The 1993 Russian Legislative Election is a turning point in Eduard Limonov’s political trajectory: it gives him a chance to enter parliament, but also exposes the cost of his preference for leading a small party over joining a larger one. The campaign unfolds after the Duma has been dissolved and bloodily suppressed, amid the social damage of economic reform and a political climate in which the meaning of democracy has become uncertain. Limonov campaigns across the Tver region with Taras Rabko, but loses while Vladimir Zhirinovsky wins a quarter of the vote. Limonov’s defeat is not simply imposed by the electorate: he declines an alliance that might have made him a member of parliament.

Background: A Country in Upheaval

The election becomes necessary after the Duma is dissolved and the confrontation is bathed in blood. In the aftermath, the claim that democracy has been saved does not settle the matter: the book describes a public atmosphere in which people no longer use the word without quotation marks, and familiar divisions between progressive and reactionary, democratic and fascist, have become unstable. The election is thus presented not as a routine transfer of power but as a contest over what political legitimacy means after violence.

Economic reform gives that contest a material setting. The price liberalization associated with Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar produces inflation of 2,600 percent. Vouchers intended to represent each citizen’s share of national wealth were mailed on September 1, 1992, to every Russian citizen over one year old; by the time they arrived, inflation had made them nearly worthless. Many recipients sold them for roughly the value of a bottle and a half of vodka. In the Tver region, Limonov encounters towns and villages devastated by shock therapy, a landscape far removed from the prosperous, American-style middle-class family shown in Gaidar’s campaign advertising.

Limonov’s Campaign in the Tver Region

A law student, Rabko helps Limonov register as a candidate. The Yeltsin years are described as chaotic but open enough that anyone can run for office and express an opinion. Alexander Dugin has promised to help, but remains in his heated Moscow office; the party’s campaign staff is therefore just Limonov and the loyal Rabko. Through December they travel around the district in an old car with Moldavian plates, lent by an officer they know. When its owner wants it back, they continue by bus and third-class train.

The district contains 700,000 voters. Limonov holds small meetings, gathering groups of fifteen to twenty people, mostly poor and elderly retirees. In the struggling settlements of Rzhev, Staritsa, Demidovo, and others, Rabko approaches passersby to bring them to the rallies. Listeners hear Limonov’s Russian nationalist platform, but many end by asking which candidate he supports: Yeltsin or Zhirinovsky. Their question registers the narrow terms in which national politics is being understood, and the difficulty Limonov faces in making independence itself sound like a persuasive choice.

The campaign also meets a public habituated to voting for the party in power. Limonov objects to Gaidar’s television advertisement, which depicts a prosperous suburban family going to vote and a child joking that the family dog cannot vote too. He regards this imagined middle-class world as an insult to most Russians. His listeners agree with the criticism, but the book notes that agreement does not necessarily translate into votes against the governing party.

Rival Appeals and the Result

A few voters support Zhirinovsky, whose campaign offers a more spectacular nationalist response to the people swindled by reform. In a documentary made for the BBC by Pawel Pawlikowski, the candidate promises free vodka, the reconquest of the empire, support for the Serbs, bombings of Germany, Japan, and the United States, the reopening of the Gulag, and imprisonment for the new Russians and supposed traitors. The book observes that this rhetoric is not far removed from Limonov’s own political stock-in-trade, but Limonov struggles to explain what his independent candidacy offers instead.

Yeltsin and Gaidar win the election, while Zhirinovsky receives a quarter of the vote. That result makes Limonov’s alternative especially stark: had he run alongside Zhirinovsky, he would have become a member of parliament. Zhirinovsky was willing to include him, but Limonov refuses. The narrator presents the decision as consistent with Limonov’s familiar preference: he would rather head a party of three than stand beneath a leader with millions of supporters.

Defeat and Political Meaning

The certainty of the outcome is such that Limonov does not wait for the results to be officially announced. He returns to Paris furious and humiliated. The campaign has taken him through a neglected provincial hinterland and brought him into contact with voters whose hardship makes the costs of reform tangible, yet it does not produce a parliamentary foothold. Its failure exposes the tension between political reach and personal command: Limonov can imagine a route into parliament, but not at the price of subordinating himself to another figure.

The election also prefigures the political world that will shape Limonov’s later activity. The book places his candidacy in the brief period when electoral participation and open political expression remain possible, even amid disorder, and sets its defeat against the broader instability of post-Soviet politics. For Limonov, the result is both a humiliation and a revealing choice: he leaves without a seat, having refused the alliance that could have delivered one.