Eduard's invitation to return to the Soviet Union

Eduard Limonov’s invitation to return to the Soviet Union turned an unlikely publishing encounter into a public homecoming: his childhood memoir was issued in a print run of 300,000, and he was welcomed in Moscow as a successful writer from the West. Yet the return carried a double meaning. Eduard had once left the country with Tanya, imagining they would never see it again; now he came back alone, celebrated by a publicity machine whose version of his life was not quite his own.

The Paris encounter

A few months before the return, Eduard met Yulian Semyonov at a party in Paris. They knew little about one another, but Eduard sensed in the small, brisk, cordial man an aura of wealth and power. Their conversation moved between political disagreements: Semyonov supported Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Eduard opposed, while their positions reversed when they discussed Joseph Stalin. The differences did not prevent them from getting along.

When Semyonov learned that Eduard was a writer, he asked whether Eduard had been published in Russia. Eduard said he had not, and saw no prospect of it happening soon. Semyonov replied that anything could be published now. Eduard insisted that he was scandalous; Semyonov answered by promising to publish him. The exchange made the invitation more than a gesture of hospitality: it began with a challenge to Eduard’s expectation that his work had no place in his home country.

Publication and the invitation

The next day, an employee acting for Semyonov collected Eduard’s writing samples. Semyonov, an author of spy novels that had sold millions of copies in the Soviet Union, had founded the weekly newspaper Sovershenno sekretno amid perestroika. It specialized in true crime and had become remarkably successful. He had also established a publishing house that issued commercial fiction as well as the collected works of George Orwell.

That publishing operation brought Eduard’s newly completed account of his childhood, Ours Was a Great Epoch, into print in his native country. Its 300,000-copy run gave the invitation a concrete consequence before Eduard even arrived: he was returning not simply as an émigré, but as an author whose work had been given an unusually large Soviet readership. Semyonov’s offer also placed the trip within the publisher’s wider public project, which presented the return of people from abroad as part of rebuilding the country.

The road back

In December 1989, on the drive from the airport into Moscow, Eduard remembered traveling in the opposite direction in February 1974. Then he had a massive hangover and lay in the back of a car with his head on Tanya’s knees while she watched buildings and woods pass by. They were convinced they would never see those sights again. Snow fell on both journeys, linking the departure and return across fifteen years. This time Eduard was alone and had lost Tanya; from a distance, his return could look like a winner’s homecoming.

The outward signs supported that appearance. Eduard had been invited alongside actress Victoria Fedorova and singer Willi Tokarev. They had traveled business class and were received at the airport like VIPs. But he chose to sit beside the driver, rather than in the back with the other guests and the public-relations woman assigned to them. He tried to start a conversation, wanting the first ordinary Russian man he had met on native soil to see that years abroad and success had not made him a stranger to his own people. The driver remained closed off, behind an indifferent manner that seemed vaguely hostile. Staff at the Hotel Ukraina received the visitors with a similar reserve.

A homecoming staged for an audience

At a cultural event organized by Semyonov at the cultural center in Izmailovo Park, Eduard encountered the promise and discomfort of being made a public figure. He had long dreamed of attracting thousands, captivating them, and rising above the crowd. But he knew the audience was drawn less by him than by anything Western, as well as by Semyonov’s publicity and the recognizable brand of his spy novels and sensational newspaper. The attention was real; its object was uncertain.

Semyonov stood at the center of the platform, bald and stocky, wearing a suit without a tie. He introduced the guests as dynamic, creative people ready to return and help rebuild the Soviet Union. Sovershenno sekretno had spent the preceding two weeks promoting Fedorova and Tokarev as major Western stars, although the audience knew little about them beyond that publicity. Eduard, too, was presented in a two-page spread as a kind of literary rock star. Knowing that this image had been manufactured diminished the pleasure he might otherwise have taken in it.

During the questions, he nevertheless tried to inhabit the character the newspaper had advertised. He described himself as a former bum who had become the butler of an American multimillionaire. Asked about his former wife, he denied the claim that she had been a New York streetwalker and instead mentioned that she was now married to a Spanish marquis. The audience responded well to that detail, so he made a note to bring it up again. Because the article had omitted homosexuality and Black men, those subjects did not arise. Eduard considered raising them himself to unsettle the room, but decided to preserve the more useful persona: a rough-edged man who had reached the heights of Western society without being impressed by its models, countesses, or supposed depravity.

Eduard expected to be the last speaker. Instead, Semyonov introduced an elderly former Gulag prisoner, who spoke at length about exposing Soviet crimes. The man said that no family had escaped the purges and that everyone could name a relative taken away in the night by the NKVD and never seen again. Eduard felt the urge to interrupt: his own family, he believed, had been unaffected, as had most families he knew. He held back. While the speech continued, he watched the audience, judging its members provincial, poorly dressed, gullible and suspicious at once, though he also noticed some pretty girls. The scene turned his celebrated return into a collision between competing versions of Soviet experience: the visiting writer’s carefully managed public story and an old prisoner’s insistence on bringing the country’s violence into the open.