I knew Limonov in Paris, where he arrived in 1980, preceded by the scandalous success of his first novel, It’s Me, Eddie. Expelled from the Soviet Union, he’d spent five years in New York, in a hardship that he tells vividly: odd jobs, living from day to day in a sordid hotel or on the street, flings with both men and women, drunken benders, robberies and brawls. In its violence and rage, it was faintly reminiscent of the life of the urban drifter played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver; in its vigor, of the novels of Henry Miller—whose tough skin and cannibal’s composure Limonov shared. The book wasn’t half-bad, and those who met its author weren’t disappointed. In those days we were used to Soviet dissidents being bearded, grave, and poorly dressed, living in small apartments filled with books and icons, where they would spend all night talking about how Orthodoxy would save the world. And here was this sexy, sly, funny guy, a cross between a sailor on leave and a minor rock star. We were in the midst of the punk era; his proclaimed hero was Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols; he didn’t think twice about calling Solzhenitsyn an old fart. This new-wave dissidence was refreshing, and when he arrived in Paris, Limonov was the darling of the small literary world. This favor could have lasted just one season, but the charming ruffian had more than one trick up his sleeve, and year in, year out, working with several editors to off-load his production, he lived from his pen for a decade. He wasn’t a novelist—all he could write about was his life—but his life was captivating, and he told its story well in a simple, unadorned style, with all the energy of a Russian Jack London. From book to book we read about his childhood in the suburbs of Kharkov in Ukraine, his time as a juvenile delinquent, and his life as an avant-garde poet in Moscow under Brezhnev. He talked of this era and of the Soviet Union with a wry nostalgia, as if it had been a paradise for resourceful hooligans, and every so often, at the end of dinner, when everyone was drunk but him—he can really hold his liquor—he sang Stalin’s praises, which we chalked up to his taste for provocation. He was incredibly successful with women. He was everyone’s favorite barbarian.
Things started to go wrong at the start of the 1990s. He began disappearing to the Balkans for long periods, where he sided with the Serbian troops. One day he appeared in a BBC documentary, discussing poetry with Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, on a hill overlooking the besieged Sarajevo, and then shooting at the city with a machine gun. He returned to Russia, where in the shambles of post-communism he created a political group with the compelling name the National Bolshevik Party, and which, as far as we knew, was pretty much a skinhead militia. Our amiable friend had become highly unsavory, and I don’t remember, in the ten years that followed, talking about him or hearing anyone else mention his name. In 2001 we learned that he’d been arrested, tried, and imprisoned for rather obscure reasons—something to do with arms trafficking and an attempted coup in Kazakhstan. A petition went around calling for his release, but that it was circulated by milieus that put out such tracts as France Gagged by the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, or Ratko Mladić, Criminal or Hero? made us all the less eager to sign. At the time I was traveling to Russia often, mostly to Kotelnich, a forlorn city in the provinces where I shot a documentary over a couple of years, but also to Moscow, where one day I bought a book by Limonov, which was translated nowhere except in Serbia, no doubt, called Anatomy of a Hero. It had a section with photos where the hero in question—Limonov himself—posed in camouflage fatigues in the company of Karadžić, the Serbian war criminal Arkan, the French right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Russian populist Zhirinovsky, the mercenary Bob Denard, and a couple of other humanists. It seemed like an open-and-shut case, with no chance for appeal. But that didn’t stop me from being intrigued by the fate of this man who was so talented, so seductive, so free, and who had wound up here. I had the vague impression that this fate said something about the madness of the world, without knowing exactly what.
