April 1, 2005

In Russia, Group Takes Radical Steps To Defy Kremlin

Mr. Limonov's Bolsheviks Play to Growing Nostalgia For Country's Past Greatness

by Alan Cullison  - THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MOSCOW -- One day last summer, a few young men in the blue uniforms of Russia's emergency-services department pulled up in a truck at the offices of the Ministry of Health, announcing they needed to sweep the building for bombs.

The staff quickly evacuated. But the young men weren't bomb-sweepers: They were members of a radical political group, the National Bolsheviks. They unfurled their red, white and black party flag from the ministry's windows and tossed leaflets into the street. A framed picture of President Vladimir Putin crashed onto the sidewalk.

"We have to expose the fallacy and stupidity of Kremlin power," says their leader, Eduard Limonov, a 62-year-old onetime punk author. "Everyone else is afraid."

Though his followers number only 15,000, Mr. Limonov's party is a rare phenomenon in Russia today: an opposition movement the Kremlin seems genuinely afraid of.

Today the National Bolsheviks boast more members behind bars than any other major political party. Forty-seven of Mr. Limonov's supporters are in prison, most for serious charges like creating mass disorder.

The crackdown on what started as an avant-garde movement of Russian punks and skinheads has only fueled its popularity.

This year, Mr. Limonov's supporters helped organize nationwide demonstrations against cuts in government welfare payments. The demonstrations have posed the first mass challenge to Mr. Putin's power since he took the presidency in 2000.

The National Bolsheviks play to a growing nostalgia in Russia for the nation's past greatness. Mr. Putin's own talk of restoring Russia's might resonates with millions of Russians, and Mr. Limonov's party takes it to the extreme. The party flag has the same colors and layout of the Nazi one: a white circle on a red background with a black symbol in the middle. The symbol itself is a hammer and sickle instead of a swastika.

After youth protest groups played major roles in toppling regimes in the former Soviet states of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, many critics of Mr. Putin's rule have been hoping Russia will join the trend. But a populist groundswell in Russia might not bring the type of change Western liberals are comfortable with -- as the National Bolsheviks' symbols suggest.

Western-style democracy has a bad name in Russia, tarnished by a decade of oligarchic capitalism that impoverished millions. Polls show half of Russians think Stalin played a generally positive role in the country's history.

"For Russia, fascism is an absolutely serious, fundamental political danger," Anatoly Chubais, one of Russia's leading liberal politicians, said in a recent interview. Mr. Chubais, who also heads Russia's state electric company, is widely reviled for directing a controversial privatization plan in the 1990s and recently survived an assassination attempt. Police have charged a retired army colonel in the attack.

Mr. Limonov's followers say their radical measures are needed in Russia's repressed political environment. The National Bolsheviks pull in disaffected young people with a humor-tinged rebellion: Mr. Limonov's followers have pelted the prime minister with an egg and squirted the chief of Russia's electoral commission with mayonnaise.

Taya Osipova, 20, swatted the Kremlin-backed governor of Smolensk with a bouquet of carnations two years ago. After serving three days in jail and a year of probation she moved to Moscow where she devotes herself to party work. "The other parties just don't do anything," she says. "You sign up, go to a meeting or two, but you know that nothing comes of it. The National Bolsheviks actually do something."

Grigory Yavlinsky, founder of one of Russia's oldest liberal parties, says his young followers are attracted by the antics. "Every day more of them go over to Limonov," says Mr. Yavlinsky.

Mr. Limonov, who has written 37 books, rejects suggestions that his party is chauvinist or anti-Semitic. Aides point out that the head of the party in Latvia is half-African, and the deputy head in Russia is Jewish. "I'll admit that we use powerful symbols, and they're provocative," he says. "But that's what brought the party its activists."

Mr. Limonov says some of the party's main planks -- an end to the war in Chechnya, an election system less favorable to Mr. Putin, and greater subsidies for students and pensioners -- are expressions of the popular will. His party, he says, is on a drive to register 50,000 members so it can compete in parliamentary elections in 2007.

In apparent response, a new pro-Kremlin youth group has formed. Its opening conference included workshops on how to foil sit-ins by the Bolsheviks.

