Article 31 of the Russian Constitution

Article 31 of the Russian Constitution matters in the book as both a stated right to demonstrate and the legal reference behind Eduard Limonov’s Strategy 31 movement. Its significance is measured not by an account of constitutional doctrine, but by the gap between the right the article guarantees and the repeated arrests that follow attempts to exercise it.

The constitutional right

The account identifies Article 31 as guaranteeing the right to demonstrate. It does not reproduce the article’s full wording or describe its legal interpretation; instead, it shows how Limonov’s opposition movement made the constitutional provision a practical point of reference. The article supplies the number, the claimed right, and the recurring form of action through which the movement tests that right in public.

From political coalition to Strategy 31

Strategy 31 emerges after the political coalition The Other Russia has ceased to exist following its failure in the presidential elections. Garry Kasparov did not even try to run, while Limonov continued political activity by creating a new movement named for Article 31. The change marks a turn from a coalition seeking influence through national politics toward a campaign organized around the ability to assemble and demonstrate.

That development follows a period in which Limonov’s party faced direct institutional pressure. The National Bolshevik Party was denied authorization to exist legally, despite Limonov’s stated figure of seven thousand adherents; he warned the justice minister that refusing registration would push the organization underground. The book does not present Article 31 as the legal cause of that dispute, but the contrast helps situate Strategy 31: after the party’s effort to secure recognition, Limonov built a movement around a constitutional right that could be asserted in the street.

Demonstrations on Triumfalnaya Square

The movement gathers on Triumfalnaya Square on the thirty-first day of months that have one. The date turns the constitutional number into a repeated organizing device: Article 31 names the right, and the calendar determines when participants publicly claim it. The scale described is modest, with roughly a hundred demonstrators facing five times as many police officers.

The encounters end in arrests rather than a routine exercise of the right. Police take away a few dozen demonstrators, and Limonov regularly spends a couple of days in prison. Foreign correspondents file reports, but the narrative describes the coverage as largely formal. The repetition is central: the protest recurs, the state response recurs, and the constitutional guarantee remains a claim that participants must enact under arrest.

Meaning and limits in the narrative

Article 31 gives Strategy 31 a clear public rationale: the movement presents demonstration as a right already guaranteed by the constitution, not merely as a demand for a new concession. Yet the reported imbalance between demonstrators and police, followed by arrests, makes the right appear conditional in practice. The book does not offer a court ruling or a resolution of that conflict. Instead, Article 31 remains the movement’s name and organizing premise, while the recurring demonstrations expose the distance between formal constitutional protection and the risks of exercising it.