Then, in October 2006, came the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya. I went to Moscow to write a report. I attentively read her books and articles. Not long before her death, she had covered the trial of thirty-nine National Bolshevik Party militants accused of having occupied and vandalized the offices of the presidential administration, shouting, “Putin must go!” For these crimes they’d been given lengthy prison sentences, and Politkovskaya, without failing to underline the differences she had with Limonov, took up their defense: she believed that the Natsbols, as they’re called in Russia, were heroes of the fight for democracy in her country. As my research progressed, I met the tiny group that constituted practically the entire opposition to the government of Vladimir Putin: independent journalists, NGO leaders, mothers of soldiers who’d been killed or wounded in Chechnya. It’s a small group, whose members are as respectable as they are atypical, but here I discovered to my astonishment that they all thought of Limonov and his entourage as courageous people of integrity, practically the only ones who could inspire hope in the moral future of their country. Several months later I learned that a political coalition called Drugaya Rossiya (The Other Russia) was forming under the leadership of Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Eduard Limonov—that is to say, one of the greatest chess players of all time, a former prime minister under Putin, and an author whom by our criteria you shouldn’t even be seen with: quite the troika. Something had obviously changed—perhaps not Limonov himself but the position he occupied in his country. Which is why when Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, whom I’d known as Moscow correspondent for Le Figaro, told me he was launching a newsmagazine and asked if I had a subject for the first issue, I responded without a second’s hesitation: Limonov. Patrick looked at me with wide eyes. “Limonov’s a petty thug.”
“I’m not sure. It’s worth checking out.”
“All right then,” Patrick said, not needing any further explanation, “check it out.”
It took me a while to track him down and get his number. What struck me, when Limonov answered and I told him my name and why I was calling, was that he remembered me perfectly. We’d crossed paths just five or six times more than twenty years earlier, he was well-known at the time, I was a young, intimidated journalist, no more than a walk-on part in his life; nevertheless he remembered that I had a red motorcycle: “A Honda 125, right?” Right. He said he had no problem with me hanging around for a couple of weeks. “Unless,” he added, “they put me back in prison.”
Two burly young guys with shaved heads, dressed in black and polite, come pick me up to bring me to their leader. We cross Moscow in a black Volga with tinted windows—the typical FSB-mobile, the driver jokes—and I half expect them to blindfold me; but, no, my guardian angels just take a quick look around the courtyard, then the stairway, then finally the landing that gives onto a little dark apartment, furnished like a squat, where two more skinheads are killing time smoking cigarettes. Eduard divides his time among three or four Moscow apartments, they tell me, and moves from one to the next as quickly as possible, keeping no fixed hours and never venturing anywhere without bodyguards—that is, party militants. He comes into the room, in black jeans and a black sweater. Has he changed? On the one hand he hasn’t: still slim, flat stomach, adolescent’s silhouette, the smooth olive skin of a Mongol. On the other hand he has, because now he sports a gray mustache and goatee, which together with his glasses and shock of graying hair remind me suddenly of a passage in his Diary of a Loser, which I’d reread on the plane and copied into my notebook. I read it out to him, as an icebreaker: “It’s great in May, in the wonderful wet May, to be a head of the All Russian Emergency Committee, to be in Odessa, and, with a goatee and a leather jacket, to stand on a balcony facing the sea, to adjust the pince-nez and breathe in the intoxicating aromas. And then to return to the interior of the room and, coughing, lighting up a cigarette, begin the interrogation of a princess N who is deeply implicated in the counterrevolutionary plot and who is famous for her remarkable beauty—the twenty-two-year-old princess.” And another passage, while I’m at it: “I dream of violent insurrection. I cherish a Razin/Pugachyov-like rebellion in my heart. I’ll never be Nabokov. I’ll never run across meadows collecting butterflies on old, hairy, Anglophone legs. Give me a million and I’ll spend it on weapons and stage an uprising in any country.” This was the scenario he painted for himself at thirty as a penniless immigrant on the streets of New York, and now, thirty years later, there you go: he’s in the film. “Is that how things stand, Eduard Venyaminovich?”