In an interview with the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda last October, Mr. Putin's right-hand man, Vladislav Surkov, dismissed the Bolsheviks along with Mr. Yavlinsky's liberals as traitors unlikely to win broad popular approval. "They each have sponsors of foreign origin. They share a hatred of what they call 'Putins's Russia' -- in reality, a hatred of Russia as such," Mr. Surkov said. "They promote the idea that it would be a good thing for their own country to lose the war on terror."

Mr. Limonov reminds some critics of czarist-era intellectuals who toyed with radical ideas and regarded politics as a sort of performance art. Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who has close ties to the Kremlin and is a frequent spokesman for its views, says the sophisticated motives of Mr. Limonov are probably lost on his supporters. With real political parties barely formed in Russia, Mr. Limonov's group is "filling the vacuum," says Mr. Pavlovsky. "They need to be banned."

Mr. Limonov directs his party from a sparsely furnished apartment in central Moscow. He can't attend rallies, he says, because he is on parole from a prison sentence for trying to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan, a charge he denies.

       He greets visitors in a black suit and tie, and soft-spoken English that he learned as a Soviet-era dissident in New York. With a goatee and heavy-rimmed glasses, he looks like a modern-day Leon Trotsky.

His real name is Eduard Savenko, and he grew up in the industrial Soviet city of Kharkov, now part of Ukraine. In his early 20s he arrived in Moscow and, using his pen name to elude authorities, gained fame as an angry counterculture poet who sold his verses illegally. The KGB eventually caught on and gave him a choice in 1974 -- go to the gulag or emigrate to the West.

    He moved to New York, where he got a job as a housekeeper for a rich Manhattan family, and continued to write in his spare time. Unable to make it as a writer in the U.S. -- his first book, Diary of a Loser, was rejected by 35 publishing houses -- he moved to France where he became the darling of nationalists and Communists in part for his writings about the banality of American consumer culture.

One night at a literary conference in Budapest in 1989, he got into an argument with the British novelist Paul Bailey over capital punishment. Mr. Bailey said he was against it. After an angry exchange, Mr. Limonov ended up knocking Mr. Bailey unconscious with a bottle of Mumm's Champagne, both men recall.

The collapse of the Soviet Union drew Mr. Limonov back to Eastern Europe, where he became embroiled in nationalist causes. He befriended Russian fighters in Transdniester, a breakaway sliver of Moldova that today is a Russian-backed haven of arms trading. In Yugoslavia, he praised Slobodan Milosevic, now facing a war-crimes tribunal at The Hague. When Mr. Limonov returned to Russia he espoused giving nuclear weapons to Serbia to defend itself against the West.

 'The Bunker'

In 1994 he opened his own headquarters in the center of Moscow in a warren of basement rooms guarded by a steel door that he and his followers nicknamed "the bunker." An eclectic collection of heavy-metal fans, vocational-school students and army veterans used the bunker for party meetings as well as rock concerts and counterculture poetry readings.

Authorities paid little attention. "I didn't know how to run a political party, and I had to learn," Mr. Limonov said. "I was always a writer, not a politician."

Gradually, the party coalesced around Mr. Limonov's biweekly newspaper, "LIMONKA," a Russian slang word for "hand grenade," pounded out by devotees in Mr. Limonov's bunker in a room festooned with posters of Che Guevera, Benito Mussolini and Kurt Cobain.

The party also got a boost in 1999, when Mr. Putin became prime minister and started talking about restoring Russia's greatness and defending the rights of Russians living elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

Mr. Limonov thinks his own party's similar agenda aroused the jealousy of the Kremlin. In 2000, shortly after Mr. Putin took the presidency, Mr. Limonov noticed he was being followed. He was at a retreat in Siberia in 2001 when more than 70 special agents closed in on his cabin with submachine guns and arrested him.

Mr. Limonov was sentenced to four years in prison over an alleged plot to carve out an independent Russian-dominated enclave in neighboring Kazakhstan.

He feared the party would die without him. Instead, it blossomed -- thanks, oddly, to a documentary on state television. The documentary accused the party of brainwashing its members and hoarding arms for the Kazakhstan operation.

