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Eduard Limonov, radical known as ‘the Johnny Rotten of Russian politics’ – obituary
A former street hooligan and bisexual mercenary, he led the National Bolshevik Party and delighted in provoking the Kremlin
Eduard Limonov, the ultra-nationalist Russian writer and politician who has died aged 77, was, variously, a teenage hoodlum, counter-culture poet, bisexual émigré writer, Parisian socialite, mercenary with the Bosnian Serbs, jailbird, and the eventual “Johnny Rotten of Russian politics”.
He was born Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko on February 22 1943 at Dzerzhinsk, near Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), the son of a low-level secret policeman in the NKVD; his mother was a munitions worker. “I was a non-conformist from birth,” he claimed.
He grew up in a dingy, dirt-poor industrial suburb of Kharkov, a grim Soviet industrial town in Ukraine. As he recalled in a memoir, The Adolescent Savenko (1983, also translated as Memoir of a Russian Punk) after being beaten up aged nine he determined to transform himself into a hardcore street hooligan.
By the age of 20 he had been a thief, a burglar, a foundry-worker and a docker. He also tried his hand at poetry, eventually joining a group of Nihilist artists calling themselves the SS, who went in for such pranks as reciting Hitler speeches in public, riding animals at Kharkov Zoo or opening their veins with cut-throat razors – the last episode getting young Eduard committed, briefly, to a psychiatric hospital.
Eventually he escaped to Moscow where, as Eduard Limonov (“Edward Lemon”), he survived by making and selling trousers while attempting to establish himself as an avant-garde poet, becoming something of an idol of the Soviet underground in the Brezhnev era.
He made such a nuisance of himself that in 1974 he was expelled from the Soviet Union, albeit with a false Israeli passport which allowed him to enter the United States. He arrived at about the same time as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and was sometimes described as a “dissident”, but since he revered Stalin and called Solzhenitsyn “an old fart”, he hardly qualified.
He ended up in New York, where he became a figure on the nascent punk scene, hanging out with the Ramones and Richard Hell & the Voidoids at the CBGB club. When New York lost interest, he lived as a down-and-out, drank, had casual sex with both men and women, and was involved in robberies and brawls. Eventually he found a job he detested as a butler for a Russophile multi-millionaire on the Upper East Side.
It was during his stay in the US that he penned the semi-autobiographical It’s Me, Eddie (1979 in Russian, 1983 in English), that would earn him notoriety in the Soviet Union during glasnost more for its lurid depictions of gay sex with a homeless black man than for its obscene language or the author’s proud boast that “I have no shame or conscience.”
The book became an immediate succès fou in France where it was published under the spoiler-alert title Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres, prompting Limonov to move to Paris.
There he became, in the words of Emmanuel Carrère, the author of a biography of Limonov, a “sexy, sly, funny guy … everyone’s favourite barbarian” in radical literary circles. It helped that, with his glasses and goatee beard, he resembled Leon Trotsky, and he was lionised as a sort of Russian cross between Jean Genet and Henry Miller.
In 1991, as the Soviet Union crumbled, Limonov returned to Russia, where he felt drawn to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the chairman of the misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party, an overtly racist and rabidly nationalist organisation advocating the establishment of a Greater Russia within the boundaries of the old Tsarist empire.
Limonov accepted the job of security minister in Zhirinovsky’s shadow cabinet but soon became dissatisfied, finding Zhirinovsky “too passive”. In 1993 he formed the breakaway National Bolshevik Party, or “Natsbol”, a direct-action movement that sought to fuse the ultra-Left and the ultra-Right in opposition to Boris Yeltsin.
Its flag was based on the Nazi white circle on a red background, but with a hammer and sickle replacing the swastika. Its magazine, Limonka, a pun on Limonov’s name and a Russian slang term for a hand-grenade, was accused of advocating mass terror.
Limonov proudly claimed to have the most extremist platform in Russian politics, advocating everything from banning imported food to invading Russia’s neighbours, and Serb-style ethnic cleansing to protect Russians in the independent former Soviet republics.
His young, disaffected followers addressed him as “vozhd” (“leader”) – the term used by Stalinists for Uncle Joe, and over the next few years Natsbol supporters occasionally popped up in news reports: shaved heads, dressed in black, marching down Moscow’s streets giving a half-Nazi (raised arm), half-Communist (balled fist) salute, chanting “Stalin! Beria! Gulag!”
During the Balkan wars of the 1990s Limonov signed up with Serbian forces as a mercenary and hobnobbed with future indicted war criminals including the paramilitary thug Arkan and the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
Notoriously, during the siege of Sarajevo, he was filmed, alongside Karadzic, firing a machine-gun into the streets. A clip can be found on YouTube, and the film was shown at Karadzic’s trial at The Hague.
Though Vladimir Putin espoused many of the same causes as Limonov, Russia’s new leader and his allies had little tolerance for Limonov’s insurrectional political stunts, and in 2001 Limonov was arrested, tried and imprisoned for obscure political reasons, apparently connected to arms trafficking and an attempted coup in Kazakhstan.
Halfway through his four-year term he was released, surprisingly enough for “good behaviour”.
After a series of spectacular political stunts, including the seizure of the Kremlin’s reception office, the National Bolshevik Party was outlawed for “extremism” in 2007.
Subsequently Limonov formed an unlikely alliance with liberal politicians, including the chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov and human rights activist Lev Ponomarev, as one of the leaders of the anti-Putin umbrella movement The Other Russia, taking part in protests and “Dissenters’ Marches”, during which he was arrested and held on several occasions.
His liberal allies might have been surprised by some of the ideas put forward by Limonov in a book, also called The Other Russia (2003), one of eight written during his spell in prison.
In one passage Limonov proposed solving Russia’s demographic crisis by forcing “every woman between 25 and 35 to have four children”.
The children would be taken away from their parents and educated in a House of Childhood where they would be taught “to shoot from grenade-launchers, to jump from helicopters, to besiege villages and cities, to skin sheep and pigs, to cook good hot food and to write poetry … Many types of people will have to disappear.”
In 2012 Limonov attempted to stand against Putin in that year’s presidential elections, but his candidacy was rejected. However his subsequent support for Russia’s annexation of the Crimea returned him to favour in pro-Kremlin circles.
He began writing a column for Izvestia and appearing on television talk shows, also writing a column on the website of the Kremlin-backed RT television.
Limonov regularly featured in ratings of Russia’s political sex symbols. In addition to numerous lovers, he was married four times, his wives including the Russian punk rocker and writer Nataliya Medvedeva, and the actress Yekaterina Volkova, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Eduard Limonov, born February 22 1943, died March 17 2020