flood)
Bibliography
Playlist
Itinerary
V. The Knout and the Pierogi (Tomsk to Baikal)
⟨…⟩
One man's life, in particular, makes a useful fable demonstrating the confusing way in which «punk» has been understood in the context of Russian political and cultural life. The writer, provocateur, founder of the quasi-fascist National Bolshevik Party, and self-identified «punk» Eduard Limonov has long blurred the line between radical politics and large-scale performance art. Because of the centrality of his experience with and interpretation of Western punk to the aesthetics of his politics, he provides a contrast with the later generation of young people, similarly inspired by Western punk but to radically different effect, who constitute the contemporary Russian punk scene. Limonov, exhilarated by characters like Johnny Rotten and of a Soviet generation mistrustful of any ideology, understood punk as an amoral license for confrontation and offense for its own sake. Today's punks (excepting, maybe, our friend Andrei), inspired by the anarchist, progressive politics of bands like Crass and Fugazi, imbibed not only aesthetics but a set of ideals and a progressive moral sensibility.
Limonov was born Eduard Savenko in 1943 in Kharkov and grew up in its gritty and violent Saltovka neighborhood, which he described in his third book, «Memoir of a Russian Punk». In the 1960s «punk» meant petty theft and hooliganism, and Limonov describes an aimless world of gang scuffles, drinking, and run- ins with the «trash,» or cops. His own father was a secret police officer who ran train convoys «transporting] punks to labor camps and prisons» in Siberia. So it was with a kind of oedipal commitment that he managed to get himself exiled from the Soviet Union by 1974. «Rat out your degenerate friends or go into exile,» the KGB reportedly told him. He went to New York and managed to embed himself in the Lower East Side punk scene, befriending and idolizing scene luminaries including Richard Hell, Marky Ramone, and, yes, Patti Smith. It was a debauched period he used as material for his first books, «Its Me, Eddie» and «His Butlers Story», which became sensations in France and Germany1 and sold more than a million copies in Russia. The exposure to the provocative downtown art world of 1970s New York shaped his self-conception permanently. To this day, he wears the «torn black sleeveless T-shirt or a button-down black T-shirt, black fake jeans unraveling at the seams, and Keds-like shoes» of an aging SoHo artist and «is clearly proud of being the sort of Iggy Pop of the right-wing literary world,» according to journalist Mark Ames, a longtime Limonov apologist. He already had a nom de punk, thanks to a friend who had dubbed him «Limonov» or «lemon» because «he was very pale, almost yellow.» He explained with no little pride that to a Russian ear the word sounds like «something punk, like Johnny Rotten.»
In the 1980s, he spent a few years as a literary celebrity in Paris. «We were used to Soviet dissidents being bearded, grave, and poorly dressed,» said French writer Emmanuel Carrere, who met him during these years and wrote a kind of «biographical novel» about him in 2011. «And here was this sexy, sly, funny guy, a cross between a sailor on leave and a rock star. . . . He sang Stalin's praises, which we chalked up to his taste for provocation.» With the fall of the Soviet Union, he returned to Russia and immediately set about making himself infamous. He was invited by the clownish populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, founder and leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, to join the LDPR shadow cabinet. After a brief stint as minister of the interior, though, he instead founded his own National Bolshevik Party (NBP), also known as the Nat-Bols. («The name made no difference to Limonov,» NBP co-founder and «ideologist» Alexander Dugin told the «New York Times». «He wanted to call it «National Socialism,» «National Fascism,» «National Communism»—whatever. Ideology was never his thing. . . . The scream in the wilderness—that was his goal.») The party unveiled a flag that was simply a Nazi flag with a hammer and sickle in place of the swastika. «Certainly it was irritation, provocative, outrageous punk, our flag,» Limonov wrote. He named the party's newspaper «Limonka», a pun on his name that was slang for a hand grenade. The Nat-Bols combined the far left, the far right, and the far out. «There's no longer any left or right,» he told an interviewer. «There's the system and the enemies of the system»—and by «system,» he explained, he meant Western liberal democracy.
The party slogan was «Russia is everything—the rest is nothing.» Limonov's young skinhead bodyguards referred to him as «Leader,» a term once used for Stalin. Party ideology was haphazard, opportunistic, but always oppositional. Party members were, said the «New York Times», «part Merry Pranksters, part revolutionary vanguard,» who
have found in the NBP a satisfyingly fierce ideology, often mediated by black humor, that can be refashioned, as Limonov readily admits, «to fit anyone and anything.» . . . His message has changed—from anti- Americanism and anti-capitalism to anti-Putinism and anti-fascism—though rabid nationalism has dominated. He has sought the mantle of everyone from Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century anarchist, to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French ultranationalist. He has shifted course so often that by now only the goal—revolution—and the means—young people—remain constants. . . . Disaffected youth are Russia's «most exploited class» in Limonov s view and, as he readily admits, his core supporters. There are young men with shaved heads in the party, though these days they are more likely to be left-wing punks than right-wing skinheads.
The mixture of the absurd, the righteous, and the belligerent was intoxicating to the disaffected youth of Russia's provincial cities, and in the pre-Internet era that ethos reached people via copies of «Limonka», which became a shared secret, a window into a garish underground, like heavy metal or science fiction. «There was every reason to be blown away by its gaudy layout, vulgar drawings, and provocative headlines,» wrote Carrere, describing the impact of the newspaper on the writer and NBP party member Zakhar Prilepin. ««Limonka» dealt less with politics than with rock and roll, literature, and above all, style. What style? Fuck you, bullshit, up yours style. Majestic punk.» Prilepin explained to Carrere,
You have to imagine what a provincial Russian city is like. The sinister life young people lead there, their lack of a future, and—if they're at all sensitive or ambitious—their despair. All it took was for a single issue of «Limonka» to arrive in a city like that and fall into the hands of one of these idle, morose, tattooed youths who played the guitar and drank beer under his precious posters of The Cure or Che Guevara, and it was a done deal. Very quickly there were ten or twenty of them, a whole threatening gang of good-for-nothings with pale complexions and ripped black jeans who hung out in the squares. . . . [«Limonka»] was their thing, the thing that spoke to them. [Limonov] said to them, «You're young. You don't like living in this shitty country. You don't want to be an ordinary Popov, or a shithead who only thinks about money, or a Chekist. You're a rebel. Your heroes are Jim Morrison, Lenin, Mishima, Baader. Well there you go: you're a nazbol already.» . . .
[They] were the Russian counterculture. The only one: everything else was bogus, indoctrination and so on. So of course the party had its share of brutes, guys recovering from military service, skinheads with German shepherds who got their kicks from pissing off the prilitchnyi—the upstanding citizens—by giving the Nazi salute. But the party also included all the frozen backwaters of Russia had to offer in terms of self-taught cartoonists, bass players looking for people to start a rock band, amateur video freaks, and timid guys who wrote poetry in private while pining after girls who were too beautiful for them and nursing dark dreams of wasting everyone at school and then blowing themselves up, like they do in America. Plus the Satanists from Irkutsk, the Hell's Angels from Kirov, the Sandinistas from Magadan.
Limonov issued provocative policy proposals, including polygamy and mandatory childbirth for women («like military service for men»)—and then retracted them: «Fuck, I even forgot I wrote that.» Indulging a Hemingway-esque infatuation with the military, he appeared, wrote Marc Bennetts in «The Guardian», in a documentary film «shooting a machine gun into a besieged Sarajevo in the company of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić.2 The incident . . . shown at Karadzic's trial at the Hague, cost Limonov publishing contracts in both Europe and the US.» The Nat-Bols embarked on a program of what Limonov referred to as «velvet terrorism.» These were direct actions of the kind the anarchist writer Hakim Bey calls «poetic terrorism»: situationist, absurdist public pranks, in which, as Bey says, «the audience reaction or aesthetic shock [is] at least as strong as the emotion of terror . . . art as crime; crime as art.»
Nat-Bols doused a politician in mayonnaise, occupied the Ministry of Health, rushed the Ministry of Finance yelling, «Return the money to the people!» and scattered leaflets encouraging Putin to «Dive After the Kursk»—the Russian Navy submarine that sank with its crew in 2000. As far back as «Memoir of a Russian Punk», Limonov had been taken with the romance of a small, disciplined group in a time of anarchy, writing about himself (as he usually does) in the third person: «Eddie-baby is convinced that if the leading people in the state are liquidated, there will be chaos in the country and a well-organized gang can seize power. . . . Eddie-baby doesn't see anything impossible about his idea. Lenin and the Bolsheviks also had a very small gang in 1917, but they still managed to seize power.» The authorities took him seriously, and he wound up serving two years in prison for smuggling arms as part of a supposed plot to take over northern Kazakhstan («We live in a terrible climate. . . . Russia should swallow Kazakhstan territory if we want our children to have sunshine,» he later explained), and the Nat-Bols were outlawed in 2007 after seizing the reception office of the Kremlin.
Limonov's time in 1970s New York, and specifically its punk scene, remains his aesthetic and nostalgic touchstone. He «was never political,» an old friend told the «Times». «New York politicized him. This city was his awakening.» Limonov himself told the «Times», «The Ramones, I knew them. Not just Joey. All of them. It was a rich life then. . . . It was a great time, a legendary time. I have now a certain nostalgia. It's exciting, and dangerous of course, what we're doing now. But to have lived in the seventies in New York, it means a lot. Still.» In one of several defenses of Limonov, Ames explains the through line between the provocations of the early punks and Limonov's reinterpretation in the political sphere of what he understood to be their modus operandi:
He told me that the first English poetry he translated into Russian after moving to New York was the lyrics of Lou Reed. Reed, both as singer of The Velvet Underground and as a major figure in Andy Warhol's Factory scene, was aggressively anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal, taking much of his aesthetic from the sado-masochist underground, from the violent fringes of society, from fascism and revolutionary aesthetics, in order to confront contemporary Western culture. Soon after Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, Limonov fell in with the punk movement in New York, which also agitated against liberal middle-class culture and values, relying heavily on violence and the threat of violence, though also more often than not on outrageous humor. Limonov never changed his heart or tastes; indeed, much of his sympathy with the skinheads goes directly back to The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Lou Reed, a Jew from Long Island who carved a giant iron cross in his skull and strutted around stage in a black leather uniform singing «Kill Your Sons.»
The use of Nazi imagery for shock was rampant in the UK punk scene. Steinholt gives such examples as «the «Sex Pistols» «Belsen Was a Gas,» Siouxsie Sioux's and Mark E. Smith's swastika armbands, [and] the origin of band names such as «Joy Division».» Johnny Rotten also toyed with swastikas as a fashion statement. «I believe [NBP membership] could be given to Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten (the Johnny Rotten of 1977) and such membership would be accepted,» Limonov said. While denying that he necessarily still considered himself a punk («How can one be a punk after 60? That would be silly»), he explicitly confirmed, in his essay «Punk and National-Bolshevism,» the influence of his youthful heroes on the NBP's aesthetic:
Punks were skeleton of Party organizations in first years of our existence. Loud denial of so-called values of civilization, grotesque, trash, screamings, some borrowings of Rightist aesthetics, were common for New York City punk movement of 1970s as well as for first National-Bolsheviks in 1990s. . . . Newspaper of National-Bolsheviks Party «Limonka» was in 1990s the most radical and most punkish of whole world. With its slogans like «Eat the Rich!» or «Good bourgeois is a dead bourgeois!» or «Capitalism is shit!» We were in punk tradition, what else? . . .
NBP's actions, however non-violent, are bearing aesthetics of punk, for example occupation of Bolshoi Theater on May 7, 2004, the day when Putin was inaugurated. Putin was expected at Bolshoi that evening, so National-Bolsheviks erupted on stage, took over president's box. They were burning fires as football hooligans, wearing flags and screaming slogans. That was beautiful. That was punk. . . . Many heavy books will be written on subject «NBP and Punk.» I just made a sketch.
Limonov may not be a punk anymore, he said, but «I believe that I am most punkish person on whole territory of Russian Republic and probably on all territory of ex-Soviet Union too. Maybe Shamil Basayev is comparable to me,» referring to the deceased Chechen terrorist who claimed responsibility for the infamous Beslan school massacre.
Musicians were prominent in both the leadership and membership of the NBP—one account of an NBP rally noted that «Mr. Limonov's speech drew a number of leather-clad rockabilly fans and thrash metal musicians.» Yegor Letov, whose Independent obituary called him «the father of Russian punk» and whose unimpeachable countercultural and dissident status included forced commitment to a mental hospital, was issued NBP membership card number four. He and Sergey Kuryokhin of the legendary band Akvarium3 became two of the NBP's most prominent members, running its «cultural wing,» and the party became a magnet for a certain strain of the aging avant-garde. Letov's presence and credibility, said Limonov, gave the party «thousands of recruits over the years.»
But their motivations and goals were not entirely in sync. The narcissistic Limonov saw himself, Steinholt argues, as the auteur of «a massive Gesamtkunstwerk that would cement his position» as a provocateur, «concentrating first and foremost on ideological taboos.» Letov, on the other hand, was a psychedelic nihilist, combining «glowing, universal misanthropy [with] anti-social tendencies» and a weakness for «territorial nationalism»—the old self-destructive and self-hating Russian patriotism at work.4 «Letov, as all punk artists, proved to be inconsistent, capricious, and unpredictable,» said Limonov, not without sympathy. «He quarreled with us in 1996, came back to party later, then went to his own punk solitude. Sometimes he is declaring himself Red and National-Bolshevik, sometimes he makes believe he doesn't know us.» In the last years of his life, Letov cycled through ideologies—he left the NBP for Zyuganov's revanchist Communists and then, as his political notoriety crippled his performing career, he renounced politics and, feeling misunderstood, retreated into a sullen silence.
Limonov, Letov, and Kuryokhin all belonged to what filmmaker Adam Curtis calls «a post-political generation,» raised in the stagnant Soviet 1970s, «who retreated from all conventional ideologies, both communist and western capitalist, and instead turned to radical avant-garde culture . . . to try and protest against the absurdity of the system . . . something they believed politics was incapable of doing. . . . Limonov has explicitly said that his aim is to take ideas and attitudes from avant-garde art and music and use them to try and create a new kind of confrontational politics.»
A coping mechanism and way of public expression distinctive to this generation in the waning years of Soviet and Eastern European communism, conscious of the emptiness of Soviet symbology and language but pessimistic about its opportunity to foment change, was an attitude colloquially called stiob. Alexei Yurchak defined stiob as «an ironic aesthetic . . . [that] differed from sarcasm, cynicism, derision or any of the more familiar genres of absurd humor [in that it] required such a degree of overidentification with the object, person, or idea at which [it] was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two. The very practitioners of stiob refused to draw a line between these sentiments . . . refusing the very dichotomy.» Stiob was parody so deadpan, so straight-faced, that it became indistinguishable from the real thing.5 The authorities would be aware of and reactive to traditionally or literally dissident language. But since the «highly formalized language . . . [of] late socialism» meant that it was more important to reproduce approved phraseology «than to concern oneself with what [the words] might «mean» in a literal sense,» Yurchak explained, official lingo proved a useful Trojan horse in which to insert subversive meaning.
An inexact parallel in contemporary American life was Stephen Colbert's past embodiment, on his Comedy Central show, of a Bill O'Reilly-esque right-wing blowhard. The comparison is inexact because «The Colbert Report» was clearly presented as a comedy program, with an audience explicitly let in on the joke. Imagine an unknown Colbert, in undercover character, hired as an actual Fox News commentator. Musicians showed a particular skill at this sort of thing—the Slovenian band Laibach, who in 2015 became the first Western band to play a concert in North Korea, remain well-known practitioners. In 1987, Kuryokhin managed to have published in «Leningradskaya Pravda» an ideologically impeccable attack on rock music, written in irreproachable Soviet jargon: rock musicians, he wrote, show a «complete lack of talent and very little skill in playing musical instruments. [The] deafening noise . . . reveals overall helplessness, the silliness of their texts reveals banality . . . their false pathos reveals social inadequacy. . . . It is time that the Komsomol takes a very serious look at this problem.» The confused reaction of officials, wrote Boyer and Turchak, proved that «a text written in that language . . . could be simultaneously an exemplary ideological statement and a public ridicule of that statement.»6
The centrality of the official antifascist line made it an ideal target for stiob actions. To the stiob generation, «all political doctrines and sentiments (multiculturalism as well as conservatism, liberalism as well as socialism, fundamentalism as well as atheism) [were] equally corrupt, deformed, and hypocritical,» wrote Yurchak. And if fascism were divorced from its sacrosanct place in the Soviet hierarchy of evil, it too could be repurposed as just another empty ideological aesthetic.
Is Limonov, then, a subtle and committed practitioner of stiob (though to ask the question is to misunderstand the game)? Journalist Matt Taibbi, the co-editor (with Mark Ames) of the amoral expat journal «The Exile» in Moscow in the 1990s, described Limonov's imprisonment as having been «for faux-fomenting real revolution, or really fomenting faux revolution.» Is he, as Ames has described him, an opportunist and self-promoter, «a cynical marketing whiz looking to . . . maintain his fame?» Were he and Letov examples of a tendency of a kind of aging contrarian to find in political strength-worship a culmination of the libertarian self-sufficiency that defined their dissident youth? Perhaps he should simply be taken at face value—actions and words do exist independent of intent—as the French writer-provocateur Michel Houllebecq once wrote of himself, as a «nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist: to lump [him] in with the rather unsavory family of «right-wing anarchists» would be to give [him] too much credit.»
Or, as Ames wrote in an impassioned defense, was Limonov a principled, almost pathological contrarian, and the criticism of his political theater the cowardice of aesthetic dilettantes? Ames described a call he received from Limonov on the occasion of «Limonka»'s fourth anniversary: the paper was throwing a party at the Mayakovsky Museum, and Limonov wanted to invite his old hero Johnny Rotten. Rotten, through his agents, begged off, citing jet lag and Thanksgiving plans. Limonov, said Ames, was a living contrast to formerly extremist artists like Rotten who had been co-opted into the bourgeoisie.
After the departure of Dugin from the National Bolshevik party—he went on to become a Kremlin-funded primary ideologue of the Russian incursions into Ukraine—and Limonov's prison term («For a man who sees himself as the hero of a novel,» his biographer wrote, «prison is one chapter that can't be missed»), the latter disavowed the more xenophobic and far- right rhetoric of the NBP, which was banned by the government in 2007. As promiscuous in his political alliances as in his personal life (he's been married six times), in 2010 he joined forces with the chess champion and Western-style liberal Garry Kasparov in an umbrella group they called the Other Russia. «Russia is rich in generals without armies,» Kasparov told the «Times». «But Limonov has foot soldiers. He commands street power.» But the Other Russia coalition crumpled in the wake of its ineffectual resistance to the election of Dmitry Medvedev in 2008, and the «Times» found Limonov seeming lost, adrift, «a performance artist who could not perform.» The massive anti-Putin rallies of 2011 were largely attended by a serious, Western-looking urban middle class, not a ragtag collection of contrarians and ironists. «Limonov held his own rally alongside,» said Curtis, «obviously hoping that he would be the vanguard for this new insurgency.» But Limonov was a man of the anarchic 1990s. The role of «virtuous opposition figure,» wrote Carrere, turned out to be a kind of booby prize, the only option left for a would-be political leader trumped by more cynical Putinists on the right and by genuine idealists on the left: «the defender of values he doesn't believe in (democracy, human rights, all that crap), alongside honest people who embody everything he's always despised.» But the nouveau bourgeois protesters had their own chosen mouthpiece, the blogger Alexei Navalny, and wanted consistency, not chaos. «[Limonov] and his supporters were completely ignored. The protests swept on past them.»7
Ames asked Limonov «what happened to that punk-fascist element in the National-Bolsheviks after he got out of jail [in 2003] and he told me: «Why would we bother playing with fascism anymore when the Kremlin is already fascist? We are an opposition party. And today the most radical position of all is to fight for democracy and elections—against Putin's fascism. It's far-right fascism that is banal and oppressive now.» To quote Yegor Letov's great anthem: «Я всегда буду против» («I will always be anti-!»)»
Maybe. But for all his contrarian rhetoric, Limonov's greatest fetish was always for power. A friend once told him that his «habit of dividing the world into failures and successes was immature and . . . [would] only result in perpetual unhappiness.» To have aligned with the emasculated Russian liberal left must have seemed like a final miscalculation, leaving him politically sidelined, an inconsequential relic. «A shitty life» was his assessment to Carrère in 2009.
And so, with power in mind, he pivoted toward Putinism. For decades Limonov had advocated for the annexation of Crimea and the return to Russia of all the territories—especially those with residual ethnic Russian populations, such as the Baltics, eastern Ukraine, and northern Kazakhstan—lost in the disintegration of the USSR. As the Ukrainian antigovernment «Euromaidan» protests of 2013–14 climaxed, he called on Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych to crack down. When Putin moved into Crimea, Limonov publicly and vociferously cheered, urging him to openly employ the Russian army to seize eastern Ukraine (including his hometown of Kharkov). Alexey Pesotsky, a member of his Other Russia party's executive committee, wrote that the «Russia Without Putin» opposition slogan had become an «empty mantra» and that Putin «has started to make steps in the last years that deserve respect. It is difficult to deny Putin's accomplishments, such as preventing a war in Syria, victorious Olympic Games in Sochi and the reunification of Crimea with Russia.» The Other Russia, which had for years been denied official registration and whose freedom-of-assembly rallies had regularly ended in arrests, was suddenly granted permission to organize public gatherings.
The party splintered, with some volunteering to fight in eastern Ukraine and others leaving, denouncing what they saw as Limonov's accommodation. Limonov traded insults with the classic-rock musician Andrey Makarevich, a onetime Kremlin supporter who wrote songs in support of Ukraine and performed in the war-torn region. (Limonov called Makarevich old and impotent, and Makarevich offered to «prove his sexual prowess» to Limonov in person.) Limonov turned up in «Novorossiya» (the separatists' aspirational name for southeastern Ukraine), still unable to resist the allure of the military encampment. Instead of writer-as-leader, he became writer-as-cheerleader—not Havel, or even D'Annunzio, but Pound. Whether out of a fear of irrelevance or a simple alignment of goals, the arch-oppositionist and revolutionary fantasist had been co-opted into the regime, finally aligned with the side of arms and cynical power.
⟨…⟩
«The Humorless Ladies of Border Control:
Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar»
// New York: «The New Press», 2016,
hardcover, 372 p.,
ISBN: 978-1-62097-179-6,
dimensions: 197⨉152⨉25 mm
1 The Dutch, French, and Italian editions of «It's Me, Eddie» were titled, in reference to Limonov's bisexual adventures, «The Russian Poet Likes Big Negroes»; the German, succinctly and inaccurately, «Fuck Off, America».
2 «I've always loved bright and handsome gangsters,» Limonov said of one of the Serbian paramilitaries, echoing Rebecca West's swoon over Yugoslav masculinity in general—«beautiful, with thick, straight, fair hair and bronze skins and high cheekbones pulling the flesh up from their large mouths, with broad chests and long legs springing from arched feet, «these were men, they could beget children on women, they could shape certain kinds of materials for purposes that made them masters of their worlds»—and the Serbs in particular.
3 Kuryokhin was also a fluent practitioner of absurdist pranks like «proving» on a talk show that Lenin had transformed into a fungus after ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms.
4 There is an implication in the commentary that Kuryokhin, for his part, was taking the piss: one of Kuryokhin's longtime associates told Steinholt «that his jokes had finally gone too far and made him friends among the wrong kinds of people.»
5 In a journal article on stiob, Dominic Boyer and Yurchak wrote, «In the post-Soviet period the meaning of this term widened considerably, and today is often used in Russian media to refer generically to irony, sarcasm and absurd humor.» The oft-noted tendency of postcommunist Eastern Europeans to hold those attributes may also go a long way toward explaining that generation's fondness for Frank Zappa.
6 Another Western analogue would be the articles in parody newspapers such as «The Onion» that, because of their pitch-perfect parroting of journalistic jargon, are mistakenly shared as real news.
