Straight to the point

A knife-wielding poet, a lover of beautiful women, a political troublemaker, a novelist who predicted his own immortality — Eduard Limonov has long been cast in many roles. To his roster, he can now add the honour of being played by Ben Whishaw in a new film, Limonov: The Ballad. Yet this Cannes-premiering biopic is not without controversy: where the creators of the film saw “greatness”, and The Guardian identified “an exhilarating, alarming look… at the Russian soul”, Ukrainians have decried an attempt to whitewash a man who had for years justified war on their country.

But Limonov’s story can’t be captured by Manichean binaries. It is more a profound tale of the inevitable downfall of the bohemian contrarian.

A poet courting fame through infamy, Limonov rebelled against conventions and revelled in being vilified. His heroes were not Russian tsars or religious zealots but the Sex Pistols and Yukio Mishima; his writing style was more influenced by Louis-Ferdinand Céline than Leo Tolstoy. “I did not want to play their game. I wanted, as in Russia, to be outside the game, or if possible, if I could, to play against them,” said the narrator of his first novel, It’s Me, Eddie, which remains his most important work.

Written in the United States in 1976, the book would be considered autofiction in today’s terms, based as it is on Limonov’s life as a welfare-relying immigrant in New York. The narrator of this picaresque tale is resentful towards what he sees as a racist and corrupt country and is driven by dreams of sex with both men and women. Writing of this desire in disturbing detail, Limonov’s ability to ditch the antiquated style of classical Russian literature would prove scandalous in his native land. Decades later, a Russian activist would famously say that she learnt to perform oral sex by reading Limonov.

Born into the family of a low-level NKVD (future KGB) officer during the Second World War, Eduard Savenko grew up in Kharkiv in Soviet Ukraine. A friend of petty thieves, the young Eduard won a poetry competition in 1957. He would choose Limonov for a pseudonym and conquer the local unofficial poetry scene before setting his sights on Moscow where he would begin to earn a living as a poet.

Limonov was forced out of Russia in 1974 when he refused to become an informant for the KGB. He migrated to New York where he rallied against Western hypocrisy and free-market capitalism, on the one hand, and the Soviet system, on the other — both to him were equally oppressive. While more and more ordinary Russians were realising their country was a failed state, Limonov wasn’t impressed by the staunch anti-communism of dissidents back home either. The émigré Limonov was, instead, developing a revanchist nostalgia whose forbidden appeal would soon conquer masses.

The collapse of communism brought Limonov back to Moscow. He almost immediately assumed the role of revolutionary-in-chief, founding in 1993 the National Bolshevist (NazBol) Party. Its manifesto was an awkward mix of Russian chauvinism, vulgar communism, Italian fascism, and geopolitical wisdom of Ayatollah Khomeini, while its logo was a marriage of communism and Nazism. It called for the creation of a new Russian empire with nationalised land, the abolishment of human rights, and the annexation of all Russian-populated neighbouring lands from Ukraine’s Crimea to Northern Kazakhstan and swathes of the Baltic states. Soon, he commanded an army of young blokes, idealists and thugs who called themselves “Nazbols”, ready to go to barricades for him. Such radicalism was a slap in the face for the then-liberal Kremlin and well-meaning public. Something like a Hamas National Front would be an equivalent in today’s Britain.

With time, the Nazbols developed an authentic, macabre, youth subculture with its own lore, music universe and slogans like, “Yes, death!” They published a cult zine titled Limonka, slang for a hand grenade and a pun on Limonov’s name. It was coined by Slava Mogutin, a young gonzo journalist who would later become a prolific chronicler of queer life in New York. He was among many conceptual artists, crusading philosophers, journalists, actors, cool kids and lost souls surrounding Limonov at that time.

While Limonov also engaged in war tourism, briefly fighting alongside ethnic Serbs in the Bosnian War and separatists in the Georgian Civil War, it was not the guerrilla cosplay alone that attracted thousands of young Russians into the party. By the late Nineties, crime and corruption were rampant, and people felt crushed by the new market economy. President Boris Yeltsin, the face of Russia’s new democracy, was permanently drunk, embarrassing himself in front of foreign leaders, with his family engulfed in corruption scandals. By contrast, the athletic and eloquent Limonov was a fresh face. At unauthorised rallies and on TV shows, Limonov would expound his revanchist politics: the collapse of the Soviet Union was a crime, Crimea should be Russian, and Nato and America were plotting to destroy Russia.

Today, these sound like lines from Putin’s annual press conferences that drag on for many hours. Yet in the Nineties, every word was a challenge to the status quo — to the Kremlin’s recently adopted faith in democracy and its new friendship with Bill Clinton. Everyone knew the future was liberal. Applications for the Nazbols to be officially registered as a party and run in the elections were thrown away. There was no place for the lost cause of Soviet nostalgia.

