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Old March 3rd, 2008 #5
Alex Linder
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[Extremely long piece on Edward Limonov, head of National Bolsheviks - the only real opposition to Putin's party, claims NYT Magazine]


Putin’s Pariah

By ANDREW MEIER

March 2, 2008

It began inauspiciously. On a frozen afternoon in late November, as Moscow was draped with blocklong plastic billboards, banners and flags, each proclaiming a variation on a single theme — “POBEDA PUTINA — POBEDA ROSSII!” (“A Victory for Putin Is a Victory for Russia”) — a few thousand Russians converged on the city center for a rare act of political theater. It seemed, at first, like a tableau from the last days of the U.S.S.R., those heady months when glasnost swelled the streets with protesters. A handful of dissidents stood on a flatbed truck; a jumble of loudspeakers were stacked below; the crew of foreign reporters vastly outnumbered the local press; and across the way, the secret policemen with their unseen amplifiers were drowning the protest in canned laughter and Soviet waltzes.

That afternoon all eyes and lenses were fixed on Garry Kasparov, the valiant chess master trying in retirement to end the reign of Vladimir Putin. After Kasparov clapped his hands and shouted “Davai!” — “Let’s go!” — he started toward the Central Election Commission, where he planned to deliver a list of complaints. As he marched, however, it was clear that he was not alone at the head of the demonstration. He had locked arms with his unlikely comrade in one of modern Russia’s most quixotic quests — Edward Limonov, the 65-year-old poet-turned-populist who heads the National Bolshevik Party, or NBP.

After the presidential election in Russia, taking place today, not much is likely to change. Putin’s anointed successor, the young lawyer Dmitri Medvedev, is little more than a proxy. But there remains one genuine opposition force, the Other Russia, a threadbare alliance comprising the remnants of the Westernizing camp led by [jew] Kasparov and the banned National Bolsheviks, the Nat-Bols, as Limonov’s young followers call themselves. In the face of Kremlin control of the airwaves and the small army of police deployed to muzzle their protests, the alliance has proved more adept at internecine warfare than at grass-roots politicking.

Limonov, however, has not given up. With his bizarre, often half-baked yet latently sinister populism, he remains hellbent on ruining the Kremlin’s party. And despite his strident nationalism and affinity for rogue youth, he works in close partnership with the liberal-minded Kasparov. “Russia is rich in generals without armies,” Kasparov told me last fall. “But Limonov has foot soldiers. He commands street power.”

The crowd at the rally was not large; in fact it was depressingly small to anyone who remembered the last days of the U.S.S.R. Yet at the fore stood a disciplined corps of 200 or 300 Nat-Bols — young men and women dressed in black whose faces beamed with unexpected joy. The march ended, as expected, nearly as soon as it began. The riot police formed walls on either end of the procession and closed the vise. When they roughed up Kasparov and threw him in a paddy wagon, the foreign press surrounded it. When they sent him to jail for five days, European leaders and even George W. Bush’s spokesman issued peals of condemnation.

Limonov, however, also vanished. A babushka in the street swore he’d been hauled off, bag over his head. Ekho Moskvy, the liberal Moscow radio station and a last preserve of independent media in Russia, reported he had been arrested. No one, however, could find Limonov in the jails. Only days later, the truth emerged. “It was my boys,” Limonov told me. The Nat-Bols had forsworn their party flags — notoriously similar in color and design to the Nazis’, only with a black hammer and sickle replacing the swastika — and executed their game plan. Before the police could reach Limonov, his supporters carted him off. “My boys saved me,” he said. “Just like they can save the country.”

“Russia is back,” they like to say in Moscow these days. What a difference a sea of oil and gas can make. Bentleys, Maseratis and Maybach 62s — those Bavarian chariots that set you back upward of $400,000 — rule the prospekty. At the Ritz-Carlton, a new marble palace erected on the remains of the old Intourist Hotel across from Red Square, the smallest singles run $1,200 a night.

Still, in Moscow, and out across the hinterland, there is something else — a new generation untouched by high-speed globalization and mired in uncertainty. Russia’s youth ranges widely in its political sympathies — from the neo-Nazi thugs who posted the beheading of a dark-skinned man on the Internet to the neo-Soviet youth groups spawned by the Kremlin. But Limonov’s National-Bolsheviks came first and now stand somewhere in the middle of Russia’s odd political spectrum, part Merry Pranksters, part revolutionary vanguard. The party does not tally its membership, “for security reasons,” Limonov says, but claims to have 1,000 to 1,500 hardcore activists and some 56,000 loyalists. Unmoored by economic upheaval and unmoved by Putin’s restoration project, they have found in the NBP a satisfyingly fierce ideology, often mediated by black humor, that can be refashioned, as Limonov readily admits, “to fit anyone and anything.”

Limonov founded the NBP in 1993 after returning to Russia from years abroad. Since then, his message has changed — from anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism to anti-Putinism and anti-fascism — though rabid nationalism has dominated. He has sought the mantle of everyone from Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century anarchist, to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French ultranationalist. He has shifted course so often that by now only the goal — revolution — and the means — young people — remain constants. “In the bureaucratic KGB-cop state, youth are expendable,” he has written. He maintains that young Russians, “physically the most powerful group in society,” are regarded by authorities as “the internal enemy,” just as the Chechens are seen as the external one. Disaffected youth are Russia’s “most exploited class” in Limonov’s view and, as he readily admits, his core supporters. There are young men with shaved heads in the party, though these days they are more likely to be left-wing punks than right-wing skinheads.

[much, much more through link]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/ma...l?ref=magazine

Last edited by Alex Linder; March 3rd, 2008 at 06:55 PM.