Vladimir Putin
LimonovVladimir Putin is the figure against whom Eduard Limonov’s later political life comes into focus: a man with a strikingly similar background and temperament who, unlike Limonov, succeeds in taking power. Emmanuel Carrère’s account presents Putin not simply as an opponent of the opposition but as its unsettling double, able to turn Soviet memory, political discipline, and an appetite for strength into a durable public authority. The book’s opening epigraph gives this double character a compact expression: “Whoever wants the Soviet Union back has no brain. Whoever doesn’t miss it has no heart.”
Identity and Background
Putin was born ten years after Limonov into a family of a similar kind: his father was a junior officer, his mother a factory worker, and the family lived together in a single room in a communal apartment. The portrait emphasizes a childhood shaped by modest circumstances and by the Soviet cult of the fatherland, the Great Patriotic War, and the KGB. Putin is described as a puny, timid boy who, as an adolescent, became a small-time hoodlum. Judo gave that early vulnerability a different direction. He trained with such intensity that friends remembered the fierce cries coming from the gym where he practiced alone on Sundays.
His decision to join the state security organs is presented as romantic rather than merely practical: he wanted to belong to an elite that defended the homeland. This identification persisted into the era of reform. He was suspicious of perestroika and resented those who emphasized the Gulag and Stalin’s crimes, dismissing them as masochists or CIA agents. The collapse of the Soviet empire remained, in the book’s account, not a regrettable transition but the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. That conviction links his public politics to a personal history in which Soviet symbols carry the weight of childhood, belonging, and lost status.
From the Loser Years to Power
The book connects Putin and Limonov through their experience of the upheaval that followed the Soviet collapse. In the disorder of the early 1990s, Putin was among those who had lost out and been swindled; he was reduced to driving a cab. His later public image, however, reverses that position. Once in power, he was photographed bare-chested and muscular, wearing combat trousers with a commando knife at his belt. The pose recalls Limonov’s own cultivated images of masculine toughness, but in Putin’s case it belongs to the ruler who can make strength an attribute of office.
The distinction between the two men is not that one is forceful and the other is not. Carrère portrays both as cold and cunning, convinced that people are wolves and that strength matters more than universal moral principles. Both prefer to inspire fear rather than experience it, and both disdain those who insist that human life is sacred. But Putin’s similar instincts are joined to the authority of the state. Where Limonov’s militant self-fashioning remains a challenge from outside power, Putin can act as the boss: he can influence school textbooks, bring NGOs and liberal opposition figures into line, and make state authority visible. His perfunctory bow at Andrei Sakharov’s tomb sits beside a bust of Dzerzhinsky on his desk, a contrast that condenses the gap between public homage and the security-state tradition he represents.
Political Authority and the Opposition
The book sets Putin’s rule against the hopes invested in the 2008 presidential election. At a press conference, Garry Kasparov presented the approaching election as a historic opening: Putin’s second term was ending, the constitution barred him from running for a third consecutive term, and no officially endorsed successor had yet emerged. Kasparov argued that a gagged media concealed widespread anger about oligarchs, corruption, and the power of the Federal Security Service. A British journalist punctured that expectation by pointing out that the constitutional restriction concerned consecutive terms, not a return after a break.
The later account confirms the journalist’s reading. Putin did not seek a third consecutive term; instead, Dmitry Medvedev became president while Putin became prime minister. Carrère compares the arrangement to a driving-school car with two steering positions: Medvedev occupies the learner’s seat, while Putin sits in the teacher’s place, ready to intervene. The arrangement preserved Putin’s central role without violating the formal restriction. Looking back to the 2012 election, Carrère notes that Putin returned to the presidency and that Medvedev did not confront or displace him. The opposition’s predicted opening thus becomes a demonstration of how constitutional form and political control can coexist.
Limonov’s own opposition continues, but on a much smaller scale. After the movement Drugaya Rossiya failed to establish itself as an electoral force and Kasparov did not run, Limonov created Strategy 31, invoking the constitutional right to demonstrate. On the thirty-first of months that had one, demonstrators gathered at Triumfalnaya Square; there were generally about a hundred protesters and five times as many police officers, with arrests among the demonstrators. Putin’s political order is present here not only in the contrast between ruler and dissident, but in the repeated imbalance between a small public protest and the forces policing it.
Soviet Memory and Political Appeal
Carrère treats Putin’s defense of the Soviet past as central to his connection with the public. Putin insists that the lives of generations who believed in communism, fought for it, or simply lived within it cannot be dismissed as worthless. He acknowledges that terrible acts occurred under communism while resisting its comparison with Nazism and defending its grandeur, heroism, beauty, and innocence. The book links this argument to the way the Soviet past remains entangled with childhood memory: people may associate the system not only with repression but with the world in which their parents lived and in which their own earliest attachments formed.
The opening epigraph therefore works as more than a neat paradox. Its two halves refuse both an uncomplicated restoration and an uncomplicated repudiation of the Soviet Union. Carrère says he believes Putin meant the sentiment sincerely and that it spoke to Russian hearts, including Limonov’s. That judgment complicates a simple account of Putin’s popularity as the product of controlled media alone. The narrative grants his appeal a connection to historical memory and to the injury people feel when their parents’ lives, beliefs, and sacrifices are treated as nothing but failure.
The Double and Limonov’s Predicament
Putin becomes the answer to a recurring question in Limonov’s story: what happens when the kind of forceful, unsentimental man Limonov imagines himself to be actually gains power? Carrère calls him a super-Captain Levitin, connecting the ruler to the figures of authority that poisoned Limonov’s youth. Limonov had believed he had escaped that world; the later rise of Putin suggests that it has returned in a more powerful form. The comparison is not a claim that their lives or political positions are identical. It is a way of showing how close Limonov’s own admiration for strength and contempt for liberal values come to the instincts embodied by the state he opposes.
The difference is decisive: Putin succeeds. Limonov, who does not believe in democracy and human rights as principles, is left occupying the incongruous position of a virtuous opposition figure alongside honest people who do believe in them. Carrère imagines that Limonov would say and do what Putin says and does, or worse, if he held Putin’s place. Yet he does not hold it. The resulting contradiction—an opponent defending values he despises against a ruler whose methods resemble his own—leaves Limonov’s political identity unsettled. Putin’s significance in the book lies partly in that reversal: he is not only the man who defeats the opposition’s hopes, but the successful double who makes Limonov’s unrealized ambitions visible.
