Red Army

The Red Army is presented as more than a fighting force: it is an institution whose internal system of political supervision becomes a template for control beyond the military. Its history also enters the book through sharply different personal memories: cultural work among soldiers, wartime changes of allegiance, and the dramatic rise of Leon Trotsky, whose career fascinates Eduard Limonov.

Command and Political Supervision

During the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, as commander of the Red Army, pressed members of the former imperial armed forces into service. These men were professional soldiers and weapons specialists, but their bourgeois backgrounds made them suspect in the new order. Trotsky established political commissars to control them, countersign their orders, and shoot them if they showed signs of resistance.

The arrangement is described as the origin of the principle of dual administration: one person performs a task while another ensures that it conforms to Marxism-Leninism. The principle then spread from the army into society. The narrative emphasizes the logic’s self-replicating quality: once one official is assigned to supervise another, a further supervisor is needed to oversee the first, with oversight multiplying in turn. The Red Army thus supplies a model not only of command, but of a political system organized around suspicion and surveillance.

Soldiers’ Lives and Wartime Loyalties

The military’s presence in Venyamin Savenko’s life is also rendered through routine rather than combat. During the war, he served as a junior NKVD orderly stationed in front of a factory. In peacetime, as a junior lieutenant, he organized cultural and leisure activities for soldiers, including dance parties on Red Army Day. He played guitar, liked to sing, and put clear polish on his nails; the portrait joins a modest military career to an unexpectedly dandyish temperament. His work shows the army as a setting for organized everyday life as well as political discipline.

Porphyry’s story gives the army a more unsettled place in wartime memory. He began the war in the Red Army, later joined the Vlasov Army, and ended up guarding a camp in Pomerania. He distinguished the camp from an extermination camp while acknowledging that he had killed several people, without boasting about it. When Eduard Limonov wondered whether he could have done the same, Porphyry assured him that anyone backed into a corner could. His trajectory places service in the Red Army at the beginning of a history that crosses enemy lines and complicates any simple division between fixed identities and wartime actions.

Trotsky’s Legend and Limonov’s Ambition

In New York, Eduard hears an émigré at Novoye russkoye slovo recount Leon Trotsky’s earlier life: the former revolutionary had lived in the Bronx, lectured on world revolution to nearly empty halls, and once bought furniture on installments before disappearing. The tale’s ending transforms its humble details into a political legend: the man who had struggled as an émigré eventually commanded the Red Army and crossed from one front to another in an armored train.

That ascent captivates Eduard despite his childhood having taught him to regard Trotsky as an enemy. Later, reading Trotsky’s collected works with American Trotskyists, he is drawn to the bluntness of revolutionary violence and to the image of Trotsky’s rapid rise from impoverished exile to army leader. The Red Army matters to Eduard here less as an institution he serves than as the endpoint of an imagined destiny: a vehicle for power, action, and historical transformation. The book sets that intoxicating legend against the actual structures of supervision, routine, and divided wartime allegiance that its other episodes reveal.