He laughs. The ice is broken. He strides back and forth in the room where the curtains are drawn and the walls covered with photos showing him with soldiers, some of whom at least must be wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It’s his new role, the professional revolutionary, the urban guerrilla, Trotsky in his armored train. Hideouts, bodyguards, the intoxication of clandestine life and the risks it involves—which are real, because in addition to being thrown in jail he’s been severely attacked on several occasions. By whom? Who has it in for him like that? “If you want to see recent threats, read this,” he says, and shows me an interview with Andrey Lugovoy in Komsomolskaya Pravda. Here I need a bit of attention. Lugovoy is a former officer of the FSB—the body that succeeded the KGB—widely suspected of having organized the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, he, too, a former FSB agent, but who fled to Britain to serve Boris Berezovsky, the ex-oligarch and sworn enemy of Putin. Lugovoy, whom Russia refuses to extradite, makes numerous declarations making it clear, first, that he had nothing to do with Litvinenko’s murder, and, second, that he knows who was involved: Berezovsky himself, who did not hesitate to have one of his own men killed so people would accuse the Kremlin. This destabilizing operation is only starting, Lugovoy maintains. He has a list of people who are to be killed, which includes the far-left opposition figure (that’s how Lugovoy describes him) Eduard Limonov. So watch out for polonium. I get the feeling we’re deep in a James Bond film, but who knows? In any case, that’s not all, and the rest is less convoluted, more fact-based. There’s a militia of pro-Putin youth called Nashi (Ours). Between the Natsbols and the Nashi it’s out-and-out war. But each time there’s a tussle, the Natsbols are arrested, tried, and imprisoned, while the Nashi get off scot-free. And they’re not content just with getting into scraps, they also campaign actively against Limonov. From a bookshelf where they sit alongside situationist or Komintern writings, he pulls out a handful of beautifully printed pamphlets, far higher quality than the newspaper he puts out. I flip through them; later I’ll study them in detail. They describe him as a “glam fascist,” with photos and quotes to back up the claim. The photos show Adolf Hitler gazing fondly at a little Limonov and are so contrived that they miss their mark. But the quotes are a different story … You can always say his words were misrepresented, but I’ve read Anatomy of a Hero. Black on white, it sings the praise of the “three great movements of the 20th century”: fascism, communism, and Nazism. Even if it goes on to say that Hitler is admirable for his strategy of seizing power and that he later committed “errors,” it’s hard not to find that shocking. I say to him, You really wrote all of that? He shrugs; it’s rubbish he wrote ten years ago, nothing to get worked up about. Above all, since it’s Putin’s minions who’re calling him a fascist, it’s easy to reply: Who’re the fascists? Who’re the persecutors, who the persecuted? Who abuses power and who goes to prison? It won’t be long before I see that here the argument carries weight.
What exactly was I expecting? A desperado at his wit’s end, meetings with lost souls in suburban back rooms? Nothing doing: he’s put all of that behind him, no longer wears military fatigues, is careful not to shoot off at the mouth. Now he only goes to important meetings, such as the press conference he’s holding together with Kasparov this morning, at the Central House of Journalists. The former world chess champion has a powerful build and a warm smile. Limonov, at his side in a jacket and tie and clutching a little leather satchel, looks more like an intellectual than an adventurer, and even, I think, a bit like a chinovnik, as the bureaucrats in the czarist government were called. The former prime minister Kasyanov, essentially the third member of the troika, isn’t here. But Lev Ponomarev is. Like Politkovskaya, this champion of human rights in Russia has defended the National Bolsheviks’ cause for the past couple of years. The Russian and foreign journalists, of whom there are quite a few, look on this motley crew of democrats with a somewhat jaded benevolence. They’ve already covered the story, it’s no scoop. Everyone knows full well that they don’t have a chance, that they have no political clout or broad support in the country, and that their big hope isn’t to win the parliamentary elections in December— let alone the presidential elections in March 2008—but simply to be able to participate, to have their voices heard just a bit. Everyone knows full well that they have no program, that if the swish of a magic wand brought them to power, they wouldn’t agree on a thing. I even think that after a week Limonov would be on the street demonstrating against his former running mates—if he hadn’t had them shot. So everyone patiently listens to this group list their grievances: meeting halls canceled at the last minute, the publication of Kasparov’s book continually being put off, all kinds of wrenches in the works. I think about what my friend Pavel said to me yesterday: this whole business about a democratic opposition in Russia is like wanting to castle when you’re playing checkers: it’s not part of the rules, it simply makes no sense, and all these opposition figures are fools. Starting to get a bit bored, I flip through my notebook and find another passage from Diary of a Loser: “I’ve sided with evil—with the small newspapers, with the Xeroxed leaflets, with the parties that stand no chance. I love political meetings with just a handful of people and the cacophony of inept musicians. And I hate symphony orchestras. If I ever came to power I’d slit the throats of all the violinists and cellists.” I watch Limonov listening to Kasparov. Champing at the bit. Twisting the tips of his mustache with a gesture that looks like a tic, and that starts to get on my nerves. I wonder what Limonov thinks, what he hopes for. Does he believe in it? Does he find it amusing to play at being a more or less respectable politician, he the outlaw, the rabid dog? Is this a tactical ruse? Yesterday I bought and started to read his political autobiography, one of the books he wrote in prison. In it he describes how his party was formed, the first recruits, the hassles, the congresses, the scissions, the persecutions, and as you read on, you can’t help thinking that all of that is both heroic and ridiculous—but also that his models, whether communists or fascists, started like that as well. That reasonable people didn’t believe in them and then one day things took off, and against all odds these stories about obscure, shabby revolutionaries who never stopped bickering among themselves became history. That’s what he must say to himself. And really, who can tell?
