The 1917 Russian Revolution

The 1917 Russian Revolution is a recurring measure of political legitimacy in the book, not a self-contained historical episode. Its meaning shifts with the collapse of the Soviet order: a revolution once commemorated as a founding triumph becomes, in public argument, both a crime and a catastrophe. The struggle over that contradiction informs the identities of the new political movements, the fate of old symbols, and the competing claims of writers and activists to speak for Russia’s past.

A Past That Cannot Be Settled

The Revolution’s most visible afterlife is a crisis of historical judgment. In Moscow, demonstrations bring together pensioners reduced to begging, unpaid soldiers, nationalists angered by the liquidation of the empire, Communists mourning a time when everyone was poor but equal, and people disoriented by the loss of a shared account of history. Their confusion is not presented as simple nostalgia: the country continues to celebrate the October Revolution while also describing it as a crime and a catastrophe. The same anniversary therefore asks the public to honor and condemn the event at once, making it difficult to know which figures count as heroes and which as traitors.

That instability becomes a political resource. The book describes how the end of Soviet rule left people arguing over whether the ideals their parents had been taught to love were now to be repudiated and placed on a par with Nazism. Among young National Bolsheviks, this repudiation produces disgust, but not a settled political program. Their inherited attachment to Soviet ideals is caught between a condemned revolutionary past and a post-Soviet order they regard as corrupt and disoriented.

Symbols at the Threshold of Dissolution

The Revolution also returns through competing political symbols. After Mikhail Gorbachev signs a measure described in the surrounding narrative, the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in Lubyanka Square is toppled. The red flag gives way to the tricolor associated in the account with the 1917 provisional government. The sequence marks a reversal in the public landscape: symbols of Soviet state power are removed, while an earlier, pre-Soviet political emblem is raised in their place.

The account then moves from symbolic change to the dissolution of the state built after the Revolution. At a hunting lodge in Belovezhskaya Forest, Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich meet in secret. They reason that because their three republics created the Soviet Union in 1922, they have the right to dissolve it. The scene is narrated through vodka, a sauna, and the absence of any prepared plan for what should replace the Union; Yeltsin becomes so drunk that the other two have to carry him to bed. The Revolution’s legacy is thus framed not as a settled constitutional inheritance but as an authority invoked during an improvised act of political unmaking.

The Return of Historical Authority

The book sets Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s return against this changing public memory. He and Eduard Limonov left their homeland in the spring of 1974 and returned twenty years later, but their reputations developed in sharply different ways. Solzhenitsyn had spent his years abroad writing The Red Wheel, a cycle of novels about the origins of the 1917 Revolution. His return by rail from Vladivostok to Moscow, filmed by the BBC and accompanied by stops to hear villagers’ grievances, was staged as a historic homecoming.

The reception, however, revealed how far the cultural conditions had changed. Readers who had once struggled to believe they had the right to read The Gulag Archipelago were now described as exhausted by books about concentration camps. Bookshops favored international bestsellers and practical guides; literary readers mocked The Red Wheel without having read it. Communists nostalgic for the Soviet past regarded Solzhenitsyn as a criminal, while democrats regarded him as an ayatollah. Young people barely distinguished him from Leonid Brezhnev among the icons of the old order. His return therefore did not restore a shared account of the Revolution or its consequences. It exposed the distance between the moral authority he had carried abroad and a society whose tastes and political categories had moved on.

Revolutionary Memory as Political Mobilization

Limonov’s politics take shape within the same unresolved history. At opposition demonstrations, he denounces self-described 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 a year of supposed democracy than in seventy years of communism, and tells the crowd that anger is building and that they should prepare for civil war. The speech draws strong applause; the book presents Limonov as finding, among the demonstrators, a public recognition he had once longed for while poor and alone in New York.

For younger National Bolsheviks, the political force of this language lies partly in a claim about inheritance. They see their parents as modest, proud people who have been defeated, impoverished, and stripped of pride. In the movement’s provincial branches, Limonov’s presence turns that grievance into a shared affiliation. The young members listen to him through the night; his stark division between what is magnificent and what is monstrous gives them a forceful vocabulary, while their loyalty and readiness to endure prison distinguish their moral code from the surrounding order. Their attachment to the Revolution’s legacy is therefore bound to personal allegiance and collective identity, not simply to a program of historical restoration.

At the party convention, several hundred delegates arrive from across Russia, though the party counts seven thousand members nationally. Finding a venue has been difficult: hosts repeatedly withdraw after apparent police pressure, and participants fear a bomb scare, harassment, or an outright ban. Limonov tells them that Russia is not ready for them to take power, but proposes another arena of action: the former Soviet republics, where he says Russians have been abandoned and marginalized. He points to the Baltic states and Central Asia, identifies Russians in Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, and calls for insurgency and separatist republics. A hundred hands rise when he asks for volunteers to join a canvassing tour of Central Asia. The old imperial space becomes, in this rhetoric, a new frontier for revolutionary action.

A Legacy Recast by Power

The book traces a further change from public mobilization to state suppression. Before the presidential election, the Ministry of Justice passes a law banning extremism and fascism while reserving the right to define those terms. The National Bolshevik Party is told that the law concerns it directly. Limonov meets the minister in a suit and tie, argues that his party has seven thousand adherents while many registered parties are only phantoms, and warns that banning it could push young people toward extremism and terrorism. The minister refuses authorization; the party loses the right to exist legally and faces the prospect of organizing in secret.

This closure contrasts with the earlier formation of The Other Russia, in which Limonov had joined a coalition that included Garry Kasparov. After the movement’s failure in the presidential elections, it no longer exists. Limonov responds by creating Strategy 31, named for Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees the right to demonstrate. On qualifying thirty-first days, demonstrators gather at Triumfalnaya Square; the book describes roughly a hundred protesters facing five times as many police officers, with dozens of arrests and Limonov regularly spending a few days in prison. The Revolution’s contested inheritance persists here as a dispute over who can occupy public space and act in the name of the people. Across commemorations, toppled statues, literary returns, party organizing, and arrests, the book shows that the past remains politically active precisely because no common verdict on it has endured.