Russia
LimonovRussia is the book’s central and contested landscape: the homeland Eduard Limonov once left believing it would remain frozen in its old form, the country he returned to in 1989, and the setting in which post-Soviet hopes gave way to economic upheaval, war, and increasingly constrained opposition. The narrative moves between Moscow apartments and demonstrations, the institutions of the state, and the memories carried back from exile. Russia is not presented as a single political verdict. Its expatriates, ordinary citizens, reformers, nationalists, and officials offer sharply different explanations of what has happened and what the country can become.
A homeland seen from exile and return
For years, Limonov followed events in the Soviet Union from a distance. He imagined his homeland as hibernating beneath an ice pack: powerful, gloomy, and essentially unchanged. That image comforted him even as life abroad suited him better. The familiar television picture of military parades and decorated leaders seemed to confirm that time had stood still. The end of Leonid Brezhnev’s long period in power, and then the collapse of the Soviet bloc, broke that reassuring continuity.
The book makes the country’s transformation tangible through Limonov’s return. In December 1989, fifteen years after leaving, he travels from the airport into Moscow through falling snow. The journey recalls the departure in February 1974, when he had lain with a hangover in a car, his head on Tanya’s knees, as they watched the buildings and woods recede. Now he returns alone, having lost Tanya, but is received as an invited visitor and travels business class. The outward signs suggest a winner’s homecoming; the remembered departure gives the scene its measure of loss.
The return also exposes a change in public language. A fellow traveler describes the country as having never worked, a judgment Limonov recognizes as new. In the past, people might grumble about bad conditions while taking pride in Gagarin, Sputnik, the army, the size of the empire, and the promise of greater social equality. Under glasnost, the traveler has absorbed a harsher account: that the rulers since 1917 were murderers and that they had ruined the country. The contrast presents Russia as a place where public openness does not simply disclose facts; it changes the stories through which people understand their own past.
Moscow: official power and everyday judgment
Moscow provides the book’s most concentrated picture of the distance between official power and ordinary vulnerability. The narrator hears expatriates and Russian acquaintances dismiss civil-rights activism as a lost cause in a country where formal liberties seem to matter less than the opportunity to get rich. Some French observers, meanwhile, regard as widely held in France the belief that the murder of Anna Politkovskaya was ordered by the Federal Security Service, or ultimately by Vladimir Putin. The account reports these views as part of a political argument, not as proof of who ordered the killing.
That argument sits beside accounts from women worn down by repeated reports of nighttime kidnappings, victims carried away in unmarked cars, and soldiers tortured by their own superiors. Again and again, they speak of justice denied. Corruption in the police and army is described as something people have learned to accept; what provokes particular anger is the authorities’ arrogance when ordinary citizens demand explanations, and their apparent confidence that they will face no consequences. The scene turns the abstract question of political freedom into a matter of what happens when a citizen asks the state to account for itself.
Moscow also refuses the assumption that Limonov’s politics can be understood from his slogans alone. While researching him, the narrator discusses him with more than thirty people, from people encountered in taxis to artists, journalists, and editors who live comfortably enough to buy furniture at IKEA and read the Russian edition of Elle. Not one speaks against him or raises fascism when asked about his flags and slogans; some treat the narrator as prudish. Their evident interest does not mean that they would vote for Limonov. Rather, their reactions reveal that his public image in Russia cannot be reduced to the alarm or disapproval he provokes elsewhere.
Politkovskaya’s writing supplies another unexpected connection between Moscow’s dissident politics and Limonov’s movement. The narrator discovers that she had defended forty National Bolshevik Party militants accused of occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices while shouting against Putin. They received lengthy prison sentences. Politkovskaya described them as young people of courage and integrity, among the few who could inspire hope for the country’s moral future. Her defense complicates any simple division between a liberal journalist and a nationalist opposition: in this instance, she recognizes political courage in people whose cause might otherwise have seemed alien to her readers.