In the car coming back from the press conference, we listen to the radio, which is giving a brief rundown on how it went. Drugaya Rossiya, the journalist sums up without a hint of irony, plans on suing the meeting-hall director who canceled their reservation. Limonov shakes his head in annoyance: it was a stupid thing to say; after that it’s the only thing the journalists pick up on, and they make the party look like a bunch of losers, guys for whom political activity consists in taking meeting-hall directors to court. In his fifteen years of political struggle, he, Limonov, has learned what to say and what not to say. He’s cold and cunning, and proud to be cold and cunning. Not like that dumb schmuck Kasparov, “who always reacts too emotionally.” World chess champion, but too emotional. Okay, Eduard, whatever you say.
Although the press conference didn’t make a strong impression on me, as the days go by, I realize that even if his reputation is tarnished in the West, in his country Limonov is hugely popular. He’s even a star. This has no statistical value, but for what it’s worth, in two weeks I discussed Limonov with more than thirty people, strangers whose cars I rode in—because anyone and everyone moonlights as a taxi driver for a few extra rubles in Moscow—as well as friends you could safely call Russian yuppies: artists, journalists, and editors, who buy their furniture at IKEA and read the Russian edition of Elle. In other words, not fanatics. No one said a word against him, and among the yuppies it was as if I’d come to interview Michel Houellebecq, Lou Reed, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit all at the same time: two weeks with Limonov, what luck! I said, still, just the name alone—National Bolshevik Party—that doesn’t bother you? And their flag, a copy of the Nazi flag with a white circle on a black background, only there’s a hammer and sickle and not a swastika in the middle? And the shaved heads, the skulls and crossbones on their armbands? They shrugged and considered me something of a prude. That was all just antics, nothing to get worked up about. Anyway, all the humanists keep their hands clean, but in fact they’re just chicken. The Natsbols practice what they preach and go to jail for their ideas.
I accompany Limonov to the gala thrown by the radio station Echo of Moscow, the social highlight of the season. He’s got his musclemen in tow, but he also brings his new wife, Ekaterina Volkova, a successful young actress: ravishing, delightful, and totally cool. Of all the people who flock to this soiree no one is more photographed or celebrated than the Limonovs, about whom the magazines’ “People” sections write gushy—and blatantly Natsbols-friendly—articles. In her interviews, Ekaterina tells with a naive freshness that before meeting Eduard she’d never been interested in politics, but that now she’s understood: Russia is a totalitarian state, you’ve got to fight for freedom and participate in the protest marches, which she seems to take as seriously as her yoga classes. (That said, as totalitarian as this state is, such statements do her as little harm as, let’s say, Kirsten Dunst had or felt when she attacked George W. Bush at exactly the same time. It’s enough to imagine what would have happened under Stalin, or even under Brezhnev, on the fictitious assumption that such words could have been printed, and I think that there are worse things than Putin-style totalitarianism.)
On another level: fifteen or so prominent Russian writers were recently asked which of their colleagues they valued the most. Ten put Limonov at the top of their list. When Michel Houellebecq and Frédéric Beigbeder—the two most popular French authors in Russia—were asked the same question, they gave the same answer: Limonov. He was the only one they knew, which confirmed the general opinion. While Limonov was in prison, an upcoming writer, Sergey Shargunov, received a big literary prize from an American foundation, ten thousand dollars, which he publicly turned over to Limonov. Today this Shargunov heads the youth section of the party A Just Russia, a bogus opposition party rubber-stamped by the Kremlin, whose president is Sergey Mironov, chairman of the upper house of the Russian parliament. I offer these few examples, unsorted, to give an idea of the staggering confusion that reigns in this country when it comes to ideological divisions—and incidentally, when it comes to everything else. That doesn’t seem to bother the Russians too much, but for Westerners the status of someone such as Limonov is a brainteaser, a minefield—which I tried to shed light on together with Zakhar Prilepin.
