2008 Russian presidential election

The 2008 Russian presidential election becomes, in Emmanuel Carrère’s account, a test of whether a constitutional transfer of office can also transfer power. Vladimir Putin did not run for a third consecutive term; instead, Dmitry Medvedev became president while Putin took the prime minister’s office. The arrangement preserved the appearance of succession while leaving Putin close at hand, and its later resolution sharpened the contrast between Limonov’s political ambitions and the system he opposed.

Background: Limonov’s political opening

Before the election, Limonov’s standing had changed. Carrère recalls discovering that Anna Politkovskaya had defended National Bolshevik Party militants sentenced after occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices. She portrayed the young defendants as courageous people who could offer hope for the country’s moral future. Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov, also supported the party members, despite the troubling associations of their name. These unexpected endorsements unsettled Carrère’s prior view of Limonov as simply a fascist leader of skinheads and suggested that the position he occupied in Russia had shifted.

That altered standing helped make Limonov a figure in a broader opposition project. Several months later, Carrère learned that The Other Russia was forming under the leadership of Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Limonov: a chess champion, a former prime minister under Putin, and a writer Carrère thought respectable company would shun. Their alliance made Limonov more socially acceptable as a politician, even as Carrère remained uncertain about what the change meant. The election would test whether that new visibility could become an effective challenge to power.

The party and its followers

The political force behind Limonov was not only a coalition of prominent figures but a movement built around his personal authority. Young National Bolsheviks regarded him as a living legend, in large part because of his conduct in prison: he had endured Lefortovo and a harsh labor camp without complaint, written seven or eight books, and helped his cellmates. On his release, inmates and guards disputed who should carry his suitcase. In the book, this prison reputation becomes a source of political allegiance as well as literary legend.

The movement’s appeal took organizational form. Branches appeared in cities including Krasnoyarsk, Ufa, and Nizhny Novgorod. At a party convention, several hundred delegates arrived from across Russia, although the party counted about seven thousand members in total. Finding a venue was difficult: places that initially agreed to host the gathering later withdrew, apparently after police intervention. The convention nevertheless opened, and Limonov addressed the gathered supporters as people who had become a real community through years of distributing the party paper.

Limonov presented the movement as a force for the country’s future but argued that the moment to take power had not arrived. He proposed instead to act on Russia’s periphery, especially in the Baltic countries and Central Asia, where he said Russians had been abandoned after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. He pointed to the Russian populations in Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan and advocated encouraging insurgency and separatist republics. This program reveals the distance between the party’s ambitious political imagination and the immediate electoral contest: its leader was building a movement and identifying other fronts, not simply presenting a conventional route to government.

The 2008 arrangement

Carrère recounts the election retrospectively, returning to a forecast made by a British journalist at a Limonov–Kasparov press conference. Putin respected the constitution’s limit on three consecutive presidential terms and did not run again in 2008. Instead, Medvedev became president and Putin became prime minister. Carrère likens the arrangement to a driving-school car with two steering positions: Medvedev occupies the learner’s seat, while Putin sits beside him as the experienced instructor, able to let him drive while remaining on hand if something goes wrong.

The analogy makes the constitutional transfer legible while stressing its imbalance. Medvedev held the presidency and was allowed to govern, but Putin’s continuing presence as prime minister cast him as the senior partner. The arrangement left two questions open in Carrère’s account: whether Putin would return to the presidency when the constitution allowed it in 2012, and whether Medvedev, having acquired power, might resist or even displace his mentor. The election therefore appears not as a settled succession but as an interval whose political meaning would only become clear later.

Opposition after the election

The same political moment exposed the limits of Limonov’s alliance. In the later account, Carrère says that Kasparov did not attempt to run after being harassed, and that The Other Russia ceased to exist after what Carrère calls its failure in the presidential elections. Limonov did not abandon opposition politics, but the coalition that had brought him alongside Kasparov and Kasyanov no longer provided a continuing vehicle. The election’s significance for Limonov lies partly in this contrast: increased legitimacy and public visibility had not yielded a durable political organization or a path into office.

Limonov instead created Strategy 31, named for Article 31 of the constitution, which guarantees the right to demonstrate. On the thirty-first of months with thirty-one days, supporters gathered at Triumfalnaya Square. Carrère describes the usual imbalance as roughly a hundred demonstrators facing five times as many police officers, with a few dozen protesters arrested; Limonov consequently spent regular short periods in prison. These demonstrations kept opposition visible, but their scale and repeated arrests differed sharply from the prospect of taking power that the earlier alliance had seemed to open.

The answer in 2012

Carrère’s account closes the question raised by the 2008 arrangement through a later look back. The 2012 election answered the first question clearly: Putin returned to the presidency. It answered the second just as clearly in the negative: Medvedev did not confront or defeat his mentor. Carrère describes Russia as resigned to eight more years under Putin. The transfer of office had thus proved temporary in precisely the way the driving-school image anticipated: the learner had driven, but the experienced driver took the wheel again.

For Limonov, the outcome completed a political reversal. Carrère suggests that Limonov may have believed he could be swept to power by a velvet revolution, while the election and its aftermath left him in the incongruous position of an opposition figure beside people whose democratic and human-rights values he did not share. The 2008 election matters, then, both as a carefully staged succession at the top of the state and as the point at which Limonov’s newly respectable opposition role failed to become a credible route to power.