7 In 2012, Curtis proposed that Limonov's true political legacy could be found in the half-Chechen fixer Vladislav Surkov, a member of the stiob generation who wielded more actual power than any of his counterparts in the opposition. Surkov became the mastermind of «managed democracy,» helping to create both Putin's party and its Potemkin opposition. He co-opted Limonov's paramilitary nationalist youth movement, forming the similar Kremlin tool Nashi, which used slogans borrowed from the NBP. Meanwhile, he wrote essays on conceptual art, ghostwrote lyrics critical of the government for a rock band, and dispensed patronage in the art world. His aesthetized, amoral power games took the stiob attitude of the interchangeability and hollowness of ideology to another, more insidious level, replacing apathetic stiob detachment with a puppetmaster's will and a nihilist's ruthlessness.
The first ripple in the bland surface of the week came when the right-wing Russian writer and activist Eduard Limonov heckled the Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz during his keynote speech. Milosz was talking about the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, when Limonov began shouting that Russia had done more than any other country to defeat Hitler: «How many Soviet soldiers died in liberating Auschwitz?» he yelled. Miłosz ignored him.
But Limonov wasn't finished. On the evening of 24 June, the final night of the conference, the delegates were drinking champagne in the hotel bar. The British and Russian panels were sitting on nearby tables. Paul Bailey described what happened:
Every country had to elect someone to say thank you to the Gettys and to the Hungarian Arts Council or whatever it was. So I thanked them, and I said, «It's been a wonderful week, there's only been one drawback, there's one person whose behaviour has been shamelessly terrible.» But I didn't name him. And he . . . suddenly turned up at the table, he came straight to me and he said, «Are you in favour of capital punishment?» I said, «That's a strange question to ask at two o'clock in the morning.» And he said it again. «Are you in favour of capital punishment?» I said, «No, of course I'm not.» And he said, «I thought so. You're one of those liberal cunts, aren't you.» And then I said, «Is there something wrong with you? Are you a secret transvestite by any chance?' And he picked up the bottle of champagne and hit me over the head with it.
It was a startling moment. Paul collapsed to the floor and «just sort of saw stars for a few minutes». Angela was sitting close by and the swinging bottle only narrowly missed her. The other Russian delegates ran over and pulled Limonov off with the help of Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the «New Republic» («people you don't expect to be involved in something like that», as Kazuo Ishiguro put it. «The whole thing was quite surreal»). But Paul emerged with nothing worse than a bump on the head, and soon they were all regarding it as a funny story. The next day, Mark met them at the airport. As they were driving back into London, Angela told the story of Limonov as if it was a joke, but Mark was outraged. He wanted to find Limonov and do him over. «He did always fiercely leap to Angela's defence,» Lorna MacDougall (who was married to Ishiguro, and had been with them in Budapest) remembered. «I think partly she got a rise out of him sometimes so he could really leap to her defence because he was so good at that.» In this case, at least, Mark's defensive instincts were sound. Limonov surfaced again in 1992 at the side of Radovan Karadžić — the so-called «Butcher of Bosnia», who in March 2016 was found guilty of genocide — and was filmed firing a sniper rifle at an apartment block in the besieged city of Sarajevo.
⟨…⟩
Edmund Gordon
«The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography»
// London: «Chatto & Windus», 2016,
hardcover, 544 p.,
ISBN: 978-0701187552,
dimensions: 240⨉162⨉41 mm
⟨…⟩ Well, I was promptly told, what other countries did was their business. I came under particularly vehement attack from the writer Eduard Limonov — who, I should point out, was a self-confessed admirer of Hitler and Stalin, advocated a new Iron Curtain to keep all foreign goods out of Russia, and wanted to ban abortions to boost the size of the Russian nation. Otherwise he was a very reasonable fellow. He objected to the very idea of a foreigner daring to pontificate about the Russian Idea — and I suppose he had a point. It was up to Russians to find a dream to follow. ⟨…⟩
Oscar-winning director Pawel Pawlikowski («Ida») is set to direct «Limonov,» an ambitious adaptation of French author Emmanuele Carrere's novelized biography of radical Russian poet and political dissident Eduard Limonov.
The Polish-born Pawlikowski has completed the screenplay for the biopic, which recounts «The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia,» as the extended title of the book's English translation reads. The film is set for a 2018 shoot.
Limonov was a Soviet underground idol under Leonid Brezhnev; a butler to a millionaire in Manhattan; a writer in Paris; and more recently the charismic leader of Russia's National Bolshevik Party.
The biopic will be in the languages of the places where it's set, which are Russia, New York, and Paris.
Italy's Wildside, which is owned by FremantleMedia, is co-producing «Limonov» with French producer Dimitri Rassam's Chapter 2, the company behind «The Little Prince.» The budget is about €16 million ($19 million). Warner Bros. Italia will be the film's Italian distributor. Talks are underway for a world sales company to come on board.
Wildside's Mario Gianani, Lorenzo Mieli and Lorenzo Gangarossa are the lead producers.
Wildside won a bidding war in 2013 for rights to «Limonov,» which has been a bestseller in Italy and France, where it won the Prix Renaudot in 2011. Carrere's book has also been named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and the Guardian newspapers.
Carrere is board as a consultant.
«Pavel has done a great job on the screenplay,» said Gianani, noting that Carrere's novel «was a re-interpretation of the Limonov character» and that «the film will be even more so.» British writer-director Ben Hopkins collaborated with Pawlikowski on the script.
Casting for the Russian actor who will play the lead has just started in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Pawlikowski first intersected with Limonov when the director shot 1992 Bosnian War BBC documentary «Serbian Epics» and filmed him in the company of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was found guilty last year of crimes against humanity.
Pawlikowski won the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film for «Ida» in 2015. His upcoming Poland-set period romance «Cold War,» now in post-production, was acquired in August by Amazon Studios.
«Variety», December 29, 2017
Epilogue.
Exit: How Soviets Became Westerners
Eleonory Gilburd
⟨…⟩
Dumpsters as the ultimate periphery were a frequent setting of émigré prose. The most scandalous novel of third-wave emigration, Eduard Limonov's «It's Me, Eddie», was about a Soviet immigrant as an outcast, a regular among the dumpsters and a fellow of the vagrants. A nonconformist poet in his former life, in America, Eddie lost his fame and his love. In anguish and sickness, «out of my fucking mind,» «wrapped in a filthy overcoat I had found in the trash, my arm oozing pus, I was roaming through the New York February, picking scraps out of garbage cans and drinking the last drops from wine and liquor bottles.»20 His permanent home was the Winslow, an old and malodorous Madison Avenue hotel, its tiny rooms populated by Soviet immigrants who had not made it. This place, its dust and darkness, embarrassed them, sapping their motivation to do anything except wallow in misery.21 Even with a room of his own, Eddie occasionally rummaged through the dumpster and wandered aimlessly, a habitué of the streets, who knew all the joints and was known to all the prostitutes. This endless meandering bespoke a fundamental homelessness. Limonov was unique among émigré artists, let alone average immigrants. His life and prose were épatage—his vulnerability and blunt anger on display, his offhandedly obscene language and graphic sex designed to shock readers. The novel was difficult to publish, and it did shock readers when it finally appeared in print. But one of the reasons it was outrageous was that it gave voice—screaming, wailing, offensive, explosive voice—to the mute despair of the average immigrant.
⟨…⟩
The disintegration of self-esteem, men's more so than women's, permeated émigré prose. Their uneasy accent, social gaffes, odd jobs, and Soviet clothes made immigrants look ridiculous even in the eyes of their spouses. In literary representations, immigrants were physically repulsive, often unshaven and unkempt, too skinny or too fat. They slouched, shyly hiding their poverty.32 Limonov's Eddie despised immigrants for «their main trait—depression.» He loathed a neighbor, «the disheveled, stupid» «Uncle Sasha,» who whimpered about how much he wanted to go back. But even as Eddie scorned them, he, too, wallowed in self-pity, mourning his former Soviet self: «Well, I was a poet, if you must know, a poet was I, an unofficial, underground poet. That's over forever, and now I am one of yours, I am scum.»33 Although nearly every page of Limonov's novel breathed hatred, It's Me, Eddie was also one of the most moving stories of love lost in twentieth-century Russian literature. He called his wife's departure «my tragedy,» but it became an antiemigration manifesto when he implicated social inequality and marginalization as causes for the breakup.34 For before losing her, he lost status (the high status of an unofficial poet) and linguistic mastery (the novel was filled with misspoken English, verbatim translations that render meaning absurd, and conspicuous self-awareness of poor English skills).35 Limonov was one of the first to suggest, provocatively, that American society was as duplicitous as its Soviet counterpart, that Soviet immigrants had been seduced by visions of a beautiful life and then abandoned to their own devices in the face of chaos.36 The loss of family should be counted among the losses of emigration.
⟨…⟩
Eleonory Gilburd
«To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture»
// Cambridge (Massachusetts):
«The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press», 2018,
hardcover, 458 p., illustrated,
ISBN: 978-0-674-98071-6,
dimensions: 241⨉165⨉32 mm
20 Eduard Limonov, Eto ia, Edichka (Moscow: Nezavisimyi al'manakh «Konets veka,» 1992). All quotations are from Edward Limonov, It's Me, Eddie: A Fictional Memoir (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 42.
«What's wrong?» I asked my friend Mikhail* as he stumbled into the dorm room. «You seem shaken up.»
«It's nothing,» he said, sitting next to me on the bed. «A gang tried to beat me up on my way from the Metro.»
It happened in a central district of Moscow. And then it happened again two weeks later. It was the spring of 2005, the early stages of Russia's precipitous descent into the far right.
«What? Who?»
«A group of five or six,» he replied breathlessly through a thick Russian accent. «They wore black and had armbands with a hammer and . . . how do you say it?… A sword.»
After he left, I went to my computer to research the insignia, finding myself in the territory of the so-called «left-wing of fascism,» with terms like «Strasserism,» the «Black Front,» and «National Bolsheviks.» The leading National Bolshevik in Russia was a well-known aesthete and provocateur named Edward «Limonov» Savenko.
I recognized the name Limonov from The eXile, a bi-weekly English-language tabloid that thrived among the expatriates who flocked to Moscow in search of rebellion through sex, drugs, and nihilistic misanthropy.
As a student, Moscow's unfathomably complex socio-cultural composition gave me vertigo. I hoped to find in The eXile something like a weekly alternative news guide. What I found increasingly struck me as deranged and delusional.
Limonov performed the deeply nihilistic sentiment that expatriates wanted to find within Russian culture — like an actor playing the gimmicky stereotype of the Russian avant-garde. I had a sadly-mistaken faith that the editors of a popular expatriate alt-weekly would not regularly publish a fascist. Yet even former eXile editor Matt Taibbi would later call him a «neo-fascist revolutionary,» and Taibbi's former co-editor, Mark Ames, gave Limonov the cringe-worthy tagline, «the Iggy Pop of the right-wing literary world.»
The more I researched the supposed «left-wing fascists,» and particularly the National Bolsheviks who made Russia their geopolitical redoubt after the Cold War, the more I realized how vulnerable we were to an encroaching far right that used pop culture, decadence, and nihilism to access subcultures, co-opt their spaces and signifiers, and draw them into a morass of political reaction.
Much of the Western media and many experts have rightly emphasized the brutality of the Alt Right, drawing its lineage to sectors of the U.S. far-right. However, there is far less understanding of the influential role played by National Bolshevism and the destructiveness it has ported into the left under the guise of prurient satire and hysterical chauvinism.
With horror, I watched this process unfold over the next decade, as so-called National Bolsheviks crossed over into American countercultures, drawing together left and right-wing tendencies that have influenced the US's political spectrum contributing to the alt-right. The eXile's alums played a critical role in cultivating these connections, joining with and influencing the inchoate alt-right in defense of Putin's aggression and in opposition to Western liberalism.
Limonov and the National Bolsheviks
A goateed Trotsky look-alike, Limonov had spent an extended stint in New York City's bohemian subculture during the 1970s before mixing with the banal fascists of the European New Right in France. Advocating «an incinerating hatred of the anti-human system of the triad of liberalism/democracy/capitalism,» Limonov came to fuse far right and left, celebrating the genocidal former leader of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, as «the Bolshevik Caesar of our country in its best period.» Of self-proclaimed «super-fascist» Julius Evola, Limonov wrote that the «racist and woman-hater . . . presents the only ideological balance to socialism and Marxism.»
Limonov's ideological synthesis, known as National Bolshevism, has its dubious origins in the 1920s amid an assortment of leftists, Russian émigrés, and «revolutionary conservatives» hoping to unite Germany and the Soviet Union in national-socialist brotherhood. After Hitler's death and the destruction of the Reich in 1945, Nazis aligned with dissident Otto Strasser to create a «national revolutionary» following seeking a «Third Way» between the Communist Soviets and the Liberal North Atlantic. Influenced by these trends and promoted by banal fascists associated with the European New Right, National Bolsheviks continued the fight against NATO for a «spiritual empire» stretching «from Dublin to Vladivostok.»
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Limonov joined fellow National Bolshevik, Aleksandr Dugin, to promote that dream of a Eurasian «large space» premised on fascist geopolitics and based in the Kremlin. Committed to the total destruction of what they perceive as the liberal and weak West, the National Bolsheviks asserted the spiritual greatness of Traditionalism found in the «Heartland» of the Asian continent.
While Dugin became the philosopher of this fascist ideology, influencing everyone from the Communist Party to the so-called Liberal Democratic Party of Russia to the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Limonov developed his role as a leading propagandist of the Russian far right. According to professor Markus Meili, Limonov «decisively influenced the emergence and growth of the Russian skinhead movement in the mid-1990s.» Despite this, firing on Sarajevo with war criminal Radovan Karadžić, and calling for a «Serbian solution» to challenges against Russia, he was indulged as a misunderstood performance artist.
Moscow and Misogyny
With Limonov, the eXile's editors, Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, took a leading role in defining some of the most chauvinistic tendencies of non-Russian expats who used Russia as an exploitative playground for glorified sex tourism and corruption. While articles have been written about The eXile's misogyny, it is rarely shown in the context of the broader melange of left and far-right politics that the tabloid put forward with Limonov.
When confronted by an interviewer about writing, «we actually prefer Russian women who embrace their roles as sex objects,» among other missives, Taibbi responded that he «had this idea that I was an equal opportunity offender.» In his own part of their co-authored book about The eXile's early years, «The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia», Ames tells of hiring underage sex workers and threatening to murder his ex if she refused to abort their baby.
The authors now claim that the book and the tabloid merely featured, in Ames's words, a «shockingly offensive satirical aesthetic,» despite its original claims to «non-fiction.» Also, The Daily Caller reported that no woman has come forward with accusations of sexual impropriety against Taibbi stemming from those days.
At the same time, Newsweek contributing editor, Owen Matthews, claimed in The Moscow Times that he was present during real occasions that Ames wrote about in the tabloid under a pseudonym, «Johnny Chen,» only to later dismiss as fiction. Specifically, Matthews referenced an article in which «Chen» rapes a woman he meets at a nightclub. In an article that fits the description, «Chen» describes the victim as «bleeding and crying,» and contemplates throwing her off a balcony.
Contacted via email, Matthews cautioned that not all of The eXile's writings should be taken completely literally. «The eXile's weakness — in this puritan age — was their prurient celebration/satire of Moscow's excess, it's celebration of rape culture and denigration of women,» he explained.
«If you think they were reveling and exulting in Russia's deep decadence, you missed the point,» Matthews wrote. «They were living it, and writing about it, and exposing the horror of it on their own skins, as the Russian phrase goes.»
In an exceedingly hostile tweet responding to a question I emailed him, Ames called his pseudonymous persona «a character created to be outrageous and morally vile in order to burlesque 1990s American expats' rape and pillage of Yeltsin's Russia.» Since The eXile was at the heart of the very 1990s American expat scene it was satirizing, however, it becomes difficult to parse the satire from reality — and such blurred lines, themselves, obscure the effect of rape «humor» on that community in the first place.
Under his own name in a June 2000 interview, Ames told The Observer, «It took me a while to learn you really have to force Russian girls, and that's what they want . . . All relations between guys and girls is basically violent, I think. It's all war.» Satire was not mentioned.
Limonov took such logic to its political conclusion in his delirious essay, Who Needs Fascism in Russia: «Russia's citizens really want the FASCISTS to come — terrible, tensed, young — and solve all problems,» Limonov declared. «Life will suddenly become easy for the kept intelligentsia . . . A boss will come, take her by the hair, pull her to him, and use her in accordance with her purpose.»
Politically, The eXile came to follow now-familiar rules: criticize Putin, but reserve the most obscene tirades for Western media hypocrisy. They would level criticisms against Putin on tough issues, such as his stony response to the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, but turn those articles back against the US. Ames seemed to oppose Putin and the oligarchs, but downplay the threat of fascists like Dugin, while publishing his comrade-in-arms, Limonov. For this reason, scholar and author of Russian Fascism, Stephen Shenfield, argued that «ways should be found to put the eXile out of business» (according to Ames's account).
Contributions to the Alt-Right
One of The eXile's most recognizable contributing editors was «the War Nerd,» the sobriquet of a war-obsessed misanthrope named John Dolan writing under the pseudonym Gary Brecher. In 1997, Dolan let his affinities be known by translating a Limonov novel under his own byline, but the pen names afforded him more license. He has admitted that the War Nerd is based on «my early self and people I knew» and that Brecher is «a more honest version of who I am.»
«Indians and Pakis Too Faggy for War,» read one Dolan headline in The eXile, deploying the racial slur common among the British far right. In another piece, he argued for «pruning» the world population by «nuking the entire Middle East,» because, «In a century the population will be 14 billion devout imbeciles (a nice volatile mix of Hindu and Muslim — what fun Saturday nights will be!)»
In 2002, Dolan joined far-right ideologue Steve Sailer for a Q&A in which he advanced racialized ideas about conflict. Alongside an essay by Sailer, Dolan placed a 2007 book review in The American Conservative, a magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan, whom Dolan described as someone «I usually agree with.» The assistant editor at the time was alt-right «co-creator» Richard Spencer, who had already built a reputation as a far-right misogynist through his handling of the Duke lacrosse scandal.
Spencer told me in an email that he brought the War Nerd with him to Taki's Mag after being fired from The American Conservative for extremism. A spin-off of American Conservative, Taki's Mag was founded by Panagiotis Theodoracopulos, who has defended the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party as «good old-fashioned patriotic Greeks.»
Along with landing far-right agitator, Gavin McInnes, a job at Taki's, Spencer told me he personally solicited and edited three articles from Dolan in 2008 and 2009. Spencer's work at Taki's was crucial to the development of a new far-right movement that he was starting to call the «Alternative Right,» or «alt-right,» bringing anti-interventionist voices together with Ron Paul libertarians, hipster fashion, and white nationalists.
One of Dolan's articles in Taki's Mag, «War of the Babies,» presented undocumented migrants as combatants in the «conquest-by-immigration we're seeing now in Europe and North America» — a typical white nationalist talking point. «I was a fan of the War Nerd's outlandish yet very smart analysis,» Spencer told me.
As with The eXile, the alt-right presented the horrifying with a satirical twist, thus testing and challenging the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Dolan's 2008 eXile article, «Bush Fought the Wars and the Wars Won,» was reposted five days later at The American Conservative, showing his cross-over status. Indeed, he was so popular among the inchoate alt-right that white supremacist, John Derbyshire, used a Dolan epigram for his 2009 book on «Conservative Pessimism» before being fired by the National Review three years later for a racist article published in Taki's Mag.
Under Spencer's leadership, the alt-right was growing, and it embraced Dolan and The eXile with alacrity.
The eXile Returns
The eXile increasingly came to represent a common thread between left and far right in geopolitical sympathy with Putin's Russia and ruthless animosity for those they identified as neoconservatives, humorless leftists, and fussy liberals, alike.
Taibbi and Ames had parted ways in 2003, apparently on bad terms, but The eXile continued in Moscow for another five years. When Ames finally shuttered the publication, based on claims of state repression that were disputed by the eXile's own investors, Spencer wrote the publication up as a «fantastically irreverent English-language paper» and praised Limonov as «a true fusionist, as it were.»
Hoping to help find Dolan a new job, American Conservative editor, Daniel McCarthy (aka Tory Anarchist), proclaimed, «Save the War Nerd,» calling The eXile a «samizdat» — the word for Soviet dissident publications that tracked the persecution of activists.
As the alt-right grew, its members idolized The eXile. Daryush Valizadeh («Roosh V), a leading Men's Rights Activist (MRA) often condemned as a «rape advocate,» described Taibbi and Ames's book as life changing, writing, «my favorite part of the book being when they describe ladies night at the Duck Bar. It was dubbed «rape camp» by the expats.»
Like Roosh V, leading MRA, Matt Forney said of Ames and Taibbi's co-authored book, «This is honestly one of the few books I've read that changed my life, and one of the few I make a point to re-read once a year.» Similarly, on the alt-right Counter-Currents Radio, Forney praised Ames's 2005 book, «Going Postal», as an adequate explanation, if not justification, for Incel-style school shooters.
Since the Men's Rights Movement helped fuel some of the most violent currents of the alt-right, The eXile's life-changing role in the lives of two MRA leaders further illustrates its editors' influence on modern fascism.
Within two years of The eXile's shuttering, Dolan was able to land a new gig at the American University in Iraq-Suleimaniyah, but the university let him go after learning of hysterical rants involving an image of Ann Coulter's face on the body of a woman being gang raped by four Arabs with the text, «Oh Annie, you little fascist flirt, you know you want it.» The university's dean called Dolan an «academic fraud» and «oblivious to any rational distinction between the real world and his imagination.»
National Bolshevism Empowered
Though the eXile left Moscow, it maintained an online presence as Russian foreign policy grew more interventionist. From Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008 to the war in Ukraine in 2014, The eXile's editors helped frame West-East conflict in ways that deflected criticism of Putin back to the US and reflected Russia's propaganda line, which brought left and right together in a geopolitical struggle with National Bolshevik overtones.
Ames blamed the U.S. for Putin's election rigging; The eXile blamed the rise of the far-right within Putin's government on the US's support for Yeltsin in the 1990s; Dolan and Ames both relished Russia's invasion of Georgia, with the War Nerd calling it «the war of my dreams.» Richard Spencer, while praising the War Nerd's position, felt it necessary to add that Dolan's «taste for blood and guts exceeds mine.» Meanwhile, Putin waged a personal war against opponents and hired Lyndon LaRouche associate, Sergei Glazyev, as his advisor on Eurasian integration.
Transferring nostalgia for the Soviet Empire into modern, capitalist conditions, Putin oversaw the rehabilitation of the reputation of far-right figures like Ivan Ilyin as well as Stalin, while amassing a vast personal fortune and unleashing far-right oligarchs on eastern Ukraine. When a Ukrainian revolution overthrew Yanukovych in 2013, Putin sent troops who wrote things like «For Stalin!» on their tanks in semi-clandestine efforts to establish an imperial «Greater Russia.» To this day, pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine manifest a melange of mercenaries and ideological fascists, authoritarian communists, and National Bolsheviks.
Looking at Ukraine, Ames took two conflicting analyses which were shredded by analyst Marcy Wheeler. The first report discussed by Wheeler presented a nuanced discussion of the interests of the opposition, while the second offered a weird and dubious account of pro-Western neoliberals responsible for teaming up with fascists to instigate regime change. His position was summed up in another article: «Stay the Hell out of Russia's way for awhile . . . Sorry Ukraine, but you're screwed.»
Limonov rejoined Putin's side after years on the opposition, enraptured by the convergence of ultranationalism and Soviet nostalgia. Limonov's former close comrade, Dugin, exhorted pro-Russian forces in Ukraine to «Kill! Kill! Kill Ukrainians!» and his close associates took leading roles in the Kremlin-supported «civil war.» Limonov and Dugin appeared on Russian TV together, a symbol of the power of the invasion of Ukraine to reunite old comrades.
The alt-right received a meaningful boost from both cofounders of the National Bolshevik Party. Dugin afforded Spencer a platform at his think tank's website, and Spencer's then wife served as Dugin's English translator. Much of the American far right read Dugin's books and developed international alliances with his international network — for example, Matt Heimbach's once-influential Traditional Workers Party.
Meanwhile, left-wingers from the West increasingly flocked to the newly minted Sputnik News, joining the head of Dugin's Center for Conservative Studies on podcasts promoting conspiracy theories and denouncing «Atlanticists.» Joining the cry of many an anti-imperialist, Spencer appeared on RT to denounce the U.S.'s «cold war» in Ukraine.