Zakhar Prilepin is thirty-three and lives with his wife and three kids in Nizhny Novgorod, where he works as a journalist. He’s the author of three novels that got him a place on the short list for the Russian Booker Prize, considerable sales, and a reputation that’s maturing from promising young writer to confirmed talent: a serious, down-to-earth type, anything but a poseur, who writes acerbic, realistic novels about the lives of real people. His first novel deals with Chechnya, where he served as a soldier; the second with the doubts and wanderings of a young guy from the provinces who believes that by becoming a Natsbol he’s giving meaning to the swampy mess of his life. The book is based on his own experiences as well as those of friends his age, because our Prilepin has been a committed Natsbol for the past ten years. He looks every bit the part: stocky, shaved head, black clothes, Doc Martens, and to top it all off he’s a nice guy.
And this is what Zakhar Prilepin has to say. Because he’s an avid reader and self-taught lover of the less frequented regions of Russian literature, he got to know Limonov through his books. He discovered them by accident, and it was the literary encounter of his life: someone who had experienced so many things, with such courage, and who wrote about them with such freedom, such naturalness. Someone who dared everything, a hero, a model. Most of Prilepin’s buddies, however, first discovered the party through Limonka, Limonov’s newspaper. Its name is taken from Limonov’s, but it also means “grenade.” I’ve had a look through a couple of old issues. It’s influenced by Mad magazine and the American underground press. It’s terribly trashy and deals less with politics than with rock and roll and style: fuck you, bullshit, up-yours style. Majestic punk. Now, you have to imagine what a provincial Russian city is like. The sinister life the young people lead there, their lack of a future, and—if they’re at all sensitive or ambitious—their despair. All it took was for a single issue of Limonka to arrive in a city like that and fall into the hands of one of these idle, morose, tattooed youths who played the guitar and drank beer under his precious posters of the Cure or Che Guevara, and it was a done deal. Quickly there were ten or twenty of them, a whole threatening gang of good-for-nothings, with pale complexions and ripped black jeans, who hung out in the squares: the usual suspects, regular visitors to the local cop shop. They had a new watchword and it was Limonka. It was their thing, the thing that spoke to them. And there was this guy who spoke to them, too, who was afraid of nothing, who’d led the adventurous life that all twenty-year-olds dream of, and he said to them, I quote, “You’re young. You don’t like living in this shitty country. You don’t want to be an ordinary Popov, or a shithead who only thinks about money, or a chekist. You’re a rebel. Your heroes are Che Guevara, Mussolini, Lenin, Mishima, Baader. Well, there you go: you’re a Natsbol already.”
What you have to understand, Zakhar Prilepin tells me, is that the Natsbols are the Russian counterculture. The only one: everything else is bogus, indoctrination and so on. So of course the party has its share of fascists, and skinheads with German shepherds who get their kicks from pissing off the prilitchnyi—the upstanding citizens—by giving the Nazi salute. There are the garden-variety fascists, and also the intellectual fascists, the eternal and melancholic cohort of feverish, wan, awkward young men who read René Guénon and Julius Evola, who develop nebulous theories on Eurasia, the Templars, or the hyperboreans, and who sooner or later end up converting to Islam. But they all blend together, the fascists, the ultra-leftists, the self-taught cartoonists, the bass players looking for people to start a rock band, the amateur-video freaks, the guys who write poetry in private, and those who nurse dark dreams of wasting everyone at school and then blowing themselves up the way they do in America. Plus the Satanists from Irkutsk, the Hells Angels from Kirov, the Sandinistas from Magadan: Natsbols every one. “My buddies,” Zakhar Prilepin says softly, and you get the feeling he could have all the success in the world—the Booker Prize, the translations, the book tours to the States—but what’s important to him is to remain loyal to his friends, the lost youths of the Russian provinces.
