Limonov Becomes a Post-Soviet Nationalist Rock Star

In the early 1990s, after living in emigration for two decades, the writer Eduard Limonov (1943-2020) moved back to Russia and became a celebrity. His fame rested, on the one hand, on the popular success of his novel It’s Me, Eddie (Eto ia—Edichka, 1979/ 1991), which described the author’s sexual experimentation, queerness, and marginality in 1970s New York. On the other hand, Limonov garnered attention for his provocative celebration of masculinity, war, and fascism as a revolt against the modern world.

While still in Paris, Limonov had begun publishing articles in popular Russian periodicals like Sovershenno sekretno, Izvestiia, Sovetskaia Rossiia, and Novyi vzgliad. These salvos came to be known as limonki (grenades) because of their aggressive style—a name soon applied to Limonka, the cult newspaper released by the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), the political organization-cum-punk movement Limonov founded and led. Limonov himself was frequently featured and interviewed in major newspapers as well as on TV and radio shows. He gained recognition both for the raw sincerity of his writing and speech, and for his distinctive fashion: the black leather jacket, the red shirt, the thick tinted glasses, the short fade.

Limonov’s success was based on a strange combination of cosmopolitan transgression—readers and interviewers never could stop wondering if he performed oral sex on a Black man in NYC, as It’s Me, Eddie luridly describes—with Soviet and working-class pride. At the same time, Limonov exhibited equal irreverence for traditions, commonly accepted norms, beliefs, and cultural capital—and for the literary classics that the Russian intelligentsia held in such high esteem.

The excerpt featured in this artifact is from one of Limonov’s first appearances on Russian television, in 1992. He was a guest on a series called “Ostankino Concert Hall’s Encounter with,” which had been hosting writers, artists, directors, and public figures since perestroika. During the one-hour event, Limonov sits at a table on the stage, speaks about his work and biography, and, at the end, answers questions from the live audience. Introducing himself to his new Russian readers, he minimizes the “sexual subjects” in his work, in particular by mentioning the first novel he published in the Soviet Union, U nas byla velikaia epokha (We had a great epoch, 1989), which focused on the author’s memories of childhood in the late Stalin era. Reinforcing his new image as a tough working-class writer, the son of a low-level NKVD officer from the industrial periphery of Kharkiv, Ukraine, Limonov describes his literary output as the result of hard work and discipline. His tastes, too, are those of a man of the people: macaroni and hot dogs (makarony s sosiskami, a stereotypically mundane Soviet meal) and clothes comfortable enough to allow brawling with the cops during street protests.

Throughout the episode, the writer displays his knack for eliciting sympathy from people of all ages and social classes: from young alternative kids curious to hear more about Western punk bands, to graying middle-aged Soviet “normies” concerned about the changes brought about by the Soviet collapse and Russia’s transition to democracy and capitalism. At the end of the show, a young neformal—an alternative kid dressed all in black and wearing thin-framed, round sunglasses—suggests taking inspiration from Limonov’s 1974 prose poem “We are the national hero [My—natsional’nyi geroi]” to start an organization of the writer’s fans who would imitate his style. This proposal anticipates the 1994 establishment of the NBP, which became one of post-Soviet Russia’s first countercultural movements.