Moscow's clandestine social media influence operations and public support for quixotic «anti-imperialist» movements that united left and right against liberalism followed the patterns of National Bolshevism. Amid the resurgence, Limonov even experienced a small comeback. Holocaust denier and erstwhile Wikileaks collaborator, Israel Shamir, boasted of Limonov as his «friend» in the left-wing site CounterPunch. In a 2017 article in the alt-right associated Unz Review, antisemitic blogger Anatoly Karlin, who had already lauded the eXile as «irreverent court jesters,» recalled «the chiliastic chic of Limonov's monthly rant.»
Meanwhile, the far right kept up its love affair with The eXile. When the Washington Post's Kathy Lally described The eXile as «juvenile, stunt-obsessed and pornographic, titillating for high school boys,» Sailer jumped to defend Taibbi and Ames in the Unz Review. One Unz commentator opined, «Their support of Limonov actually makes them somewhat precursors of the alt-right.» Indeed, the War Nerd published white nationalist talking points in Taki's Mag during the formation of the alt-right, and Ames and Taibbi's book figured as a life-changing influence for leading MRAs.
For Ames's part, having spent years creating travel documentaries for RT, he migrated to Pando News, a site partly funded by Silicon Valley Trump supporter, Facebook board member, and Palantir co-founder, Peter Theil. According to the New York Times, a Palantir employee would work closely with Cambridge Analytica to inappropriately gain access to millions of Facebook users' information and use that data to assist the Trump campaign.
The «Next Stage» of Dirtbags
Despite continuing to defend and promote Limonov amid the rise of the alt-right, The eXile's alums became idols for a growing online community of self-described «dirtbag leftists,» a term coined by podcaster Amber A'Lee Frost to describe a contingent of leftists associated with the controversial podcast, Chapo Trap House.
The top-ranked podcast on Patreon, Chapo Trap House (CTH) emerged in 2016, growing to include more than 26,000 patrons dishing out over $108,000 per month. Known for an «ironic» sense of humor that blurs the distinction between truth and ideology, the million-dollar a year podcast typically garners 100,000–200,000 listens per episode.
Like the alt-right, hosts make often self-deprecating jokes at the expense of rape survivors and people with autism. Controversy flared when CTH hosts seemingly mocked the #MeToo movement and responded to a critical essay by Jeet Heer in The New Republic with a homophobic comment.
Given their misogynistic tendencies and opportunistic blurring of satire and reality, it is no surprise that in the early days, CTH fawned over Taibbi as «our old pal and first mega-guest.» When Dolan and Ames's podcast, Radio War Nerd, was listed as part of the «dirtbag left» in a critical piece, Ames tweeeted out the hashtag, «#JeSuisDirtbag.»
Showing the alt-right's sustained enjoyment of The eXile's form of offensive irreverence, now in the form of the «dirtbag left,» Richard Spencer told an audience, «I do find it kind of amazing. If you listen to fifteen minutes of [CTH], it sounds like an alt-right podcast in terms of the jokes, the memes, the cynicism, the irreverence. It's pretty funny. So I do think that that's going to be the next stage.»
Spencer's comments may not be not far off. A few years before CTH started, soon-to-be host Virgil Texas brought the alt-right «comedy group,» Million Dollar Extreme, to perform at one of his events, indicating the proximity between their style, if not politics.
The «dirtbag left» also engaged in an interesting pattern of geopolitical analysis so conducive to National Bolshevik ideology that the Duginist blog, Fourth Revolutionary War, cross-posted a number of articles and podcasts from Ames, Dolan, and CTH, including a CTH episode with Taibbi. CTH hosts seem to invite such crossovers, having gone on Sputnik and RT and toed the Kremlin's foreign policy line — particularly with regard to the war in Syria, where one of their hosts praised war criminal Issam Zahreddine.
While Spencer changed his Twitter handle to feature an image of the Syrian regime's flag after Assad forces deployed a chemical weapons attack on Khan Shaykhun, another CTH host named Will Menaker joined conspiracy theorists in speculating that the attack was a «false flag» on Twitter before deleting the tweet.
Such false-flag conspiracy theories are promoted through an extensive pro-Kremlin network involving a mix of left and right-wing commentators attempting to discredit the Syrian opposition — especially the first responders known as the White Helmets, whom the purveyors of disinformation accuse of staging the chemical attacks. These accusations, often used to deflect from efforts to confront genocide in Syria, issue from a tendency to support authoritarian dictators that the left has yet to fully reckon with.
Although many of their fans have attempted to distance themselves from The eXile's former editors, CTH hosted a Syria podcast with the War Nerd, who deflected from regime atrocities in Aleppo. For their podcast, Radio War Nerd, Dolan and Ames brought on frequent RT and Sputnik commentator Max Blumenthal, who has mocked Syrian victims, referred to the White Helmets rescue workers as «an arm of Al Qaeda,» and is currently facing a defamation lawsuit for allegedly participating in a «coordinated effort to attack, discredit and endanger journalists whose work counters a certain political line.»
Aside from attacking me personally in an article cowritten with Blumenthal, Ames has defended a similar line on a number of salient issues. Following the GRU's Novichok attack in Salisbury that left Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia hospitalized and killed a bystander, Ames and a number of pro-Kremlin pundits and right-wing conspiracy theorists started trying to poke holes in the «official narrative.» After open-source analysts at Bellingcat uncovered the identities of the two suspects as members of the GRU, Ames joined The eXile's Yasha Levine and an extensive pro-Kremlin reaction against the open-source investigation group.
Indeed, Ames has a history of attacking Bellingcat, stretching back to harsh words comparing the group to 9/11 Truthers after it uncovered evidence that Russia had been involved in the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17). Ames and Bellingcat crossed swords again in 2017, when Ames attacked founder, Eliot Higgins, for critiquing journalist Seymour Hersh's debunked reporting on Assad's use of chemical weapons.
The «dirtbag left» and associated lefties have revealed similar clustering tendencies regarding Donald Trump — for instance, dismissing allegations of collaboration with Russia, defending Trump's foreign policy, and supporting left-right convergences. When liberals brought up the potential that Russia engaged in elections meddling, Taibbi compared them to WMD theorists — a comparison repeated by Trump less than a week later. When Trump shocked NATO by questioning the defense of small member states like Montenegro, which had narrowly avoided a Russia-backed coup coordinated with Serbian ethno-nationalists, Blumenthal used the opportunity to deflect from Trump by taking another stab at liberals. When CTH favorite Angela Nagle appeared on Tucker Carlson's show in favor of hard borders amid Trump's concocted «border crisis,» Richard Spencer giddily tweeted out, «NazBol [National Bolshevik] gang when?»
It bears noting, despite tendencies to align, that the «dirtbag left» is a complex and decentralized political ecosystem with different pundits related along particular lines of affinity and harboring distinct grudges. Even a CTH host denounced Nagle for her comments on borders, while a host of the related Dead Pundits Society podcast defended her. It is further worth noting that, while the «podcast left» of would-be pundits have an outsized influence, they hardly constitute the ideals of the left, in general. Although they have capitalized on the left's growth since 2008, the dirtbags's egos are viewed by many leftists as a liability and an impediment to actual left-wing organizing.
Abandoning the Geopolitics of Edgelords
In the 1990s, Limonov and Dugin set to work harmonizing fascism and Stalinism in an imperial geopolitik that they hoped would return Russia to a mythical former glory. The eXile gave Limonov a regular platform, bringing his work to a larger English audience and endearing themselves to the U.S. far right. Through this tacit support of National Bolshevism, as well as general misogyny and Dolan's direct engagement with the inchoate alt-right, The eXile gained a cultish following that still intermingles far right and radical left.
Though The eXile, itself, exists as more of a blog than anything else, its nostalgic status as an edgy and transgressive gonzo publication remains, inspiring the next generation of left-wingers who engage with misogyny and fascism in much the same way that they did. Yet in a world where «anti-establishment» populism has become hegemonic, the renegade aspect of The eXile's «transgression uber alles» approach may be wearing thin, even for The eXile's own former editors.
Whereas he once gloated that The eXile published in Russia partly because they «were out of the reach of American libel law,» Taibbi now leverages legal threats against critics with the help of a lawyer who works for Kremlin-promoted activists from left and right.
With the decline of the alt-right, due in no small part to allegations regarding their leaders' terrible treatment of women, a sense of triumphalism has emerged in some antifascist circles. «We out-organized them,» some proudly declare. However, when the pervasion of misogyny, disinformation, and fringe fusion of far right and hard left go unchallenged, the seedbed from which the alt-right emerged will remain fertile.
To prevent the return of an «anti-establishment» National Socialism, leftists will have to combat ignorance, abandon the geopolitics of edgelords, and build a public reputation as honest and open defenders of the commonweal.
* My friend's name «Mikhail» has been changed for the purposes of this article.
Alexander Reid Ross teaches at Portland State University. He is the author of «Against the Fascist Creep», ranked one of the Best Books of 2017 by the Portland «Mercury», and his articles have appeared in such sites as «Haaretz», «Vice Noisey», and «Think Progress».
Эдуард Лимонов умер из-за осложнений после операции.
Как сообщили нам его представители, в последнее время политик болел. Сегодня перенес сразу 2 операции. Начались проблемы с горлом, потом пошло воспаление, великий писатель умер.
from comments:
Soon as I have a spare moment I'll write something up. Unfortunately most of what we'll get will be filtered through Carrere, who got famous with the Manhattan lit world by rewriting Limonov's books for middlebrow simps.
Eduard Limonov, who has died in Moscow, was a one off. A Soviet-era dissident, his controversial 1970s memoir «It's me, Eddie» scandalized Russia when first published in the country in 1991, selling over a million copies.
His death was announced by State Duma (national parliament) deputy and chief editor of «Yunost» magazine Sergei Shargunov. Limonov's assistant Dmitry Sidorenko subsequently confirmed it to Moscow daily RBK. He didn't specify a cause of death, but Russian media suggested it was due to complications from surgery.
Shargunov told the TASS news agency that Limonov died on Tuesday evening at a hospital in Moscow. «He had his wits about him to the end, and was talking, he remained of sound and clear mind,» the MP explained.
Russian writer, political activist Eduard Limonov has died today at the age of 77. Honest, talented, provoking. A Lord Byron of modern times. R.I.P. pic.twitter.com/KqaqezSGUK
Born in Russia's Nizhny Novgorod (then Gorky) region in 1943, as Eduard Savenko, to a military family, Limonov mostly grew up in Kharkov, in Soviet Ukraine. He moved to Moscow in the 1960s where he wrote poetry and became active in literary circles. in 1973, Limonov and his second wife, Elena Shchapova, emigrated from the USSR. Soon after, she left him later marrying an Italian Count.
Limonov settled in New York, working for a Russian-language newspaper and immersing himself in radical politics and the punk sub-culture. He complained about harassment from US authorities, writing that «the FBI is just as zealous in putting down American radicals as the KGB is with its own radicals and dissidents. . . [but] the methods of the FBI are more modern.»
He later detailed this period in «It's me, Eddie»where he graphically illustrated casual sexual encounters with homeless people, alongside other unconventional behavior. In France, where it first achieved fame, it was titled «The Russian Poet Prefers Big Blacks» («Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres»).
Disillusioned with America, Limonov relocated to Paris in 1980. There he become close with the leaders of the French Communist Party.
France suited him better, with his work finding a receptive audience. He remained popular in the country over the following decades. In 2011, the French film director, and writer, Emmanuel Carrère wrote a best-selling biographical novel based on the Russian's life and times, bringing him to a new audience.
As a newly constituted Russia emerged from the Soviet collapse, Limonov returned to Moscow and took Russian citizenship. He had been stateless from 1974 to 1987, when he acquired a French passport, which he would later relinquish.
Around this time, as Russia opened up, most of his writing was first published at home. «It's Me, Eddie» stunned a conservative Russian society emerging from the totalitarian isolation of the USSR-era, with its hardcore depictions of homosexual acts involving the narrator.
In Moscow, he set up a magazine «Limonka» and founded an ultra-nationalist political party, called the «National Bolsheviks.» It advocated for Russia to create a huge empire, dominating all of Europe and north and central Asia. The movement, seen as a midpoint between communism and fascism by Limonov's then ally, controversial philosopher Alexander Dugin, was outlawed.
In the 1990s, Limonov was already agitating for Crimea to be returned to Russia. He also passionately supported Bosnian Serbs in the Yugoslav wars and was once notoriously filmed shooting a gun in the hills above Sarajevo, in the presence of Radovan Karadzic, who was later jailed for war crimes.
He began writing in English, for Moscow ex-pat magazines «Living Here» and «the eXile», whose former editor, Mark Ames, described him on Tuesday as «the last great Russian writer.»
Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled («Twitter», 17.03.2020):
Never wasted a day of life.
RIP to the last great Russian writer.
Эдуард Лимонов умер из-за осложнений после операции.
Как сообщили нам его представители, в последнее время политик болел. Сегодня перенес сразу 2 операции. Начались проблемы с горлом, потом пошло воспаление, великий писатель умер.
An arrest followed, in 2001, on terrorism charges when he was accused of planning to raise an army to invade Kazakhstan and of possessing weapons. Limonov dubbed the trial ridiculous, but he spent two years in jail over the affair.
Limonov, who had been strongly opposed to Vladimir Putin since he was first elected to the Kremlin in 2000, became active in the Moscow protest movement, leading the «Other Russia» campaign, along with chess legend Garry Kasparov and Human Rights activist Lev Ponomarev.
He decided to run for president himself in the 2012 Russian election. However, the Central Election Commission denied him registration. A year later, he broke with his liberal opposition allies when he strongly condemned the pro-Western «Euromaidan» protests in Kiev. Subsequently, Limonov labelled them «traitors» after they opposed Russia's 2014 reabsorption of Crimea, which he vocally backed.
Like many Russians, his nationalism became more pronounced during the Ukraine crisis, and his rhetoric more hardline. He called for the closure of «enemy» opposition media and suggested pro-Western journalists be «expelled» from the country. In 2016, he began to write a regular column for RT's Russian-language service.
Limonov was married four times, to artist Anna Rubinstein, the aforementioned Shchapova, poet and singer Natalia Medvedeva and actress Ekaterina Volkova. With the latter, he had two children, a son Bogdan (now 13) and a daughter Alexandra (now 11). The couple separated in 2008, but Volkova said Limonov was a hands on father, actively involved in raising his children.
When fellow Soviet-dissident and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn died in 2008, Limonov was scornful. «The ideological death of Solzhenitsyn took place the night after the Soviet Union fell in 1991,» he ventured. «What came after was a sort of life after death.»
Whether or not that was true of Solzhenitsyn, the same certainly could not be said of Eduard Limonov.
— Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko (better known was Eduard Limonov) was born on 22 February, 1943 in Dzerzhinsk, USSR. He died in Moscow, Russia on 17 March, 2020.
He wrote colorful books based on his time in exile in New York. His politics were just as colorful.
Eduard Limonov, a Russian writer and political activist whose chameleonlike career included living in exile in New York and leading Russia's ultra-right National Bolshevik Party, died on Tuesday in Moscow. He was 77.
The Other Russia, a political opposition group of which he was a leader, posted news of his death on its website but gave no details.
Mr. Limonov liked to describe himself as the Johnny Rotten of Soviet dissident writers, a reference to the impish, anarchic lead singer of the Sex Pistols. His first book, «It's Me, Eddie,» published in France in 1979, was a fictionalized, somewhat scandalous memoir about a Russian in New York.
«The Soviet press found it filthy,»
Keith Gessen wrote in Slate in 2003,
«while the more perceptive émigré establishment denounced Limonov for stating the awful truth: that for many of those who came over, America was just nasty, brutal and expensive — and New York was no city on a hill.»
The book, when finally published in Russia in 1991, is said to have sold a million copies. In the meantime Mr. Limonov had written, among other things, «His Butler's Story» (1987), another fictionalized memoir, inspired by his time as a housekeeper to a wealthy Manhattanite in the late 1970s. The protagonist, Maggie Paley wrote in a review in «The New York Times», had a decidedly sour outlook.
«He hates the underclass for being weak and stupid and the ruling class for being insensitive,»
she wrote.
«He hates women — whom he describes in terms of female sex organs — for using men. He considers the other Russians in New York to be snobs or boors. He has no use for political systems, Communist or capitalist. He believes in revolution as a «phenomenon of nature.» Yet he's made no plans to foment it.»
Russian writer Eduard Limonov, a controversial figure who founded a radical nationalist party and led protests against President Vladimir Putin before supporting the Kremlin on Crimea's annexation, has died at 77, his party said Tuesday.
«Eduard Limonov died today in Moscow,» The Other Russia party, which he previously led, said on its website.
Limonov, whose real name was Eduard Savenko, was born in 1943 in the central Russian city of Dzerzhinsk.
He moved to Moscow in 1966 and emigrated to the United States in 1974, working in a variety of odd jobs while writing and later moving to Paris, acquiring French citizenship.
In 1980, he published his best-known work «Eto Ya, Edichka» (It's Me, Eddie), a personal manifesto subsequently translated into 15 languages.
His autobiographical works became the basis of a 2004 feature film called «It's Russian.»
After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, he returned to Russia and founded the ultra-nationalist National Bolshevik Party that was banned in 2007.
His radical nationalist positions won him notoriety in the 1990s when, among other actions, he was photographed during the 1992-95 Bosnian conflict, firing a machine gun from a hillside above the besieged city of Sarajevo.
He was arrested in Siberia in April 2001 after party militants were found in possession of automatic weapons.
He served more than half of a four-year prison term for illegal arms possession.
A successor to the banned National Bolshevik Party was non-registered party, The Other Russia, which fused ideas of the extreme right with communist ideals.
It staged bold political stunts, including occupying a part of Putin's presidential administration in 2004.
As one of the leaders of the movement, which also included chess legend Garry Kasparov, Limonov called regular peaceful protests in central Moscow against curbs on freedom of assembly under Putin's rule at which supporters were roughly detained by riot police and Limonov was himself often arrested.
He attempted to stand as president against Putin in 2012, but his candidacy was rejected.
But after criticising Ukraine's Maidan popular protest movement and backing the Kremlin on Crimea's annexation, Limonov was embraced by pro-Kremlin media.
He began writing a column for pro-Kremlin Izvestiya daily and appearing on national television talk shows. Up to last month, he wrote a column on the website of Kremlin-backed RT television.
After his death was announced, his name was the top trend on Russian-language Twitter.
Regularly featuring in ratings of Russia's political sex symbols, Limonov was known for his colourful personal life.
His wives included Russian punk rocker and writer Natalya Medvedeva, who died in 2003, and actress Yekaterina Volkova, with whom he had two children.
On March 17, writer and political activist Eduard Limonov died in Moscow of cancer at age 77. It was reported on the site of the political party, The Other Russia, that Limonov headed.
Limonov was born Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko in 1943 in Dzerzhinsk. He began to write poetry in 1958 and took part in his first political protest in 1963 in a strike against wage cuts. At age 17 he was already working in a variety of manual jobs including a loader, ironworker, welder, and construction worker.
In 1967 he moved to Moscow where he quickly gained celebrity more as a tailor than a poet: he sewed jeans and jackets for the entire Moscow underground. During his period in Moscow, he wrote and self-published poetry and was a well-known part of young literary Moscow. Somewhere along the way Savenko became Limonov, a nom de plume purportedly invented by the cartoonist Bagrich Bakhchanyan. In 1974, by his account, the KGB told him he either had to become an informer or emigrate; he and his then wife, Yelena Shchapova, whom he married in an Orthodox Church ceremony — almost unheard-of at the time — left for New York.
In New York Limonov and Shchapova quickly divorced. Limonov worked as a proof-reader for the local Russian-language newspaper «Novoye Russkoye Slovo» while continuing to write prose and poetry. His largely fictional autobiography «It's Me, Eddie,» was a sensation in the Russian diaspora and then in the Soviet Union, once a copy was smuggled in. Limonov's New York was not an émigré paradise. Written in a revolutionary style, «It's Me, Eddie» was brash, critical, obscene, pornographic and yet moving and utterly compelling. He would write other books about his time in New York including «The Butler's Story,» in part about his job working as a private servant in a home on the upper East Side of Manhattan. He was author of more than 15 works of fiction and hundreds of articles.
At the same time he was writing fiction, he worked with the American Socialist Worker's Party and once handcuffed himself to the building of The New York Times to protest their refusal to publish his articles. He was eventually fired from «Novoye Russkoye Slovo, and in 1980 Limonov moved to France, where he became close to the leaders of the French Communist Party, who were instrumental in helping him get French citizenship in 1987.
However, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, Limonov arranged for Russian citizenship and moved back to Moscow. Although he continued to write, both articles for the Russian press — and some in intentionally terrible English for «The eXile» — and fiction, he was more involved in politics, professing an odd, for Russia, mix of left and right. While he attended every protest against state impingement of the right to assembly and joined forces with Gary Kasparov to march in anti-governmental demonstrations in Moscow 2006–2008, he founded the right-wing, nationalist National Bolshevik Party and then, after it was disbanded under court order, the Other Russia party.
Limonov stood with the Serbs and was filmed shooting a machine gun at the Bosnians in the war in former Yugoslavia, supported the Abhazians in their war against Georgia, and took the side of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic against Moldova. He supported the Berkut officers who shot and killed protesters on the Maidan in 2013 and strongly supported both the annexation of Crimea and the war for separatism in the Donbass. He was arrested for arms possession and served a few months of a four-year sentence before being released on parole.
It is no wonder that Russian social media has been filled with heated arguments about Limonov and his legacy. Many people recalled the young Limonov and the incredible impression that «It's Me, Eddie» made on them. Film critic Anton Dolin wrote that Limonov «was a great Russian writer — there are few, if any, like him.,» to which Maxim Pavlov, head of the cinema program of the Tretyakov Gallery, replied, «He was scum, ordinary scum…»
On her Facebook page, writer Liudmila Petrushevskaya noted that despite his despicable behavior, «We will never forget that flash of joy that readers felt with «It's Me, Eddie».» Poet Lev Rubenstein recalled liking Limonov's early poetry, but not liking the man. «He reminded me of a little boy who locked himself in the toilet to scare his grandmother, and then his grandmother went out and the little boy had to sit there in the locked toilet.»
The photographer Eduard Gladkov recalled meeting Limonov in the 1970s. «One morning on the way to work I met Limonov near my house. He'd come out of the next-door entrance, got into my car and started chatting away, saying he didn't care where he went . . . he said he'd spent the night in a stranger's apartment . . . and when he woke up, no one was there, so he left. He sounded very drunk as he told me this. I got worried and asked if he locked the door. He answered me, completely sober, «Of course, I locked it! Do you take me for an idiot?» And I suddenly realized that it was all a game, a game he played for himself, I suspect. He probably found it easier to write that way. Maybe some of those episodes from his later fiery life were a game, too?»
He will be buried in a private ceremony in Moscow.
A Limonov may not have been interested in democracy, but democracy needs to be interested in Limonovs.
I never met Eduard Limonov, and now I never will. That saddens me, even while I recognize that I have a perverse curiosity about the contrarian radicals and radical conservatives, the romantics, rogues and the out-and-out rotters of Russia's nationalist extreme.
After all, in an age when Putin's regime has co-opted so many aspects of the conventional nationalist socio-political realm, from the Russian Orthodox Church and patriotic bombast, to the hagiography of the Great Patriotic War and unprogressive flat taxation, almost by definition oppositionists are positioned on its liberal flank.
Democrats and constitutionalists, advocates of LGBT+ rights and anti-racists, while they disagree with each other with zealous enthusiasm, the very venom of the disputes are often products of the relatively narrow genuine differences between their world views.
They are typically young, hip and smart. Brave, too, but in a strangely constrained way. They will unflinchingly stand in front of a phalanx of riot-armored OMON, but when they are arraigned on charges of attacking one of these gallant but strangely fragile defenders of the public order, you just know it's a frame-up.
On 1905 Square, where I remember Limonov's National Bolsheviks rallying, there's a striking statue, a bronze worker hefting a hunk of rock, presumably about the hurl it at the minions of the oppressor class: «The Cobblestone is the Weapon of the Proletariat.» Today's liberals don't seem cobblestone type.
Not so Limonov.
From his open admission of having fought alongside war criminal Radovan Karadzic's forces in Bosnia to his enthusiastic support for the war in the Donbass, Limonov was of that fascistic breed which exalted action and will over legality and gradualism, with a strong side-order of self-conscious deviltry.
