1989 Revolution

The 1989 Revolution in the book is not a single uprising but a historical turning point: political upheaval made long-suppressed realities speakable, even as the new freedom to remember and oppose power produced fresh conflicts over justice, national identity, and who would control the future. Its consequences reach from the reading queues of late-Soviet Moscow to the Romanian revolution’s staged violence and, years later, the rise and suppression of Eduard Limonov’s opposition movement.

Glasnost and the return of history

The decisive change began in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. He had not set out to abolish the Communist Party or the Soviet Union; the book presents him initially as a model apparatchik seeking to resume reforms associated with Nikita Khrushchev. Yet the six years after Gorbachev became general secretary brought an unforeseen break: people gained the freedom to write their history as they saw fit. Glasnost, announced as transparency and a promise to fill in history’s blank pages, opened a space that the leadership could not keep within its intended limits.

That opening mattered because official Soviet history had not merely omitted inconvenient events; it had trained people to behave as if they had never happened. The book connects the silencing of collectivization, the famine in Ukraine, and the purges of the 1930s with private knowledge carried by families. Children knew that authorities had taken their fathers, but also learned that acknowledging this could endanger them. Public history demanded that they deny what their own lives had taught them, while Stalin’s Short Course supplied the sanctioned account. The result was a collective performance of forgetting, not an absence of evidence.

The book makes this assault on memory concrete through the revisions demanded of libraries and readers. After Lavrentiy Beria’s execution, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were instructed to cut out his entry and replace it with one on the Bering Strait: the alphabetical sequence remained, while Beria was made to disappear. Copies of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were likewise removed from older issues of New World after Khrushchev’s fall. These acts expose the governing principle of the system: not simply to conceal the past, but to demand that citizens accept that what they had seen was not real.

Reading, naming, and public responsibility

From 1988, writing that had circulated only among intellectuals, in samizdat, or in smuggled foreign editions began reaching the wider public. The change took the form of a mass reading rush: new works sold out in huge print runs, while people queued at kiosks at dawn and read in the subway, on buses, and in the street. Doctor Zhivago dominated conversation for a week, followed by Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, George Orwell’s 1984, and books by Robert Conquest on collectivization and the purges. Texts once withheld from public life became part of ordinary conversation, giving readers a vocabulary for horrors they had been expected to leave unnamed.

The recovery of history also became a public and institutional task. Under Andrei Sakharov’s patronage, dissidents founded the Memorial Society to identify victims who had been killed and then erased from remembrance. Its work answered Anna Akhmatova’s wish to call the dead by name. At first, Memorial hesitated to use the word millions; when it did, the scale of repression seemed to many people less like a new discovery than a truth they had been waiting for permission to say aloud. The book marks the speed of this change in the movement from Gorbachev’s reference to hundreds of thousands of Stalinist victims to public discussion of deaths in the tens of millions. Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s principal adviser, framed rehabilitation not as an act of clemency but as repentance by those who had remained silent and looked away.

That recovery unsettled the political order as well as its historical narrative. In May 1990, at the Red Square parade, urban, young, largely intellectual democrats who had initially admired Gorbachev jeered him for no longer daring to push ahead. The act of publicly insulting a leader—and demanding the end of the Party—would previously have been unthinkable. But Gorbachev’s effort to please both reformers and conservatives left both increasingly hostile to him. In the book’s account, the new political freedom did not remove disagreement; it made disagreement audible, visible, and consequential.

Romania: revolution and compromised justice

The Romanian revolution appears as both a dramatic overthrow and a warning about the violence and falsehoods that could accompany the new order. After Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu were captured, a television broadcast showed their trial and execution. The narrator and Limonov saw the footage separately. Limonov responded by writing about the couple’s gestures of mutual care as they faced death; the narrator, while rejecting any suggestion that their crimes amounted only to unavoidable mistakes of power, was also disturbed by the parody of justice and summary execution. The staged proceedings failed to transfer dignity to the victors: in the narrator’s judgment, it remained with the accused, however criminal they had been.

The revolution’s claims about its victims soon became another test of truth. Reports from Timişoara described mass graves and advanced a death toll that grew from thousands to tens of thousands; television images of exhumed bodies intensified demands for outside intervention. The account later identifies the graves as a sinister masquerade involving only a few dozen bodies at most. The discrepancy does not make the suffering or the political crisis unreal. Instead, it reveals a post-communist landscape in which evidence, indignation, and propaganda could be entangled, and in which a story presented as moral clarity might itself be rigged.

