Post-communist era

The Post-communist era is presented not as a settled passage from dictatorship to democracy, but as a struggle over who may define the new order and what the Soviet past means. Political freedom opens space for opposition, yet economic dislocation, revived national claims, and the persistence of state power repeatedly undermine the promise of liberal transformation. Eduard Limonov’s improbable movement from underground idol and émigré to leader of young militants and, finally, a dissident opponent of Vladimir Putin supplies one route through this unsettled history.

A society in political motion

The era’s instability is registered in Limonov’s successive identities: a young punk in Ukraine, an idol of the Soviet underground, a homeless man, a multimillionaire’s butler in Manhattan, a fashionable writer in Paris, a soldier in the Balkans, and an elderly but charismatic leader of young desperadoes. His life is not offered as a model of the era so much as a measure of its extraordinary social and geographical dislocations. The narrator suspends judgment on whether Limonov is a hero or a scoundrel, but argues that his dangerous, romantic trajectory says something about Russia and about the world since the Second World War.

The political labels attached to Limonov shift as the country changes around him. The narrator initially sees him as a fascist leading skinheads; discovering Anna Politkovskaya’s defense of forty National Bolshevik Party militants unsettles that verdict. The young defendants had occupied and vandalized presidential-administration offices while demanding Vladimir Putin’s departure, and received long prison sentences. Politkovskaya described them as courageous people of integrity who offered hope for the country’s moral future. Yelena Bonner likewise expressed support for the National Bolsheviks, despite reservations about the party’s name. The contrast shows how a movement the narrator had dismissed as beyond the pale could also be understood by prominent democratic and dissident figures as resistance to authoritarianism.

Contested claims to legality

The conflict over post-Soviet legitimacy becomes literal at the White House. The building, once an international emblem of Boris Yeltsin and the democrats, draws thousands of patriots as resistance gathers against him. Some are fascists, but they present themselves as defenders of constitutional order and accuse democrats of preparing dictatorship in democracy’s name. The rebellion is led by Ruslan Khasbulatov, chairman of the Duma, and Alexander Rutskoy, the republic’s vice president, both of whom had stood beside Yeltsin two years earlier. Rutskoy and Khasbulatov convene the dissolved parliament, declare its dissolution unconstitutional, depose Yeltsin, name Rutskoy president, and occupy the building. They claim to represent the people and say they will leave only if driven out at bayonet point.

Limonov joins the crowd and spends the night moving excitedly between meetings as the rebels talk, drink, shout, write communiqués, and form a government. At three in the morning he gains an audience with Rutskoy, addresses him as president, and asks which side the army will take. Western governments have declared support for Yeltsin, a development that appears to unsettle the general. Limonov argues that Western countries will back Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev because they want a weakened Russia, but frames the confrontation as an elected parliament resisting dictatorship rather than as a coup. He then insists that the decisive action will occur in the White House itself and asks whether the rebels have weapons. In this episode, the language of democracy and constitutional legality no longer belongs securely to one political camp.

The party, its base, and its new frontier

The National Bolshevik Party turns disaffection into an organization. At its convention, several hundred delegates arrive from across Russia, although the party has about seven thousand members in total. Many sleep in a workers’ hostel; securing a venue is difficult because prospective hosts withdraw after reconsidering, apparently under police pressure. The anticipated bomb scare, harassment, or outright ban does not prevent the convention from opening. For Limonov, the gathering confirms that years of distributing the party newspaper at railway stations have produced a community of real people rather than merely a readership.

The delegates are not the idealized paramilitary figures imagined by Dugin, but provincial adolescents marked by poverty and social awkwardness. Limonov gives them a style, an ideal, and a sense of belonging; they respond with devotion. Their arrival, including young women among them, makes the convention feel to him like a new political beginning. Yet he tells them that the moment for taking power has not arrived. Instead of joining coalitions with Orthodox anti-Semites or Stalinists, he proposes action on the periphery of Russia, in territories where Russians were left exposed after the Soviet Union’s collapse. He names the Baltic countries and Central Asia as targets for agitation in support of separatist republics, pointing to Russians in Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. A hundred delegates volunteer for a planned tour of Central Asia, far more than the ten or so Limonov had invited. The party’s politics thus combine opposition at home with a project to reclaim influence beyond Russia’s borders.

