Sovershenno sekretno

Sovershenno sekretno, also known as Top Secret, is the weekly newspaper Yulian Semyonov founded during perestroika. A highly successful true-crime tabloid that also fed a publishing business, it became a powerful publicity machine: it helped bring Eduard Limonov’s writing to a Soviet readership and staged his return as a literary celebrity, even as its promotion exposed the gap between the image it sold and the audience’s actual knowledge of him.

A tabloid and a publishing enterprise

Semyonov created Sovershenno sekretno in the fever of perestroika as a newspaper devoted to true crime. The paper proved extraordinarily successful. Alongside it, Semyonov established a publishing house that issued commercial novels as well as the complete works of George Orwell, placing mass-market publishing and an opening to previously unfamiliar writing under the same commercial umbrella.

That enterprise gave Limonov a route back into publication in his home country. After Limonov had finished Ours Was a Great Epoch, a newspaper employee collected his writing samples on Semyonov’s behalf. The book appeared in a print run of 300,000 copies, and Limonov was invited to Moscow with two other guests. The sequence links the paper’s editorial reach to a concrete change in Limonov’s career: a manuscript about his childhood became a large-scale domestic publication, not merely a text circulated among a small literary circle.

Manufacturing a Western literary star

At a cultural event in Izmailovo Park, Semyonov presented his guests as dynamic, creative people returning to help rebuild the country. The audience, however, had little independent information about them. For the preceding two weeks, Sovershenno sekretno had promoted one guest as a major Western star and another as a celebrated Western crooner, although neither reputation reflected what readers could actually know about their work. The paper’s publicity created the occasion’s excitement while also making that excitement feel staged.

Limonov was featured in a two-page spread as a kind of literary rock star. He understood that the crowd was drawn not simply to him but to anything from the West, amplified by Semyonov’s name and the newspaper’s own sensational brand, which included naked women and stories about Ukrainian cannibals. When questioned onstage, Limonov played up the persona the paper had helped construct: a former bum and American multimillionaire’s butler who had reached the jet set without being impressed by it. He also corrected a false claim about his former wife and, noticing that the audience responded to her marriage to a Spanish marquis, resolved to repeat that detail when useful. The publicity gave him a platform, but its distortions also imposed a role he chose to perform selectively.

The newspaper beyond the platform

Sovershenno sekretno’s reach appears again on an eighteen-hour train journey, where a passenger across from Limonov reads the paper. Limonov suspects the man might recognize him because his photograph had appeared in the previous week’s issue; the passenger does not. Instead, he recounts a newspaper story about a girl chained outside in extreme cold, so badly frostbitten that her limbs had to be amputated, and then subjected to further abuse after being sent home. The episode presents the paper not just as a route to celebrity but as a carrier of brutal stories into ordinary conversation.

The conversation turns from the reported crime to the country’s condition. The passenger sees everything as having failed, rejecting the older, more affirmative account of Soviet life that had rested on achievements such as Gagarin, Sputnik, military power, and the scale of the state. Limonov connects this collapse of confidence to glasnost: the new openness has brought ordinary people the ideas that those who governed since 1917 were murderers and that they had ruined the country. In this scene, the tabloid’s crime story opens onto a broader change in public language and historical feeling. Sovershenno sekretno is at once a sensational newspaper, a vehicle for literary promotion, and part of the media landscape through which the post-Soviet sense of national failure becomes speakable.