Eduard Limonov—Vladimir Putin

Eduard Limonov—Vladimir Putin is a relationship of political opposition complicated by affinity. Limonov portrays Putin’s government as authoritarian and dangerous to its challengers, and builds movements and public actions against it. But the opposition never resolves into a simple moral contrast: the narrative also suggests that Limonov recognizes, and may even admire, qualities in Putin that he would exercise himself if he held power. The distance between them is therefore both a political struggle and a question of who gets to occupy the commanding position.

Opposition Takes Shape

Limonov’s conflict with the Putin-era state becomes personal in his account of being a hunted political opponent. He tells the narrator that he no longer dreams of an armed insurrection, as he once did, but of a pacifist, democratic revolution like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. He says the Kremlin fears such a movement and will do everything to crush it. He describes himself as living under threat: he had been beaten with baseball bats, had recently escaped an assassination attempt, and saw his name on a list of enemies of Russia, with addresses and telephone numbers published to incite hatred. Anna Politkovskaya and the former Federal Security Service officer Alexander Litvinenko were also on the list; Limonov presents himself as a possible next target.

The danger is set against the political significance Limonov claims for his movement. The prosecution of forty National Bolshevik Party militants for occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration offices, while shouting against Putin, initially seemed to the narrator an open-and-shut case. But Anna Politkovskaya defended the militants as courageous young people of integrity, and Yelena Bonner also supported them. Their intervention unsettles the easy equation of Limonov’s party with a fascist militia: people known for opposing authoritarianism could regard its activists as part of a democratic struggle, even while remaining uncomfortable with the party’s name.

The party’s appeal was also rooted in Limonov’s personal legend. Young supporters admired the composure they believed he had shown in prison: he had endured Lefortovo and a harsh labor camp, written several books, and helped fellow inmates. The story that guards and prisoners argued over who would carry his suitcase on release condensed that reputation into a scene of authority. His followers could see in him a man who had lived the adventurous life they longed for, and whose endurance offered a model of resistance. That admiration supplied the movement with loyalty, but it tied political opposition closely to Limonov’s own charismatic image.

Coalition and the Question of Political Change

The formation of The Other Russia gave Limonov a place in a broader opposition coalition led by Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Limonov. Their different backgrounds made the alliance striking: a world chess champion, a former prime minister under Putin, and an author the narrator considered disreputable by conventional standards stood together. The coalition appeared to offer a chance to contest the political order through a democratic opposition rather than an armed revolt.

At a joint press conference, Kasparov argued that the 2008 presidential election presented a historic opening. Putin was nearing the end of his second term, and the constitution barred him from serving a third consecutive term. With no officially endorsed successor yet visible, Kasparov said, the opposition might have an opportunity. He spoke of a gagged media, public discontent with oligarchs and corruption, and the unchecked power of the Federal Security Service. The narrator briefly considered the possibility that the gathering marked the beginning of a significant democratic movement.

A British journalist’s intervention punctured that hope. He pointed out that the constitutional restriction applied to consecutive terms: Putin could leave office while an ally held the seat, then return. The aside shifted the narrator’s judgment. What had seemed like a possible opening began to look like opposition conducted within rules that could be managed by the incumbent power. The relationship between Limonov and Putin was thus shaped not only by direct confrontation but by the uncertain ground on which opposition was expected to operate: the coalition could assemble, speak, and attract foreign attention without necessarily possessing a path to power.

Competing Claims to Legitimacy

Limonov’s politics also appear in the crisis around Boris Yeltsin, when he joined patriots gathered at the White House against the president. Some of the crowd were fascists, the narrative acknowledges, but they presented themselves as defenders of constitutional order against a president accused of imposing dictatorship. Limonov argued to General Rutskoy that the confrontation was not a coup but an elected parliament resisting dictatorship, and that Western governments would have to accept this claim in the name of their own values. His argument shows a recurring method: he framed political legitimacy against the actions of the existing ruler, even when the forces making that claim included people whose politics sat uneasily with democratic ideals.

