Attempted assassination of Eduard Limonov

Eduard Limonov’s attempted assassination marks the point at which his opposition to the Russian government is described not merely as a political struggle but as a danger to his life. The account offers no date, location, method, or identified perpetrator. Instead, it places the narrowly escaped attack within a wider climate of intimidation and follows Limonov’s political fortunes as his movement confronts growing state restrictions.

The Threat Becomes Personal

In an interview with Emmanuel Carrère, Limonov says the time for armed uprising has passed. He describes his current goal as a pacifist, democratic revolution like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which he says the Kremlin fears and will do anything to crush. The interview presents his sense of being hunted as part of this political conflict: several years earlier, he had been beaten with baseball bats, and more recently he had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.

The threat is sharpened by Limonov’s inclusion on a list of “enemies of Russia,” described as a list of people to kill, complete with their addresses and telephone numbers. The account places him alongside Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed with an Izh pistol, and the former security officer Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with polonium after denouncing criminality among his former colleagues. Mikhail Khodorkovsky is also named in this group, though the passage describes his imprisonment in Siberia for entering politics rather than an attempt on his life. Limonov is presented as the next person at risk, but the book does not establish that the list’s compilers carried out the attempt against him.

Opposition and Exposure

The assassination attempt enters an account of Limonov’s public role during a period when opposition activity was becoming more visible. Two years before Carrère’s discovery of Anna Politkovskaya’s account of the trial of forty National Bolshevik Party members, she had defended them as courageous people of integrity after they occupied and vandalized the presidential administration’s offices while demanding that Vladimir Putin leave. Her stance, and Yelena Bonner’s support for the party’s members, challenged Carrère’s assumption that Limonov’s movement could be understood simply as a fascist militia. Several months later, Limonov joined a coalition called The Other Russia, alongside Garry Kasparov and former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

At a press conference with Kasparov, Limonov appeared before militants as well as journalists, including foreign reporters who expected the coalition to rise to power. The book presents the contrast between that expectation and Limonov’s account of danger: he described himself as targeted while publicly advocating a democratic revolution. It does not, however, connect the assassination attempt to the coalition, the press conference, or any particular political opponent.

Political Pressure and Aftermath

The party’s later confrontation with the authorities provides further context for the risks surrounding Limonov’s activism, without explaining who attempted to kill him. After the Ministry of Justice adopted a law banning extremism and fascism, Limonov met with the minister to argue for the National Bolshevik Party’s authorization. The party was subsequently denied permission to exist, despite its seven thousand adherents. Limonov warned that driving it underground could push young people toward extremism and terrorism; the minister asked whether that meant the party would start setting off bombs. The passage describes a dispute over registration and political pressure, not evidence that the state ordered an assassination.

After The Other Russia failed to endure, Limonov founded Strategy 31, named for Article 31 of the constitution, which guarantees the right to demonstrate. On qualifying thirty-first days, demonstrators gathered at Triumfalnaya Square; the account describes around one hundred protesters facing five times as many police officers, with dozens of protesters arrested. Limonov regularly spent a couple of days in prison. This later pattern of arrests shows the continuing costs of opposition activity, but the book does not say that the attempted assassination recurred or that these arrests resulted from it.

What the Account Establishes

The event remains deliberately spare in its reported particulars: Limonov escaped an assassination attempt, and the book presents him as a named target in a climate where other critics had been killed or poisoned. Its political context makes the threat consequential, but does not resolve its authorship or circumstances. The account therefore supports a distinction between the attack itself, which is reported briefly, and the larger story of opposition, intimidation, and state pressure in which it is placed.