The Kremlin has not only proved incapable of ignoring Limonov; it has also adopted his tactics. Putin’s ideologues, led by his deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, have created a raft of “youth groups” like Nashi (“Our Own”) and Molodaya Gvardiya (“the Young Guard”). As well financed, unyielding and patriotic as their patrons, they have earned the collective nickname “Putin Jugend.” While some discount their reach, and Nashi may soon lose its state financing, the British ambassador, Anthony Brenton, learned their power firsthand. Two years ago Nashi activists — Nashisty, as the Nat-Bols call them, with a deliberate ring of fashisty, fascists — began shadowing the diplomat in Moscow. For months, they leafleted his car, picketed his residence and heckled him in public, before the Russian foreign minister stepped in. Brenton’s offense? He had attended an opposition conference, sitting in the company of Limonov.
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The two and a half years Limonov spent behind bars earlier in the decade proved a boon to his writing; it was his most prolific time since his days in New York welfare hotels. In prison, he finished eight books — “nearly 2,000 pages,” he said, measuring his output like a Soviet shock worker. The guards left him alone to write. He only had “to push a button and ask to go to work,” he said. Limonov emerged from jail, in the Russian tradition, with a manifesto, “a series of lectures for NBP members”: “Drugaya Rossiya” (“the Other Russia”). Kasparov liked the title; it became the name of their coalition. An inchoate wide-ranging treatise, the book calls for a “new civilization,” a collection of “armed communes” to replace the evils of urban Russia and restore the insulted and injured to their rural roots. To reverse Russia’s dismal birth rate, polygamy will be permitted, free love encouraged and childbirth required, “like military service for men.” Abortion will be outlawed, and all women, before they reach 35, must have “no fewer than four children for the motherland.” Limonov, however, wants to have it all. “One should not view the new civilization as a leap backward,” he wrote. “The newly civilized shall not wage war against science, against the useful and intelligent achievements of technological progress. Not at all. We will develop the Internet and genetics and HDTV. TV and the Internet will unite the armed communes as one in the unified civilization of free citizens.” The takeover of power, Limonov promised, will not come from an external force, as it did in Afghanistan when the Taliban swept in from refugee camps in Pakistan. “It will come from within.”
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