Formation of The Other Russia

The Other Russia was a political coalition formed under Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Eduard Limonov. Its significance lay both in the opposition it sought to assemble and in the unlikely position it gave Limonov: an author whom the narrator had regarded as an unacceptable fascist became a partner in a movement presented as Russia’s democratic alternative. The alliance made his changing public role impossible to ignore, without proving that his underlying politics had changed.

From political outcast to opposition figure

The narrator’s interest in Limonov began to shift after discovering that Anna Politkovskaya had defended National Bolshevik Party militants sentenced for occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices. They had shouted for Putin to leave; Politkovskaya described them as courageous and morally serious. Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov, likewise supported the National Bolsheviks, despite reservations about their party name. These unexpected endorsements unsettled the narrator’s assumption that Limonov was simply a fascist leading skinheads. They suggested that, for some prominent critics of the Russian government, his followers could also represent a meaningful opposition.

Several months later, the coalition’s formation made that change in political position still clearer. The narrator understood its three leaders as an extraordinary combination: Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players of all time; Kasyanov, a former prime minister under Putin; and Limonov, a writer whom respectable company was not supposed to embrace. The narrator took Limonov as the subject of a proposed magazine’s first issue without hesitation. The editor Patrick de Saint-Exupéry dismissed him as a petty thug, but the narrator replied that the subject was worth investigating. The exchange captures the coalition’s immediate provocation: Limonov’s presence challenged not only the Kremlin but also settled assumptions about who could stand for opposition.

The alliance and its democratic promise

At a press conference the following day, the narrator recognized many militants he had encountered while researching Politkovskaya’s work, alongside a substantial number of journalists, particularly foreign correspondents. A group of Swedish filmmakers had committed to three months of filming, anticipating the irresistible rise of The Other Russia and the prospect that Kasparov and Limonov might come to power. Their confidence showed how readily the coalition could be read as the beginning of a historic political opening.

On the podium, Kasparov appeared the more commanding figure: physically imposing, smiling, and at ease as a public speaker. Limonov, goateed and bespectacled, seemed cast as the calculating strategist beside a natural leader. Kasparov argued that the 2008 presidential election offered a historic opportunity. Putin was nearing the end of his second term, the constitution barred him from a third consecutive term, and no officially endorsed successor had emerged. Kasparov presented a democratic opposition as having a chance for the first time in Russian history, insisting that controlled media concealed public anger at the oligarchs, corruption, and the power of the security services.

The press conference also stages the limits of that optimism. A British journalist sitting beside the narrator argued that Russians supported Putin and that the constitutional restriction concerned consecutive terms, not a return after an intervening president. His skepticism punctured the narrator’s brief sense that he might be witnessing a Russian equivalent of Solidarity. The narrator’s perception of Kasparov shifted in an instant: a speech that had sounded eloquent and momentous now seemed provincial and empty of prestige. The alliance could make a democratic opening visible, but it could not establish that the public wanted one or that the rules of Russian politics would permit it.

Limonov’s political language and earlier alignments

Limonov’s role in the coalition drew on a political identity that predated it. During the 1993 confrontation over the White House, he had joined the patriots rallying behind the rebel parliament against Boris Yeltsin. After the parliament declared Yeltsin deposed and named Alexander Rutskoy president, Limonov argued to Rutskoy that the conflict should be understood as an elected parliament resisting dictatorship, rather than as a coup. He urged Rutskoy to focus on what happened inside the White House and pressed the need to fight. The episode shows Limonov making a case for constitutional legitimacy from a camp that included nationalists and fascists as well as other opponents of Yeltsin.

That earlier alignment helps explain why the later coalition should be read as a change in Limonov’s political position, not necessarily a conversion to liberal democratic principles. The narrator later describes him as occupying the incongruous role of virtuous opposition figure alongside honest people whose values he had long despised. Limonov’s pamphlets attacked Putin as a tyrant, yet the narrator believed Limonov might have governed with similar or greater severity if he had held power. The coalition thus joined people who could oppose the same government without sharing a settled political program or a common understanding of democracy.

The coalition’s failure and its aftermath

The broader political climate made opposition seem both urgent and precarious. Five years after Yeltsin had declared the Communist Party illegal, polls indicated that voters were ready to support it in response to their frustration with democracy, the market, and the injustices of the transition. Gennady Zyuganov presented his candidacy less as a restoration of the Gulag than as a promise to fight corruption, recover national pride, and reduce the gap between rich and poor. At the same time, oligarchs had a direct financial stake in Yeltsin’s re-election: their loans to the state were secured against shares in valuable, not-yet-privatized industries, with repayment deadlines falling after the presidential election. The coalition’s challenge therefore unfolded amid popular discontent and powerful interests invested in continuity.

The hoped-for opening did not become a successful bid for power. By the narrator’s later account, Kasparov did not attempt to run, The Other Russia failed in the presidential elections, and the movement no longer existed. Limonov did not abandon political action. He created Strategy 31, named for the constitutional article guaranteeing the right to demonstrate, and organized gatherings on Triumfalnaya Square on the thirty-first of months that had one. The typical imbalance was stark: around a hundred demonstrators faced five times as many police officers, who arrested dozens; Limonov consequently spent regular short periods in prison. He also tried to establish a national assembly of opposition forces, while Kasparov launched a competing platform. The two former allies had become rivals, though the narrator regarded the rivalry as muted. The Other Russia’s formation had briefly joined radically different figures under the possibility of democratic opposition; its dissolution left Limonov pursuing a narrower, recurrent contest over the right to assemble.