Eduard Limonov—Garry Kasparov

Eduard Limonov and Garry Kasparov’s alliance in The Other Russia brought an internationally celebrated chess champion and a writer long associated with radical politics onto the same opposition stage. Their partnership gave Limonov a new public position, but never resolved the question of what he believed in the democratic cause they appeared to share. The coalition’s failure turned that uncertainty into rivalry.

From unlikely allies to a public coalition

The narrator’s understanding of Limonov shifted after discovering that Anna Politkovskaya had defended National Bolshevik Party militants prosecuted for occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices. Politkovskaya, and also Yelena Bonner, had described the activists as courageous and morally significant, a judgment sharply at odds with the narrator’s prior image of Limonov as a fascist leader of skinheads. That discovery supplied a political context for the later alliance: Limonov and his followers could be viewed not only through the party’s provocative identity but also as part of an opposition confronting the Russian government.

Several months later, a coalition called The Other Russia began forming under Kasparov, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, and Limonov. The combination seemed improbable, and the narrator chose Limonov as the subject for the opening issue of a new magazine. A skeptical editor dismissed him as a petty thug, but the narrator decided the change in Limonov’s political position was worth investigating. The partnership was thus presented from the outset as a puzzle as well as a political development: the question was not simply whether Limonov had changed, but what place he now occupied in the country’s opposition.

The press conference and its competing images

At a press conference with Kasparov, Limonov appeared alongside many of the militants the narrator had encountered while researching Politkovskaya, as well as numerous foreign journalists. A Swedish film crew was preparing a substantial documentary, apparently expecting The Other Russia to rise irresistibly to power. Its confidence illustrated the hopes invested in the alliance, but also the distance between a movement’s international image and its actual prospects.

Kasparov dominated the podium. Physically imposing and eloquent, he argued that the 2008 presidential election offered a historic opportunity: Vladimir Putin was nearing the end of his second consecutive term, and the authorities had not yet produced an officially endorsed successor. Kasparov maintained that a gagged media concealed public anger over oligarchs, corruption, and the power of the security services. Limonov, by contrast, stood beside and slightly behind him, listening calmly rather than visibly competing for the floor. The scene made their different public functions legible: Kasparov articulated the democratic case, while Limonov’s stillness and unreadable expression invited speculation about the alliance’s less conventional partner.

A British journalist countered Kasparov’s optimism with a prediction that Russians would continue to support Putin and that the constitutional limit on consecutive terms could be evaded by an intervening placeholder. The narrator, briefly carried along by Kasparov’s eloquence, returned to a more skeptical view of the opposition’s prospects. Limonov’s own writing sharpened that doubt: a passage from Diary of a Loser celebrated siding with political losers and small, ineffective groups, while threatening, in deliberately violent terms, the musicians of a victorious establishment. The narrator wondered whether Limonov truly believed in the democratic movement, enjoyed performing as a virtuous dissident among people he had long called naive, or was playing the wolf among the sheep. The book leaves the question open rather than treating their alliance as proof of ideological conversion.

A shared opposition, unresolved differences

The partnership belonged to a political moment in which labels and claims to legitimacy were unstable. During the 1993 confrontation around the White House, Limonov sided with opponents of Boris Yeltsin, including Aleksandr Rutskoy and Ruslan Khasbulatov. The rebels presented themselves as defenders of constitutional order, while their opponents were the elected authorities; the narrator notes that some of the patriots supporting them were fascists, yet the charge that the democrats might impose dictatorship in democracy’s name could not simply be dismissed. Limonov’s subsequent appeal to Rutskoy cast the conflict as a parliament resisting dictatorship and urged him to concentrate on the struggle inside the White House. This earlier episode makes the later alliance with Kasparov more complicated than a straightforward passage from radicalism to liberal opposition: Limonov’s political language could attach itself to competing claims of popular and constitutional legitimacy.

That instability also appears in the National Bolshevik Party’s internal culture and its imagined future. Zakhar Prilepin’s novel Sankya depicts a teacher who sees the party’s name, flag, and slogans as provocative, and its militants’ disruptive actions as courageous because dissent in Russia can bring prison sentences. The same conversation turns to the party’s appeals to the fatherland, empire, and Soviet restoration, which trouble the teacher. This context helps explain why Limonov’s partnership with Kasparov could attract attention without erasing suspicion: the alliance placed democratic opposition alongside a movement whose identity and rhetoric remained deliberately provocative.

Failure and political rivalry

The Other Russia did not become the electoral force anticipated by its most hopeful supporters. Kasparov did not try to run after being harassed, and the movement ceased to exist following its failure in the presidential elections. Limonov did not abandon political action. He created Strategy 31, named for the constitutional right to demonstrate, and organized protests on the thirty-first of months that had that date. These gatherings generally drew around a hundred demonstrators against roughly five times as many police officers; arrests were frequent, and Limonov regularly spent a few days in prison.

Limonov also tried to establish a national assembly of opposition forces, a project supported by some older democrats and human-rights activists. Kasparov sought to preempt it by launching his own platform, making their divergence explicit. The narrator describes the rivalry as comparatively mild: Limonov took satisfaction in his website attracting more visits than Kasparov’s. The contrast between their paths completes the arc of the relationship. They had briefly shared a coalition and a public challenge to the authorities, but the collapse of that project left them competing over how opposition should be organized and represented. Limonov’s continued activity did not restore the coalition; it made clear that their alliance had been a political convergence, not a settled partnership.