The very fact that his newspaper was called Limonka — Little Lemon — not just a play on his own name but also the slang for a hand grenade, the same hand grenade which would be a central motif on the banners on his NatsBol movement, spoke to this cocktail of fascism, radicalism, irony and narcissism.
Was Limonov a visionary or a poser, an artist or a politician, a leftist or a rightist? The answer to all of them is, of course, yes. In many ways he was a cliché, but he was not unaware of that: the point was that he chose his own cliché. He had will and agency. In 2006, he could join forces with Gary Kasparov in the Other Russia pro-democracy movement, and then become a frothing advocate of the undeclared war in the Donbass in 2014. He was, in short, his own master.
It is worth dwelling on Limonov's passing for three main reasons. First, he brought a particular kind of energy, of color and passion into Russian politics in a time when Putin, the archetypal grey man in a grey suit, seems determined to monochrome it. In cosplay politics, enthusiasm, disagreement and ideology are being simulated by a new generation of bland and infinitely plastic careerists.
The new nomenklatura is well-groomed, well-spoken, well-trained and well-versed in the habits of genuflection to power. Were opposition critic Alexei Navalny suddenly catapulted into the Kremlin, they would be sporting pro-democracy badges and hipster eyeglasses overnight. One can no more imagine them taking a contrarian stand — let alone an unpopular one — than autobiographically outing themselves as bisexual, as Limonov did in «Eto Ya, Edichka».
Of course, that color was often brown, with hints of black and red. Despite his role in Other Russia, Limonov was always fascistic in that Italian rather than German Nazi sense, aesthetic politics that exalted a hyper-masculine notion of will, action and national destiny. The NatsBol symbol of a Nazi flag but with a black hammer and sickle instead of a swastika was at once manifesto and deliberate blasphemy, again a Limonov trademark.
He spoke, thus, for what one could call the other, other Russia, the opposition to the Kremlin that comes not from the liberal, Westernizing end of the spectrum. It is easy to dismiss the so-called «red-brown» forces as frothing ultra-nationalists, narrow-minded anti-Semites and out-and-out Soviet nostalgics, and many indeed are just that.
But they are not necessarily — or all — fools or fanatics. Some come from a principled place in their own terms, however unpleasant it may be for Western (or Westernized) liberals. Others are able to articulate a complex, contradictory ideology.
Consider, for example, the leftist firebrand Sergei Udaltsov, who notoriously praised Josef Stalin (although he has since backed away from that position). He has spent much of his time since 2014 in detention or house arrest, but was still protesting in front of the FSB headquarters on Lubyanka Square last weekend.
Or, perversely, the way that Igor Girkin — «Strelkov» — may be considered a war criminal for his exploits in the Donbass, but his sense that Putin has betrayed Russians has led to his campaigning on a platform, largely likely composed by Konstantin Krylov, that sees genuine democracy as the best protection against further such betrayals.
None of this is to support their respective positions but rather to note that the Udaltsovs, Strelkovs, Krylovs and Limonovs represent strands of political opinion, even oppositionist ones, often ignored by the commentariat and yet with their own advocates in some serious quarters. I have met OMON who arrested Udaltsov and yet spoke of his with respect. I have met security officers who quote Strelkov's critiques of their bosses with approval.
And this is the final ironic challenge that Limonov posed and still poses. There has to be room for people like him who often seem to stand against the very foundations of the system. He was willing to oppose the regime blood and body when he felt that was right.
He was willing to support its actions just as fiercely when he felt that was right. Much was pose and ego — though could one not say the same about most political leaders? — but there was an underlying sense that politics had to matter and that personal ethics were at their heart. And, within the bounds of legality, a central challenge for any real representative system is how to accommodate those who seem so determined to be unaccommodating — like Limonov.
A Limonov may not have been interested in democracy, but democracy needs to be interested in Limonovs.
One of the most controversial and restless contemporary Russian authors, Eduard Limonov was a rebel since his adolescence, as well as during his time in emigration.
«I consider myself to be scum, the dregs of society . . . I am scum,» that's how Eduard Limonov, a famous and scandalous Russian writer who has published more than 50 books, began his first novel, «It's Me, Eddie», which was written in New York City in 1976.
The book tells the story of a vagabond Russian immigrant, Edichka (Eddie, short for Eduard), barely surviving in the U.S. in complete despair. Though Limonov always emphasizes that he and his lyrical hero are not the same, he admits that it's his story to a great extent.
In the 1970s Limonov began his journey to the West, and returned to Russia only 16 years later. Why did he originally leave the Motherland?
From tailor to émigré
By 1974, after he had left the USSR, Limonov had already lived quite a life. A provincial poet from Kharkiv (now Ukraine) Eduard Savenko took the punk-sounding nom-de-guerre, Limonov, (associated both with lemons and limonka, a slang word for an F1 grenade), and moved to Moscow.
At first, he had to work as a tailor to make ends meet, but then his poetry grew popular in bohemian circles, among artists and authors not fond of the authorities. In 1973, he married Elena Shchapova, a model and a fellow poet, and the couple left the USSR a year later.
It's unclear why precisely Limonov left Moscow. In 1992, the author would claim that the KGB (Soviet secret service) tried to convince him to become their snitch, with departure as the only alternative. Nevertheless, in another interview Limonov said: «It was mostly the feeling of estrangement from the place I lived in, the will to find another path that made me go.»
In the lower depth
Moving to the U.S. didn't make Limonov happier — his wife Elena dumped him almost immediately after they settled down in New York City. Broke, lonely and completely unknown in a strange land (he barely knew English), the author hit the very bottom of society, living on welfare and aimlessly wandering through his American life.
«It's Me, Eddie», Limonov's first novel, was born out of these harsh circumstances — the author describes a hopeless man, both pitiful and arrogant, verging on the brink of collapse. A furious howl full of cursing and pornographic scenes, «It's Me Eddie» is characterized as Limonov's «confession.» The protagonist, Edichka, weeps for Elena and tries to get over her through meaningless sex with both women and men, abusive drinking and embittered denial.
Nihilist, anarchist, punk
Unlike many émigrés, Limonov ignored the American «bourgeois» way of life. In «It's Me, Eddie» he wrote: «I receive welfare. I live off your labor: you pay taxes and I don't do s*** . . . What, you don't want to pay? Well, then why the f*** did you get me to come here? Take it up with your propaganda — it's too strong.»
This declaration was true only to some extent Limonov had jobs, including as a busboy, a proofreader at a Russian newspaper, and a housekeeper at a millionaire's mansion. But he loved befriending outcasts: the Trotskyist Workers' party, vagrants and punk rockers. In one of his short stories, «The First Punk», he recalls reading Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem, «Left March», on stage at a punk concert.
Crossing the Atlantic
Nevertheless, Limonov dreamt of success and desperately tried to publish his novel. About 35 American publishers refused to have anything to do with «It's Me, Eddie», considering it outrageous and anti-cultural.
So, in 1979, he found one in France — Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who had previously published the writings of the Marquis de Sade. «I owe him a lot. He discovered me,» Limonov would say later. In France, the novel had another title: «Le poète russe préfère lesgrands nègres.»
After that, success found Limonov, and he became famous and was able to live on his literary income. He continued to write his «fictional memoirs» — stories of life in America, France and of his young years as a Kharkiv thug. In 1980, Limonov moved to Paris with his fiancé, Natalya Medvedeva, a poet and a singer.
A Russian Frenchman
He stayed in France, and was granted French citizenship in 1987. In addition to working on his novels and poetry, he wrote for the newspaper, «L'Idiot international», as well as other publications associated with both right and left radical movements.
Besides politics, the writer enjoyed life in Paris, and recalls it with nostalgia. «I was filled with rapture,» he described his walks in France's capital in his later book, «Under the Sky of Paris» — «and sometimes I shouted out loud in Russian: «Oh, this sun! Oh, this wind from the Seine!»»
As soon as the USSR collapsed, however, Limonov closed the chapter of his life in France, and charged back into chaotic Russia. He would show himself to the world as a whole other person, more of a radical political leader than a writer. He eventually founded his own party, and later spent years in prison . . . but that is a whole other story.
Eduard Limonov, a Russian writer, leader of the opposition Second Russia movement, and a devotee of the politics of Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s, died at the age of 77 in Moscow, Vijesti.ba news portal reported on Wednesday.
The Russian writer, has spent part of his life in the United States and France. His most famous literary work is the novel «This is Me, Edicka», about a Russian immigrant in New York. Interfax has announced that the cause of his death is unknown at this time.
In 1992, Limonov fired from firearms from Pale on residents of Sarajevo
Limonov, a supporter of Greater Serbian politics, in 1992, accompanied by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, fired Pale from a machine gun at the besieged Sarajevo.
Before that, he was in occupied Erdut, as a friend of Zeljko Raznjatovic Arkan, and visited Vukovar shortly after the fall, reports Hina.
I have never made peace with the single rough photograph I took of Edward Limonov in the living room of his house in Moscow. It's a domestic, amateur portrait that you'd find in a private album of memories, but now I have to definitively reconcile myself with the shot, because the bandit is dead.
Many of us did not want to believe it and asked immediately for confirmation. «Da. Pravda. Yes, it's true» wrote one of his tireless assistants: Olga, taxi driver, one golden tooth for more than 30 years, shaved blonde hair. The writer Edward Limonov died on March 17 in a Moscow clinic where he was hospitalized after surgery operations and complications, Olga confirms for me via Telegram. The same channel where the Kremlin reported his death to the rest of Russia through the mouth of their deputy Serghey Shargunov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Yunost, «Youth».
Whenever big things changed in the Russian Federation all the journalists always reached out to Limonov, a professional provocateur always willing to be extreme. He could be counted on to have something irreverent to quote. Now he will no longer respond quickly as usual for the interviews, with the speed that distinguished him and for which, in the end, you thanked him. He would always reply steadily: «I'm not a kind man, I'm just an effective type.» Even if he mocked those who teared up in pain, the boys of Drugaya Rossia — the Other Russia — the political party founded by the writer in 2009, are now mourning him among his memories, books, leaflets. They had been marching for years following him in the protests in the streets of the Russian Capital, holding the red flag with the symbol of the limonka, the grenade, the object with which the «hooligan of literature» had decided to baptize himself, bartering his original surname with «Limonov». The man wanted to be called a bomb.
Limonov was born as Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko in 1943 in the Soviet Union while it was in a brutal war. He grew up in Charkiv — now Ukraine — as a son of poverty and violence, which he exercised indiscriminately in return against all those who stepped against him. He always lived at an extreme limit that the ones who tried to narrate his story could never fully grasp but only observe through him.
He became Edik, Eddie, Edichka at alternate latitudes. He possessed the talent of astounding those around him. Vernacular, stinging, ineffable, romantic. «It's me, Edichka. The Russian poet who prefers large Negroes» is the title of his first scandalous novel, with which he decided to amaze the Soviet Union which had just collapsed in the 1990s. Limonov had already died dozens of times, as he loved to say smiling, but unlike this time, he had risen in a thousand improbable and unreal existences, from one side of the world to the other, in alienating destinies between Paris and New York, Russia, America and Europe. Tailor, waiter, high village courtesan, dandy butler, riotous and macho, fighter and confidant of commanders of the Serbian wars. Finally he had become a cross-legged revolutionary on whose words the Russian suburban boys hung, those that nobody ever listens to. He, Limonov: the punk, the nationalist Bolshevik, disconsolate representative of a broken humanity. A paradoxical marathon runner, a mask with a sense of humor underneath that was forbidden to the rest of us.
When I first met him, in a cold Moscow spring, I had more than 15 questions in my notebook, but only one in my head. Who would open the door in Limonov's house? The protagonist of a novel or a real man? The literary and alcoholic rogue born from the French pen of Emmanuel Carrere or the boy who died and rose again many times between New York and Paris? The man who passed under the smug eyes of the Serbian commander Karadzic? The butler, the dandy, the revolutionary, the fighter? Will Limonov or his dvoinik — his double, his literary impersonator — or both, be behind his door?
He lived where the black, gigantic statue of the most famous futuristic poet of Russia stands, in a square usually full of young Russians that peel their knees falling off skateboards. On the top floor of a pastel-colored building, a thousand steps from Vladimir Majakovsky square, Limonov looked usually through the peephole for quite a long time behind his black, armored door. Eventually he decided there was no danger and he would invite you to enter, smiling palely.
Behind the door there was a thin man, straight like a gun, with a white smile the same color of his hair, a pink and smooth skin on which wars, despair and unhappy loves have left no scars or wrinkles. He was a shaved, bony bundle of nerves, imprecations and extreme political positions, courted many times by the official political establishment to which he has never succumbed. He conjugated all Russian contradictions and all the artistic ones. Narcissist, megalomaniac and dedicated writer, in a dry body like a birch trunk. He lived 77 years with few moments of peace and calm in his biography.
If not in the streets and squares or marching in the Capital, he was in his house, a four room apartment where he lived between black and white photographs, and pages and pages. Once inside his house, he insisted on kindly offering his green tea. A sweetness that you could not reconcile with the extremism of his positions and his destiny. In the rooms where he lived barricaded between walls of books, you did not find flames, memories of the prison and guns he loved to write about, but biscuits and all the versions of the novel by Emanuel Carrere, the writer who made him famous by bestowing on him the role of the thug. He silently derided the stereotype of the Russian rogue built on his figure for European readers by the novel.
Talking to him was like boxing. A fight that would leave poor strength and punches to settle. «Don't you love Dostoevsky?» I asked him. «It's not about loving or not loving, the story is another matter. The Western world thinks that Dostoevsky's characters represent Russians, but real Russians have nothing to do with them. Dostoevsky was an epileptic boy and many of his books are born from his experiences in prison, where people are very close to each other, they constantly drink tea and talk endlessly about anything, any bullshit. For me Dostoevsky is not bearable, but the West likes to think that Russians are like this,» Limonov said.
Limonov, like Dostoevsky, spent years in Russian prisons, the cells that he described in Book of Water. He told me: «An old criminal once told me in prison: I live here. After that sentence I did exactly the same: I started living in there every single day. You have to live in prison, don't wait for the day you go out. I never lost an hour of air, I did physical exercises, I trained, I read a lot, I wrote every day for five hours, I wrote seven books when I was inside.»
Limonov's favorite writer was Gogol, which he told me clearly.
«I believe that the best Russian writer is Gogol, he produced some of the greatest Russian archetypes,» he commented. I demanded: «What other writers do you love?». A question he would answer with a nasty verdict: «I really hate writers. I hate being with writers. They are not interesting. They irritate me. I spent part of my life with soldiers, activists, prisoners. But not with writers.»
I noticed a seeming contradiction: «aren't yourself a writer, the Russian writer Limonov, the hero of Carrere's novel?» And he replied: «Carrere misunderstood many things, but I promised him I would never report them, so I won't tell you now.» Beyond literature, it was «Rossya», Russia, the word he would pronounce the most: «In the future Russia will become even more patriotic. After Putin someone else will come, and no matter who, he or she will be obliged to follow the wishes of the people, who demand social equality and that all Russians are reunited in one state. Russia wants its share of power in the world. Russians love to be a great power, this is our obsession, our disease.»
The Russian hunger for power was an illness Limonov would explain further. «We are sick of a mania of greatness. We have always been an empire, the great people of the Second World, this has gone to our heads, but also to the heart. We can live very badly, to be a great nation, it is our specialty. Russian people know how to sacrifice their happiness for their pride.»
Now we can no long ring his doorbell, he won't be watching us through the peephole. Limonov left us with the same questions that slammed between the walls of our brains while he was still alive: who was Edward Limonov? Moscow now pays homages to its indomitable son. The bandit turned out to be a novel character for himself and for the others and — surviving his own myth like few else — he managed to pursue his literary mission until the end. A few days ago, on March 13, he confirmed the release of his latest book, from a title that sounds like a prophecy of his last pilgrimage: The Old Man Travels.
I was a fun-loving character
Then turned into a recluse and a pauper
I lost my job a while ago
and I'm just barely alive
All I need is bread and potatoes
and salt, water and tea
I use a teaspoon to feed myself
And I am skinny like you wouldn't believe
But then I owe nothing to no one
and no one yells at me from early on
and if someone drops by at two p.m.
or half past any other hour — me, lying down
Эдуард Лимонов
* * *
Я был веселая фигура
А стал молчальник и бедняк
Работы я давно лишился
живу на свете кое-как
Лишь хлеб имелся б да картошка
соличка и вода и чай
питаюся я малой ложкой
худой я даже через край
Зато я никому не должен
никто поутру не кричит
и в два часа и в полдругого
зайдет ли кто — а я лежит
This incredible day was covered by rain
In the park —
Bricks in buildings with red walls
Got soaked
People lived in the houses surrounded by trees
Young, old and kids:
Katya — stared into a corner a whole day
She ran and ran and screamed
Olya — messed up all of her hair
In the attic Fyodor was reading a secret book
Gloomily glancing sideways
Anna — got adorably excited
by discovering in nature something new
(New in nature
Maybe a ray of empty Sun
Maybe depth of an empty forest
Or a new species of a flower)
Rain was rhythmically monotonous
Olya — stared in the mirror
Fyodor — enjoyed his tea with a Chinese bun
Katya — was flying away while falling asleep
Anna — was going out in the rain sadly
Эдуард Лимонов
* * *
Этот день невероятный
Был дождем покрыт
Кирпичи в садах размокли
Красностенных дОмов
В окружении деревьев жили в дОмах
Люди молодые старые и дети:
В угол целый день глядела Катя
Бегать бегала кричала
Волосы все растрепала — Оля
Книгу тайную читал
С чердака глядя украдкой мрачной — Федор
Восхитительно любила
Что-то новое в природе — Анна
(Что-то новое в природе
То ли луч пустого солнца
То ли глубь пустого леса
Или новый вид цветка)
Дождь стучал одноритмичный
В зеркало теперь глядела — Оля
Кушал чай с китайской булкой — Федор
Засыпая улетала — Катя
В дождь печально выходила — Анна
United States / Russia • Culture / History • by Maciej Zurowski
The Russian provocateur Eduard Limonov venerated «talented misfits» and claimed to offer a galvanizing cause for hopeless youths. But his politics were built on Russian revanchism — a «National Bolshevism» combining fascist imagery with a claim to restore Soviet grandeur.
Nineteen ninety-two outside besieged Sarajevo: a quiet moment on the heights from which Serbian artillery has been bombarding the city. Troopers play with dogs or clean their guns. In their midst, Radovan Karadžić — president of the breakaway Republika Srpska, psychoanalyst, poet, and commander responsible for actions that an international tribunal would later term genocide. He is in conversation with a lean, semi-bohemian type dressed rather inappropriately in a tight '70s leather jacket and narrow blue jeans.
Aside from being well into his forties, the dandy resembles Andreas Baader at the Palestine Liberation Organization military training camp in Jordan, foppishly prancing about a martial scenery in which he clearly doesn't belong. A soldier shows him the workings of the Browning machine gun he had been greasing. He offers his guest a try. Once instructed on the correct position, the excited visitor fires in the direction of the besieged city.
This footage appeared in the documentary «Serbian Epics» (1992) by Pawel Pawlikowski and Lazar Stojanovic, which formed part of the evidence exhibit at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the war that destroyed the multiethnic socialist country, what these images appeared to show was despicable: a pathetic war tourist firing at civilians under siege to impress the big boys; an edgy artist exploiting misery to feed his narcissism and carefully constructed public image.
The artist was Eduard Limonov — a former «dissident» Soviet author, and soon a leader of the snappily named National Bolshevik Party. His real name was Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko, his nom de guerre was derived from limonka (lemon), the Soviet nickname for an F1 hand grenade.
Watching the Sarajevo footage when it resurfaced on YouTube was enough to despise the Russian provocateur, whose pseudo-political antics I had previously taken a peripheral interest in. I had first encountered Limonov in connection with Grazhdanskaya Oborona, a wayward Siberian punk band I had been a fan of since my late teens. Alongside Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, their vocalist Egor Letov was among the founding members of the National Bolshevik Party. Pictures of «Nazbol» demonstrations were intriguing: there were black-clad Russian punk girls and skinheads marching in tight formation, extending their arms to display a cross between a Roman salute and the clenched fist of the Red Front. Their banner: essentially a hammer and sickle superimposed on a Nazi flag. Images of Stalin, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, and sometimes Sid Vicious . . . It all looked amazing, and I consumed the visuals like fascist pornography. I did not take the politics very seriously — it all seemed a little bit too like the act put on by Laibach to warrant closer analysis.
With the Sarajevo footage, Limonov's image assumed a darker tone in my mind: what I had previously considered an entertaining prankster looking like Leon Trotsky with a Hitler Youth hairdo, who occasionally issued rather agreeable sound bites about the crimes of «the West,» now seemed like an unscrupulous chancer exploiting tragedy — a bit like the main characters in «Cannibal Holocaust», but worse.
Years later, I inevitably stumbled across Limonov again when researching National Bolshevism in earnest. This curious hybrid is the name for the intellectual and political trend whose evolution began in Germany (and, to a far lesser extent, among nationalists in Soviet Russia) under the impression of the Treaty of Versailles and the trajectory of the Russian Revolution from 1919 onward.
What was National Bolshevism? On this, its two preeminent scholars, Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf and Louis Dupeux, disagreed. For Schüddekopf, it was a syncretic crossover politics by virtue of which German nationalists arrived at fundamentally left-wing, socialist positions — not for nothing was his seminal study titled «Left-wing folks from the right» («Linke Leute von rechts»). For Dupeux, it was unconditionally an ideology of the «ultra-right» — in his words, «the hardest, purest form of German nationalism» and the most uncompromising outgrowth of the so-called conservative revolution, the intellectual avant-garde of German fascism.
A variation of this ideology — merging a right-Hegelian reverence for the state with the belief that the Soviet Union in its glory days was the last word in Greater Russian nationalism — would again emerge in circles like Limonov's as the USSR entered its final death spiral.
Budding Poet
So how did Limonov get to this? Born in Dzerzhinsk as the son of a lowly NKVD officer in 1943, he grew up in a modest household, albeit one relatively privileged on account of his father's connections. Eduard's future seemed to hold out little more than factory work or lowly service in his father's image — but his family was a bit more equal than most, shielded as it was from the various hazards of the Stalinist postwar period. Limonov's memories of this era were overwhelmingly positive: in his teenage years, he became a budding poet running with the bad boys from the 'hood, for whom he embodied something like their resident gangster rapper.
During his predicament as a laborer in a local factory, Eduard developed a degree of contempt for his coworkers: people in the same position as him, yet people with their shoulders bowed in defeat, deferential to fate, and without any ambitions to escape the monotony of their lives. Eduard's poetry was his ticket to a bohemian existence in the Russian artistic underground, where poets, artists, and dissidents of all stripes rubbed shoulders — first in Kharkiv, then in Moscow. Limonov never considered himself a dissident. As he would later insist, he was «a delinquent, not a dissident»: a punk rather than a critic. His motivation was never a desire to reform the Soviet system, with which he saw nothing fundamentally wrong aside from a certain inertia, but rather his own personal ambition. Eduard Limonov wanted to be somebody.
He was a great poet during his time in Moscow, if eyewitnesses are to be believed. But in 1974, he decided he had outgrown it and emigrated to the United States – with the blessing of Soviet officials, who by now considered his nonconformist style a mild nuisance. These were the very early days of punk in Limonov's new home of New York City, and he felt quite at home among the fashionable junkie poets, new wave musicians, and washed-up Warhol hangers-on at the CBGB. It was also the last year in the life of Karl Otto Paetel, an original German «Nazbol» and author of the «National Bolshevist Manifesto», who died in New York City in May 1975. I have sometimes wondered whether the two might have met, and if Paetel passed on some seed to Limonov — although the chances are, admittedly, slight.
Limonov, who went from destitute poet to homeless bum and then, by happenstance, became a billionaire's servant during his time in New York, hated the bourgeoisie. In «His Butler's Story», one of several memoirs based on his Manhattan period, he describes himself as an «anarchist» in this period; he speaks of mastering the «theory of class struggle» in NYC, of «capitalist pigs» and the «international bourgeoisie» of which he considers his philanthro-capitalist employer a particularly hypocritical specimen. But beyond such phrases, chosen by the protagonist to portray himself in hindsight, there is little indication that Limonov's politics at the time extended beyond the most elementary — if justified — class hatred.
