Moscow

Moscow is the city in which Eduard Limonov’s life repeatedly changes direction: from clandestine provincial arrival to literary ambition, from celebrated returnee to political agitator, and finally to an opposition figure watched by both guards and journalists. The narrative does not present the capital as a stable backdrop. Its rooms and public spaces carry the marks of successive regimes, while Limonov’s changing fortunes make the city feel at once familiar and newly hostile.

A City of Arrival and Constraint

In 1968, Limonov and Anna moved to Moscow, an act that required a residence permit, or propiska, which they did not obtain. Without it, they lived clandestinely and risked being stopped at subway checkpoints. They rented small rooms on the outskirts and moved often to avoid attention. Their few possessions—a suitcase for clothes, a typewriter for poems, and a sewing machine for making trousers—made the precariousness of their new life tangible. They also stitched two-handled bags from cheap calico, copying a model from an old issue of Paris Match: each bag cost one ruble to make and sold for three.

The city’s first impression was hardship. During the coldest winter of the decade, the couple wore layer upon layer and remained cold; at the cafeteria, they scraped leftover mashed potatoes and sausage skins from dirty plates. Moscow also offered a counterworld of artistic access. The painter Brusilovsky, established in the capital after coming from Kharkov, gave them protection and brought them into his large, warmly furnished studio. He directed Limonov toward Arseny Tarkovsky’s poetry seminar, advising him to ask for Rita because entry to the crowded gathering depended on knowing someone inside. Moscow thus appears as both a system of restrictions and a place whose literary circles could be approached through personal connections.

The city’s public spaces also became sites of dissent. In August 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the Prague Spring, eight dissidents demonstrated on Red Square. Vadim Delaunay, whom the narrator had met as a boy, carried a placard bearing the words FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS. The demonstrators were arrested and sentenced; Delaunay received two and a half years in prison. The square’s political significance is sharpened by the contrast between its monumental visibility and the small number of people willing to protest there.

The Return to a Changed City

Limonov returned to Moscow in December 1989, fifteen years after leaving the Soviet Union with Tanya. The journey into the city recalled the earlier departure: then, he had lain hungover in a car with his head on Tanya’s knees as snow fell; now the snow was falling again, but he was alone. Invited back with other émigrés and treated as a prominent guest, he arrived in business class and was taken to the Hotel Ukraina, one of Moscow’s Stalinist skyscrapers. Its immense lobby, noisy with hustlers and visitors, did not supply the solemn atmosphere of power he had expected. His suite was lavish by Soviet standards but dim and unwelcoming.

The hotel also made the altered rules of contact newly visible. In the past, calling friends from abroad could put them in danger; now, it seemed possible to call anyone. Yet Limonov had brought almost no useful numbers. He tried the one he had for Natasha’s mother, without success at first, and wondered whether old friends might gather at an event in Izmailovo Park. The gap between a changed communications system and his own poor preparation left him isolated in the city he had once assumed he would never see again.

Walking outside, he found Moscow gray, dismal, and inhospitable. He crossed broad avenues through underground passages crowded with people and dirty water, past kiosks selling cheap food and clothing. The subway stations, in contrast, seemed like palaces. He revisited places associated with his relationship with Tanya, including Novodevichy Cemetery and the building where he had once slashed his wrists. He remembered Tanya’s poodle and considered calling her in Madrid, but could not imagine saying anything other than that he had come to take her back. The old city remained legible through private memory even as its present-day streets felt strange to him.

At Izmailovo Park, a large audience gathered for an event organized by Yulian Semyonov. Limonov had long wanted to command the attention of thousands, but understood that many had come for the glamour of anything Western and for Semyonov’s publicity, not for him. Onstage, the returning guests were introduced as dynamic figures ready to help rebuild the country; newspaper coverage had inflated their fame abroad. Limonov played the role that publicity had prepared for him, presenting himself as a former bum and American multimillionaire’s butler who had reached elite society without being impressed by it. The event gave him a public platform while making the audience’s interest—and its limits—plain.

The Capital as a Political Battleground

Moscow’s political meaning shifted sharply during the failed August 1991 coup. Boris Yeltsin organized resistance from the parliament building known in the city as the White House. Crowds gathered there, built barricades, and placed their bodies between the building and the threat of force. A photograph of Yeltsin standing on a tank outside the White House became the defining image of those days. The account recalls soldiers backing away and young women placing flowers in rifle barrels; the coup’s defeat brought relief that political freedom would continue.

Two years later, the White House became the center of another confrontation. In September 1993, Limonov was in Moscow when Yeltsin announced the dissolution of the Duma. Viktor Alksnis called to tell him that patriots were gathering at the building, and Limonov left after finishing a bowl of broth. He initially came and went freely, but left the next day to shower, change, and urge Alexander Dugin to join the opposition. Dugin chose to watch events on television. By the time Limonov returned, the siege had begun: the electricity and telephones had been cut, and riot police blocked access. Limonov spent the night trying to reach the building, moving among trucks and armed soldiers, but remained outside as candles lit its windows.

The siege lasted ten days. Limonov regretted leaving and felt out of place both behind the barricades and at home watching television. On October 3, he joined several hundred thousand demonstrators supporting the insurgents, accompanied by the young Ukrainian student Taras Rabko. The crowd’s slogans included antisemitic and racist abuse, which Limonov considered both stupid and damaging to the cause. When riot police opened fire and beat demonstrators, young people recognized him and shielded him with their bodies. After Alexander Rutskoy called for a march on the Kremlin and the seizure of Ostankino Television Tower, Limonov and Rabko boarded a bus heading there. Moscow’s streets, otherwise deserted, became a route into a struggle over who could command the news and the state.

An Opposition City and a Private Stage

The Moscow of the later chapters is a city of guarded apartments and political performance. When the narrator arranged to meet Limonov in 2006, two party militants collected him in a black Volga with tinted windows and took him across the city to a small, dark apartment. Limonov, they explained, moved among several apartments, kept irregular hours, and did not go out without bodyguards drawn from party members. The clandestine arrangements made an opposition leader resemble both a hunted dissident and the head of an underground organization. At their meeting, Limonov stood in a spare office with its curtains drawn, alert and formally distant.

The city also contained the small circle of people who opposed the government openly. After Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in October 2006, the narrator visited Novaya Gazeta and human-rights offices, as well as committees organized by mothers of soldiers killed or wounded in Chechnya. These poorly lit rooms, equipped with old computers, housed a thin network of activists who knew one another and formed nearly the whole democratic opposition described in the account. Their limited numbers stood against the indifference of expatriates who believed that few Russians cared about formal liberties so long as they could become rich.

By 2009, the meeting protocol had changed but the guarded life continued. A party member met the narrator at a subway station and escorted him on foot to Limonov’s apartment. The elevator was broken, so they climbed to the ninth floor of a modest building. Inside, a table, a chair, and a single bed were almost the only furnishings. Limonov had been fined 500,000 rubles after criticizing Moscow’s judges and still owed most of the amount. He was also organizing Strategy 31, which drew on the constitutional right to demonstrate: activists gathered on Triumfalnaya Square on the thirty-first day of months with thirty-one days. Usually about a hundred demonstrators faced five times as many police, and arrests regularly sent Limonov back to prison for a few days. The capital remained the place where his public ambitions met the material limits imposed on them: a crowded square, a disproportionate police presence, and a bare apartment from which he continued to organize.