“Long live civil war!”

“Long live civil war!” is the phrase Eduard Limonov singles out as a model of political speech without hesitation or pious restraint. His admiration for it reveals the kind of revolutionary destiny he wants: not simply to belong to a movement, but to act decisively and to emerge on the winning side of history.

Trotsky and the desired destiny

While attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party in New York City, Limonov reads Leon Trotsky’s collected works, lent to him by Carol. He likes Trotsky’s open embrace of civil war, his disdain for speeches about the sacred value of human life, and his assertion that winners and losers are sorted by history. The slogan’s force lies partly in its refusal to soften political violence with moral qualification.

Limonov is drawn not only to the words but to the fate he associates with their author. As he understands the story, Trotsky went within a few months from being a down-and-out émigré in New York to leading the Red Army from an armored train, moving from front to front. That transformation supplies Limonov with an image of the destiny he wants for himself. The contrast is immediate: the American Trotskyists can speak at length about oppressed minorities and political prisoners, but Limonov sees them as afraid of the streets, ghettos, and poor people whose world he considers the real test of revolutionary commitment.

From revolutionary rhetoric to political action

The book later places Limonov amid the confrontation over Boris Yeltsin’s dissolution of parliament. Several thousand patriots gather outside the Moscow White House, a building that had recently symbolized Yeltsin and the democrats. Some among the crowd are fascists, yet they present themselves as defenders of constitutional order. The account stresses the contradiction: their opponents accuse the democrats of preparing dictatorship in the name of democracy, and the charge is not dismissed as wholly false.

Limonov joins the occupation after Alexander Rutskoy and Ruslan Khasbulatov convene a session of the dissolved parliament. The assembly declares its own dissolution unconstitutional, removes Yeltsin, names Rutskoy president, and says it will leave only if forced out at bayonet point. Inside, Limonov spends the night moving excitedly among meetings as the occupiers discuss, shout, drink, write communiqués, and form a government. His presence gives the earlier slogan a political setting: the appeal of civil conflict is no longer only literary admiration but part of a willingness to enter a struggle over power and legitimacy.

At three in the morning, Limonov gains an audience with Rutskoy, whom he addresses as Comrade President. When the general appears shaken by Western support for Yeltsin, Limonov argues that Western governments want Russia weakened and that the conflict is not a coup but an elected parliament resisting dictatorship. He insists that events in the White House, rather than diplomatic declarations or the army bases, will decide the outcome, and presses the question of whether they have weapons. His rhetoric casts confrontation as a test of political will; the passage does not establish that the slogan itself is repeated there.

The slogan’s political afterlife

A later discussion of the National Bolshevik movement shows how revolutionary language and provocation can be received differently by different generations. In Zakhar Prilepin’s novel Sankya, a teacher sees the party’s stunts—tagging trains, unfurling banners on inaccessible monuments, and throwing tomatoes at a governor—as immature but courageous, especially because such disruptions can bring prison sentences in Russia. The teacher is more troubled by the movement’s solemn invocations of the fatherland, empire, and sacred national purpose, and argues for the possibility of an ordinary life rather than another convulsion of history. The episode does not quote Limonov’s slogan; it illuminates the tension it crystallizes between political disturbance as courage and the danger of making conflict an ideal in itself.

The book also sets this revolutionary temper against the return of Communist electoral strength. Five years after Yeltsin declared the Communist Party illegal, voters are so disillusioned with democracy, the market, and its accompanying injustice that the party may win massively. Gennady Zyuganov campaigns less on restoring the Gulag or the Berlin Wall than on fighting corruption, national pride, and a spiritual mission. Meanwhile, oligarchs fear his possible repudiation of the loans-for-shares deal that could transfer the country’s natural riches to them. Civil conflict is thus more than a romantic image: the account connects the language of historical struggle to material inequality and rival claims over who may govern.

Violence, power, and the irony of opposition

In its later portrait of Vladimir Putin, the book describes a leader whose cold, forceful image has succeeded where Limonov’s political ambitions have not. Putin’s rule is associated with the Kursk submarine disaster, the deaths of hostages at the Dubrovka Theater, and the Beslan school massacre, while official attention turns to the health of his dog’s puppies. He can shape school textbooks, pressure NGOs and liberal opposition figures, display a bust of Dzerzhinsky, and threaten military or economic retaliation abroad.

The narrator presents Limonov as privately impressed by Putin’s virile airs, even as Limonov writes pamphlets denouncing him as a tyrant. The deeper contrast is that Putin gives political expression to a longing not to have Soviet lives and sacrifices dismissed as worthless: communism is remembered as something that could feel grand, heroic, and bound to childhood, despite its atrocities. Limonov, who would act as harshly as Putin if he held power, instead occupies the incongruous position of an opposition figure beside people whose democratic and human-rights values he has long despised. In retrospect, “Long live civil war!” names an enduring attraction to force and decisive historical action, while the book’s later contrasts expose the uneasy distance between that attraction and the compromised role left to Limonov.