Stalin! Beria! Gulag!

“Stalin! Beria! Gulag!” is a slogan used by young National Bolshevik Party marchers, and one of the book’s most compressed expressions of the movement’s politics: a public invocation of Soviet power and terror that the narration reads as implying, “We want them back!” Its force lies in the collision between the chant’s blunt nostalgia and the history carried by the names it joins together.

The slogan in the street

After the collapse of communism, Eduard Limonov returned to Russia and created the National Bolshevik Party. News reports showed its young supporters marching through Moscow with shaved heads and black clothes, one arm raised in a half-Nazi salute and the other hand clenched in a half-Communist fist. They shouted “Stalin! Beria! Gulag!” while carrying flags modeled on the Third Reich’s, but with the hammer and sickle replacing the swastika. The chant belongs to a carefully visible political performance: its gestures and symbols make the movement’s ideological mixture legible before anyone explains it.

The sequence also frames the slogan through the narrator’s estrangement from Limonov. The man at the head of the columns, gesticulating with a megaphone, is the former friend remembered as an amusing and seductive young man. The chant makes that distance audible: a familiar person now leads a movement whose public language celebrates the very institutions that had shaped Soviet life through coercion.

What the names invoke

The three-part formula compresses a political leader, a state-security figure, and a system of imprisonment into one shouted line. In the book’s account of Soviet historical memory, Beria had headed the NKVD under Stalin. After Beria’s disgrace and execution, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were instructed to cut out his entry and replace it with one on the Bering Strait: the alphabetical order remained, but the person was treated as though he had never existed. The chant reverses that imposed disappearance by loudly restoring Beria’s name to public speech.

That act of restoration is not innocent of the violence the names carry. The narration describes collectivization, famine, purges, killings, and deportations as events that Soviet society was taught not to acknowledge. Against that history, “Stalin! Beria! Gulag!” is not merely a nostalgic list: as the narrator explicitly glosses it, the slogan implies a desire to have them back. Its shock depends on making repression sound like a political allegiance rather than a forbidden memory.

Provocation and political ambiguity

The book presents the slogan as part of a broader repertoire of deliberately disturbing signs: the party’s name, its flag, its shouted formulas, and its militants’ public actions. In Zakhar Prilepin’s later novel about the nazbols, a sympathetic former teacher is uncomfortable with the party’s name, flag, and slogans, but considers the possibility that they are provocations in the manner of the French Surrealists. He finds some militant stunts immature but also courageous, because acts that might bring only a fine in Western Europe can lead to prison in Russia. His response does not erase the slogan’s historical associations; it shows how provocation can be defended as dissent while remaining troubling in what it chooses to invoke.

The chant’s bluntness contrasts with the uncertainty around what the movement wants beyond rejecting the existing order. In the same fictional conversation, Prilepin’s hero is challenged over the party’s cries of “Soviet Union!” and whether they mean a return to communism. The slogans declare allegiance and unsettle their audience, but do not by themselves settle the question of what political program lies behind them.

Narrative significance

The expression gives a voice to the National Bolshevik Party’s fusion of Communist and fascist imagery without making those elements appear harmonious. The raised arm and clenched fist are enacted side by side; the flag substitutes the hammer and sickle for the swastika; and the chant summons Soviet terror as a rallying cry. This deliberate mixture is part of what makes the movement, and Limonov’s transformation into its leader, appear so strange to the narrator and his former circle.

The slogan also concentrates the book’s larger concern with who controls historical memory. Where official Soviet culture could remove Beria from an encyclopedia and instruct people to treat violence as though it had not happened, the marchers bring his name back—but as an emblem of defiance and apparent longing. The result is not a careful recovery of the past. It is a provocation whose political charge comes from making a history of repression publicly repeatable as a chant.