Ukraine’s Orange Revolution

Ukraine’s Orange Revolution is presented in Emmanuel Carrère’s account chiefly as a political model, not as a narrated sequence of events. During an interview, Eduard Limonov says he no longer dreams of an armed uprising: what he wants instead is a pacifist, democratic revolution like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. The reference marks a decisive change in the revolution he imagines, while also revealing how he understands the danger facing opposition in Russia.

Limonov’s political reference point

Limonov’s earlier revolutionary self-image had been more violent. Carrère recalls the passages in Diary of a Loser in which Limonov, as a penniless immigrant in New York, fantasized about buying weapons and staging an uprising. Decades later, Carrère sees him inhabiting the role of professional revolutionary, but Limonov draws a distinction between that youthful scenario and his present objective. He tells Carrère that the time is no longer right for an armed uprising and points instead to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution as a recent example of a peaceful, democratic alternative.

The book gives no account of the Orange Revolution’s participants, events, or outcome. Its significance here lies in the use Limonov makes of it: it supplies a model for political change that does not depend on an armed revolt. Limonov says the Kremlin fears such a revolution above all and will stop at nothing to crush it. That is his characterization of the threat, presented within Carrère’s account of their conversation rather than as an independent explanation of the revolution.

Opposition, repression, and public perception

Limonov presents himself as a hunted opponent of the authorities. He tells Carrère that he was beaten with baseball bats and had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. He also describes his name as appearing on a list of “enemies of Russia,” alongside Anna Politkovskaya, the former FSB officer Litvinenko, and Khodorkovsky. In this telling, the peaceful democratic possibility represented by Ukraine’s Orange Revolution is inseparable from the personal danger faced by those Limonov regards as its Russian counterparts.

Carrère’s account also records how sharply perceptions of Limonov’s movement could differ. After discovering that Anna Politkovskaya had defended forty National Bolshevik Party militants sentenced for occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices, Carrère is struck by her description of them as courageous people who might inspire hope for Russia’s moral future. Yelena Bonner likewise supported the militants, while suggesting that the party’s name carried unpleasant associations. These reactions complicate Carrère’s earlier view of Limonov as a fascist leading skinheads, though they do not make the Orange Revolution and the occupation the same event.

A model beside a different strategy

Elsewhere in the book, Limonov’s political program extends beyond the prospect of peaceful democratic change. At a National Bolshevik Party convention, he tells delegates that the moment to take power in Russia has not arrived. He instead proposes stirring insurgency and fostering separatist republics in former Soviet territories, naming the Baltic countries and Central Asia as targets. His appeal to the Orange Revolution therefore sits alongside a distinct, more confrontational strategy; the book presents both as parts of his shifting political outlook, not as a single course of action.

The party’s subsequent circumstances sharpen the contrast between political aspiration and institutional constraint. The Ministry of Justice refuses to authorize the National Bolshevik Party, which Limonov says has seven thousand adherents, and informs him that it no longer has the right to exist. Later, after the coalition The Other Russia has ceased to exist, he forms Strategy 31 around the constitutional right to demonstrate. Its rallies on Triumfalnaya Square typically draw about a hundred demonstrators against five times as many police officers, and Limonov is regularly detained for a couple of days. These later episodes are not consequences of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in Carrère’s account; they show the Russian opposition setting in which its example had resonated.

Significance in the narrative

The reference to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution creates a tension between Limonov’s revolutionary persona and his stated preference for a pacifist, democratic transformation. Carrère first frames the exchange through the striking correspondence between Limonov’s old fantasies and his later political role, then lets Limonov revise that image by rejecting armed insurrection as the present objective. The revolution matters in the narrative as a standard against which Limonov’s evolving ambitions—and the dangers he attributes to the Russian state—can be read.