Soon branches of the National Bolshevik Party sprang up in Krasnoyarsk, in Ufa, in Nizhny Novgorod. One day Limonov visited Zakhar’s city, accompanied by three or four of his men and a girl who, in these heroic days, was not yet a movie star but rather a leather-clad adolescent with a shaved head, beautiful—Limonov’s women are always beautiful. The whole gang showed up to meet them at the station. Those who needed a place to stay were put up here and there, and the gang spent entire nights talking, preparing their next actions—spraying slogans on trains, unraveling banners at official parades, staging agitprop happenings of all kinds. They felt alive. They were against the war in Chechnya, but they defended the rights of Russian minorities in the former Soviet republics; they opposed the oligarchs, cynical leaders, and corruption and called for a return to order, but they also wanted to stir up a maximum of trouble. They set up vague alliances, one day with Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian Jean-Marie Le Pen (Limonov introduced the two politicians, incidentally), another with the Communists. These came to nothing, but the party grew. In Yeltsin’s day there was so much chaos that no one paid any attention to them, but things changed when Putin came to power.
It’s the start of 2001. Limonov and his girlfriend at the time (who’s a minor) spend the winter in Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, where he’s started an investigative book on a local oligarch, Anatoly Bykov, a gangster who became an aluminum magnate and one of Russia’s richest men. Limonov accepted the offer from a publisher in Saint Petersburg both because he likes gangsters and because he needs money for his party—little for himself: he’s frugal, hates all forms of comfort, and draws aristocratic pride from the poverty that has accompanied him all his life. I started reading the book after getting back from Russia. As I read slowly in Russian, I can’t give you a complete account, but the first fifty pages are excellent: Capote without the aestheticism, Mailer without the jerky side, and I think to myself first of all that if I were a French editor, I’d forget about the malaise surrounding the author and publish the book lickety-split, and second, that I would quite like to write a book in the same genre about Limonov. A Hero of Our Time; too bad the title’s already taken. Anyway, as he goes about his investigation, Limonov feels that he’s being watched, followed. He’s used to it, but here things are tightening around him. He’s in a hurry to finish because before the thaw he wants to join up with a group of four or five Natsbols he left in a log cabin in the middle of the Altai Mountains, charged with spending the winter and seeing how they get along. That’s Limonov’s idea of a good vacation: a training camp under severe conditions. He leaves his fiancée in Krasnoyarsk and arrives in Barnaul, capital of the Altai region, only to find out that one of his men has thrown himself out of a window, or more likely was thrown out. It’s the first death in the party; things are starting to look grim. Limonov makes his way to the mountain retreat where the guys—rebyata in Russian, one of the words that comes up again and again in his writings—are languishing, and the next day at dawn the FSB surrounds the camp and takes them prisoner. In the last chapter of his political autobiography, Limonov gives a description of the capture worthy of Alexandre Dumas, ending with a melancholic, drunken conversation with the arresting officer on the long trip back to Moscow. Impressed by his prisoner, the officer practically pleads, “Why aren’t you with us? We belong to the same world: we’re men, real men, who like commando operations and twisted bodies … Why don’t you like us?”
Limonov answers disdainfully, “Because you don’t deserve to call yourselves chekists. Because you’re assholes and your founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, would turn over in his grave if he saw you. He was a great man, he I respect, but you…” The officer lowers his head sheepishly. You’d think he was going to burst into tears.
At the trial, Limonov and his men are accused of arms trafficking and an attempted coup in neighboring Kazakhstan with the intention of creating a separate Russian republic. No weapons were found in the cabin (what surprises me, to tell the truth, is that the FSB didn’t plant any there), and as for the coup, Limonov says he had neither weapons, nor men, nor contacts. At the very most he’d toyed with the idea and doesn’t deny it: let’s say the project was being studied. The prosecution calls for a prison term of fourteen years for Limonov; he’s sentenced to four, amid general indifference in Russia and abroad. He serves them in part at the legendary KGB fortress of Lefortovo and in part in a labor camp in Saratov, on the Volga River. Conditions are harsh in both, and Limonov was pushing sixty; nevertheless I believe him when he says without batting an eye that he loved prison. One last quote from Diary of a Loser, written thirty years earlier: “I love being an adventurist. It often saves me. Suddenly it rains and I am depressed, and poor, and want to cry. And then I think, ‘Don’t give up, boy, you’ve chosen that road yourself, you didn’t want a normal life.’” For a man such as him, who’s in love with his own destiny and who believes that life is there to try things out, it’s a blessing, a golden opportunity to test your strength. And his strength didn’t fail him. He’s proud of having commanded the respect of the ordinary criminals he was in with. When he was released, they even wrangled with the guards over who would carry his suitcase to the gate. In Lefortovo, the daily promenade on the roof took place at 7:00 a.m., and in the winter at minus fifteen degrees most of the inmates preferred to sleep a little longer. Not Limonov. Often alone, he went out onto the roof and ran, boxed the icy air, did push-ups and sit-ups. In his tiny three-man cell, he found a way to write six or seven books, and he came out with his head held high, in good shape, satisfied with the experience.