Reform, wealth, and the crisis of the 1990s
The account traces the post-Soviet crisis through both political aspiration and household consequences. Limonov’s mother regards Boris Yeltsin as the figure who embodied a popular desire for freedom: a man formed by communism who broke with it, followed Andrei Sakharov’s coffin beside Yelena Bonner, defended the White House, and outlawed the Communist Party. Her view sets Yeltsin against Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she sees not as the liberator of the country but as an overwhelmed leader who tried to brake forces he had helped unleash. The disagreement is also a dispute over agency: whether Russia’s political opening was deliberately achieved or forced upon its leaders by events and people beyond their control.
Economic reform soon tests the promise attached to that opening. Price liberalization brings inflation of 2,600 percent. On September 1, 1992, vouchers worth ten thousand rubles are mailed to every Russian citizen over one year old, each voucher intended to represent a share in national wealth and to turn citizens into investors. By the time they arrive, inflation has made them nearly worthless; a voucher might buy a bottle of vodka. Many recipients sell them to people ready to exploit the new market. Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky become examples of the small group that rapidly amasses enormous wealth. They enter a business world that had been forbidden and then abruptly opened, without established rules, laws, banking, or taxation.
The gains and losses are sharply unequal. While millions begin enriching themselves through shock therapy, far more people are driven into hardship as prices rise and salaries do not keep pace. Limonov’s father, a former Soviet security officer, can scarcely buy two pounds of sausage with his pension. Another former intelligence officer, repatriated from Dresden after East Germany disappears, loses both job and home and resorts to black-market taxi driving in Leningrad. The book identifies him as Vladimir Putin, then forty and, like Limonov, convinced that the end of the Soviet empire was the century’s greatest catastrophe. Economic dislocation thus becomes part of the background from which a future national leader emerges, rather than an impersonal statistic.
By the 1996 presidential election, the damage has become a crisis of legitimacy. The first wave of privatization and shock therapy has plunged the country into chaos, and many people regard the years since 1989 as a historic calamity. Yeltsin appears to have lost control; isolated in the Kremlin with his family and security chief, he drinks through what the narrator describes as serious black moods. The oligarchs, meanwhile, have a direct stake in keeping him in office. Their loans-for-shares scheme lends money to an empty state in exchange for shares in major, still-unprivatized resources such as gas and petroleum; if the loans are not repaid after a year, the lenders can take the assets. Because that deadline falls after the election, they work to ensure Yeltsin wins.
Berezovsky persuades six other powerful oligarchs to unite behind Yeltsin, even though their private forces are killing one another in disputes. Together they deploy their money and control of newspapers, radio, and television to make the election a choice between Yeltsin and chaos. The campaign also floods the airwaves with documentaries about the Gulag, the famine organized by Stalin in Ukraine, and the Katyn Massacre, countering any renewed idealization of communism. Russia’s political contest is therefore fought not only at the ballot box but through concentrated economic and media power, over which memories the public will be asked to fear or recover.
War, nationalism, and opposition
The country’s conflicts extend beyond Moscow and reshape the meaning of Russian power. At the start of the siege of Grozny in December 1994, the Russian army is described as carrying out 4,000 detonations per hour, compared with 3,500 a day at the height of the siege of Sarajevo. Grozny is laid waste as Vukovar had been. Chechen fighters answer with guerrilla warfare and terrorist actions on Russian territory, while forty thousand young conscripts, including Zakhar Prilepin, find themselves trapped in a war whose promised swift victory has turned into a prolonged catastrophe. The scale and speed of destruction make the state’s military reach inseparable from the human cost of its campaigns.
Limonov’s political response is staged in the streets. He attends demonstrations in Moscow and is recognized by readers of Dyen, who greet him as evidence that Russia is not lost. At one rally, invited by his comrade Viktor Alksnis, he takes a megaphone and denounces the supposed democrats as profiteers who have betrayed the blood shed by their fathers in the Great Patriotic War. He argues that people have suffered more in one year of democracy than in seventy years of communism and urges them to prepare for civil war. The crowd applauds after each sentence. His speech is not presented as unique among the platform speeches, but the response gives it force: the language of betrayal and historical injury meets an audience already prepared to hear it.
