Special Purpose Mobile Unit of the Russian Interior Ministry

The Special Purpose Mobile Unit of the Russian Interior Ministry, commonly referred to as OMON, appears as the force deployed against insurgents and demonstrators during the 1993 crisis around the Moscow White House, and later as a police unit used against the National Bolshevik Party. The book does not give an institutional history or describe the unit’s internal organization. Instead, it makes OMON legible through its actions: enclosing a besieged building, breaking up a crowd, and entering a political group’s headquarters. Across these scenes, the unit marks the point where competing claims about constitutional order and public dissent meet state force.

Identity and Narrative Scope

OMON enters the account during the confrontation between Boris Yeltsin and the parliamentary insurgents led by Alexander Rutskoy and Ruslan Khasbulatov. Their supporters gathered at the Moscow White House, a building that had recently symbolized Yeltsin’s triumph, but which now became the insurgents’ stronghold. The book describes the force as detachments of riot police deployed by Yeltsin as the crisis deepened. It does not distinguish particular units or individual officers; OMON is presented collectively, through its role in the operations against the crowd and the occupied building.

The narrative places OMON in a political landscape where labels themselves are contested. The insurgents called themselves constitutionalists, while their opponents and much of the media represented them as fascists and madmen. The narrator acknowledges that some of the patriots supporting the rebellion were fascists, but also argues that their criticism of the democrats’ readiness to impose authority in democracy’s name could not simply be dismissed. OMON’s actions therefore occur within a conflict over who represents legality, not in a scene where the meaning of the confrontation is settled in advance.

The White House and the October Demonstration

After Limonov left the White House to shower, change, and visit Alexander Dugin, the siege began. Yeltsin’s government cut electricity and telephone service and deployed OMON detachments. Limonov tried throughout the night to get back through military trucks and lines of soldiers carrying machine guns, but the approaches were closed. Inside the building, candles replaced the normal lighting; outside, loudspeakers continuously called on the insurgents to surrender. OMON thus forms part of the encirclement that separated the occupied building from its supporters, even as the narrative emphasizes that Limonov’s own ill-timed departure left him on the outside.

On October 3, Limonov joined a demonstration of several hundred thousand people in front of the White House, accompanied by the young Ukrainian student Taras Rabko. The crowd waved red flags and shouted support for the Soviet Union and against Yeltsin. Some demonstrators also used racist slogans, which Limonov rejected as both stupid and likely to dominate Western coverage. When the crowd provoked OMON, the officers opened fire. They pulled demonstrators into their trucks and beat them; young people who recognized Limonov surrounded him and shielded him with their bodies. The sequence turns an enormous political gathering into a direct physical confrontation, while showing the crowd’s mixed rhetoric rather than smoothing it into a single, unambiguous cause.

After Rutskoy called on supporters to march to the Kremlin and seize the Ostankino Television Tower, Limonov and Rabko boarded a bus with armed men bound for the tower. Several thousand people arrived, but only about one in ten was armed, and OMON squadrons were waiting. The account describes the officers opening fire and charging with batons, striking and shooting as they advanced. Limonov threw himself to the ground; the Irish journalist who fell on top of him was dead. Limonov was hit in the shoulder, and Rabko tore his shirt to dress the wound before helping him find cover among trees. They evaded the police in the park and spent the freezing night hidden in bushes. Here OMON’s role is not merely to disperse a demonstration: the assault becomes a massacre in the narrative, witnessed at close range through a dead journalist, a bleeding wound, and the two men’s flight.

Assault on the Building and Aftermath

At dawn, Limonov and Rabko reached a subway station and learned that tanks had surrounded the White House. Rutskoy surrendered that afternoon. The account reports 150 casualties before his surrender and describes the subsequent assault on the building as a bloodbath: OMON entered and hunted the besieged through corridors, offices, and toilets, beating them and, in some cases, killing them. The officially registered dead and injured included insurgents, passersby, elderly people, and children. Limonov and Rabko feared further arrests in nationalist refuges and went to Tver, where they stayed in Rabko’s mother’s apartment for two weeks. OMON is part of the violent resolution of the standoff, but the account also stresses the wider human cost and the uncertainty that followed: after the imposed media version began to crack, familiar distinctions between democratic and reactionary, or good and bad, no longer seemed secure.

Later Raids and Street Policing

The book returns to OMON in its account of pressure on the National Bolshevik Party. After militants distributed a leaflet denouncing the treatment of opposition figures in Kazakhstan at the official premiere of a film by Nikita Mikhalkov, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the party’s bunker. OMON then forced its way in, confiscated property, beat party members, and imprisoned those who happened to be there. The narrator attributes the response to Mikhalkov’s influence as a conviction held by Limonov, rather than establishing it independently. Two party members later threw rotten eggs at Mikhalkov at another screening; they were arrested and sentenced to six months, though the account does not identify the arresting officers as OMON.

In a later description of Limonov’s Strategy 31 demonstrations, roughly one hundred protesters faced a police presence about five times as large, and several dozen demonstrators were arrested. Limonov regularly spent a couple of days in prison. The passage does not specifically name OMON as the officers involved, so these arrests belong to the book’s broader picture of policing opposition rather than to a clearly identified OMON operation.

Narrative Significance

The recurring appearances of OMON connect the 1993 constitutional crisis to the later narrowing of space for organized dissent. At the White House and Ostankino, the unit acts against crowds and an occupied seat of political resistance; at the party bunker, it acts against a small opposition organization. The contexts and scale differ, but the narrative repeatedly presents coercive intervention as the practical force behind official power.

That pattern also complicates the language used by all sides. The crisis is fought in the names of democracy, constitutional order, and popular sovereignty, yet the account follows those claims into scenes of cordons, beatings, gunfire, arrests, and imprisonment. OMON’s significance in the book lies in this contrast: it is less a developed character or institution than a recurring agent through which political conflict acquires bodily consequences.