Fall of communism

The Fall of communism is the turning point after which the Soviet world Limonov had recalled with provocative nostalgia becomes a site of political struggle rather than a vanished backdrop. Its consequences in the book are contradictory: the end of Communist rule opens the way to new parties, public protest, and market reforms, while economic dislocation, disputes over national identity, and state repression help shape a new opposition—and the later political order that constrains it.

The rupture and its competing meanings

Before the collapse, Limonov spoke wryly of Moscow under Brezhnev as a kind of paradise for resourceful hooligans. His dinner-table praise of Stalin could be dismissed by his Paris acquaintances as provocation. The change came when communism fell: those around him were delighted, while Limonov was not, and his calls for Gorbachev to face a firing squad no longer seemed like a joke. The difference in their reactions signals an early divide over whether the end of the Soviet order represented liberation, loss, or an unfinished national struggle.

The rupture also changed Limonov’s position in public life. He began spending long periods in the Balkans and fought on the Serbian side; footage later showed him participating in the bombardment of besieged Sarajevo under the eye of Radovan Karadžić. After returning to Russia, he created the National Bolshevik Party. Its young followers marched in black, combining a raised-arm salute with a clenched fist, and carried flags modeled on the Third Reich’s design but bearing the hammer and sickle. For the narrator’s Paris circle, the transformation of a once-admired friend into the leader of this movement was difficult to reconcile with their earlier memories of him.

The new order did not settle what the Soviet past meant. In later political debate, the narrator argues that Vladimir Putin’s appeal rested partly on rejecting the idea that seventy years of Soviet life could be dismissed as worthless or equated with Nazism. The same account notes that Limonov, while opposing Putin as a tyrant, was made to occupy the incongruous position of defending democracy and human rights alongside people whose values he had long disdained. The end of communism thus appears not as a clean break with its history, but as a struggle over which parts of that history could be mourned, condemned, or reclaimed.

Economic shock and the new social order

The political transition was accompanied by a rapid attempt to remake Russia’s economy. Boris Yeltsin, conscious of his limited economic expertise, turned to Yegor Gaidar, who believed strongly in liberalism. Their program, called shock therapy, began with the liberalization of prices. Inflation reached 2,600 percent, wiping out the intended effect of voucher privatization before many people could use their vouchers.

On September 1, 1992, vouchers worth ten thousand rubles were mailed to every Russian citizen over the age of one. They were meant to give each person a share in national wealth and turn people into investors in businesses and private property. But by the time the vouchers arrived, inflation had reduced their practical value to, at most, the price of a bottle of vodka. Many beneficiaries sold them cheaply to buyers able to take advantage of the upheaval. Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are named as three of the men who became billionaires within months. The book stresses that they entered a business world with no established rules, laws, banking system, or taxation, as activities forbidden under the previous order were suddenly permitted.

The visible city changed just as quickly. On Limonov’s returns to Moscow, streets that had regained their pre-Revolution names filled with neon signs; traffic jams and black Mercedes appeared beside old Ladas, and goods once brought from abroad for friends were now readily available. A McDonald’s on Pushkinskaya Square was followed by a fashionable disco. These details set everyday abundance and commercial spectacle against the former Soviet monotony, but they accompany a political economy in which the gains of transition were sharply unequal.

Political crisis and contested legitimacy

The early post-Communist order did not settle who could claim to speak for democracy or the people. During the 1993 confrontation, thousands of patriots gathered outside the White House, the building that had recently symbolized Yeltsin’s democratic triumph. Some among them were fascists, yet they now presented themselves as defenders of constitutional order and accused the democrats of using dictatorship to defend a democracy few wanted. The rebellion was led by Ruslan Khasbulatov, president of the Duma, and Alexander Rutskoy, vice president of the Russian Republic; both had been on Yeltsin’s side two years earlier.

After Rutskoy and Khasbulatov convened a session of the dissolved parliament, the assembly declared its dissolution unconstitutional, deposed Yeltsin, installed Rutskoy as president, and occupied the White House. The rebels said they would leave only if forced out at bayonet point. Limonov joined the crowd and spent the night moving among meetings, where people debated, shouted, drank, wrote communiqués, and began forming a government. At three in the morning he obtained an audience with Rutskoy, whom he addressed as president, and urged him to see the confrontation as a democratically elected parliament resisting dictatorship. The episode shows how the language of constitutional legitimacy could be claimed by opposing sides at once, amid the unresolved institutions left by the collapse.

The electoral contest that followed also exposed deep public discontent. Five years after Yeltsin had declared the Communist Party illegal, polls pointed toward a large vote for the Communists. Their leader, Gennady Zyuganov, presented a cautious program emphasizing anti-corruption, national pride, and Russian Orthodoxy rather than a return to the Gulag or the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, the oligarchs feared his promise to reduce the wealth of the rich. Their loans-for-shares scheme offered loans to an impoverished state in exchange for shares in major industries, including natural gas and petroleum, with the prospect of taking those assets if the state did not repay within a year. Because the deadline fell after the presidential election, the oligarchs had a direct interest in keeping Yeltsin in power.

Opposition, repression, and the unsettled aftermath

The fall of the old order created opportunities for organized opposition, but those opportunities remained precarious. Anna Politkovskaya defended forty National Bolshevik Party militants who were given lengthy sentences after occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices while demanding Putin’s departure. She described them as courageous young people of integrity. Yelena Bonner also supported the party’s members, although she remarked on the troubling associations of its name. Their defenses unsettled the narrator’s prior certainty that Limonov was simply a fascist leading skinheads. The episode makes visible the gap between the party’s provocative symbols and its opponents’ assessment of its militants’ resistance to the government.

Limonov later gathered several hundred delegates for a party convention, though he said that the organization had seven thousand adherents across Russia. The gathering had been difficult to arrange: venues withdrew their offers, and participants feared a bomb scare, police harassment, or an outright ban. Many delegates were impoverished provincial adolescents; in the narrator’s account, the party had given them a sense of purpose, style, and ideal. Limonov argued that the moment was not yet ripe for taking power inside Russia and instead called for support for Russians in former Soviet republics. He cited communities in Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan and proposed fostering separatist republics in the Baltic countries and Central Asia. A hundred hands went up when he sought volunteers for a tour of the region.

The state’s response narrowed the party’s legal space. 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 argue against the party’s exclusion from registration. After the deadline passed, authorization was denied. He returned to the minister and warned that a party with seven thousand adherents, refused legal status while many other parties were registered, would have to organize in secret. The episode links the unsettled politics of the post-Communist period to a later pattern: movements that had emerged in the new public sphere could be pushed toward illegality by the state.

That pattern continued after the coalition The Other Russia failed to establish an effective electoral challenge. Limonov created Strategy 31, named for Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees the right to demonstrate. Its supporters gathered on Triumfalnaya Square on the thirty-first day of months that had one; typically, there were about a hundred demonstrators and five times as many police officers, who arrested dozens. Limonov regularly spent a couple of days in prison. The transition that had promised a new political order therefore ends in the account not with a settled democracy, but with an opposition still invoking constitutional rights while facing routine arrest and diminished political influence.