In «It's Me, Eddie» (1979) — the most famous of his New York memoirs, which unexpectedly made him a literary star in France, he recalls his brief and superficial involvement with members of James P. Cannon's Socialist Workers Party. They are exactly what you imagine Trotskyists to be: inoffensive, bookish types from the suburbs. In this book, Limonov admits to a growing fondness of Trotsky: he admires what Ernst Jünger once called Trotsky's «modern martial energy,» the story of his armored train, his courage and sacrifice in the civil war. Trotsky's disciples, however, appeared as the very opposite of these qualities. Moreover, Eduard liked Stalin for very similar reasons as he liked Trotsky.
Boris Groys, who remembers Limonov from his Soviet days, confirms my impression:
«Limonov learned to hate everything American. He believed that America is only about money and does not respect poets, intellectuals and writers. However, he was not interested in politics in his time in New York.»
Limonov's politicization, Groys tells me,
«started in Paris with «L'idiot international». That was the beginning of his interest in Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ernst Jünger and so on.»
In the pages of «L'idiot international», the Sartre-founded journal to which Limonov regularly contributed after relocating to Paris in 1980, the writings of the «fascist Gramscian» luminary Alain de Benoist appeared alongside those of left intellectuals and assorted contrarians. One might, in hindsight, describe its offices as a veritable hub of red-brown intellectual activity, though others would shrug that the French move in mysterious ways to affront common decency — pour épater les bourgeois.
Deciding to Act
Yet it was the period of perestroika and the breakup of the Soviet Union that gave Limonov the final impetus to take up political activism. In Grazhdanskaya Oborona's song «Everything Is Going According To Plan,» his future National-Bolshevik comrade Egor Letov, a former anarchist with Tolstoyan leanings, described feelings both men harbored:
«So they went and fed my wife to the mob, with the global fist they crushed her chest, with the freedom of nations they tore up her flesh, now bury her in the name of Christ.»
The wife, here, was the Soviet Union, about to be fed to the Russian mafia, the liberal oligarchs, and the looters and plunderers from the West. The brutality of this process, the impact it had on the majority of the population, must not be underestimated. When Limonov returned to Russia, he did not like what he saw — and he decided to act.
For a couple of years, he volunteered to fight on the Serb side in the civil war in the Balkans. Evidently, this is where he saw the new front line of battle against the encroaching Great Satan of the West. At first, his role was that of a sympathetic eyewitness — that's where the footage described at the outset of this article was filmed. As I found out when my attention returned to Limonov more recently, the editing was deceptive: he wasn't aiming at anyone when trying out the machine gun — and he was shooting from too great a distance to hit anybody. Emmanuel Carrère analyzes the sequence at some length in his «Limonov» biography.
Limonov would return to the Balkans a year later and take on a more active fighting role, perhaps envisioning himself as a «soldier-poet» in the vein of Gabriele D'Annunzio in post–World War I Italy. While it is uncertain if Limonov killed anyone, it goes without saying that he put his life on the line. He did so in a sordid, deeply regrettable civil war, not to mention in a struggle that wasn't his. What is more, as some of his later writings testify, he was partly motivated by a desire for «authenticity.» Yet the fact that he was prepared to give his life for what he believed to be a just cause belies any inference from «Serbian Epics» that he was simply an amoral poseur.
Back in Russia after the Bosnian campaign, Limonov began to mix in circles whose common denominator was anti-liberalism, ranging from orthodox Communists to neofascists. Among them was Aleksandr Dugin — a philosopher well-versed in the writings of the old «conservative revolution,» including National Bolsheviks such as Ernst Niekisch and Karl Otto Paetel, but also an eminent authority on the entire canon of fascism's heroes and progenitors from Georges Sorel to Yukio Mishima. With Dugin, Limonov set up the National Bolshevik Party — an organization whose name lends itself to a «fascist» label.
Some economic demands found in the 1994 «Programme of the National Bolshevik Party» did appear to be directly lifted from the German Nazis' 25-point program from 1920, while others aimed to restore some of the basic property relations of the USSR — a «beyond left and right» pastiche not untypical of fascist rhetoric, peppered with talk of the «total state,» a term borrowed from Niekisch. Nazbol activists were mainly recruited from among punks, skinheads, artists, hooligans, and assorted no-future youths — a social base some might describe as declassed bohemia and lumpenproletariat.
In his manifesto for the NBP's successor organization, The Other Russia, Limonov drew a parallel with the Bolsheviks:
«The first proletarian revolution was organized and performed not by the proletarians but by misfits, hysterics, tramps, demagogues, orators, half-educated people, bums and all kind of rolling stones. The sailors, peasants and the workers joined later, but they were not the fathers of the revolution. Lenin lacked the insolence and honesty to declare that only a party of talented misfits . . . is capable of carrying out a revolution.»
Moreover, unlike fascist movements, the Nazbols were never a particularly violent bunch, confining themselves to spectacular actions, stunts, and damaging property — always directed against those «above,» never kicking down. Russian leftists and workers' organizations had nothing to fear from them — in fact, the Russian Nazbols regarded them as allies. Nor did their nationalism have a racist character: the NBP program was very clear that anyone, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or descent, could be a Russian and a Nazbol — just as long as they were prepared to give «everything» for Russia.
Nor was Limonov personally a racist or antisemite: if anything, he was prone to a certain «philosemitic» exoticism, motivated not least by his distaste for what he regarded as the typically provincial prejudices of the average Russian boor. Despite all the smoke and mirrors and edgy fascist borrowings, in practice his party resembled a left-nationalist formation — especially after Dugin's early departure.
Oppositionist (and Not)
So, was Limonov ever a real leftist — or a fascist? In Boris Groys's view,
«it probably depends on the definition of a leftist. But essentially, his political activity is a poetic performance in the style of Marinetti. It was always about being a charismatic leader. He may sound nationalist but in the Russian context, he is neither nationalist nor conservative but a Western import.»
Be that as it may, Limonov's cultural National Bolshevism resonated with Russian youths in a post-Soviet context. Indeed, the simultaneous experience of national dismemberment and economic doom produced a psychological effect not unlike that which haunted Germans after World War I. The Nazbols boasted their strongest bases of support where the territorial and socioeconomic degradation of the former USSR was felt most acutely — among young ethnic Russians in countries such as Latvia and Lithuania.
From the mid-2000s, Limonov attempted to widen his appeal, rebranding himself as a face of the anti-Putin opposition. He helped to set up a broad «pro-democracy» front alongside worthies such as chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. In this vein, he even earned himself the praise of the late Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist-author of «Putin's Russia». Given his previous political trajectory, it is doubtful that Limonov had really grown soft to notions of democracy and pluralism. The stiff prison sentences endured by Nazbol militants at the turn of the century may well have inspired him to moderate his demands for a strong law and order state.
More recently, events around the «Euromaidan» and the resulting civil war saw Limonov voice critical support for Putin — eventually landing him, the lifelong anti-establishment figure, a regular slot on Russian TV. It's hard to imagine Pussy Riot taking a similar turn — though nor would a man like Limonov ever have earned the affections of Madonna.
Much about Limonov is relatable — he even displayed an inspiring commitment to the underdog. The profound class hatred permeating his books will be familiar to many of us, yet there is also a certain sensitivity to his writing. In «His Butler's Story», he describes with great honesty the humiliation he feels, his inability to cope with the situation down to his trembling hands, as he endures another barrage of verbal abuse from his boss.
Far from all of Limonov's work was outstanding — especially objectionable was his sometime inclination to pass off masturbation fantasies regarding young girls as transgressive prose. But despite such repugnant material, he was far from being a substance-free contrarian. He was a «problematic» character, to say the least — but one from whose colorful life and work has much to tell us about the times that created him.
Eduard Limonov died on March 17, 2020 in a hospital in Moscow, following complications after surgery, reportedly linked to cancer. One hopes that his passing will encourage someone to republish the long out-of-print English translations of classics such as «It's Me, Eddie or Memoir of a Russian Punk». Indeed, just days before his death, the seventy-seven-year-old Limonov announced that he had just signed a publishing deal for a book he had written. The title: «The Old Man Travels».
«Jacobin», March 29, 2020
Maciej Zurowski is a music journalist and translator of German and Polish historical texts.
Fabrizio Fenghi is an assistant professor of Slavic Studies at Brown. His book «It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia» (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) focuses on the culture and history of Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party.
Eduard Limonov (né Savenko) died in a Moscow hospital on the evening of March 17, at the age of 77. According to the website of the «non-registered» radical organization The Other Russia, today's incarnation of the National Bolshevik Party, which he led, the official cause of death was cancer. Limonov, as he often claimed, would have rather died a violent death, preferably «blown up» by one of his political opponents. And he tried as hard as he could to die young, like a romantic hero. Limonov was an absolute rebel and an absolute contrarian. At times he called himself a hero, at times a loser. And at times he looked like a fool. As many of those who knew him wrote in the past few days, Limonov had never grown old. Or to put it differently, like in the lyrics of a famous song by his beloved Ramones, Limonov didn't really want to grow up.
(Russian-)American readers mostly remember him as the protagonist at the beginning of his most famous semi-autobiographical novel, «Eto ia – Edichka» («It's Me, Eddie», 1979), standing naked on the balcony of the Hotel Winslow at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, eating cabbage soup from a giant pot and shocking «the clerks, secretaries, and managers» looking at him from behind the windows of the surrounding office buildings. The novel portrayed all the misery and humiliation of émigré life, Edichka's compulsive loneliness and masturbation, his love for the outcasts, and his sexual escapades with both women and strong African American men. Edichka lived on welfare, criticized dissidents for ignoring the fate of millions of Russian immigrants for whom life in the West had turned out to be even more miserable than in the Soviet Union, befriended Americant Trotskyites, and dreamt of a violent world revolution.
In the 1990s, Limonov came back to Russia and co-founded (with the guru of Russian imperialism Aleksand Dugin) the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), with the goal of gathering into a single organization all of Russia's new outcasts and those whom the market reforms had left behind — communists and fascists, as well as punks, anarchists, metalheads, war veterans, and nonconformist artists. The party and its newspaper «Limonka» combined the aesthetics of the Russian avant-gardes, Italian Futurism, neo-Nazism, and punk. Limonov and his followers wrote about Jean Genet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse, and about idols of the far right like Julius Evola, Miguel Serrano, and the general of the White Army Roman Ungern von Sternberg, the «Mad Baron.» For a good part of the 1990s, the NBP remained a sort of political art project that attracted pretty much everyone who had a taste for the radical and the extreme. To use the expression of Alexey Tsvetkov, one of the minds behind it, the National Bolsheviks or natsboly were mostly «thugs who aspired to be poets» and «poets who aspired to be thugs,» who scared the Russian public with terrifying slogans like «Zavershim reformy tak — Stalin, Beria, Gulag» («This is how we'll implement reforms — Stalin, Beria, Gulag!»). In the late 1990s, the natsboly tried to turn some of these scary slogans into reality by organizing an armed revolt in the Altai Mountains. But things did not turn out too well and Limonov ended up spending three years in prison on illegal arms trade charges. When Putin came to power, the natsboly became pioneers of the resistance against his authoritarian rule, in part redeeming themselves in the eyes of the liberal media. With the coalition The Other Russia, the Dissenters' March, and Strategy 31, the focus of the NBP became advocating for freedom of speech and assembly and protesting human rights abuses, social inequality, and corruption. The natsboly became famous for their peaceful and carefully staged «direct actions» against the government. They also indirectly exerted a certain influence on mainstream politics: the infamous state-sponsored youth movement Nashi, for instance, was thought of as a direct response to the NBP in the wake of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Things changed again quite drastically in 2014, when the natsboly, who had historically supported the idea that Russia should take back all the territories formerly belonging to the Soviet Union, supported Putin's annexation of Crimea and the separatist conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Since then, Limonov became a somewhat more acceptable figure for the Russian establishment and mainstream media. Many in Russia saw this as a betrayal and a sign that he had sold out to the regime.
As Eliot Borenstein points out, Limonov's legacy is indeed complicated. Perhaps it is not by chance that the NYT whitewashed his memory, given that Limonov's life and personality cannot be easily boxed into a unidimensional narrative (as the ones that unfortunately the NYT has recently produced when covering Russia). Faced with a similar issue, scholars of Russia have historically tried to compartmentalize his life and work, trying to fit him into one or the other canon: «he was a great writer, but a horrible politician,» or vice versa, «he was not a writer but a media personality and a provocateur, but as a writer he will soon be forgotten,» or again, «his early poetry was great, but everything he did afterwards was despicable.» Paradoxically, Limonov himself did everything he could to be recognized as a writer and at the same time he made sure that his work could not become part of any kind of canon. His novels are intimate, sexual, and violent to the point of being disturbing. His poems are direct, funny, and often very powerful. He violated taboos and challenged the puritanism and conservatism of the Russian literary establishment by portraying homosexual love and desire, as well as the anger of the Russian and Soviet peripheries. And he was a pioneer of Russian counterculture. In this sense, the NBP was Limonov's main and most accomplished masterpiece, like The Sex Pistols were Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's. Indeed, style and fashion played an important role for Limonov, who back in the 1970s made his way into the Moscow underground by tailoring pants for prominent Russian artists and writers. But, like many punks and rockstars, and perhaps even more so, in his quest for radicalism and destruction Limonov also embraced various forms of hate and bad taste. He befriended and admired war criminals in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and he tried to join forces with true neo-Nazis like the infamous leader of Russian National Unity Aleksandr Barkashov. And both his writing and his politics were not devoid of misogyny, machismo, and prejudice.
For someone who based so much of his work and life on self-fashioning, Limonov's public persona was not very likable. He was not at all accommodating and he often played the part of the tough guy — but with thick glasses (which he hated) and a slightly high-pitched, almost nagging voice. Sometimes he could be unpleasant. I experienced this intentionally hostile attitude first-hand when I interviewed him in his apartment in Moscow back in 2013 when I started researching the NBP. On that occasion, Limonov played a role that (as I later discovered) he had rehearsed many times in the past. He welcomed me in adidas sweatpants and a sort of souvenir t-shirt with the writing «Cuba, Pearl of the Carribbean.» At the time I was a graduate student at Yale, which he obviously saw as a symbol of academic prestige and Western colonialism, but of course I was also much younger and more inexperienced than he was and I found the idea of talking to him, a famous Russian writer, about my project potentially intimidating. However, during the interview Limonov refused to answer several of my questions and repeated several times — scoffing — that he had no idea of what I was talking about because he «did not go to Yale» and he was a politician and a «man of action» and not an intellectual. As I later discovered, this was a rhetorical device that he often used during interviews with academics — of course by changing the name of the prestigious institution in question (La Sorbonne, Yale, Berkeley, etc.). Even if at the time I thought that this response was quite superficial and almost a bit cliché, what I found redeeming later on in my research was Limonov's loyalty, support, and sympathy for those who are most vulnerable and disenfranchised. I could appreciate these qualities not just in his writing but through the eyes of the numerous natsboly I talked to while working on my book, all of whom respected him deeply and saw him as a source of inspiration. Limonov had been hostile toward me because he thought I came from a position of privilege (like most of the journalists and academics he interacted with), while he reserved his humanity and support for his young radical followers, who for better or worse were fighting or had been fighting, in certain cases sacrificing pretty much everything they had, for what they believed in. Overall, I could respect that.
Limonov often proclaimed his love for the outcasts and the losers of the world and his hatred for the «masters of life.» In one of his best novels, «Podrostok Savenko» («The Adolescent Savenko», translated into English as «Memoir of a Russian Punk»), Limonov's alter ego is Eddy-baby, a romantic, desperate, and somewhat naïve sixteen-year-old from the working class periphery of Kharkov (or Kharkiv) in Soviet Ukraine in the 1950s with a passion for poetry and organized crime — a sort of Young Werther carrying a straight razor in his pocket. While walking through a sketchy neighborhood in New York City, Edichka declares: «If I were making a revolution I would lean first of all on the people among whom we were walking, people like me — the classless, the criminal, and the vicious. I would locate my headquarters in the toughest neighborhood, associate only with the have-nots.» Throughout his life, the eternal adolescent Limonov remained faithful to his young, angry, and somewhat naïve self, that of Eddy-baby, and to the losers of the world, and brought this energy into his writing and politics. It is ironic that Limonov died at a time of fear of contagion and «social distancing.» What Edichka hated the most about America and neoliberalism was the distance and indifference that he experienced as a poor, marginalized immigrant, which he identified with the words «that's not my problem.» Edichka's work and politics were too personal, physical, and almost visceral to be appreciated from afar — they needed to be experienced up-close.
«NYU Jordan Center (fort he Advanced Study of Russia)», April 6, 2020
Again, damnit! I've been doing this forever. Most of my friends kicked the bucket before I reached the ripe old age of 30. Addicts don't live that long, heroin isn't a nurturing mother, no matter what you think when you use it. Since then, I had very few genuine friends. Well, Edward Limonov, whom I've consorted with for forty odd years, was one of them. He just died before the onset of apocalypse, as we know it with this cybernetic virus of a very dubious origin. Sly old bastard, he even figured when to leave the world scene.
I knew he was gonna die, all flags were red the last times I saw him, in Paris in May 2019, to march with the Yellow Vests, and in Moscow, October 2019, when we had that last meal. He greeted me with a joke, parted with me joking. Motherfucker had class. Knew it was likely to be our last reunion and I did too.
Although, damnit, not so soon!… Since you don't want it to happen, you always think, it's gonna last a little longer. In Paris in May, when I saw him drinking like a fish, I thought: all right, he knows, decided to have some fun before sunset. In Moscow in October, I confronted him with that shit: why are you drinking, when you're not supposed to? He came up with a dubious theory according to which vodka was better than wine (one glass a day, as he had previously determined since his brain tumor was removed four years ago) for his ailment. So it was obvious, he was preparing to die. He knew that I knew, and just smiled. Between old friends, some things stay unsaid, but not unbeknownst, particularly when it's time to go. I always knew when my friends were going to die. Call it junkie intuition.
Now, motherfucking Limonov had a tremendous influence on my life, I wouldn't even be writing an «eXile» column without him. I met Mark Ames in his Moscow flat, twenty odd years ago. Because Edward had this gift as well, he just knew what was going to be fruitful, and he had the generosity.
When I first met Edward, in March 1981 in Paris, he was a freaking living god to us, coming from New York, the punk-rock Mecca, and from Moscow, essential to the punk-rock esthetics. We just hated the bleeding heart liberal baby boomers, he was the living-proof that some people from that generation, coming from the cold, could be worth our while. In freaking France, they had published his scandalous first novel, «It's me Eddie», and, wannabe journalists, we interviewed him. Not knowing to whom sell the interview. We eventually did. Edward did not know any genuine Parisians at the time, save for his publisher and the PR woman. He and my crew (most of them dead now) made fast friends. He even bought pot to my long gone friend Fabrice, a burglar fresh out of jail. He talked about it in his first «Book of the Dead», published in 2000.
He and I had a special bond, for a very simple reason, I was the only one, in that crew, gifted with foreign languages, English at first, then Russian when, again thanks to him, I met Nina, a Russian immigrant who forced me to learn Russian, when I fell in love with her, as he had foreseen. She was the drinking buddy of Limonov's new wife Medvedeva, so in a way, however strange it may sound, we had a family. This bond strengthened when I married Medvedeva so she could get a French Green Card and stay with Edward in Paris. Nina was jealous. And so was Medvedeva, her drinking buddy had tried the French guy, who was her husband?… Limonov laughed when I recounted the women's intrigues…
Then, as years went by, it was my turn to exert a tremendous influence on Edward, when I wrote my first novel, Fasciste, in 1988. Nobody, much less him, was expecting it from me, rather an account of my street junkie days, which I wrote thirty years later. When I got drunk with him and our pal Danila Doubshin in 2015, eating gigantic pork chops, he recognized, against all odds, that my first book was a revelation to him. I never thought he would admit it, although I knew it since I have a long-ass memory. But this motherfucker was, on top of it all, also generous with his friends. And I was lucky enough to be one of them, as the New York Russian journalist Oleg Soulkin once said to me: You're one of the few he never trashed. So Edward said, yes Thierry, I remember your first book to this day! Much to my amazement.
Then there are numerous stories, how we lost one another in JFK airport in 1982, my first trip to New York, then met again in a art opening in a art gallery in SoHo, after I put an ad in the Village Voice — «Limonov Call Me» — and when the Puerto Rican girl said we don't put family names on ads, I answered it's a Russian name, she didn't know better at the time. Edward and I ended up at Chemiakin's place, and when Chemiakin threatened me — he was gonna kill me because I was staying at some Russian woman's place and the Russian painter was sweet on her — Edward punched him in the face.
Marignac & Limonov, Moscow
Then in February 2001, I'm detained by the FSB at Sheremetyevo airport, since I'm carrying Limonov's letter to the infamous old mercenary Bob Denard. It's all bullshit, since he's inviting him to a «Congress of hot spots» on the Earth, and the Russian Embassy has to grant him a visa, and they know Denard since the Cold War days, he's fought them in Africa, not to say Denard is fresh out of jail at the time and already Alzheimer's. Yet, the agents dance the macho menuet to freaking make me wet my pants. Well, I'm a veteran of the junkie wars, I remember how it was in the old days in France, I don't particularly freak, knowing they don't have much on me.
As soon as I land in Paris I call Limonov to let him know what happened. He says: Well, that happened. Now his apartment was bugged all over, and a few weeks down the line, when I call Nina, passion of my life to this day, she says, don't ever come back, yesterday on TV they posted conversations between you and Edward talking about coup d'État !… But I'm back there two months later, invited by the French Embassy to write a novel, and Edward is already in jail. I walk the straight and narrow. Mark Ames and I have paranoid meetings on the Red Square, away from the bugs, to determine what we're gonna do, since our names were brought up in Limonov's trial. We wouldn't even utter a word in the eXile headquarters where we both worked together. And the lawyer is trying to pull us in way deeper, since it could be useful in Edward's trial. Damn!… I don't even remember how we survived. Nina, Edward's original gift from Paris 1983, supported me wholeheartedly, and wisely. Mark had worked out his own immunity already 8 years living in Russia. We managed to escape any dire consequence and Edward got out of jail in 2003.
How the fuck can I forget a friend like that, with whom I've gone through so much, who always supported me through thick and thin?… Damn, the world doesn't seem right without this motherfucker, something's missing!…
A former street hooligan and bisexual mercenary, he led the National Bolshevik Party and delighted in provoking the Kremlin.
Eduard Limonov, the ultra-nationalist Russian writer and politician who has died aged 77, was, variously, a teenage hoodlum, counter-culture poet, bisexual émigré writer, Parisian socialite, mercenary with the Bosnian Serbs, jailbird, and the eventual «Johnny Rotten of Russian politics».
He was born Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko on February 22 1943 at Dzerzhinsk, near Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), the son of a low-level secret policeman in the NKVD; his mother was a munitions worker. «I was a non-conformist from birth,» he claimed.
He grew up in a dingy, dirt-poor industrial suburb of Kharkov, a grim Soviet industrial town in Ukraine. As he recalled in a memoir, The Adolescent Savenko (1983, also translated as Memoir of a Russian Punk) after being beaten up aged nine he determined to transform himself into a hardcore street hooligan.
By the age of 20 he had been a thief, a burglar, a foundry-worker and a docker. He also tried his hand at poetry, eventually joining a group of Nihilist artists calling themselves the SS, who went in for such pranks as reciting Hitler speeches in public, riding animals at Kharkov Zoo or opening their veins with cut-throat razors – the last episode getting young Eduard committed, briefly, to a psychiatric hospital.
Eventually he escaped to Moscow where, as Eduard Limonov («Edward Lemon»), he survived by making and selling trousers while attempting to establish himself as an avant-garde poet, becoming something of an idol of the Soviet underground in the Brezhnev era.
He made such a nuisance of himself that in 1974 he was expelled from the Soviet Union, albeit with a false Israeli passport which allowed him to enter the United States. He arrived at about the same time as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and was sometimes described as a “dissident”, but since he revered Stalin and called Solzhenitsyn «an old fart», he hardly qualified.
He ended up in New York, where he became a figure on the nascent punk scene, hanging out with the Ramones and Richard Hell & the Voidoids at the CBGB club. When New York lost interest, he lived as a down-and-out, drank, had casual sex with both men and women, and was involved in robberies and brawls. Eventually he found a job he detested as a butler for a Russophile multi-millionaire on the Upper East Side.
