"An Armed Paradise"

This artifact features two articles from Limonka by anarchist writer Aleksey Tsvetkov (1975-). As the paper’s associate editor between 1996 and 1998, he reflected the violent, visionary, and rebellious spirit of the early NBP. In his writing and performances, Tsvetkov pushed Dugin and Limonov’s imaginative, provocative, and arguably irresponsible free play with art and radical politics even further, turning Limonka into a de facto postmodern art project.

In the first article, “An Armed Paradise,” Tsvetkov imagines a young party member joining the radical heroes from the posters in his bedroom—Charles Manson, the German terrorist Andreas Baader, Che Guevara, Malcolm X—in an attempt to assassinate the Russian president and eventually enter a totalitarian “armed paradise.” Here, per Tsvetkov, young National Bolsheviks live side by side with their political models, wear “uniforms made of sun” and “golden handcuffs,” and drink the “wine of eternal life” handed to them by a “white-haired goddess.”

In the second article, “Skinheads,” Tsvetkov fantasizes about creating a “new style” for Russian skinheads, inspired by Dugin’s conspiracy theories and mystical writings. Another important source for Tsvetkov’s “new style” is the Soviet icon Stierlitz, the fictional spy from the popular Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973) who works undercover in Nazi Germany while wearing a sleek SS uniform. The outfit of “the new Russian skinhead” would include “a switchblade, baseball bat, purple bomber jacket, military boots in the Dr. Martens style with red and brown laces, [and] tattoos of a grenade or a hammer and sickle in the shape of a snake biting its own tail.” Tsvetkov’s imaginary countercultural aesthetic was quintessentially masculine, in that young National Bolshevik activists were meant to “cultivate a masculine idealism (totalitarianism) despite the feminine cynicism (democracy) that is in the air.”