Central Asia

Central Asia occupies two apparently different places in Eduard Limonov’s life: it is a proposed frontier for National Bolshevik action and, later, the landscape in which he imagines an acceptable old age. The movement between those meanings matters. Limonov first sets out in the name of Russians he describes as abandoned after the Soviet Union’s collapse; he comes back speaking instead of Central Asian peoples and Muslim fighters with admiration. Years later, his image of Samarkand and Bukhara is neither a campaign plan nor a retreat into comfort. It is a vision of life at the margins, among people he sees as cast off and yet kingly.

A Political Frontier

At a meeting with party supporters, Limonov argues that the National Bolsheviks are not ready to take power inside Russia. The political moment is not ripe, he says in effect, and the party should not waste itself in alliances with Orthodox anti-Semites or Stalin’s descendants. He offers another field of action: the former Soviet republics, where, in his account, Russians who had once administered territory for the Soviet Union have been left without a secure place after its disappearance.

His argument gives this proposed action both a constituency and a grievance. He says that 25 million Russians were abandoned, and names 900,000 in Latvia, 11 million in Ukraine, and 5 million in Kazakhstan as populations whom Boris Yeltsin would not help. He casts these Russians as formerly dominant people who have become victimized, ostracized, or merely tolerated in countries they helped build. The comparison with Serbs in the former Yugoslavia binds the party’s prospective Central Asian activity to Limonov’s wider language of national loss and threatened minorities. The figures and claims are part of the political case he makes to his followers, not a detached account of the region.

From that case comes a concrete proposal: to encourage insurgency and the creation of separatist republics. Limonov identifies the Baltic states and Central Asia as targets for action, noting that the party already has about a hundred members in Riga. He announces a canvassing tour of Central Asia and asks for about ten volunteers. A hundred hands go up. The applause turns the proposal into a scene of collective commitment: the followers see a new frontier opening, while Limonov imagines the moment through the precedent of Gabriele D’Annunzio gathering a battalion to retake Fiume.

The Tour and Its Reversal

The expedition lasts two months and takes Limonov and eight National Bolshevik companions through Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Photographs reproduced in Anatomy of a Hero show the group in front of tanks beside Russian troops stationed in the region. The images preserve the tour’s paramilitary appearance, though the narrative also records a friend’s joke that the travelers had gone there only to get into one another’s pants. The narrator says the idea had not occurred to him and that he does not believe it, while leaving it unresolved. The photographs, the joke, and the stated political purpose coexist without making the trip’s meaning entirely simple.

Limonov had also tried to recruit Bob Denard, whom he had met in Paris. Denard’s experience organizing putsches and abortive coups in Africa might, Limonov thought, have helped identify opportunities for destabilization. Denard had other concerns and did not join the party. The failed recruitment gives the expedition a practical ambition beyond travel: Limonov was looking for someone able to assess the possibilities of political disruption. Yet the tour, the account says, failed to destabilize much of anything.

Its more consequential result is a change in Limonov’s attention. Although the Russians in Central Asia supplied his original reason for going, he returns captivated by Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, and Turkmens. The narrator attributes to him a set of broad characterizations—proud, easily offended, poor, hospitable, and shaped by traditions of violence and vendetta—with which Limonov sympathizes. The shift is striking: a journey announced as a mission on behalf of Russian populations becomes a discovery of other peoples whom he regards as more compelling. He leaves thinking of D’Annunzio and returns imagining himself after Lawrence of Arabia, no longer a liberator of Russian communities but a champion of Uzbek and Kazakh mountain dwellers resentful of local dictators.

From Political Cause to Personal Allegiance

That change also alters Limonov’s relation to Islam. Under the influence of his Serbian friends, he had been strongly opposed to it; after the Central Asian tour, he speaks in its favor and extends his admiration to the Chechens. He praises their frugality, guerrilla tactics, and what the narrator calls their elegant cruelty. The passage does not present this as a steady political doctrine. It is a rapid redirection of allegiance, from the Serbian cause toward Muslim peoples and fighters whom Limonov now sees as resisting power.

The narrator finds a principle beneath the reversals: Limonov likes the underdog. The formulation links Central Asia to a recurring pattern in his life, where sympathy attaches to the skinny against the fat, the poor against the rich, and the self-confessed outsider against the socially approved majority. This does not erase the difference between his proposed separatist strategy and his later admiration for local peoples. Rather, it shows how he makes successive political causes answer to a more durable personal preference: siding with those he perceives as weaker or excluded. Central Asia changes from territory to be mobilized into a place whose inhabitants command his regard.

An Imagined Old Age

In a later conversation, when asked whether he can imagine growing old in his modest apartment, Limonov laughs and rejects the prospect of retirement and calm. His alternative is Central Asia. The question brings the region back not as an immediate political operation but as a personal destination, one he associates with feeling most at ease. He names Samarkand and Bukhara: sun-parched, dusty, slow, and violent cities, in his description, where beggars gather in the shadows of mosques and beneath high crenellated walls.

The narrator’s own childhood memory enters at this point. He has never been to Central Asia, but remembers photographs taken there by his mother on a long trip. His father had looked after him with awkward tenderness while she was away; the photographs, seen when he was very young, weighed on him and made the region seem among the remotest places on earth. This recollection gives the late conversation a second history of attraction. Central Asia is not only Limonov’s chosen refuge: it has already existed in the narrator’s imagination as a faraway landscape, encountered through family photographs rather than travel.

Limonov’s proposed future there is not a vision of wealth, domestic ease, or restored political power. He dwells on beggars who are gaunt and tanned, toothless and sometimes eyeless, dressed in filthy tunics and turbans. They place scraps of velvet before them and wait for small coins; the narrator observes that their lives before this condition are unknown and that they will end in communal graves. The description turns from visible deprivation toward the loss of possessions, history, and even names. Limonov’s final reversal makes those people more than objects of pity: they are castoffs, wrecks, and kings. His readiness to accept such a life gives the imagined old age its force. The region that once offered a stage for national action becomes a place where he can picture himself among the dispossessed.

Narrative Significance

Central Asia’s meaning in the account is therefore built through successive changes of scale. In the political speech, it is a field of post-Soviet grievance, marked by named republics, population figures, volunteers, and a proposed campaign. On the tour, it becomes a lived encounter that redirects Limonov’s sympathies away from the constituency that originally justified the journey. In the later conversation, it contracts to particular cities and to the figures of beggars beneath their walls.

The passage also keeps the limits of Limonov’s vision visible. His account of Central Asian peoples arrives in sweeping descriptions, and the landscape is rendered through images of remoteness, violence, poverty, and ancient-seeming endurance. The narrative does not establish those descriptions as a comprehensive portrait of the region; it shows how Limonov sees and uses them, first as grounds for political intervention and then as an imagined home among the rejected. Central Asia becomes significant less as a fixed destination than as the place where his changing causes and enduring allegiance to outsiders meet.