It was during his stay in the US that he penned the semi-autobiographical It's Me, Eddie (1979 in Russian, 1983 in English), that would earn him notoriety in the Soviet Union during glasnost more for its lurid depictions of gay sex with a homeless black man than for its obscene language or the author's proud boast that «I have no shame or conscience.»
The book became an immediate succès fou in France where it was published under the spoiler-alert title Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres, prompting Limonov to move to Paris.
There he became, in the words of Emmanuel Carrère, the author of a biography of Limonov, a «sexy, sly, funny guy . . . everyone's favourite barbarian» in radical literary circles. It helped that, with his glasses and goatee beard, he resembled Leon Trotsky, and he was lionised as a sort of Russian cross between Jean Genet and Henry Miller.
In 1991, as the Soviet Union crumbled, Limonov returned to Russia, where he felt drawn to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the chairman of the misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party, an overtly racist and rabidly nationalist organisation advocating the establishment of a Greater Russia within the boundaries of the old Tsarist empire.
Limonov accepted the job of security minister in Zhirinovsky's shadow cabinet but soon became dissatisfied, finding Zhirinovsky «too passive». In 1993 he formed the breakaway National Bolshevik Party, or «Natsbol», a direct-action movement that sought to fuse the ultra-Left and the ultra-Right in opposition to Boris Yeltsin.
Its flag was based on the Nazi white circle on a red background, but with a hammer and sickle replacing the swastika. Its magazine, Limonka, a pun on Limonov's name and a Russian slang term for a hand-grenade, was accused of advocating mass terror.
Limonov proudly claimed to have the most extremist platform in Russian politics, advocating everything from banning imported food to invading Russia's neighbours, and Serb-style ethnic cleansing to protect Russians in the independent former Soviet republics.
His young, disaffected followers addressed him as «vozhd» («leader») – the term used by Stalinists for Uncle Joe, and over the next few years Natsbol supporters occasionally popped up in news reports: shaved heads, dressed in black, marching down Moscow's streets giving a half-Nazi (raised arm), half-Communist (balled fist) salute, chanting «Stalin! Beria! Gulag!»
During the Balkan wars of the 1990s Limonov signed up with Serbian forces as a mercenary and hobnobbed with future indicted war criminals including the paramilitary thug Arkan and the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
Notoriously, during the siege of Sarajevo, he was filmed, alongside Karadzic, firing a machine-gun into the streets. A clip can be found on YouTube, and the film was shown at Karadzic's trial at The Hague.
Though Vladimir Putin espoused many of the same causes as Limonov, Russia's new leader and his allies had little tolerance for Limonov's insurrectional political stunts, and in 2001 Limonov was arrested, tried and imprisoned for obscure political reasons, apparently connected to arms trafficking and an attempted coup in Kazakhstan.
Halfway through his four-year term he was released, surprisingly enough for «good behaviour».
After a series of spectacular political stunts, including the seizure of the Kremlin's reception office, the National Bolshevik Party was outlawed for «extremism» in 2007.
Subsequently Limonov formed an unlikely alliance with liberal politicians, including the chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov and human rights activist Lev Ponomarev, as one of the leaders of the anti-Putin umbrella movement The Other Russia, taking part in protests and «Dissenters' Marches», during which he was arrested and held on several occasions.
His liberal allies might have been surprised by some of the ideas put forward by Limonov in a book, also called The Other Russia (2003), one of eight written during his spell in prison.
In one passage Limonov proposed solving Russia's demographic crisis by forcing «every woman between 25 and 35 to have four children».
The children would be taken away from their parents and educated in a House of Childhood where they would be taught «to shoot from grenade-launchers, to jump from helicopters, to besiege villages and cities, to skin sheep and pigs, to cook good hot food and to write poetry . . . Many types of people will have to disappear.»
In 2012 Limonov attempted to stand against Putin in that year's presidential elections, but his candidacy was rejected. However his subsequent support for Russia's annexation of the Crimea returned him to favour in pro-Kremlin circles.
He began writing a column for Izvestia and appearing on television talk shows, also writing a column on the website of the Kremlin-backed RT television.
Limonov regularly featured in ratings of Russia's political sex symbols. In addition to numerous lovers, he was married four times, his wives including the Russian punk rocker and writer Nataliya Medvedeva, and the actress Yekaterina Volkova, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Eduard Limonov, born February 22 1943, died March 17 2020
«The Telegraph», 22 April 2020
Introduction. The Story behind the Story
Juliane Fürst
⟨…⟩ Reading Emmanuel Carrere's biography of Eduard Limonov, who circulated somewhere on the edges of the hippie community before he became the leader of National Bolshevism, induced me to try to emulate Carrere's example of marrying the style of the subject with his own style of writing.* This attempt to capture a mood, not only in description but also in style, has been confined to a few specific passages and is only clearly spelled out in the stiob (ironic persiflage) of the title «The Short Course in the History of the Hippie Movement» of Part I of this book. ⟨…⟩
Juliane Fürst
«Flowers Through Concrete:
explorations in soviet hippieland»
// «Oxford University Press», 2021,
hardcover, 478 p., illustrated,
ISBN: 978-0-19-878832-4,
dimensions: 236⨉150⨉36 mm
// «Oxford University Press», 2022,
paperback, 496 p., illustrated,
ISBN: 978-0-19-286606-6,
dimensions: 223⨉165⨉40 mm
* Emmanuel Carrere, «Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia», trans. John Lambert (London: Penguin Books, 2015).
When the Russian writer, poet, and politician Eduard Limonov died in March last year, critics, journalists, writers, and academics struggled to assess his artistic and political output. The reactions ranged from glowing write ups and critical but appreciative appraisals, to brusque and damning dismissals on social media. His work as a novelist, once controversial among conservative Russian emigres for explicit depictions of homosexual sex, has not, recently, been the cause of his notoriety. Instead, it was Limonov's decision, in the 1990s, to lead an unauthorised political party, The National Bolshevik Party (NBP), using both Nazi and communist imagery, that has continued to generate fascination and disgust.
Indeed, there has been a long history of artists, musicians, and writers flirting, perhaps cynically, with symbols on the political extremes to provoke, outrage, engage, and shock mainstream society. One can spot examples ranging from David Bowie's Thin White Duke, Joy Division naming themselves after official brothels run in Nazi concentration camps after changing their name from Warsaw Pakt (the Eastern Bloc alternative to NATO), the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek hanging a Stalin picture in his flat «to absolutely annoy people», to the British punk band Fat White Family playing with Stalinist and Hitlerian imagery to shock viewers and question societal norms. However, Limonov took this provocative act one step further: pushing himself into the political arena of post-Soviet Russia.
But was Limonov truly using aesthetics to shock Russian society out of an ideological complacency after capitalism had replaced communism? Or was he simply a series of well-timed poses: modernist, disco-goer, punk, literary intellectual, cult leader?
Limonov was born Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko to working-class parents in February 1943 in Dzerzhinsk, near Nizhny Novgorod, before moving to Kharkiv in what was then the Ukrainian SSR. After a childhood of petty crime and poor grades at school, Limonov travelled to Moscow where he made avante-garde clothes for members of the Moscow creative class such as sculptor Ernst Neizvestny and poet Bulat Okudzhava. It was during this time that he changed his last name to «Limonov» (lemon), a close cognate of «Limonka»: a nickname for the Soviet F1 hand grenade: an early example of his famed ability to strategically brand himself as a destructive outsider.
After a run-in with the KGB, Limonov left for New York in 1974 with his wife Yelena Shchapova. There they associated with various anti-Moscow Trotskyist groups and pioneers of the disco movement frequenting the short lived but influential nightclub Studio 54. Displaying a character trait that would come to define him in his later years, Limonov transformed himself alongside the burgeoning punk scene in New York's lower-east side: trading in his flairs and long hair for a mohawk and minimal tailoring.
It was during this time, between 1975 and 1977, that Limonov wrote his debut and most famous novel, «It's Me, Eddie». An expletive-laden example of autofiction, it recounted Limonov's life in New York as a recently divorced restaurant busboy struggling to stay above the poverty line. The novel was published in the west and smuggled into the USSR via samizdat. Controversially, at the time, Limonov included one of the first depictions of a protagonist engaging in homosexual and interracial sex in Russian emigre literature.
However, many have identified Limonov's descriptions of homosexuality as a pose rather than a progressive identification:
«It's a self-promotional strategy, Limonov . . . wherever he is, is not with the majority,»
says Andrei Rogatchevski, Professor of Russian Literature at The Arctic University of Norway and author of «A Biographical and Critical Study of the Russian Writer Eduard Limonov» (2003).
«He writes his first book about his bisexuality, and that provokes a scandal . . . But when he moves to Paris, he signs a [sexist] book about his relationship with one of his wives, Natalia Medvedeva . . . For the same reason, the particular anti-feminist agenda that he pursues is calculated to create the maximum noise.»
Limonov drew even more attention when he returned to Russia and entered politics in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union. While the West celebrated «the End of History», as Francis Fukuyama called the start of a process whereby the whole world would slowly become liberal and democratic, Limonov scandalised everyone by setting up the National Bolshevik Party. The party protested against the «shock therapy» delivered to the Russian economy under Boris Yeltsin and the dissolution of the USSR's borders. Yet, veering away from the left, the party would also come to support virulent forms of Russian nationalism — and revanchism — that drew on fascist politics and aesthetics.
While the NBP never gained political traction, its adoption of Limonov's personal style and use of provocative poses and direct action would help create the foundations for the aestheticised Russian performance protests of Voina and Pussy Riot. Because Limonov took on so many poses, and was a cultural chameleon who changed with the times, those who came after him could ditch his particular politics while retaining dissident outsider tactics. For instance, Limonov's aestheticised political campaigning in the 1990s and 2000s would influence the founder of the performance group Voina, Oleg Vorotnikov, who looked to:
«Lenin and [Eduard] Limonov. No one else [being] radical enough.»
A former Voina performer member, who split from Vorotnikov in 2009, Nadya Tolokonnikova would go on to found Pussy Riot in 2011. While the Western press has focused on Pussy Riot as prototypical liberal human rights activists, some academics have argued that the group share more with the National Bolshevik Party punk bands that circled Limonov in their commitment to «local forms and traditions of paradoxical humour and provocation». Indeed, one may see Limonov as the originator of a distinct dissenting tradition that continues to question dominant narratives about Russia coming from both the Kremlin and America.
Yet the writer would betray his commitment to dissent as the Kremlin started to pursue foreign policy aims that aligned with his preferences for Russian revanchism. In his later years, while running the Other Russia party (the successor of the NBP), Limonov's support for a greater Russia was to align with Putin's annexation of the Crimea in 2014: for the first time he found his outsider pose co-opted by the establishment. The British documentary maker Adam Curtis claims that Limonov's influence found its way into the Kremlin via his own approach to politics that inspired many of the government's advisors. Among them, the ideologist Vladislav Surkov is credited for turning «Russian politics into [a] postmodern absurdist theatre» of shifting ideological performances, while the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin uses postmodern epistemological arguments to support the Kremlin.
Has Limonov just gone through multiple, contradictory phases? Or did his early work already offer a clue to his personality and motives?
«Adolescent provocation, that's the through-line,»
says Karen Ryan, Professor of World Languages at Merrimack College and a scholar of Limonov's work in the 1980s.
«When he wrote «It's Me, Eddie», it was right before the fall of the Soviet Union — what he was doing in terms of provocation was not just political, it was also linguistic and literary. The inclusion of «mat» (obscenities) was provocative among emigres and people in Soviet Russia.»
Ryan argues that the root of Limonov's controversial activity with the NBP can be seen in his early novels:
«He is an oppositionist… It's either the Soviet system, in «Memoirs of a Russian Punk», or it's the American system «It's Me, Eddie». The oppositional stance is there from the beginning.»
Although Ryan states that, ultimately, Limonov's literary potential was lost to his artistic self-fashioning and bigotry:
«I became pretty turned off by his work… One of the things that I found hardest to take was his misogyny.»
Adding that:
«he became a parody of himself.»
However, Yngvar Steinholt, Professor of Russian Literature and Culture, at the Arctic University of Norway, argues that:
«one way of understanding what Limonov was doing is through the concept of late Soviet irony — what the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak calls «stiob» (taking the piss). The point is to over-identify with something provocative: for as long as people cannot decide whether you mean it, or whether you're just doing it to provoke, you have power over them.»
The use of stiob, and the commitment to provocative poses, can also be seen among contemporary Russian performance artists and actionist-artists. For instance, Voina's mock hangings in supermarkets, staged orgies, and drawing of a penis on Liteyny Bridge in St Petersburg all apply a mischievous sense of stiob.
Limonov's particular brand of ambiguous stiob found its way into American culture, after he returned to Russia, and took up writing for the English-language «The eXile» which catered to an ex-pat audience in Moscow. «The eXile» set out to mock the hedonistic lifestyles afforded to westerners in Russia, during the 1990s, through macho-posturing and explicit sex scenes but also via absurd depictions of Putin's Kremlin. There is still debate today as to whether Limonov, and his fellow American journalists Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, were writing about real misogyny or taking on an ironic satirical pose.
Even more controversial and far less ambiguous is the instance of Limonov appearing in Pawel Pawlikowski's «Serbian Epics» (1992) alongside war-criminal Radovan Karadžić. During a scene above the besieged city of Sarajevo, Limonov is pictured shooting an automatic machine gun at buildings. In «Serbian Epics», the pose of macho outsider, raconteur, and provocateur became a reality: going beyond any pretence at stiob. This would help him find followers outside the literary avant-garde where he was established, drawing in nationalist young men and gang members.
However, by maintaining his connections across demographics and playing both sides, Limonov managed to find influence among marginal groups and underground artistic movements too: from the Pop Mechanics movement of Sergey Kuryokhin to the LGBTQ artist Slava Mogutin. Both macho and queer aesthetics could be used as stiob — to provoke and confuse — and to claim power for the artist.
An example of Limonov «playing both sides» can be seen in his interest in gender non-conformity and dandyism. In an early edition of the NBP's newspaper «Limonka», andrognynous male models were dressed in female clothing.
«He tended to always want to be on the wrong side,»
says Fabrizio Fenghi, Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies, Brown University and author of «It Will be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia», (2020).
«In that sense, there is a continuity between the queer gender-ambiguous performance of his early literature (and the involvement Slava Mogutin in «Limonka») and the later hyper-masculine cult of war he developed.»
This ambiguity, and Limonov's pose as both a hard man and dandy aesthete, would find its way into his politics. For instance, after working with left-wing groups during the 1993 constitutional crisis, Limonov and the NBP allied themselves with a liberal capitalist movement led by the chess prodigy Garry Kasparov. «I was in Moscow between 2007 and 2011, when I met Limonov, it was at the marsh nesoglasnykh (Dissenter's March 2006–2007) — a series of protests against the Kremlin,» says Luke Harding, a «Guardian» foreign correspondent and former Moscow bureau chief who often interviewed Limonov at protests.
«He thought of himself as an intellectual,»
Harding argues,
«but [his game] seemed to me to be about the performative and theatrical politics of resistance. There were demonstrations in Pushkin Square where [the NBP] would stick banners out of crumbling 19th-century stucco buildings.»
Harding asserts that Limonov's self-promotion and aestheticism became a handicap for the marsh nesoglasnykh:
«I think [he] did a disservice to anti-Putin politics… it was difficult for Kasparov because he was trying to fill a space where there should have been a pro-western Russian opposition and it was made impossible by Limonov.»
This period of uneasy alliance between Limonov and Kasparov, as well as the paranoia caused by constant Kremlin surveillance, was captured by the documentary filmmaker Alyona Polunina in her films «Yes, Death!» (2004) and «The Revolution that Wasn't» (2008). Both of Polunina's films show how many young people in Russia were taken in by a political programme concerned with performance, action, and spectacle.
«He had a physical attitude towards politics… he didn't care about theory and wanted action, leather jackets, and weapons,»
says Fenghi. Indeed, every shot of Limonov in «The Revolution that Wasn't» is aesthetically composed: he comes across less like a politician, and more a charismatic cult leader, wandering around snowy alleyways clad in black. And yet, the 2008 presidential elections, which the documentary covers, are a landslide for Putin's ally Dmitry Medvedev. Performative politics led Limonov to defeat and irrelevance within the Russian power structure. As Harding contends:
«when the history of the current regime is written, I don't think Limonov and the National Bolsheviks will be more than a footnote.»
Yet, within Russia, Pussy Riot, although radically politically distinct from Limonov's NBP, still cite the writer as an artistic influence, employ National Bolshevik aesthetics satirically in their music videos, and undertake direct action methods, such as those used in «A Punk Prayer» (2012) to provoke the Kremlin. The use of stiob and provocative poses have found their way into progressive movements that have positive political platforms. It certainly can be argued that Limonov's cult of masculinity and his avoidance of religious provocation against the Orthodox Church implicitly helped support the values that the Kremlin has promoted to the Russian people and weakened his own anti-system stance. For Harding, Pussy Riot attacked the social dogmas of the Kremlin, not just its politics, because:
«they're young women, and unlike Limonov, they are not just anti-system but also anti-church.»
However, others warn against trying to fit either Limonov or later Russian dissidents into Western political paradigms narrowly concerned with social progress. For instance, in reaction to obituaries in the American press, journalist Yasha Levine argues that we should take Limonov seriously as a dissident political figure who was outside the norms of West:
«from the «New York Times» down to «Jacobin» — [they are all] trying to interpret and explain this radical Soviet writer and dissident through their provincial and puritanical and smugly comfortable suburban worldview… [they] didn't like his liberal bashing and his anti-oligarchic, anti-privatisation politics.»
What remains constant is the ambiguity of Limonov's commitments, both aesthetic and political. As Rogatchevski reminds us:
«all this has been done to promote his art, his publications and his books. So the question is, do you promote them better by being a countercultural figure who has unpopular and provocative views? Or do you promote them better when these views coincide with the ruling party?»
Limonov has achieved widespread influence as an aesthetic provocateur who was able to shape himself to fit the moment. How committed he actually was to the politics of National Bolshevism — or indeed Putinism — is a question that has not been answered. However, Limonov's distinct strategy of visual provocation will live on among Russian direct action artists long after his problematic literary and political influence become irrelevant. The debate, as to whether this particular brand of post-modern Russian protest, concerned with personality and symbols over ideological commitment, is a good thing, is still very much open. Indeed, if protest is only concerned with a performative pose, and not substantial opposition, its own strategies can be used and performed by those it demonstrates against. Perhaps Limonov's greatest blindspot is that his personality-driven inconsistency, relativism of political value, and aestheticisation of power are also techniques adopted, or appropriated, by repressive post-modern politicians within the system he claimed to hate.
Mario Gianani, CEO of Fremantle's Rome-based The Young Pope and My Brilliant Friend production powerhouse Wildside, is enjoying a high-profile time on the international film festival circuit this year.
The producer, whose earlier feature film credits include Marco Bellocchio's Vincere (2009) and Bernardo Bertolucci's Io E Te (2012), was at Cannes this May with Belgian directorial duo Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch's Jury Prize winner The Eight Mountains.
He is now at Venice with a quartet of Italian titles: Emanuele Crialese's Golden Lion contender L'Immensità, Paolo Virzì's Out of Competition title Siccità (Dry) and first features Amanda and Ghost Night.
Deadline talked to Gianani ahead of the world premiere on Sunday of the 1970s Rome-set drama L'Immensità, starring Penelope Cruz as a mother, whose daughter's determination to identify as a boy pushes their fragile family dynamics to the edge.
⟨…⟩
DEADLINE: Wildside is also in production on Kirill Serebrennikov's Limonov, based on an adaptation by Pawel Pawlikowski of French writer and filmmaker Emmanuelle Carrère's book about the controversial Russian poet and political dissident Edouard Limonov. Do you have an update?
— That's another long story. We took the rights to the book six years ago. Pawel Pawlikowski came on board to write and direct, and we financed the film but then he changed his mind.
We kept the script. It was a fantastic script, as ever. He managed to condense the story into 80-pages and it's great.
We were looking for alternatives, for Russian directors. An agent put us in contact with Kirill Serebrennikov and it was a fantastic meeting. We asked him if he knew the character of Limonov and he pulled out a picture, showing himself as an 18-year-old next to the real Limonov.
It all came together very naturally but again it was complex. We had been shooting for three weeks in Moscow and then there was the invasion. We had reconstructed New York in Moscow, so we had to lose the whole set and rebuild in Riga. We stopped for a few months and restarted in August and will be finished in the coming days.
We're very proud. We think this is a very timely project. It explains a lot about how we got to where we are today. Limonov is the seed of everything. He was an isolated man and a loser. As often happens in life, losers embody that something that is the belly of a larger community. A few years later, [his writing] has become a very sharp prediction of what is happening now, but we didn't understand at the time.
In politics, many did not like him, but in literature his authority was almost indisputable. Secular publications were interested in his private life, and the most authoritative literary forums discussed his books. Schoolchildren remember him by a few obscene lines, and many major writers of our time call him their teacher. He lived as he wrote, and wrote as he lived — sincerely, vividly, scandalously. On February 22, Eduard Limonov would have turned 80 years old. Izvestia recalls the writer's life path.
Teen Savenko
Eduard Savenko was born on February 22, 1943 in the city of Dzerzhinsk, Gorky Region. His father, Veniamin Ivanovich, was a communications officer, his mother, Raisa Fedorovna, worked as a technician at a factory. His name, as the writer's father later recalled, the boy received in honor of the poet Bagritsky. Savenko often moved from place to place: from Dzerzhinsk they moved to Kazan, then to Kharkov, where they finally settled. They lived more than modestly: at first, the family was placed on an empty floor of the hospital, then they were given a room in a communal apartment. Communal life, a dysfunctional area, many former criminals… In this environment, the young writer grew up and felt at home. He himself did not differ in exemplary behavior: in his school years he got into the police more than once and was even registered there. As his comrades in childhood pranks, harmless and not very, said later, he knew how to stand up for himself and was not a weakling.
The glory of a hooligan did not prevent young Edik Savenko from studying well and admiring reading. He himself later wrote that he devoured books, especially about sea voyages and research expeditions. The future poet wanted romance, and he, by his own admission, was preparing himself for the life of a naturalist and pioneer. After graduating from school, he was going to enter the Faculty of History of Kharkov University, but after the first exam, he changed his mind, took the documents — and went to work as a steelmaker in a hot shop, and then as a high-altitude fitter at a construction site. As Limonov himself later admitted, for equally romantic reasons, he was inspired by the film Vysota, which was popular in those years. However, their own aspirations certainly played a role here, which in the future will take shape in the main literary credo: do not go with the flow, always go across and contrary. So from the first independent steps, the future writer created a creative biography for himself.
Edik Savenko wrote poetry from his youth, but he decided to take up literature seriously in 1965. Then the pseudonym that glorified him was born. It was invented by a Kharkov friend, the artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan — the novice writer liked the idea, and from now on Edik Savenko, the young scoundrel Edichka, irrevocably becomes a character in artistic texts, and the poet Eduard Limonov enters the literary scene.
The early poetry of Limonov, who followed the traditions of the Russian avant-garde, is still highly valued by literary critics. However, Kharkov was in no hurry to print «non-formatted» verses. But the lack of official recognition not only did not disappoint the young writer — it was a challenge for him, a fulcrum, perhaps the main one in his biography. The confrontation between boring and mundane reality has become the main vector of his literary biography. Limonov was ready to enter the big literary scene — and in 1966 he went to conquer Moscow.
Young scoundrel
The capital, however, did not particularly expect a novice author. Limonov was interrupted by odd jobs and was even forced to return home for several months, in order to then storm Moscow with renewed vigor. However, he soon found a way to make money, successfully tested back in Kharkov. Limonov sewed jeans for Kharkiv fashionistas; he continued the same small personal (and not quite legal in those years) business in Moscow. Soon his name became known among the metropolitan bohemia. Later, Limonov was happy to talk about the fact that employees of the fashion magazine Smena, Literaturnaya Gazeta, and even such celebrities as Bulat Okudzhava and Ernst Neizvestny walked around in jeans sewn by him.