That tension also troubled a teacher in Zakhar Prilepin’s novel about the National Bolsheviks. The teacher could accept some militants’ stunts as courageous protests against a state that punished disturbances severely, but worried when their language turned to the fatherland, imperial greatness, and the sanctity of their cause. Limonov’s opposition was not simply a defense of liberal democracy; it could mobilize through national grievance and a demand for order that left the meaning of the desired political future unresolved.

Discontent with the post-Soviet order widened the field in which such appeals could work. Five years after Yeltsin had declared the Communist Party illegal, many voters were ready to support it, frustrated by democracy, the market, and the injustice accompanying them. Gennady Zyuganov’s campaign combined promises to fight corruption and reduce inequality with national pride and Russian Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, oligarchs had arranged the loans-for-shares scheme, which gave them a stake in keeping Yeltsin in power. This political landscape helps explain why Limonov could present opposition as resistance to a compromised establishment without making his own political destination clear.

Organization, Suppression, and Street Protest

The National Bolshevik Party grew beyond Limonov’s immediate circle. At its convention, several hundred delegates came from across Russia, though the party had thousands of members nationally. They stayed in a workers’ hostel or arrived early at the party’s bunker; finding a venue was difficult because organizers feared police pressure, a ban, or worse. The convention’s opening, after years of distributing the party paper at railway stations, represented the conversion of individual devotion into an organized body. Limonov told the delegates that the party was not yet ready to take power, but proposed that it act in territories outside Russia, where he said Russian populations had been abandoned after the Soviet Union’s collapse. He named Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, and called for insurgency and separatist republics. The proposed frontier made clear that his opposition to the Kremlin was also a struggle over national belonging and the consequences of the Soviet breakup.

The state eventually struck at the party’s legal existence. Before the presidential election, the Ministry of Justice passed a law banning extremism and fascism, while reserving the right to define those terms. Limonov met the minister in a suit and tie to dispute the accusation that his party was extremist or fascist. When registration was refused, he returned and argued that a country recognizing 130 parties could not reasonably exclude his organization, which had seven thousand adherents. He warned that banning it would force young people who cared about their country toward clandestine organization and extremism. The exchange exposed the narrowing space between legal opposition and the underground: a movement that had built membership and held conventions could be made illegal through state action.

After The Other Russia faded following its failure in the presidential elections, Limonov did not abandon public opposition. He created Strategy 31, named for the constitutional article guaranteeing the right to demonstrate. On the thirty-first of months containing that date, protesters gathered at Triumfalnaya Square. Usually about a hundred demonstrators faced five times as many police officers; a few dozen protesters were arrested, and Limonov regularly spent a couple of days in prison. The tactic invoked a constitutional right while repeatedly making its exercise the occasion for detention. The movement’s modest numbers and recurring arrests contrasted sharply with the earlier hopes invested in the coalition, but kept Limonov’s challenge visible.

The Opposition’s Contradiction

Limonov’s written attacks on Putin sharpen the contrast between political position and political temperament. He calls Putin a tyrant, but also describes him as bland and mediocre, a judgment the narrator considers glaringly wrong. The narrator sees Putin’s appeal in his defense of Soviet memory: people should not be told that decades of their lives, their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and the beliefs for which they fought were worthless. The argument acknowledges communist atrocities while rejecting the equivalence of communism and Nazism, and presents the Soviet past as something grand, heroic, and bound to childhood memory.

The narrator’s account makes the relationship more troubling by suggesting that Limonov would say and do the same things as Putin, or worse, if he occupied Putin’s place. Limonov is instead left in the incongruous role of an opposition figure defending democracy and human rights alongside honest people whose values he has long despised. He continues to oppose the government, but the narrator cannot treat that opposition as proof of a liberal conviction. The contrast between the two men is finally less a division between opposite political natures than a division between the ruler and the excluded rival: Limonov condemns Putin’s power while embodying, in the narrative’s view, some of the same appetite for force and command.