That project unfolds beside a growing divide inside the party. Dugin’s followers look down on Limonov’s recruits as an unruly mass of rock fans and brawlers, while Zakhar Prilepin dislikes the party’s references to the Freikorps and its fascist associations. Dugin eventually leaves to establish a geostrategic research center, leaving the party’s more populist membership to itself. In Prilepin’s novel about the National Bolsheviks, a sympathetic teacher regards the militants’ stunts—tagging trains, unfurling banners on hard-to-reach monuments, and throwing tomatoes at a governor—as immature but courageous, since actions that might earn a fine in Western Europe can bring prison sentences in Russia. The teacher fears that talk of the fatherland, empire, and sacred causes leads toward trouble; the young militant rejects the prospect of a normal life organized around comfort and security. Their exchange places the movement between protest as a challenge to repression and nationalism as a potentially dangerous answer to social uncertainty.

Market reform and the return of the Communist vote

The era’s economic disappointments transform electoral politics. Five years after Yeltsin made the Communist Party illegal, polls indicate that many voters are prepared to support it, disillusioned with democracy, the market, and the injustices associated with both. Its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, does not campaign on restoring the Gulag or the Berlin Wall. He presents a cautious program against corruption and inequality, appeals to national pride and Russian Orthodoxy, and even casts Jesus as the first Communist. The narrator’s pointed example of elderly people dying of hunger and cold makes the social appeal of promises to narrow the gap between rich and poor difficult to dismiss.

The oligarchs’ fear of Zyuganov is tied to their own economic interests. They have arranged the loans-for-shares scheme: banks lend money to an impoverished state in exchange for shares in major, not-yet-privatized industries, including natural gas and petroleum. If the state fails to repay the loans after a year, the lenders can take control of the assets. Because that deadline falls after the presidential election, the oligarchs need Yeltsin to remain in power rather than risk Zyuganov repudiating the arrangement. The electoral contest is therefore bound up with the transfer of the country’s resources, not simply with competing political ideals.

A narrowed opposition

The promise of political participation contracts as the state moves against the National Bolshevik Party. Before the presidential election, the Ministry of Justice passes a law banning extremism and fascism while reserving the right to define those terms. Limonov meets the minister in a suit and tie and argues that neither label fits him; the minister listens sympathetically, but the party is denied authorization. Limonov points out that Russia has registered many parties, including phantom organizations, while his has seven thousand adherents. He warns that forcing a substantial youth movement underground could push its members toward extremism and terrorism. The minister asks whether this means the party will set off bombs. The exchange captures the state’s power to determine which political actors may exist legally, even as the party’s leader uses that very exclusion to frame his movement as a response to repression.

Later, Limonov creates Strategy 31, named for Article 31 of the constitution, which guarantees the right to demonstrate. On the thirty-first of months with that date, its supporters gather in Triumfalnaya Square. The demonstrations usually draw around a hundred protesters against five times as many police officers, with a few dozen demonstrators arrested; Limonov consequently spends a couple of days in prison on a regular basis. The Other Russia, a coalition formed under the leadership of Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Limonov, has meanwhile disappeared after its failure in the presidential elections, and Kasparov does not attempt to run. Limonov tries to build a national assembly of opposition forces, while Kasparov launches a competing platform. Their rivalry has become muted and personal, measured in part by which man’s website attracts more visitors.

The period’s political reversal is completed by Vladimir Putin’s use of Soviet memory. Limonov writes pamphlets portraying Putin as a tyrant, but also as bland and mediocre; the narrator regards this judgment as mistaken. Putin’s public defense of Soviet experience insists that decades of ordinary people’s lives, beliefs, and sacrifices cannot simply be dismissed as worthless, and rejects treating communism as identical to Nazism. The narrator argues that this message speaks to Russians, including Limonov. Yet Limonov is left in the incongruous position of opposing a leader whose power and historical rhetoric he might have exercised himself, while standing alongside people whose commitments to democracy and human rights he has long despised. The post-communist era’s defining tension is not a clean choice between old and new: its political identities, memories, and claims to legitimacy continually cross and contradict one another.