This prison stint was decisive for his legend, and for the self-awareness of his group. It comes again and again in all my conversations with the Natsbols. He took a risk and paid the consequences, and that in itself was cause for hope. I said to myself, Zakhar Prilepin is a great guy, but he’s a writer. I know writers. I have to see the grassroots militants. The gorillas who drove me to their leader almost every day in the black Volga frightened me a bit at first, but I soon found them nice. They didn’t talk much, that said, or I just didn’t go about it the right way. At the end of the press conference with Kasparov I started talking to a girl, just because I found her pretty, and asked if she was a journalist. She said she was, that is, she worked for the website of the National Bolshevik Party. Cute as a button, graceful, well-dressed: she was a Natsbol. The party had been banned for “extremism” since April 2007, so there were no meetings or headquarters, but through her I met the head of the Moscow branch: a guy with long hair, an open face, friendly, impossible to imagine anyone more sincere. He welcomed me into his somewhat dirty little apartment in the suburbs, where he had albums by Manu Chao and paintings in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat on the walls, done by his wife. “So your wife shares your political struggle?” I ask. “Oh, yes. In fact, she’s in prison. She was one of the thirty-nine in the big 2005 trial.” He says it with a big smile, proud as punch—and if he’s not in prison, too, it’s not his fault, it’s just that “Mne ne povezlo”—that’s not how things worked out. Not yet, it’s not too late.
As it happened, there was a trial that day at the Taganskaya District Court, and we went there together. A tiny courtroom with the accused sitting handcuffed in a cage and their friends on the three benches reserved for the public, all of them from the party. Seven are in the dock: six guys with a range of looks, from the bearded Muslim student to the working-class hero in a tracksuit, as well as a somewhat older woman with tousled black hair and a pale complexion, rather beautiful in the style of a leftist history teacher who rolls her own cigarettes. They’re accused of hooliganism, that being in this case tussling with pro-Putin youths. They say the others started it and that they aren’t being charged with anything; the trial is purely political, and if they have to pay with their convictions, so be it, they’ll pay. The judge is neutral, professional, courteous; the guy in a uniform who represents the prosecution mutters an incomprehensible tirade, which he doesn’t seem to believe for a minute. The defense points out that the accused aren’t hooligans but serious students with good grades, and that they’ve already done a year of preventive custody, which should be enough. At the end of the trial the guards let the seven Natsbols out of their cage, and they clench their fists in the direction of their friends, saying, “Da, smert”—until death. They laugh. Their friends look on with envy: these are heroes. You can say that above all they’re boys playing at cops and robbers. But a couple of years in prison in Russia is no joke, and for practically nothing at all—a scrap in which only they were injured—they risk getting two more on top of the one they’ve already served.
One day, we went to the countryside—with the rebyata, of course. At first I thought it was for a meeting, some political event, but, no, it was just to inspect a dacha Limonov’s wife had bought, a hundred miles outside Moscow. We took advantage of the drive to talk about this and that. Limonov was relaxed, dry humored. I wanted to come back to Serbia, and the film that apparently—I hadn’t yet seen it—shows him shooting at Sarajevo with a machine gun. He assured me that he had never shot at human targets, just in the direction of the city, which was far too distant for him to hit anyone. Just for the fun of it, then? My remark annoyed him, enough said. Later, when I was back in Paris, the director of the film, Paweł Pawlikowski, confirmed that it was no doubt too far. He remembers a body-built Limonov who played at being Hemingway, couldn’t stop pawing all the weapons, and wasn’t taken too seriously by the Serbs. Some of them had read It’s Me, Eddie and saw him as a joker who got screwed by black guys: not our type. Finally I saw the film: beside Karadžić, Limonov looks like an intimidated little boy, a playground bully who’s finally found someone to talk to, and when he gets behind the gun, it’s like at the shooting arcade. In the car, I almost asked him if he’d ever killed a man. I think he would have told me the truth, since he’s devoid of any type of superego and isn’t embarrassed about anything. He’s the opposite of a liar, even if these days he does pay some attention to what he says.
