Yeltsin era

The Yeltsin era in Emmanuel Carrère’s account begins with the promise that Russia might break with communism and build a democracy, a market economy, and a new society. It instead becomes a period of violent economic dislocation and political reversal: rapid reform concentrates wealth, impoverishes much of the population, and helps make both a Communist revival and oligarchic intervention possible. The era also changes Eduard Limonov’s place in public life, from a figure many considered politically untouchable to a leader whose opposition movement attracts real support—and, eventually, state prohibition.

From political rupture to economic shock

In the struggle between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, French opinion in the account tends to favor Gorbachev. He is treated as the reforming hero, while Yeltsin appears a rough, ambiguous populist whose role after the 1991 coup leaves observers unsure whether he is a democrat or a potential dictator. Carrère’s mother, by contrast, sees Yeltsin as the man who embodies Russians’ desire for freedom. He had broken with communism, followed Andrei Sakharov’s coffin beside Yelena Bonner, become Russia’s first elected president, defended the White House, and outlawed the Communist Party. The contrast captures the era’s early uncertainty: the same political rupture could look like liberation or a dangerous concentration of power.

Yeltsin’s lack of economic expertise leads him to rely on Yegor Gaidar, a young reformer who places extraordinary faith in the market. Their answer is shock therapy: act quickly, before opponents can stop the transformation. Prices are liberalized, and inflation reaches 2,600 percent. A voucher program meant to give citizens a share of national wealth falters almost as soon as it begins. On September 1, 1992, vouchers worth 10,000 rubles are mailed to every Russian citizen over one year old. By the time they arrive, inflation has made them nearly worthless; some recipients can exchange one for little more than the price of a bottle of vodka. Many sell them cheaply to buyers able to accumulate assets.

Among those who profit are Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who become billionaires within months. Carrère presents their rise not as the outcome of a settled market system but as a sudden transfer of opportunity into a landscape with no effective rules, laws, banking system, or taxation. The new fortunes are one side of the shock; the losses borne by ordinary people are the other.

Unequal transformation and public disillusionment

The Moscow that Limonov sees on visits every few months changes at startling speed. Streets regain their pre-Revolution names; neon signs crowd the city, traffic jams form beside old Ladas and black Mercedes, and goods once carried abroad as gifts become readily available. A McDonald’s on Pushkinskaya Square is followed by a fashionable disco. Restaurants that had seemed dreary and uniform now offer smiling waitresses, Kobe beef, and oysters flown in from the coast of Brittany. The figure of the new Russian—cash-rich, brutal, ostentatious—enters popular mythology, with a joke about businessmen competing over suits by claiming to have paid ever more exorbitant prices.

For most people, however, the market’s arrival does not mean abundance. While a million people grow rich, 150 million are plunged into misery: prices rise while salaries stand still. Limonov’s father, a former security officer, can scarcely afford two pounds of sausage on his pension. Life expectancy for Russian men falls from 65 in 1987 to 58 in 1993. The queues outside empty shops give way to older people selling whatever they can in underground passages: pickles, tea cosies, old magazines. Other occupations and institutions also become commodities. Generals sell tanks or aircraft; judges sell verdicts; police officers sell tolerance. The account makes the new order visible through these transactions, in which survival and public authority alike are put up for sale.

Elections, oligarchs, and the changing opposition

By the 1996 presidential election, the damage done by shock therapy and the first privatizations has made the democratic experiment look like a calamity to much of the population. Yeltsin, once the object of enormous hopes, appears isolated in the Kremlin and drinks heavily through depressive episodes. His conduct at the Berlin commemorations of the 1945 victory—nodding, then attempting to conduct the military band—embarrasses Russians watching their president represent the country. The account also connects his vulnerability to the decision to wage war in Chechnya: hawkish generals see a conflict as a way to weaken nationalist opponents and revive Yeltsin’s popularity, while Carrère recounts his cousin Paul Klebnikov’s theory that war could also conceal corruption in the military high command and the sale of weapons on the black market.

The Communists, once banned by Yeltsin, become a serious electoral alternative. Gennady Zyuganov campaigns less on restoring the Gulag than on opposing corruption and inequality, appealing to a public exhausted by the market’s costs. The oligarchs have their own stake in the result. Under the loans-for-shares scheme, their banks lend to the cash-strapped state against shares in valuable, not-yet-privatized industries such as natural gas and petroleum. If the loans are not repaid after a year, the lenders can take the assets; the deadline falls after the election. To protect the arrangement, Berezovsky brings six other powerful oligarchs together, and they deploy their financial and media power behind Yeltsin. Newspapers, radio, and television repeat the choice as Yeltsin or chaos, while documentaries and films about Soviet terror warn against a return to communism.

This political landscape also alters how Limonov is regarded. Carrère discovers that Anna Politkovskaya defended forty National Bolshevik Party militants imprisoned after occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices and shouting for Putin to go. She described the defendants as courageous people of integrity. Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov, also expressed support for the party’s members, despite the name’s troubling associations. These unexpected endorsements unsettle Carrère’s earlier view of Limonov as a fascist leading skinheads and help prompt him to make Limonov the subject of a long article.

From movement-building to prohibition

Limonov’s political work develops within the instability the era has created. At a National Bolshevik Party convention, several hundred delegates arrive from across Russia, although the party has about 7,000 members in total. Finding a venue has been difficult: owners repeatedly withdraw their offers, apparently after police intervention, and the delegates fear harassment, a bomb scare, or a ban. The convention nevertheless opens. Limonov sees the gathering as proof that years spent distributing the party newspaper beyond Moscow have brought together real supporters. Many are poor provincial adolescents who, in the narrative’s unsparing description, might otherwise have become alcoholics or delinquents. The party offers them a style, an ideal, and a sense of belonging.

Limonov tells the delegates that the time to take power has not yet come. He rejects immediate alliances with Orthodox anti-Semites or Stalin’s descendants and proposes another field of action: the former Soviet republics. He argues that Russians left outside the Russian Federation have been abandoned, naming communities in Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, and calls for separatist republics in the Baltic region and Central Asia. At the prospect of a canvassing tour in Central Asia, a hundred delegates volunteer, far more than the ten Limonov requested. The scene shows a party converting grievance over the Soviet Union’s dissolution into a program of mobilization beyond Russia’s borders.

Under Vladimir Putin, that space for organization contracts. Before the presidential election, the Ministry of Justice adopts a law against extremism and fascism whose definitions it can determine, then informs the National Bolshevik Party that the law concerns it. Limonov meets the minister in a suit and tie and argues that his party is neither extremist nor fascist. When its registration is refused, he points out that many of the 130 registered parties are phantom organizations, whereas his has 7,000 adherents. He warns that banning it will force it underground and could push young people toward extremism and terrorism. The exchange does not save the party: it loses the right to exist legally.

The later opposition inherits both the hopes and the failures of the Yeltsin era. The coalition The Other Russia, formed under Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Limonov, eventually disappears after it fails to gain traction in the presidential elections. Limonov continues with Strategy 31, invoking the constitutional right to demonstrate: on months with a thirty-first day, activists gather at Triumfalnaya Square. Usually about a hundred demonstrators face five times as many police officers, and dozens are arrested; Limonov himself regularly spends a few days in prison. The period’s decisive legacy is therefore not simply the end of Soviet rule. It is the succession of economic disillusionment, concentrated private power, and narrowing political space through which the opposition must keep remaking itself.