But Limonov's relationship with the metropolitan literary underground was by no means limited to orders for tailoring fashionable trousers. Very soon, he became his own in an informal literary get-together, attended the literary seminar of Arseny Tarkovsky, became a member of the creative group SMOG («Courage, Thought, Image, Depth»), which united young experimental poets who opposed officialdom and sought to create new literature. Looking for a new language and style, Limonov turned out to be among his own: he was one of the brightest participants in the association, his poems, and later journalism, went around, they were talked about. Limonov became a bohemia star, and not only a literary one: he was a recognized fashionista and looked after the first beauties of the capital. One of them was Elena Shchapova, a poetess and model. In 1973, they married Limonov, getting married in a church, and a year later they emigrated to the United States.
In the States, Limonov was waiting for literary fame. It was there that he first began to write prose. But here, too, he did not look for easy ways: instead of achieving fame in the Russian-speaking cultural circle, like many émigré writers, he tried to join the local literary tradition. This was the era of gonzo journalism and «I-literature», the arrival of the language of everyday life and everyday plots in the artistic text. Here Limonov, a master of household sketches and poetic texts, was in his element. But still much more important for him was the element of opposition to the mainstream. A fierce anti-Soviet in the USSR, in the States Limonov equally emotionally criticized the local way of life, castigated the vices of capitalism. This frightened many: for critical speeches, Limonov was fired from the newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo, where he served as a proofreader. Finally chaining himself to the fence of the New York Times, which refused to publish the texts of the unrecognized genius, Limonov leaves for France. Here he finally waited for literary fame: in Paris and New York, his first novel «It's me — Eddie» is published, «The Diary of a Loser», «Teenager Savenko» and «Young Scoundrel» are published.
The Parisian years become the most fruitful for him: he writes several novels, numerous collections of short stories, social and philosophical works, and numerous articles. He is being actively translated and people are talking about him as a serious writer.
The fame he dreamed of finally came to him. But, probably, even Limonov himself at that time did not believe that only a few years would pass — and his scandalous novels, which caused a lot of rumors, would be published in Russia, that they would lay the foundation of new Russian literature.
The old man travels
Limonov's literary talent was never denied even by his fierce critics. The richness of the language, the sharp eye, the attention to detail and the mastery of the word are the hallmarks of his texts, whether they are stories, articles or major works of fiction. But the main thing in his literary heritage, perhaps, was the readiness to resist any inertia, any routine — both social, political and literary.
It is not surprising that it was Limonov, who never officially taught, who did not consider himself a literary guru, did not favor students and, according to many witnesses, never sought to teach, became the founder of a whole school of Russian prose — albeit informal, but no less significant. He is called his teacher by such different authors as the multiple finalist of the Russian Booker and the National Bestseller Zakhar Prilepin and the winner of the Big Book Roman Senchin. Not only they, but also dozens of other, less well-known writers, have experienced the influence of Limonov and speak about it exclusively with pride. His worldly myth-making itself has become a new literary norm.
However, even having tasted the coveted fame, Limonov did not change himself: his own life still remains his main literary work, which he wrote with the same brilliance and fury in his advanced years. In 1987, he received French citizenship — only a few years later to give it up and return to Russia.
He was exactly the teacher that teenagers are looking for: he taught them not to be afraid to think and act in their own way, to go against the mainstream, to fight reality, turning it into the field of their own lifelong creative experiment. For all his opposition, he remained a true patriot of his country, enthusiastically meeting the return of Crimea to Russia and supporting the struggle of Donbass for freedom. He remained a furious, uncompromising publicist, and wrote for Izvestia.
He completed his last book, The Old Man Travels, shortly before his death. Eduard Limonov died in 2020 at the age of 78 as a result of complications from surgery. On his grave there is a monument created by the sculptor Mikhail Baskakov and approved by him during his lifetime. The last avant-garde artist of the century knew a lot about posthumous fame.
«BLiTZ», February 22, 2023
comment:
Thierry Marignac: Well, Prilepin is trashing him now, My old friend trashed Prilepin shortly before his death, trying to make sure no one would follow the path of the careerist. This is a rather conventional bio of Edward. The only thing remotely fun is calling him «avant-garde», that he was throughout his whole life. I was Edward's friend for almost 40 years, and expected more bite.
Michael Kumpmann delves into Eduard Limonov's hidden philosophical impact, revealing how his blend of style, radicalism, and thought shaped the Identitarian Movement and more.
The majority of the New Right is at least rudimentarily familiar with the philosophy of Alexander Dugin. However, Eduard Limonov, who worked with Dugin for decades, is almost absent from the discussion. Nevertheless, he too developed an interesting philosophy that is certainly worth a look.
The first fundamental thing that can be said about Eduard Limonov is that fashion, youth culture, politics, and philosophy are inseparable in his work. His National Bolshevik Party was thus not meant to be a party like the AfD (Alternative for Germany) but rather a mix of political party, «punk group», and avantgarde. This influence also partially spilt over into the early texts of Alexander Dugin and is, for instance, a reason why Dugin's «Arctogea Manifesto» concludes the «list of most significant philosophers» with John Lydon from the Sex Pistols.
Direct Predecessor of the Identitarian Movement
This is precisely why Limonov must be seen as a direct predecessor of the Identitarian Movement, trends like Vaporwave, and individuals like Chris Ares. Surprisingly, however, Limonov nowhere mentions Stanley Kubrick's film «A Clockwork Orange». And this is despite the fact that his movement often really acts like a transfer of the youth gangs there into reality.
The second point is that Limonov uses an extremely personal, emotive style that quickly builds a closeness with the reader and therefore often uses tools like anecdotes. Hence, Limonov's style is the complete opposite of Alexander Dugin's, who often writes so academically dryly that one only grasps his meaning after the third reading.
The downside, however, is that Limonov did not really think through much of what he demanded. This is particularly noticeable on the topic of the economy. For instance, he quite rightly complains that work in principle is «rubbish» and that workers have to lead a dreary life as «wage slaves». Yet he does not mention automation but instead suggests at one point that in order for people to work less, there should be a voluntary agreement to consume less.
Libertarian Totalitarianism?
The third point: at first glance, National Bolshevism sounds highly antithetical to freedom, namely authoritarian and totalitarian. This is greatly misleading. Limonov manages to combine the most freedom-loving aspects of the left, the right, and a few libertarians into a mixture that is closer to anarchism than to totalitarianism. His main influences are anarchism, Traditionalism (Evola etc.), the «68 student revolution (especially in the form of the hippie communes and the works of Herbert Marcuse), American militia culture, the «chaos troops» of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, and «left-handed Christianity», as represented, for example, by the so-called Anabaptists, the Khlysts, and Grigori Rasputin.
Limonov's fundamental thesis is that he views modernity as a process in which the world is increasingly technologised, quantified, and regimented in a way that can be easily controlled from above — similar to Ted Kaczynski, René Guénon, Theodor Adorno, and Martin Heidegger. This process makes the world more efficient and safer. However, it also ensures that the world becomes «more boring»; man becomes more alienated from his life and from others, and traditional systems such as the family are devalued, undermined, and degenerated into mere instruments of state power. Directly tangible effects of this process are, above all, the exploitation of workers, as well as the modern school system, which only drills children into obedience.
Hence, the choice between capitalism and communism plays a secondary role. Capitalist states would preach the free market but not live it. Instead, the same «control structures» have been established in the West as in communism, with the difference that the West, instead of the state, prefers some international mega-corporations and destroys the economic freedom of all others to their advantage.
A consequence of this is that there are private companies in the West but, with few exceptions, no visionary entrepreneurs who shape the company through their own spirit. Instead, companies have devolved into stock corporations, whose ownership is so fragmented that it is no longer clear for whose benefit a company still exists.
Dictate of Economic Efficiency
This development also tries to destroy every other culture and way of life, and to subject all people to the dictate of economic efficiency. This phenomenon is at the core of globalisation. The counterpoint to this development is cultural evolution. Here, Limonov is a follower of the historiosophical «Great Man» theory. This theory is the antithesis of the Marxist philosophy of history, which prescribes the course of history in group dynamics.
The Great Man theory, on the other hand, assumes that some outstanding individuals influence the course of history through their ideas and actions, while the masses are just a «lethargic heap of disinterested fools» who only jump onto a «train» as followers.
This special individual who directs history is the radical outsider apart from the masses. He does not care what the common people think of him and instead lives only according to what he believes to be right. The reference to Nietzsche's Übermensch (overman) is obvious here.
Culture-Creating Geniuses
However, since modernity only wants humans as cogs in the machine, it fights these «culture-creating geniuses» particularly hard. Therefore, such people live today as «outcasts» on the fringes of society. And this is where Herbert Marcuse comes into play. He described the «outcasts» of a society as the true revolutionary class, with whose help a new society could be built.
According to Limonov, these people represent the precursor of the Nietzschean Übermensch described above. And such a group of pariahs, according to Limonov, are the punks to whom he particularly addressed himself — but at the same time, all kinds of radicalism, whether left-wing, right-wing, religious, or anarchist in motivation.
This could now be interpreted very individualistically. However, this is not entirely true. The individualism that is typical of Western states today is, for Limonov, a sick consequence of modernity, born out of fear of syphilis and other diseases. Instead, humans need the community to unfold their potential and freedom. Limonov develops a concept that roughly reminds one of the typical New Right communitarianism and communes of left-wing anarchists and hippies, as well as Jack Donovan's idea of the «new barbarian tribes». One should imagine the ideal commune in the Limonovian sense as a kind of large family where everyone is either related or married to each other.
Everyone Should Be Married to Everyone
Limonov does not mean this «metaphorically», as it may sound. In «The Other Russia», Limonov demands that the inhabitants of such a commune should actually voluntarily share possessions and spouses, so that literally everyone should be married to everyone. He even goes so far as to suggest that other members of the commune who have problems with this should be helped to overcome them.
This demand for free love was the main reason why Alexander Solzhenitsyn was hostile towards Limonov. Indeed, from a Traditionalist point of view, this can be delicate. However, Julius Evola has referred to both marriage and the orgy as legitimate traditional forms of sexuality and partnership. Terence McKenna, who, as a hippie, advocated free love and drugs, had a worldview very similar to Traditionalism.
However, Limonov saw the fundamental prerequisite for a community as the willingness to fight for one's loved ones and family and possibly to die for them. Limonov formally calls this conscription. However, typical of his anarchist manner, he rather means the idea of a militia, as it is realised in the USA, particularly through the Second Amendment. According to Limonov, when individuals are allowed to own weapons and organise and defend themselves, it ensures that they develop a healthy mistrust of central authority.
The Collapse of Globalism
According to him, the modern state and globalism are on the verge of collapse. This is because every system becomes more corrupt and «rotten» from within over time, and this process can, at most, be slowed down but never stopped. The time should be used to gather strength and form an «alliance of separatists». This means an alliance of all forces that want to decide for themselves about their lifestyle. It could be anyone from an anarchistic free spirit to a religious sectarian. At some point, the right time will come and then the system can be easily and finally kicked into the abyss.
This would be the endpoint of modernity and the centralised state. In the ensuing chaos, people would reorganise themselves into nomadic groups and small village communities. A variety of voluntary associations with the most diverse cultures and ways of life would emerge, living freely on their own. And these would organise themselves like former principalities into a new «feudal» Russia.
It is evident that Limonov's philosophy is much more chaotic and «destructive» than that of Dugin and most of the New Right. Therefore, it will not be an option for many to adopt his system wholesale. However, Limonov managed to develop an extremely dynamic philosophy from a Traditionalist or conservative point of view. And precisely because many conservatives are sinking into prudishness, humourlessness, philistinism, and hostility to life, it is worth looking at Limonov's philosophy of extreme, chaotic freedom as an antidote.
National Bolshevism: The History of Red-Brownism Part 5
The Soviet Union's Collapse and The New Russian National Bolshevism.
Under Gorbachev's leadership, the Soviet republics began to demand more autonomy, embracing the spirit of liberalization. Yet, the central authorities in Moscow were reluctant to relinquish their centralized power as the 1980s drew to a close. In an effort to maintain their grip on the Union, Soviet officials ordered military interventions to quell dissent in the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania. Despite these forceful measures, the disintegration of the Soviet bloc seemed unavoidable. The constituent Soviet republics could no longer maintain a facade of unity, and the once-touted ideal of the "Friendship of The Peoples" unraveled, exposing its superficiality. The cohesion of the Soviet Union had long rested on the coercive force wielded by the communist regime, which maintained order through intimidation and the suppression of those who dared to challenge the status quo or advocate for the rights of minorities.
The consequences of Gorbachev's actions were:
The gold reserves experienced a significant decrease, plummeting from 2,500 tons to a mere 240 tons.
The external debt of the USSR skyrocketed from 31.3 billion to a staggering 70.3 billion.
The GDP experienced a severe decline of 50%.
Life expectancy witnessed a distressing decrease of 10 years.
Approximately 40% of the population found themselves living in poverty.
The country faced a staggering death toll of 7.7 million.
The number of factories was significantly reduced from 30,000 to a mere 5,000 units.
The vital sectors of healthcare, science, and education suffered extensive destruction.
There was an alarming prevalence of epidemic levels of abortion, drug use, alcoholism, and AIDS/HIV.
During the final stages of the Soviet Union's existence, the Caucasus republics became centers of intense nationalistic conflicts. Notably, the Nagorno Karabakh region and Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, witnessed vicious anti-Armenian pogroms that led to significant violence and fatalities. In a parallel situation, Georgia was the scene of fierce fighting between Georgians and the Abkhazian minority, heightening ethnic strife in the area. These clashes were partly a result of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of liberalization, which, though well-intended, unintentionally empowered nationalist movements and amplified ethnic tensions across the Union. Moreover, Gorbachev's reforms had far-reaching international effects. The 1989 revolutions that toppled communist governments throughout the countries of the Warsaw Pact signaled the fall of Soviet-backed socialist states. This domino effect of democratization and the eruption of revolutionary fervor exerted increasing pressure on Gorbachev to respond to calls for more democracy and self-governance from within the Soviet republics. The disintegration of Eastern European socialist governments acted as a driving force for stronger demands for independence and political change within the Soviet Union itself. With nationalist fervor on the rise and ethnic conflicts intensifying, Gorbachev stood at a crossroads in Soviet history. The push for expanded democratic rights and sovereignty from the Union's republics reached its zenith, marking a critical moment that would shape the fate of the Soviet Union.
In 1991, the Soviet Union was rocked by the audacious August Coup, where a group known as the Gang of Eight—comprising key figures within the Soviet hierarchy—made a bold move to depose Mikhail Gorbachev. This clique of communist diehards and military bigwigs included the likes of Gennady Yanayev, the Vice President, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, Interior Minister Boris Pugo, Oleg Baklanov, the second-in-command of the Defense Council, Vasily Starodubtsev, head of the Union of Collective Farms, high-ranking Communist party official Alexander Tizyakov, and Anatoly Lukyanov, the Supreme Soviet Chairman.
Bonded by their resistance to the liberalizing reforms of Gorbachev, these conspirators aimed to reverse the tide of change and reinstate the preeminence of the central Soviet authority. Their plan was to take the reins of power, put a stop to the reform process, and reaffirm Moscow's control. However, the coup was doomed to fail due to a variety of decisive elements. The united front of pro-democracy advocates, widespread public opposition, steadfastness within key institutions, and global backlash all contributed to foiling the coup, contributing to the further destabilization of the Soviet government and accelerating the Union's disintegration.
Post-coup, the Soviet Union witnessed a swift series of events that led to its demise. Various republics took advantage of the chaos to declare independence, precipitating the Soviet Union's fragmentation. Under intense strain, Gorbachev resigned on December 25th, handing over the reins of leadership—including the nuclear codes—to Boris Yeltsin, who would lead the Russian Federation until 1999. After the Soviet Union's collapse, a new struggle for power emerged in Russia between the legislature and the newly elected president, Boris Yeltsin, a situation complicated by rampant hyperinflation, plummeting living standards, and a contentious push towards economic liberalization that stripped away vital social protections. Concurrently, separatist movements within the Russian Federation grew stronger. The pervasive corruption linked to extensive privatization efforts and the «shock therapy» economic reforms backed by the United States exacerbated the turmoil.
«President Yeltsin delivered the first big shock to the Russian economy when he lifted price controls in December 1991. As the Soviet economy collapsed, however, the policy ended up unleashing hyperinflation. By 1994, consumer prices in Russia would skyrocket to almost 2000 times what they had been in 1990. That candy bar that had cost $1 now cost $2.000. Hyperinflation devastated ordinary Russians. Meanwhile, Chubais was tasked with overseeing mass privatization. That entailed transforming a nation whose almost entire economy consisted of state-controlled industries — manufacturing plants, oil refineries, mines, media outlets, biscuit factories, you name it — into private enterprises. It was, to date, surely the biggest transfer of state assets to private owners in world history. Privatization was conducted in two waves. The first wave, which began in October 1992, had at least the veneer of being a fair and open process. Russia issued 148 million «privatization checks,» or vouchers, to Russian citizens. These vouchers could be freely sold or traded. They could then be used to buy shares of state enterprises going private at public auctions around the nation. It was like the former Soviet Union was holding the world's largest garage sale and vouchers were the tickets to shop. The people on their way to becoming Russia's first class of oligarchs scoured the nation, trying to buy as many vouchers as they could. Many of the oligarchs had come from nothing. They had initially gotten rich — but not quite buy-superyachts rich just yet — by hustling in the black market or through legitimate businesses when the Soviet Union first allowed private entrepreneurship in the late 1980s. For example, Roman Abramovich made his first pot of money selling rubber ducks and other random objects to Russians out of his Moscow apartment (seriously). He was also a mechanic. By the time privatization began, many soon-to-be oligarchs owned banks and had enough money to buy lots of vouchers. Sponsor Message The oligarchs went on a buying spree, purchasing hundreds of thousands of vouchers, each of which were worth 10,000 rubles, or about $40 or less back in the 1990s. Average Russians, who were struggling during hyperinflation, were often eager to sell. After amassing vouchers, the oligarchs — both come-up-from-nothing hustlers and former Soviet government insiders — used them at auctions to buy up stocks in newly private companies. By all accounts, many of these enterprises were shockingly undervalued — and those who were able to get large chunks of lucrative enterprises became fabulously wealthy in a very short period of time. Between 1992 and 1994, about 15,000 state-run enterprises went private under the program. By 1994, when the voucher program ended, around 70 percent of the Russian economy had been privatized. But some of the biggest, most valuable industries remained in the government's hands. Chubais had plans to privatize these state enterprises and raise much needed funds for the government by selling them off for cash to the highest bidder in legitimate auctions. However, politics got in the way of the increasingly unpopular privatization drive — and even threatened to reverse it. That's when the Yeltsin administration resorted to a much shadier form of privatization.»
The economic disaster, coupled with the rise of a capitalist oligarchy and a sense of national humiliation, united various factions, including Communists, Nationalists, and Monarchists, against the liberal state. As Eduard Limonov aptly described,
«There's no longer any left or right. There's the system and the enemies of the system.»
In September 1993, President Boris Yeltsin took the controversial step of bypassing the constitution to dissolve the legislature and announced new elections. He rationalized this move by referencing a referendum in which over 60% of Russian voters supported his recent economic measures. Vice President Alexander Rutskoy sharply criticized these measures as «economic genocide» and, following Yeltsin's dissolution of the parliament, the legislature impeached Yeltsin and proclaimed Rutskoy the interim president. This precipitated large-scale demonstrations in Moscow, drawing tens of thousands rallying behind the parliament and leading to confrontations with Yeltsin's backers. The ensuing violence claimed over 100 lives and left many injured.
The parliament of that time was a melting pot of conflicting ideologies, hosting groups such as anti-liberal populists, communists, nationalists, feminists, anarchists, and non-affiliated independents. With independents holding around 28% of the seats and the lackluster performance of parties aligned with the Kremlin, the parliament struggled to set a definitive course of action, casting uncertainty on the trajectory of a post-Soviet, liberal-capitalist Russia. It's notable that this era saw the emergence of non-communist parties, starting in 1991.
In the face of the widespread opposition to Yeltsin's rule, there was a movement towards unity among his detractors, culminating in the creation of the National Salvation Front. This alliance united the most vehement critics of Yeltsin, encompassing a spectrum of groups from Fascists and National Bolsheviks to Anarchists, Monarchists, and Communists. The formation of the National Salvation Front was a response to pervasive disillusionment with Russia's fall from superpower status to a state struggling with disarray and persistent crises.
The front maintained close ties with a parliamentary bloc called Russian Unity. Aleksandr Prokhanov, the editor-in-chief of Dyen, the National Salvation Front's official publication, served as the co-chairman of the National Salvation Front. Dyen published excerpts from «The Protocols of The Elders of Zion» and expressed support for fascist groups in the West. Another notable figure involved in the National Salvation Front was Albert Makashov, a former Major General in the Red Army who led the armed wing of the group during the 1993 revolution. Alexander Dugin, who contributed to and assisted in editing Dyen, as well as Eduard Limonov, a former Russian exile with connections to punk and leftist circles in the United States, also participated in the National Salvation Front. Limonov had met Alain de Benoist, a philosopher associated with the European New Right, in Paris and had been involved in the Yugoslav war on the side of Radovan Karadzic before returning to Russia and joining the red-brown opposition against Yeltsin. Furthermore, Dugin had the opportunity to meet and interview Léon Degrelle, a former leader of the Waffen SS and the Belgian Rexist movement, during this period.
In 1991, Eduard Limonov, a Soviet émigré and literary dissident, returned to Russia and in 1994, went on to form the National Bolshevik party (NBP). It's crucial to note that the NBP was officially established not as a formal party but as a political organization. Co-created with Alexander Dugin, and including influential musicians Yegor Letov and Sergey Kuryokhin, the NBP drew in a diverse array of members and formed coalitions reminiscent of the National Salvation Front. Nonetheless, the NBP adhered to a more cohesive ideological stance, merging elements of nationalism, Marxism (omitting Feuerbach's influence, as articulated by Dugin), and ideologies from the Conservative Revolution, such as Eurasianism, to create a unique strain of National Bolshevism. Dugin eventually parted ways with the NBP due to ideological differences and personal disputes with other members. Sergey Kuryokhin promoted the concept of «White Communism,» much like his intellectual forerunner Nikolai Ustryalov, proposing it as a solution for Russia's revival. In contrast, Limonov, diverging from Dugin, favored an anarchist approach combined with elements of nationalism and socialism, a stance that resonated with Letov's own political views.
In the words of Marlene Laruelle:
«The party is inspired by so-called third-way ideas: it asserts that national revolution and social revolution emanate from one and the same principle, and that the extremes, left and right, should join forces to form a common front in the name of a «general principle of uprising.» The development of an avant-gardist National Bolshevik doctrine owes much to the theoretician Alexander Dugin. Basing himself on anarchism and terrorism, Dugin developed the idea of forming an alliance between the revolutionary radicalism of the left and the right, and proffered an exalted romantic vision of action and death…The movement claimed that the key solution was to form a new Great Imperial Russia: it accordingly managed to gain the attention of authorities in Latvia and the Ukraine, who were anxious about its members' activities on their territories, and in Kazakhstan it fomented attempted «uprisings» alongside Cossack circles.»
Within the National Salvation Front, the NBP emerged as a key player and became influential in Russia's counter-culture movement. Gennady Zyuganov, also a prominent figure in the Front, had dialogues with Alain de Benoist and Jean Francois Thiriart, the latter being a former Waffen SS member who later embraced National Bolshevism. Zyuganov later founded the Communist party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which, despite its communist moniker, adopted nationalist and conservative stances. The KPRF has taken a stand against «cosmopolitanism,» disseminated conspiracy theories regarding Zionist ambitions for worldwide control, and advocated for the prohibition of Jewish and Freemason groups in Russia.
In 1993, following Yeltsin's decision to disband the Russian parliament, the National Salvation Front attempted to instigate a shadow government in opposition to Yeltsin during the political crisis that unfolded. This action precipitated a confrontation between Yeltsin's government and the red-brown coalition, which counted the Russian National Unity (a fascist organization) among its ranks, at the Russian White House. In the end, Yeltsin commanded military forces to seize the Russian White House, an event that led to casualties and injuries among the red-brown coalition and resulted in the detention of several opposition figures.
