Tver Oblast becomes the terrain of Eduard Limonov’s attempt to turn the National Bolshevik Party into an electoral force. With Taras Rabko as his sole dependable campaign companion, Limonov travels through the region in December, addressing small gatherings amid provincial poverty and political disillusionment. The campaign’s limits are as revealing as its ambitions: his listeners are not persuaded to vote for him, and he leaves before the election results are announced.

Electoral setting

After the Duma is dissolved and bloodshed makes new elections necessary, Limonov decides to run as a candidate in Tver Oblast. Taras Rabko, a law student, helps him register. The account presents the Yeltsin years as chaotic but still permissive enough that candidates can run for office and express opinions, an opening that Limonov’s party tries to use.

The party’s campaign operation is tiny. Dugin had promised to help but stays in his heated Moscow office, leaving Limonov and Rabko to cover the district together. They begin in an old car with Moldavian plates, lent by an officer they know. When the officer reclaims it, they continue by bus and third-class train, carrying their campaign through the region without the resources of an established party.

Towns and voters

The journey takes them to Rzhev, Staritsa, Demidovo, and other backwaters. Limonov regrets that years abroad and in a large city have left him unfamiliar with the Russian hinterland. The narrator describes these places as devastated by Shock therapy and, beneath their present hardship, little changed from the bleak provincial world associated with Chekhov.

The narrator’s picture of provincial life is partly shaped by having filmed a documentary in Kotelnich, a village offered as a point of comparison rather than a stop on Limonov’s tour. That experience makes imaginable the broken pipes and hotel without running water, shabby restaurants, abandoned small factories, and empty square with its bust of Lenin. With no money for posters, Rabko approaches passersby himself, like a fairground crier, to draw them to Limonov’s rallies.

There are 700,000 voters in the region, but the campaign gathers them in groups of only fifteen to twenty. Most are elderly, poor, and apprehensive retirees. They listen as Limonov recites his Russian nationalist catechism, then ask which side he supports: Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Their question makes the campaign’s problem plain: a political identity framed against the established choices is difficult to explain to people who want a recognizable alternative.

Campaign rhetoric and defeat

Limonov rejects Yeltsin, and he attacks an advertisement for Yegor Gaidar’s party as an insult to nearly all Russians. The commercial depicts a prosperous suburban family going to vote, with the child and dog left out of the choice; to Limonov, that imagined middle-class world bears little relation to the audience he is addressing. His listeners agree with his criticism, yet the narrator notes that they may still vote for the party in power, as people in Russia are accustomed to doing.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky offers a more familiar populist appeal. His promises to those hurt by the reforms include free vodka, imperial reconquest, support for the Serbs, attacks on foreign countries, and a return to the Gulag for perceived enemies. His political pitch is not far from Limonov’s, but Limonov struggles to explain why voters should choose him instead. Declaring himself independent does not clarify his appeal to them.

Yeltsin and Gaidar win, while Zhirinovsky receives a quarter of the vote. Limonov could have run alongside Zhirinovsky and entered parliament, but refuses because he would rather lead a party of three than serve beneath a politician with millions of supporters. He does not wait for the result to be formally announced: furious and humiliated, he returns to Paris.

Significance

Tver Oblast brings the distance between Limonov’s self-conception and electoral politics into focus. He can attract small audiences and denounce the social order they inhabit, but neither his independence nor his nationalist program gives those audiences an easy voting choice. The campaign’s improvised transport, improvised publicity, and intimate meetings with poor retirees stand in contrast to the scale of the electorate he must win over.

The region also makes the consequences of post-Soviet economic change concrete. The campaign passes through towns described as devastated by Shock therapy, where hardship and lost confidence frame the political encounter. Tver Oblast is therefore more than a constituency on Limonov’s route: it is where the promise of unrestricted political participation meets the practical difficulty of persuading people that a marginal party can offer them a way out.