The narrator calls those who exploited such contradictions subtle minds: diplomats, journalists, and observers who made a specialty of contradicting official accounts, media clichés, and well-intentioned assumptions. In Romania they used the exposure of a false report to cast doubt more broadly on condemnations of institutions such as the KGB and Securitate, and on accounts of Elena Ceauşescu’s scientific work. Their influence reached François Mitterrand’s foreign policy. Against this cultivated skepticism, an elderly Romanian exile described recognizing poverty and dirt in the streets but also a bitterness, suspicion, and fear that made the people seem to him like strangers. The contrast shows the human cost of a society in which years of fear and deception had damaged trust as well as political institutions.

The opposition after the revolutions

The new era’s political openings did not settle what post-communist Russia should become. In later years, Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party assembled a constituency drawn from the country’s provincial margins. Its members included poor young people whose work, when they could find it, involved loading crates, sweeping courtyards, plastering walls, or guarding parking lots. They watched wealthier contemporaries arrive in expensive vehicles and despised the privilege on display. Many had been children when communism collapsed; they remembered the Soviet Union as a time when life made sense and recalled the later defeat and impoverishment of their parents as a loss not only of material security but of pride.

The party built an identity around people who might otherwise have remained isolated. When several hundred delegates came to its convention from across Russia, some stayed in a bunker and others in a workers’ hostel; finding a venue had been difficult because owners repeatedly withdrew permission. The gathering nevertheless opened. Limonov saw the delegates not as the heroic ideal imagined by Alexander Dugin, but as poor provincial adolescents who had found in the movement a style, an ideal, and a reason to belong. The party’s countercultural appeal thus joined political protest to the experience of exclusion and to resentment toward the beneficiaries of the new economic order.

Limonov also gave that constituency a political project beyond taking power in Russia. At the convention he argued that the moment was not yet ripe for the party to rule, but proposed organizing among Russian populations in former Soviet republics, which he described as abandoned after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. He cited 900,000 Russians in Latvia, 11 million in Ukraine, and 5 million in Kazakhstan, and advocated fostering insurgency and separatist republics in the Baltic states and Central Asia. The proposal transformed a sense of lost status into a territorial and nationalist program. It also showed how the revolutionary era’s unfinished questions—belonging, sovereignty, and the rights of populations left outside new borders—could be taken up by movements far removed from liberal reform.

That opposition encountered new limits as the state consolidated power. Before the presidential election, the Ministry of Justice passed a law banning extremism and fascism while reserving the right to define them. Limonov met the minister in a suit and tie and argued that his party, with seven thousand adherents, could not simply be treated like a phantom organization. When registration was denied, he warned that forcing young people into secrecy could push some toward extremism and terrorism. The National Bolshevik Party was then deprived of the right to exist legally. The sequence recasts revolutionary political opportunity as a narrowing contest between opposition organization and state control.

By the time Limonov created Strategy 31, the coalition called The Other Russia had disappeared after failing to break through electorally, and Garri Kasparov had not tried to run under the pressure he faced. Strategy 31 drew its name from Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees the right to demonstrate. Its supporters gathered at Triumfalnaya Square on the thirty-first of months containing that date; typically, roughly a hundred demonstrators faced five times as many police officers, and dozens were arrested. Limonov repeatedly spent a couple of days in prison. The protests preserved the claim to a right that the revolutionary period had made imaginable, but the imbalance between demonstrators and police measured how constricted that right had become.

Memory and the changed political landscape

The book places the later opposition against Vladimir Putin’s use of Soviet memory. Putin’s appeal, as the narrator understands it, rests partly on refusing to let the lives of generations who believed in and fought for communism be dismissed as worthless. The narration recognizes the force of that appeal for people who associate the Soviet past with childhood, confidence, and a sense of collective purpose, even while acknowledging the atrocities committed under communist rule. This is not the same as restoring the silenced history of repression: it is a struggle over what that recovered history means and whose losses it authorizes people to mourn.

Limonov’s position embodies the resulting contradiction. He attacks Putin as a tyrant, yet the narrator believes that Limonov would do the same things, or worse, if he occupied Putin’s place. Instead, he finds himself cast as an opposition figure alongside people whose commitments to democracy and human rights he does not share. The revolutionary era had opened a public space for truth-telling and dissent, but it did not guarantee that its opponents would become democrats or that its victories would endure. Its legacy in the book is therefore double: the freedom to expose a manufactured past, and the continuing struggle over whether memory can restrain power or be turned to serve it.