When a former KGB officer took over in 2000 as a hand-picked heir of Yeltsin and his oligarchic backers, like his predecessor he at first had little time for revanchism. Back then, Putin dismissed any talk of annexing Crimea as provocation, and was ready to admit at least some of Russia’s historic crimes. And he was not going to tolerate real opposition. A year into Putin’s first term, Limonov was arrested by the FSB. He was sentenced to four years in prison on charges of possessing weapons and running armed groups.

While in prison, he resumed his literary career, completing several novels and revolutionary manifestos. The time for revolution, however, had passed; Putin made sure there would not be one. Limonov still tried his luck, revitalising the Nazbols once he was released on parole in 2003. It was now a different party: gone were the days of fascist cosplay. Its new manifesto called for greater freedom of press and the development of civil society and grassroots politics.

Limonov would paint a cold and frightening portrait of the new Russia. In his 2006 book, Limonov vs Putin, he described a poor, dark, hopeless place with freedoms taken away by an all-powerful president. But, he wrote, the secret was that Putin was not a strong man. He was a power-hungry mediocrity, a liar and a coward afraid of the people he ruled over. He could be summed up as: “Short legs. Narrow shoulders”, a mocking portrayal which would be popularised years later by Alexei Navalny. In response, the Nazbol party was officially outlawed and proscribed as a “terrorist organisation”, on one list with al-Qaeda.

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Cornered, Limonov started an elaborate dance with the liberal opposition. Whatever their past disagreements, they now had a common goal: to prevent Putin’s third presidential term. In 2011, he launched a presidential bid, endorsed by the united opposition front. As always, he was refused registration. Yet, for a few fateful years, Limonov would be among the leaders of a protest movement that held mass rallies just across the Kremlin. For the first time during his presidency, it felt like Putin had lost control of the capital if not the whole country.

Putin persevered and, having crushed the opposition, turned to Ukraine. In 2014, he annexed Crimea and occupied parts of the Donbas. Immediately, Limonov, always a Russian nationalist, suspended his political career and endorsed the land grab. By invading Ukraine, Putin was not fulfilling Limonov’s dream of restoring Russia’s greatness. The president used revanchist slogans and nationalist fantasies to expand his personal rule to a foreign country. It was the same rule that had brought nothing but “humiliation, suffering, misery and unfreedom”, according to Limonov’s book. Regardless, yesterday’s sworn enemy of the Kremlin was now a paid guest on state TV shows.

Limonov’s life was a series of conquests and break-ups. He would waltz into an exclusive literary or political circle and become its darling, grow disillusioned and move onto the next one. From the small poetry scene in Kharkiv to Moscow literary circles, the émigré community in New York, and so on. The Kremlin, though, wouldn’t totally yield to Limonov’s charms by joining his long list of conquests. The award for crossing the floor was modest: invitations to the state talk shows or a column on the Russia Today website. Unlike third-rate Western actors or loyal local proxies, he would never be showered in praise or granted exclusive meetings in the Kremlin. And his party, despite its members fighting for Putin in Ukraine, remained outlawed.

Increasingly cranky and listless in the last years of his life, Limonov wouldn’t admit that the late Putinism that he allied himself with was the total sum of all things he hated: a declining empire destroying its neighbours, an economy dominated by billionaires but propped up by migrant labour, with officials seeking to control the citizens’ private lives.

His life is best understood as a cautionary tale of the downfall of the bohemian provocateur, as an illustration of what happens to a politics based on vibes, not principles. He was too focused on attacking the delusions of his own intellectual class — the “opinion leaders” who were stuck in the anti-communism of their youth — to clearly see what they were up against. Ironic detachment and outrageous provocation were Limonov’s powerful tools in exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of post-Soviet Russia’s liberal establishment. But when his slogans were cynically appropriated by Putin’s anti-liberal establishment, Limonov failed to see that the new regime was even more corrupt and ruthless.

And his descent was not unusual — other provocative outsiders in the West have undergone a similar trajectory. Figures like the comedian Russell Brand went from asking inconvenient questions to feeding conspiracy-minded audiences a steady ration of rants about “globalist elites”, vaccines, “Ukrainian Nazis” and “revelations” about 9/11. Equally predictable was Kanye West’s evolution from protesting the tyranny of groupthink to saying, “I like Hitler.”

In today’s angry and polarised world, where any opinion or artistic act must be pigeon-holed into a political camp, there is little space left for the provocative outsider. There is nothing uniquely Muscovite about Limonov’s downfall — the writer, militant, and counterculture icon is, rather, just another of the West’s very own enfants terribles.

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