Martin A. Lee provides a comprehensive and detailed explanation of this:
«In September 1993, Yeltsin summarily disbanded the Russian parliament. This presidential decree set the stage for the bloody confrontation between Yeltsin loyalists and the so-called «patriotic forces» who gathered at the Russian White House, where the parliament normally functioned.Sensing that the long-awaited civil war was about to begin, Limonov and his supporters flocked to the parliament building. They were joined by thousands of Red-Brown extremists, including Barkashov's black-shirted storm troopers who brought their weapons with them, expecting a fight. As tensions escalated, the European Liberation Front dispatched several people to Moscow to underscore their solidarity with the Russian opposition. Michel Schneider, a French neofascist representing the ELF (who had previously accompanied Thiriart on a trip to Moscow), was among those injured in the White House when Yeltsin finally convinced the army to send in the tanks in early October.Hundreds were killed during the assault and many more were wounded. Limonov and several opposition leaders were thrown in jail. But Barkashov and dozens of armed resisters escaped through a network of underground tunnels after putting up a fierce fight. A few weeks later, Barkashov was shot by an unknown assailant from a moving car. Security officials arrested Russia's top neo-Nazi as he lay recovering in a hospital bed. He, too, was headed for prison.»
After the suppression of Dyen and similar opposition publications, Yeltsin strengthened his grasp on power through constitutional amendments that significantly bolstered the president's powers, subsequently calling for fresh elections. In a surprising turn of events, the KPRF gained 32 seats in the State Duma, while the inaptly named Liberal Democratic party of Russia, headed by the staunchly fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, won 59 seats. Zhirinovsky, who had earlier been introduced by Eduard Limonov to former Nazi collaborator Jean-Marie Le Pen during a trip to Paris in 1992, received an endorsement from Le Pen for his presidential campaign. The election outcomes were interpreted as a rebuke of Yeltsin's leadership.
In February 1994, the Duma, now under the control of Yeltsin's adversaries, passed an amnesty for political prisoners from Yeltsin's tenure. Dyen reemerged as Zavtra, Aleksandr Barkashov openly paraded in Moscow, and Limonov launched his own publication, Limonka. As Russia's economic and social fabric began to fray, Yeltsin resorted to populist and increasingly xenophobic rhetoric, targeting ethnic minorities, especially in the mid-1990s. Yeltsin's decision to launch a military campaign in Chechnya in 1994 led to the fragmentation of the National Salvation Front, with key figures condemning the conflict. Nonetheless, Zhirinovsky, Limonov, and Barkashov endorsed Yeltsin's approach and the ensuing violence in Chechnya. Limonov later distanced himself from Zhirinovsky after the latter supported Yeltsin in 1998. Furthermore, Limonov criticized Barkashov's blatant nazism, arguing that such extremism was impractical due to the deep scars left by Nazi crimes and the heavy casualties sustained by the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Limonov believed that fascism could only be introduced in Russia via subtler tactics. In 1995, Barkashov attempted to reinvent himself as a «serious politician» to shed the Nazi image, while Limonov's National Bolshevik Front maintained collaborative ties with Barkashov's Russian National Unity (RNU). By 1998, the RNU had penetrated 64 of Russia's 89 regions and was operating boot camps indoctrinating youngsters with fascist doctrines. They found surprising leniency and even cooperation from various local and regional authorities.
Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the KPRF, ran against Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential elections. Zyuganov garnered backing from a spectrum of the Russian Right, including conservative personalities like Sergey Baburin and his All Russian People Union. However, Zyuganov's campaign faced formidable obstacles, encountering resistance from Russian oligarchs, foreign figures like George Soros, and the American government, which allegedly employed tactics including media smears, vote manipulation, intimidation, and infusing over $200 million into Yeltsin's campaign. Ruslan Khasbulatov, the former chairman of Russia's parliament, contends that Yeltsin was substantially influenced by the CIA during his presidency. Khasbulatov suggests that Yeltsin's inner circle included numerous Americans and insinuates that Washington had a hand in Yeltsin's 1996 electoral victory. He alleges that around a hundred CIA operatives were engaged in guiding Yeltsin's choices and offering counsel. Khasbulatov also points to Yeltsin's habit of sending security officials and department heads to the U.S. for evaluation and guidance. Similar claims have been made by Alexander Rutskoy, the former vice president of Russia, who asserts that the CIA was involved in the execution of Yeltsin's market reforms.
Martin A. Lee drew parallels between the situation in Russia at the time and the Weimar Republic, suggesting that the unstable conditions contributed to the ascent of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative who evolved into a conservative authoritarian leader. Putin's harsh response to the Chechen conflict earned him the role of acting president, appointed by Yeltsin. Concurrently, there was a schism within the National Bolshevik party, leading to Eduard Limonov's separation from his colleague Alexander Dugin in the spring of 1998. In the 2000s, Limonov positioned himself against Putin and aligned with liberal icon Garry Kasparov's United Civil Front. Together, they played instrumental roles in orchestrating the anti-Putin demonstrations called the Dissenters' March. Eventually, the National Bolshevik party was outlawed, and Limonov emerged as a key figure in The Other Russia, an opposition bloc co-led with Kasparov that united diverse factions, including National Bolsheviks, nationalists, liberals, social democrats, and socialists.
Despite the dissolution of the National Salvation Front and Yeltsin's departure, the enduring legacy of these alliances and mutual respect among various groups and ideologies is evident, with some actively involved in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. In contemporary Russian politics, several significant parties exhibit strands of nationalism and express skepticism towards free markets and Western influence. Moreover, many of the red-brown alliance's leaders and members continue to be influential today.
Alexander Barkashov, the head of the National Socialist group RNU, reached the height of his influence in the late 1990s, though his prominence waned in the 2000s. Nonetheless, his organization remains one of Russia's largest neo-Nazi groups and has contributed fighters to the conflict in Donbass. In October 1993, Barkashov, together with ex-Soviet General Vladislav Achalov, established the Union of the Defenders of Russia to commemorate those who resisted the government during the constitutional crisis. Several neo-Nazi factions have direct ties to this entity, including the Rusich Battalion, Russian Imperial Movement, and the Wagner Group, which function as a volunteer militias/mercenary force, providing support to Russian military operations.
Eduard Limonov and his National Bolshevik party faced diminishing influence, internal rifts, and prohibition, akin to Barkashov's experience. Nevertheless, Limonov formed a new political entity, The Other Russia party, which has been active in various demonstrations across Russia and has sent combatants to Donbass. Limonov regained a measure of his past notoriety through media appearances, including interviews and debates on Russian television in the mid to late 2010s. Despite being a contentious figure, he maintained a presence in the public eye until his passing in March 2020..
Alexander Dugin has emerged as a prominent anti-liberal intellectual both inside and outside of Russia. He has also articulated how National Bolshevism was an initial attempt to synthesize desirable elements of both communism and fascism into an ideological opposition against liberalism. However, Dugin recognizes that this attempt did not yield the desired results and considers it «still too modernist.» Instead, Dugin has developed the «4th Political Theory» as a means to transcend previous ideologies and establish an authentic traditionalist worldview. This revision aligns with the Conservative Revolutionary movement.
Dugin's aim is to establish a new framework for political action through what he calls Neo-Eurasianism. It's important to distinguish between two aspects of Alexander Dugin's philosophy: Neo-Eurasianism and the Fourth Political Theory. The Fourth Political Theory represents his meta-political perspective on how politics should be approached. Neo-Eurasianism, on the other hand, is Dugin's specific ideology that applies the Fourth Political Theory to Russia, envisioning a new Eurasian empire or «great space» with Russia at its center.
«Eurasia means not succumbing to the West's claims to universality, rejecting its hegemony, and insisting that no one has a monopoly on truth, especially not the West. Eurasia is the possibility for peoples and civilizations to follow their own path and, if the logic of the path demands such, not only a non-Western one, but even an anti-Western path. This is Eurasia.»
In addition to Carl Schmitt, it is worth noting the similarities between Dugin and French fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. Both thinkers advocated for transcending nationalism in favor of pursuing a larger empire or continentalism. Rochelle viewed nationalism as a necessary step in the evolution of fascism, while Dugin downplays its importance, likely due to Russia's historical status as an empire. Rochelle described his ideal empires as a union of neighboring countries forming a single civilizational entity, which bears resemblance to the old Soviet model. Dugin draws inspiration from various sources, but there are certainly elements of Rochelle in his thinking. Rochelle praised Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin for their creation of vast empires, a sentiment that aligns with another French fascist, Robert Brasillach, who prophesied: «I see how in the East, in Russia, fascism is rising—a fascism borderless and red.» Dugin references this quote in his work «Fascism — Borderless and Red» to justify the concept of a new Eurasian Russian Empire.
Dugin's call for a «red and unbound fascism» signifies his adaptation of his ideology as an aggressively open system, incorporating elements from various points on the political spectrum to combat its ultimate enemy, the United States and ideological liberalism. This indicates that the Fourth Political Theory, along with Dugin's neo-Eurasianism, aims to establish a new foundation for Russian philosophy, as Russia is envisioned as the center of a distinct civilizational sphere or new empire. For many Russian nationalists navigating increasingly difficult circumstances, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative backed by Russian oligarchs, emerged as an unexpected ally.
Before the Soviet Union's dissolution, Putin was a KGB officer stationed in East Germany. There are allegations, as historian Mark Felton posits, that he supported the West German militant group, the Red Army Faction, by providing them with safe havens and may have even served as the handler for the German National Socialist, Rainer Sonntag. The goal behind such KGB operations, including potential involvement by Putin, would have been to sow discord in West Germany, mirroring the United States' strategy of backing dissident movements in the Eastern Bloc to cause destabilization. Additionally, Putin carried out espionage in West Germany and recruited for the KGB in East Germany. At the time of the Eastern Bloc's collapse in 1989, Putin was in East Germany, actively involved in securing and destroying sensitive KGB documents to prevent them from being acquired by the West.
Contrary to what some might expect, Putin was not a hardline communist; he supported reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev and resigned from the KGB during the 1991 coup attempt. The Soviet Union's fall was regarded by Putin as a catastrophic loss for Russia, diminishing its global standing and internal cohesion. Nevertheless, Putin realized that a Soviet revival was impractical and critiqued foundational tenets of Leninism, such as the rights given to Soviet republics, which he saw as inherently problematic. Aligned with Stalin's vision, Putin believed in a centralized Soviet Union with Russia at its core, and he also disapproved of the Soviet Union's stance against religion. Putin's views align with post-Soviet right-wing thinking, appreciating the significance of the Soviet era but also recognizing its critical shortcomings and accepting that its restoration was not feasible.
Post-Soviet, Putin became a foreign relations advisor to the Mayor of St. Petersburg and helped establish the local division of the liberal conservative party, Our Home Russia, in 1995. By 1997, he had relocated to Moscow, where Boris Yeltsin and influential oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky appointed him to the Presidential Staff, eyeing him as Yeltsin's successor. After some initial reluctance, Putin accepted the role. Following Yeltsin's resignation in 1999, Putin assumed the presidency and secured his position through the 2000 election. Contrary to the oligarchs' expectations of a Yeltsin-like figure, Putin took a different path.
In his first presidential term, Putin took legal action against numerous oligarchs on charges of corruption and tax evasion, leading to arrests and expatriates, like Boris Berezovsky, fleeing to Western Europe. Though starting as a liberal conservative, Putin moved towards nationalizing Russia's oil industry, previously under oligarchic control. Gradually, his ideology evolved towards national conservatism. He tackled the destabilizing Chechen insurgency, reinforcing his grip on power. Putin sustained the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and founded the Eurasian Economic Union in 2015. He championed separatist movements in Georgia and Ukraine to counteract Western expansion and fostered ties with nations sharing an illiberal stance, including China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Belarus, Nicaragua, among others. When Russia initiated military actions in Ukraine in 2022, Putin advocated for a worldwide coalition of conservative and socialist forces to confront Western capitalism, which he views as a socio-economic threat to Russia and the developing world.
After Putin made changes and distanced himself from US and liberal influences, some individuals on the pro-Soviet right, such as Alexander Dugin, became supporters of Putin and developed their own ideologies, such as the Fourth Political Theory. Others, like Gennady Zyuganov, Sergey Baburin, and Albert Makashov, opposed Putin for not going far enough in dismantling capitalism and liberalism but still supported him on certain issues, such as the ban on LGBT propaganda and military intervention in Ukraine. The Communist party of the Russian Federation, the second-largest party in Russia, maintained a coalition called the National Patriotic Forces of Russia, which included groups like Left Front, A Just Russia, and Great Russia. The Communist party also collaborated with the Orthodox Church and upheld nationalist and social conservative positions.
Eduard Limonov and his NBP consistently resisted Putin's leadership. The NBP transitioned from forming alliances with rightist factions to collaborating with leftist and liberal organizations. Limonov advocated for the dismantling of the existing system and the introduction of direct democracy in Russia. The party was known for bold acts such as storming Russian government premises and attempting to assert control in regions of Kazakhstan, actions which ultimately led to its prohibition in 2007. Following this, Limonov established The Other Russia, which fused right-wing and left-wing principles, persisting in its opposition to Putin but occasionally endorsing his policies, particularly on the conflict in Ukraine. The group even created their own battalion, the Interbrigades, to participate in the Ukrainian conflict. After Limonov's death in 2020, the movement continued under the banner of The Other Russia of E. V. Limonov, in tribute to its founder. Sergey Baburin later founded the Rodina party, which, despite being the sixth-largest party in Russia, has distanced itself from its initial red-brown ideology and supports the country's decommunization process. Rodina also collaborates with Putin's ruling United Russia party. Baburin resurrected his former party, the All Russian People Union, and ran for president in 2018, though he did not succeed against Putin.
Alexander Barkashov, former head of the now defunct RNU, remains a key figure in Russian nationalist circles. Although RNU has disbanded and fragmented, its former members continue to be active, with some forming a combat group in Ukraine. Pavel Gubarev, an ex-RNU affiliate, became the inaugural head of the Russian separatist Donetsk People's Republic. While Gubarev maintains ties with Barkashov and other RNU offshoots, his political stance has evolved towards a center-left nationalism. Barkashov also has affiliations with the Russian Orthodox Army, a militant group of Russian separatists in Ukraine.
Despite the disbandment of the National Salvation Front in 1993, its affiliates' influence within Russian politics remains. Contemporary Russian political entities often merge anti-capitalist sentiments, social conservatism, and nationalism. Notably, adherents of these ideologies have come together to fight in Ukraine against Western-backed forces. This coalition, which Dugin terms an «All-Russian Ideology,» integrates concepts from both historical and contemporary sources, drawing inspiration from Russia's imperial and Soviet legacies.
«It is growing crystal-clear that National Bolshevism is not only a metaphysical verity, but has also been vindicated by its founders' absolute historical prescience. The only political discourse of the 1920s and 30s that has maintained relevance to this day is to be found in the texts of the Russian Eurasianists and the German «Left» Revolutionary Conservatives. National Bolshevism is the last refuge of the «enemies of the open society» if these latter wish not to insist upon their obsolete, historically inadequate, and utterly ineffective doctrines. If «far-leftists» refuse to be mere appendages of an opportunistic and prostitute social-democracy, if «far-rightists» want to avoid serving as a breeding ground for the extremist wing of the liberal repression apparatus — they are left with only one way out: National Bolshevism.»
The Russian punk rebel swapped his literary career for revolution.
A knife-wielding poet, a lover of beautiful women, a political troublemaker, a novelist who predicted his own immortality — Eduard Limonov has long been cast in many roles. To his roster, he can now add the honour of being played by Ben Whishaw in a new film, «Limonov: The Ballad». Yet this Cannes-premiering biopic is not without controversy: where the creators of the film saw «greatness», and «The Guardian» identified «an exhilarating, alarming look… at the Russian soul», Ukrainians have decried an attempt to whitewash a man who had for years justified war on their country.
But Limonov's story can't be captured by Manichean binaries. It is more a profound tale of the inevitable downfall of the bohemian contrarian.
A poet courting fame through infamy, Limonov rebelled against conventions and revelled in being vilified. His heroes were not Russian tsars or religious zealots but the «Sex Pistols» and Yukio Mishima; his writing style was more influenced by Louis-Ferdinand Céline than Leo Tolstoy. «I did not want to play their game. I wanted, as in Russia, to be outside the game, or if possible, if I could, to play against them,» said the narrator of his first novel, «It's Me, Eddie», which remains his most important work.
Written in the United States in 1976, the book would be considered autofiction in today's terms, based as it is on Limonov's life as a welfare-relying immigrant in New York. The narrator of this picaresque tale is resentful towards what he sees as a racist and corrupt country and is driven by dreams of sex with both men and women. Writing of this desire in disturbing detail, Limonov's ability to ditch the antiquated style of classical Russian literature would prove scandalous in his native land. Decades later, a Russian activist would famously say that she learnt to perform oral sex by reading Limonov.
Born into the family of a low-level NKVD (future KGB) officer during the Second World War, Eduard Savenko grew up in Kharkiv in Soviet Ukraine. A friend of petty thieves, the young Eduard won a poetry competition in 1957. He would choose Limonov for a pseudonym and conquer the local unofficial poetry scene before setting his sights on Moscow where he would begin to earn a living as a poet.
Limonov was forced out of Russia in 1974 when he refused to become an informant for the KGB. He migrated to New York where he rallied against Western hypocrisy and free-market capitalism, on the one hand, and the Soviet system, on the other — both to him were equally oppressive. While more and more ordinary Russians were realising their country was a failed state, Limonov wasn't impressed by the staunch anti-communism of dissidents back home either. The émigré Limonov was, instead, developing a revanchist nostalgia whose forbidden appeal would soon conquer masses.
The collapse of communism brought Limonov back to Moscow. He almost immediately assumed the role of revolutionary-in-chief, founding in 1993 the National Bolshevist (NazBol) Party. Its manifesto was an awkward mix of Russian chauvinism, vulgar communism, Italian fascism, and geopolitical wisdom of Ayatollah Khomeini, while its logo was a marriage of communism and Nazism. It called for the creation of a new Russian empire with nationalised land, the abolishment of human rights, and the annexation of all Russian-populated neighbouring lands from Ukraine's Crimea to Northern Kazakhstan and swathes of the Baltic states. Soon, he commanded an army of young blokes, idealists and thugs who called themselves «Nazbols», ready to go to barricades for him. Such radicalism was a slap in the face for the then-liberal Kremlin and well-meaning public. Something like a Hamas National Front would be an equivalent in today's Britain.
With time, the Nazbols developed an authentic, macabre, youth subculture with its own lore, music universe and slogans like, «Yes, death!» They published a cult zine titled «Limonka», slang for a hand grenade and a pun on Limonov's name. It was coined by Slava Mogutin, a young gonzo journalist who would later become a prolific chronicler of queer life in New York. He was among many conceptual artists, crusading philosophers, journalists, actors, cool kids and lost souls surrounding Limonov at that time.
While Limonov also engaged in war tourism, briefly fighting alongside ethnic Serbs in the Bosnian War and separatists in the Georgian Civil War, it was not the guerrilla cosplay alone that attracted thousands of young Russians into the party. By the late Nineties, crime and corruption were rampant, and people felt crushed by the new market economy. President Boris Yeltsin, the face of Russia's new democracy, was permanently drunk, embarrassing himself in front of foreign leaders, with his family engulfed in corruption scandals. By contrast, the athletic and eloquent Limonov was a fresh face. At unauthorised rallies and on TV shows, Limonov would expound his revanchist politics: the collapse of the Soviet Union was a crime, Crimea should be Russian, and Nato and America were plotting to destroy Russia.
Today, these sound like lines from Putin's annual press conferences that drag on for many hours. Yet in the Nineties, every word was a challenge to the status quo — to the Kremlin's recently adopted faith in democracy and its new friendship with Bill Clinton. Everyone knew the future was liberal. Applications for the Nazbols to be officially registered as a party and run in the elections were thrown away. There was no place for the lost cause of Soviet nostalgia.
When a former KGB officer took over in 2000 as a hand-picked heir of Yeltsin and his oligarchic backers, like his predecessor he at first had little time for revanchism. Back then, Putin dismissed any talk of annexing Crimea as provocation, and was ready to admit at least some of Russia's historic crimes. And he was not going to tolerate real opposition. A year into Putin's first term, Limonov was arrested by the FSB. He was sentenced to four years in prison on charges of possessing weapons and running armed groups.
While in prison, he resumed his literary career, completing several novels and revolutionary manifestos. The time for revolution, however, had passed; Putin made sure there would not be one. Limonov still tried his luck, revitalising the Nazbols once he was released on parole in 2003. It was now a different party: gone were the days of fascist cosplay. Its new manifesto called for greater freedom of press and the development of civil society and grassroots politics.
Limonov would paint a cold and frightening portrait of the new Russia. In his 2006 book, «Limonov vs Putin», he described a poor, dark, hopeless place with freedoms taken away by an all-powerful president. But, he wrote, the secret was that Putin was not a strong man. He was a power-hungry mediocrity, a liar and a coward afraid of the people he ruled over. He could be summed up as: «Short legs. Narrow shoulders», a mocking portrayal which would be popularised years later by Alexei Navalny. In response, the Nazbol party was officially outlawed and proscribed as a «terrorist organisation», on one list with al-Qaeda.
Cornered, Limonov started an elaborate dance with the liberal opposition. Whatever their past disagreements, they now had a common goal: to prevent Putin's third presidential term. In 2011, he launched a presidential bid, endorsed by the united opposition front. As always, he was refused registration. Yet, for a few fateful years, Limonov would be among the leaders of a protest movement that held mass rallies just across the Kremlin. For the first time during his presidency, it felt like Putin had lost control of the capital if not the whole country.
Putin persevered and, having crushed the opposition, turned to Ukraine. In 2014, he annexed Crimea and occupied parts of the Donbas. Immediately, Limonov, always a Russian nationalist, suspended his political career and endorsed the land grab. By invading Ukraine, Putin was not fulfilling Limonov's dream of restoring Russia's greatness. The president used revanchist slogans and nationalist fantasies to expand his personal rule to a foreign country. It was the same rule that had brought nothing but «humiliation, suffering, misery and unfreedom», according to Limonov's book. Regardless, yesterday's sworn enemy of the Kremlin was now a paid guest on state TV shows.
Limonov's life was a series of conquests and break-ups. He would waltz into an exclusive literary or political circle and become its darling, grow disillusioned and move onto the next one. From the small poetry scene in Kharkiv to Moscow literary circles, the émigré community in New York, and so on. The Kremlin, though, wouldn't totally yield to Limonov's charms by joining his long list of conquests. The award for crossing the floor was modest: invitations to the state talk shows or a column on the «Russia Today» website. Unlike third-rate Western actors or loyal local proxies, he would never be showered in praise or granted exclusive meetings in the Kremlin. And his party, despite its members fighting for Putin in Ukraine, remained outlawed.
Increasingly cranky and listless in the last years of his life, Limonov wouldn't admit that the late Putinism that he allied himself with was the total sum of all things he hated: a declining empire destroying its neighbours, an economy dominated by billionaires but propped up by migrant labour, with officials seeking to control the citizens' private lives.
His life is best understood as a cautionary tale of the downfall of the bohemian provocateur, as an illustration of what happens to a politics based on vibes, not principles. He was too focused on attacking the delusions of his own intellectual class — the «opinion leaders» who were stuck in the anti-communism of their youth — to clearly see what they were up against. Ironic detachment and outrageous provocation were Limonov's powerful tools in exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of post-Soviet Russia's liberal establishment. But when his slogans were cynically appropriated by Putin's anti-liberal establishment, Limonov failed to see that the new regime was even more corrupt and ruthless.
And his descent was not unusual — other provocative outsiders in the West have undergone a similar trajectory. Figures like the comedian Russell Brand went from asking inconvenient questions to feeding conspiracy-minded audiences a steady ration of rants about «globalist elites», vaccines, «Ukrainian Nazis» and «revelations» about 9/11. Equally predictable was Kanye West's evolution from protesting the tyranny of groupthink to saying, «I like Hitler.»
In today's angry and polarised world, where any opinion or artistic act must be pigeon-holed into a political camp, there is little space left for the provocative outsider. There is nothing uniquely Muscovite about Limonov's downfall — the writer, militant, and counterculture icon is, rather, just another of the West's very own enfants terribles.
from comments:
Soon as I have a spare moment I'll write something up. Unfortunately most of what we'll get will be filtered through Carrere, who got famous with the Manhattan lit world by rewriting Limonov's books for middlebrow simps.