Before we arrived, he told me in passing that the property beside the one his wife had bought had been purchased by the Russian American journalist who was killed in Moscow: Paul Klebnikov, you remember? As if I couldn’t remember Paul Klebnikov: he was my cousin, and my friend. A correspondent for Forbes magazine, he carried out meticulous and courageous investigations into how the largest Russian fortunes were created. He was murdered in 2004, gunned down in front of his office building. My sons adored him, he was their model—the very picture of a great reporter to a little boy: Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously. The inquiry into his murder, like that into Politkovskaya’s, has, to this day, failed to turn up anything. Rumors put the blame on a Chechen warlord to whom Paul had dedicated a book called Conversation with a Barbarian. “That’s bullshit,” Limonov said. “The fact is that this Chechen, Noukhayev, was happy with the book. Very happy. Just like Bykov, the Siberian oligarch I wrote about. He’s thrilled with my book about him.” Will Limonov be happy with the book I’ll write about him, if I write it? I’d talked about him with Paul, not long before Paul was killed. He made a face. For him, Limonov was a brilliant writer doubling as a little fascist thug, and I wondered what Paul would think today if he were here. I wondered what I thought myself. I still do, and I answer that that’s a good driving force for a book.
The dacha is much more than a dacha: it’s what’s called an usadba, a veritable manor. Abandoned and vandalized, the old wooden house is immense. There’s a pond, and a birch forest. Limonov’s wife bought it a couple of years ago for a ridiculous sum, five thousand dollars; now it had to be renovated, and Limonov talks with a local craftsman, the way someone who’s done all imaginable jobs himself knows how to talk to a contractor and not get ripped off. And in general, I wish much pleasure to anyone who tries to rip him off. I stroll through the gardens and see his little black silhouette from a distance, gesticulating in a pool of sunshine, his goatee unkempt, and all of a sudden I think, He’s sixty-five, he’s got an adorable wife who’s thirty years younger, a ten-month-old child whose photo he showed to everyone the other night at the gala, including the heavies in charge of security. Maybe he’s had enough of war, bivouacs, the knife in his boot, police breaking down his door at dawn. Maybe he finally wants to put his suitcase down. To come and settle here, in the countryside, in this beautiful house, like the landed gentry of the old regime. There would be big bookshelves, deep couches, the shouts of children outside, berry jam, long conversations around the samovar, the gentle passing of time. A novel by Turgenev, a film by Mikhalkov. Happy like Ulysses after a long voyage, he’d talk about his adventures. To recapitulate: he was a young punk in Kharkov, an underground poet in Moscow, a magnificent loser in New York, a trendy writer in Paris, a soldier of fortune in the Balkans, and, again in Moscow, the elderly leader of a party of young desperadoes. Could his seventh life take place here, in peace? “Do you see yourself ending your days like one of Turgenev’s heroes, Eduard Venyaminovich?”
I ask him the question on the way back, and it makes him laugh. No, that’s not how he sees things. Really. He’s got another idea for his old age. To understand, he tells me, you have to know Central Asia, where he’s been several times with the guys. That’s where he feels the best, that’s where he feels at home. You have to know such cities as Samarqand, Tashkent, Bukhara. Cities parched by the sun, dusty, slow, violent. In the shadow of the mosques, over there, under the high crenellated walls, there are beggars. Whole groups of beggars, gaunt, tanned old men without teeth, often without eyes. They wear tunics and turbans that are black with dirt; they place a scrap of velvet before them and wait for passersby to throw down a few small coins. Most often they’re high on hashish. They’re castoffs. They’re wrecks. They’re kings.
That, okay, he’d be fine with that.
Published in XXI, winter 2008