This politics becomes organizational as well as theatrical. At the National Bolshevik Party convention, several hundred delegates arrive from across Russia, out of a total membership described as seven thousand. Some sleep in a bunker; others are placed in a workers’ hostel. Finding a venue is difficult because owners who initially agree later withdraw, apparently after police pressure. The convention nevertheless opens, and Limonov stands on the podium beaming after three years of distributing the party newspaper and building its presence. Its program extends beyond the Russian state’s borders: it portrays Russians in former Soviet territories as abandoned and dispossessed, and calls for support for insurgencies and separatist republics in the Baltic countries and Central Asia. Russia’s imperial past is recast as a present grievance and a proposed political mission.
The state’s return and the narrowing of political space
The book’s later Russia is marked by a reversal: the post-Soviet opening that enabled new parties and public movements also gives way to the state’s power to define which forms of opposition may exist. Before a presidential election, the Ministry of Justice passes a law banning extremism and fascism while reserving the right to define those terms. Limonov puts on a suit and tie and argues his case directly to the minister, who appears receptive and respectful of his talent. After the deadline for authorization passes, however, the answer is no: the National Bolshevik Party is denied the right to exist. Limonov returns for another meeting and challenges the government over the recognition of 130 parties while his own is refused. The formal procedure and the result expose the limits of appeal within a system whose authorities control the terms of legality.
The state’s reach is also rendered through imprisonment. Limonov is held in Lefortovo, a secretive prison near Moscow that the account associates with high-profile political prisoners and state enemies. For fifteen months he lives under strict isolation, initially without knowing what he and his companions are accused of. He has seen no lawyer and receives no visitors; he cannot tell when the trial will begin, what people outside know of his arrest, or whether those closest to him know where he is. His transfer to Saratov takes place aboard a government Antonov aircraft under an imposing police escort. There he must repeatedly recite the criminal-code articles under which he is imprisoned, a stark contrast with the uncertainty of his first months in Lefortovo.
Public representation supplies another kind of confinement. After the September 11 attacks, Channel One Russia airs a film presenting the National Bolshevik Party as an Al-Qaeda branch and an Altai hut as a secret training camp for hundreds of fanatics. The camp’s imagined scale, the narrator notes, reflects Limonov’s dream rather than reality. Prisoners who have watched the film begin calling him bin Laden, a nickname that flatters him but also makes his position more dangerous. The episode shows how television can turn an opposition movement into a security threat in the public imagination, while the state’s account circulates beyond the prison walls.
In the final political scenes, Limonov’s opposition persists in a more limited form. After Garry Kasparov’s movement, The Other Russia, ceases to exist following its failure in the presidential elections, Limonov creates Strategy 31, named for the constitutional article guaranteeing the right to demonstrate. Its supporters gather on Triumfalnaya Square on the thirty-first day of months that have one. Usually about a hundred demonstrators face five times as many police officers; several dozen demonstrators are arrested, and Limonov regularly spends a couple of days in prison. The right remains written in the constitution, but exercising it produces a repeated cycle of assembly, arrest, and brief detention.
The narrator finally sets Limonov’s predicament beside Vladimir Putin’s rise. Limonov had thought himself free of the Captain Levitin figures who poisoned his youth, only to find a super-Captain Levitin in Putin. Yet the comparison does not make the two men interchangeable. Limonov writes against Putin as a tyrant, while the narrator argues that Putin’s appeal also answers a deep injury: the belief that generations of Russian lives, sacrifices, and convictions have been dismissed as worthless. Limonov’s tragedy, in this reading, is that he ends up defending democracy and human rights alongside honest people whose values he has long despised, while not believing in those values himself. Russia remains the arena of that contradiction: a country where opposition can be celebrated, criminalized, or absorbed into the very historical grievances that brought it into being.
