Eduard Limonov's hostility toward Boris Yeltsin

Eduard Limonov’s hostility toward Boris Yeltsin was not presented as a private feud but as a political alignment against the order Yeltsin represented. Limonov portrayed post-Soviet democracy as a new arrangement that enriched profiteers while abandoning ordinary people; in 1993 he committed himself to the parliamentary revolt against Yeltsin and survived the violence that crushed it. The relationship became a defining test of Limonov’s politics: he opposed Yeltsin in the name of the people, even as the struggle’s competing claims to democracy and constitutional authority resisted a simple moral division.

Political Opposition Takes Shape

Limonov’s opposition grew amid Moscow demonstrations by pensioners reduced to begging, unpaid soldiers, nationalists grieving the liquidation of the Soviet empire, Communists, and people disoriented by the rewriting of their history. He attended these gatherings whenever he was in the city. Readers of his articles in Dyen recognized him, congratulated him, kissed him, and blessed him as someone who gave them hope that Russia was not lost. His public standing had shifted: what had once looked, to the narrator, like the marginal politics of a fascist with a skinhead militia was also attracting defenders who saw Limonov and his followers as courageous opponents of the state. Anna Politkovskaya, writing in defense of National Bolshevik Party militants imprisoned after occupying and vandalizing presidential administration offices, described them as people of integrity who could inspire hope for Russia’s moral future.

At one opposition rally, invited onto the platform by Viktor Alksnis, Limonov took the megaphone. He accused the supposed democrats of profiting from the blood their fathers had shed in the Great Patriotic War, and argued that people had suffered more in one year of democracy than in seventy years of communism. He warned that anger was building and that people should prepare for civil war. The speech, the narrator observes, differed little from others at the rally, yet the immense crowd applauded after each sentence. For Limonov, this reception answered an old longing: the isolation he had experienced in a room at the Embassy Hotel in New York had given way to a crowd that returned his words as approval and affection.

The 1993 Constitutional Crisis

The immediate confrontation began in September 1993, when Yeltsin announced that he was dissolving the Duma and calling new elections. Limonov was at his lodging, eating broth in front of the television, when Alksnis called to say the patriots were gathering at the Moscow White House. Limonov emptied his bowl and went there. The sequence connects his political opposition to concrete action: he did not remain a spectator to Yeltsin’s announcement but joined the people organizing against it.

The dispute quickly became a struggle over who could claim lawful authority. The rebels included Ruslan Khasbulatov, the Duma’s president, and Alexander Rutskoy, the vice president, both of whom had stood beside Yeltsin two years earlier. That evening, the dissolved parliament declared Yeltsin’s action unconstitutional, deposed him, installed Rutskoy as president, and occupied the White House. Its members said they represented the people and would leave only if forced out at bayonet point. Limonov spent the night moving between meetings in cigarette smoke, as participants argued, drank, wrote communiqués, and discussed forming a government. He was impatient with the talk of distributing ministries: he wanted preparations for the expected siege.

At three in the morning, Limonov secured an audience with Rutskoy, who was shut away on the top floor with soldiers guarding the door. He addressed the general as president and urged him to see the confrontation as a contest over the White House, not merely diplomatic support or the loyalties of military bases. When Western governments declared for Yeltsin, Limonov argued that their support reflected a desire for a weakened Russia and recast the rebellion as an elected parliament resisting dictatorship. He pressed Rutskoy on whether the rebels had weapons. Their exchange ended badly: Rutskoy dismissed him after taking offense at being lectured by an intellectual. The scene shows both Limonov’s conviction that force was imminent and the limits of his influence over the men directing the revolt.

The Siege and Its Defeat

The next day Limonov made what he regarded as a decisive mistake: he left the White House to shower and change at friends’ home, then visited Alexander Dugin to urge him to join the patriots. Dugin stayed home and watched the crisis on television. By the time Limonov returned, Yeltsin had ordered the electricity and telephones cut and deployed the Special Purpose Mobile Unit of the Russian Interior Ministry. Limonov tried throughout the night to get past the military vehicles and armed soldiers, imagining himself as a French partisan during the Nazi occupation, but the building was inaccessible. From outside, he could see candlelit flickers and shadows through the windows.

The siege lasted ten days. Limonov believed the men inside would pay dearly and regretted leaving them, while television coverage enraged him: the insurgents were presented as fascists and madmen, and the pro-Yeltsin demonstration and a concert supporting Yeltsin were shown repeatedly, while viewers were left to imagine what was happening inside the besieged building. On October 3, however, Limonov joined a vast demonstration outside with Taras Rabko, a Ukrainian student and fellow National Bolshevik Party member. The crowd’s slogans included support for the Soviet Union and attacks on Yeltsin. Limonov disapproved of racist abuse shouted by some demonstrators, anticipating that it would dominate Western coverage. The Special Purpose Mobile Unit nevertheless opened fire, beat demonstrators, and dragged people into vehicles. Young supporters recognized Limonov and shielded him with their bodies.

Rutskoy then urged the crowd to march on the Kremlin, arrest Yeltsin, and take the Ostankino Television Tower. Limonov and Rabko boarded a bus with armed men bound for the tower. At Ostankino, the arriving crowd faced prepared police units. In the ensuing assault, an Irish journalist fell on top of Limonov and died; Limonov checked the man’s pulse and saw that he was dead. Limonov himself was struck in the shoulder. Rabko tore his shirt to dress the wound, and the two escaped the police sweep by hiding overnight in park bushes. Limonov told himself that next time he would be in charge, rather than generals he considered cowardly and talkative.

By dawn, tanks surrounded the White House and the rebels’ apparent chance of victory had vanished. Rutskoy eventually surrendered. The assault left 150 casualties by the account given in the book, and the official register included hundreds dead and thousands injured, among them insurgents, bystanders, older people, and children. Limonov and Rabko feared arrests and hid in the town of Tver for two weeks. The defeat was not simply a military reversal for Limonov: it confirmed the cost of the political cause he had joined and left him arguing that the people inside the White House had been misrepresented or erased from public view.

Aftermath and Political Meaning

The crisis unsettled the usual division between Yeltsin’s democrats and their opponents. The book describes the rebels as including fascists, but also notes that their charge—that democrats were prepared to establish dictatorship in democracy’s name—could not be dismissed outright. After the bloodshed, the word democracy itself was increasingly used with suspicion. Andrei Sinyavsky, a dissident and committed democrat, expressed the crisis’s central disorientation when he said that truth seemed to be on the side of people he had always considered enemies. Limonov’s hostility to Yeltsin thus sits within a narrative that neither makes the insurgents uncomplicated heroes nor treats Yeltsin’s claim to democracy as sufficient to settle the question of legitimacy.

Limonov’s opposition later took organizational forms beyond the 1993 revolt. He helped form The Other Russia, a coalition that included figures from sharply different political backgrounds, and subsequently built the National Bolshevik Party into a movement with thousands of adherents. The state later denied the party authorization under a law against extremism and fascism, forcing it toward an illegal and potentially secret existence; that episode belongs to the party’s later conflict with the authorities rather than to a direct encounter with Yeltsin. By the time Limonov created Strategy 31, gathering demonstrators on Triumfalnaya Square to assert the constitutional right to protest, the opposition had shifted from the armed confrontation of 1993 to recurring street action—and from a mass revolt to small demonstrations routinely outnumbered by police. Across these changes, hostility to Yeltsin’s political legacy remained a key part of Limonov’s public identity, but the book’s account keeps the contradiction visible: a movement that claimed to resist dictatorship had itself embraced force, and its defeat did not make the competing meanings of democracy any clearer.