National Bolshevik Party Occupation of the Presidential Administration

The National Bolshevik Party Occupation of the Presidential Administration was a direct-action protest that brought forty National Bolshevik Party militants into the offices of Russia’s presidential administration, where they damaged the premises and shouted “Putin must go!” Its significance in Emmanuel Carrère’s account lies not only in the arrests and prison sentences that followed, but in the sharply opposed meanings attached to the action: for some, proof of a fascist movement’s danger; for Anna Politkovskaya and Yelena Bonner, evidence of young people willing to resist political cynicism and defend a democratic future.

The occupation and prosecution

Two years before Carrère encountered Eduard Limonov again, Anna Politkovskaya had covered the trial of forty National Bolshevik Party militants accused of occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices. The demonstrators’ shouted demand, “Putin must go!”, made the action an explicit challenge to the government. The account supplies no detailed explanation of how the occupation was organized or what prompted its participants to choose the building; its concrete record centers on the action, the slogan, and the state’s prosecution of the forty.

The defendants received lengthy prison sentences. In Carrère’s telling, the severity of the punishment became part of the event’s public meaning: the militants were not simply prosecuted for damaging offices, but became figures in a dispute over whether opposition to the government could be treated as legitimate political action. The trial’s consequences therefore extended beyond the defendants themselves, making their case a test of how the movement and its opponents understood dissent.

Politkovskaya and the counter-interpretation

Politkovskaya did not present the forty as thugs. She vigorously defended them, describing them as young, courageous people of integrity and as almost the only people capable of inspiring hope for the country’s moral future. Her account, which Carrère finds while reading a collection of her articles, overturns his expectation that the case is self-evident. He had regarded Limonov as a hideous fascist leading a militia of skinheads; Politkovskaya’s praise forced him to confront a radically different assessment of the militants and their political significance.

Yelena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov and a widely respected dissident, likewise supported the National Bolshevik Party members. She acknowledged that the party’s name carried unpleasant associations for some people and suggested it might be changed, yet otherwise regarded the militants as admirable. The force of this contrast is not that either woman erased the party’s provocative identity, but that their judgments could not be reconciled with Carrère’s assumption that its members were beyond the bounds of democratic opposition. The occupation thus becomes, in the book, an episode whose meaning changes according to who is looking at it.

A wider movement and later prosecutions

The 2005 case sits within a broader account of the National Bolshevik Party’s appeal and methods, but it should not be confused with later trials of other militants. Carrère visits Taganskaya District Court on a separate occasion and watches seven party members tried for hooliganism after a clash with pro-government youths. The accused say the other side started the fight; the defense stresses that they are serious students with good grades and have already spent a year in preventive custody. The judge sentences all seven to two years. As police lead them away, they laugh, clench their fists, and shout “Da, smert’!” Their friends watch with envy, seeing the defendants as heroes.

One of the forty from the presidential-administration case is connected to this later scene through the wife of the clandestine head of the Moscow section: she is in prison because she was among the forty. The distinction between the cases matters. The later courtroom does not establish further details about the occupation; instead, it shows how the earlier prosecution became part of a continuing experience of imprisonment, public solidarity, and militant identity. Carrère describes a constituency of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, drawn to Limonov’s example and to the image of endurance associated with his own imprisonment.

The party’s subsequent organizing gives that constituency a public form. At a convention attended by several hundred delegates, drawn from a movement said to have seven thousand members across Russia, Limonov presents the gathering as proof that years of distributing the party newspaper have produced a community. He also outlines ambitions beyond taking power immediately: the party should mobilize among Russians in former Soviet republics and support separatist republics there. This later program differs from the specific demand voiced during the occupation, but it shows how the party’s opposition developed into a wider, increasingly radical political project.

Suppression, adaptation, and significance

The state later refused to authorize the National Bolshevik Party under a law banning extremism and fascism, leaving the organization without the right to exist legally. Limonov argues that the party has seven thousand adherents and warns that forcing it underground could push young people toward extremism and terrorism. The ban marks a change in the terrain of opposition: the earlier occupation had brought militants into the presidential administration’s offices; later, the party faced the loss of its legal status and the prospect of organizing in secret.

After the failure of The Other Russia movement and the collapse of its electoral prospects, Limonov established Strategy 31, invoking the constitutional right to demonstrate. Its supporters gathered on Triumfalnaya Square on the thirty-first of months that had one, typically numbering about a hundred against roughly five times as many police officers. Dozens were often arrested, and Limonov regularly spent a couple of days in prison. This later protest strategy was not the occupation itself, but it continues the book’s account of opposition meeting an increasingly restrictive state through public action and repeated arrests.

Carrère’s return to the 2005 trial record is therefore also a reassessment of political labels. The occupation remains a disruptive act against the government, followed by lengthy sentences; the evidence does not make it an uncomplicated democratic gesture. But Politkovskaya’s and Bonner’s defenses prevent the event from being reduced to Carrère’s initial image of a fascist militia. Its lasting narrative significance is the unresolved tension between the National Bolshevik Party’s authoritarian and provocative associations and the courage its imprisoned supporters could display in opposing a government they regarded as illegitimate.