Ours Was a Great Epoch

Ours Was a Great Epoch is Eduard Limonov’s memoir of his childhood and the book that brought him back to the Soviet Union as a loudly promoted author. Its enormous print run and staged public reception promised a triumphant homecoming; instead, the book exposed a divide between Limonov’s self-invention and the dissident identity others expected of him, while its distribution left its actual readership uncertain.

A childhood book published at home

Limonov had just finished writing Ours Was a Great Epoch when Yulian Semyonov offered to publish him. Semyonov, a hugely successful author of spy novels, had founded the weekly Sovershenno sekretno during perestroika. The newspaper specialized in true crime, and his publishing house issued commercial novels as well as the complete works of George Orwell. Through this operation, Limonov’s account of his childhood appeared in his home country in a print run of 300,000 copies. He was invited to Moscow along with Fedorova and Tokarev.

The publication was more than a book launch: it marked Limonov’s return as a Soviet celebrity promoted by an influential publisher. Semyonov’s publicity presented the guests as major figures from the West, and Limonov was given a two-page spread that cast him as a kind of literary rock star. He had long wanted to command a crowd, but he understood that the audience’s excitement was directed less at him than at anything Western, amplified by Semyonov’s reputation and newspaper. The book’s reception was therefore shaped from the beginning by the difference between the literary stature advertised for Limonov and the reasons the audience had come.

The family history and the charge of apology

The book’s portrayal of Limonov’s family became a point of contention when an underground writer questioned what an apology for the KGB meant coming from a supposed dissident. The narrator sets that accusation against the family history surrounding the book. In Paris, Limonov liked to announce that his father was a Chekist because he knew the label would unsettle listeners; after letting them imagine the worst, he would say that his father had essentially been a gendarme.

The narrator complicates both the provocative label and the defensive correction. Limonov’s father, Venyamin Savenko, had worked as a modest functionary within a system built around supervision and reporting. During the war he served as a simple NKVD orderly stationed in front of a factory. In peacetime he became a junior lieutenant and organized leisure and cultural activities for soldiers, including dances on Red Army Day. He played guitar, liked to sing, and put clear polish on his nails. This account does not erase the security apparatus, but it distinguishes the father’s limited duties from the picture of a major perpetrator that Limonov’s initial announcement might conjure. The controversy over the book thus turns on a real tension: a family story involving state security, told by a writer who deliberately provoked the audience and resisted the moral identity attached to dissidence.

A homecoming staged for an unfamiliar audience

At the event in the cultural center in Izmailovo Park, Semyonov introduced his guests as dynamic, creative people ready to help rebuild the country. The audience had been primed by Sovershenno sekretno to regard Fedorova and Tokarev as major Western stars, although it knew little about them beyond that publicity. Limonov, meanwhile, leaned into the persona assembled for him: a former bum and American multimillionaire’s butler who had reached the heights of the jet set without being impressed by Western luxury. The publicity gave him a platform, but it also set limits on what the audience knew about the man or the book.

An elderly former Gulag prisoner spoke after Limonov, calling for the crimes of the Soviet Union to be fully exposed and describing purges that had touched every family he knew. Limonov was irritated. He wanted to object that his own family had escaped the purges and that this was true of most families familiar to him, but he held back. The scene placed the book beside a competing account of Soviet history: one speaker insisted on the reach of state terror, while Limonov’s family experience did not fit that generalization. The two positions did not resolve into a shared understanding.

The book’s reception and uncertain circulation

The event ended with Limonov signing autographs but no books. Semyonov reassured him that 300,000 copies had been printed, yet Limonov did not see the book for sale and the people around him did not seem to have read it. The narrator connects this mismatch between print run and visibility to the disorder of book distribution in Russia. On another visit, a Russian publisher treated the shipment of an entire 10,000-copy print run of the narrator’s own novel to a wholesaler in Omsk as a successful deal. The example does not establish where Limonov’s book went; it shows why a large number printed could not guarantee that readers would encounter it.

At the Central House of Writers, the few people who had gathered to see Limonov were veterans of the underground rather than the cultural officials he had expected. One of them had obtained a copy of Ours Was a Great Epoch and confronted him over its apparent defense of the KGB. Limonov answered that he had never been a dissident, only a delinquent. A woman who remembered him as an inspired, long-haired young poet was dismayed by his current appearance, which she associated with a Komsomol secretary. Their exchange made the book a test of competing expectations: for some, its author had betrayed the dissident past; for Limonov, that past was itself a mistaken label. Its public life was consequently defined as much by argument over who he had been as by the childhood he had written about.