Party members say the portrayal helped turn Mr. Limonov into a pinup for Russian ultranationalists. A steady stream of admirers visited him in prison with gifts and requests for interviews.

He wrote eight books in prison. One was "Another Russia," in which he calls for the creation of a giant "Eurasian state" populated by "armed nomadic communes" whose youthful members would practice free love.

To ensure sufficient population, he said all women would be required to give birth to four children while they were between the ages of 25 and 35. In the coming revolution, he writes, "people will perish young but it will be joyous."

Mr. Limonov's followers hailed his book as their political credo. His publisher, Alexander Ivanov, compares Mr. Limonov to Vladimir Lenin and Fyodor Dostoevsky, each of whom wrote seminal books while behind bars in Russia.

Mr. Limonov's movement raised its profile during 2003 parliamentary elections, which took place shortly after he was released from prison early for good behavior.

Western-style moderates tried to compete, even though they knew they were no match for Mr. Putin's political machine. The National Bolsheviks, by contrast, treated the elections as a farce from the beginning. They opened a blitzkrieg of "food terrorism" -- throwing eggs, tomatoes and mayonnaise.

During the campaign, Mr. Putin's elections commissioner, Alexander Veshnyakov, held a conference entitled "For Honest Elections."

Mr. Veshnyakov was standing before a bank of television cameras and photographers when one of Mr. Limonov's followers squirted a bag of mayonnaise on his neatly tailored dark suit. The next day his picture appeared in newspapers across the country.

Harsh Response

The Kremlin responded with arrests and threats of long prison terms. But Mr. Limonov's followers upped the ante.

The takeover of the Health Ministry, in which Mr. Putin's portrait was tossed out of a window, took place last summer as part of protests against the planned changes to welfare payments. Police eventually battered down the door and arrested the protesters, who received sentences of three years in prison.

Undeterred, Mr. Limonov's followers held a sit-in at the offices of the presidential administration in the center of Moscow. For two hours they refused to leave and handed out fliers protesting the war in Chechnya, election irregularities and the closure of an opposition television station. Police arrested 40 of them and charged them with organizing a mass revolt, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

On Jan. 1, the government began to implement the welfare changes, which withdrew privileges for pensioners such as free bus rides in return for cash payments that often failed to arrive on time. Protests sprouted up across Russia, forcing the Kremlin to backtrack on the plan.

The National Bolsheviks were at the center of many protests. In St. Petersburg, the scene of the largest protests, the governor invited National Bolsheviks along with Communists and members of Mr. Yavlinsky's liberal party into talks on ending the unrest.

As the party grows, it is bracing for a fight, Mr. Limonov says. Eleven members have died under mysterious circumstances -- some stabbed, others beaten, one thrown out of a window -- in the past few years, party members say. Last month a group of men showed up at the Moscow bunker and broke the jaw of a young man guarding the door.

The party is giving boxing lessons at the bunker on Friday nights and asking members with fighting experience to volunteer for guard duty.

Ivan Prokhorov, 20, now takes the train once a week from St. Petersburg, where he is earning a degree in political science, to sleep for three nights in the bunker. "A lot of people say that we're the fascists," says Mr. Prokhorov, whose knuckles are scratched and bandaged from boxing practice. "But I think we're fighting the fascists."

                                                           Alan Cullison

                      The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2005

Write to Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com

 Writers, Meeting in Budapest, Warm to a Concept

By HENRY KAMM, Special to The New York Times

Published: June 22, 1989 

 http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/22/books/writers-meeting-in-budapest-warm-to-a-concept.html

Several dozen writers and poets from many nations, assembled in a hall where the Hungarian Parliament once met, have since Monday been sitting through sessions of parochial debates in which their colleagues, divided into national panels, discussed what seem to them the many pains and few joys of their work.

The others listened politely and, when given an opportunity, asked polite questions. Few outsiders came to listen, even for the session on Hungarian literature. The meeting is the American Wheatland Foundation's third annual Conference on Literature. The foundation is financed by Ann Getty, the publisher and philanthropist.

But Tuesday the pace picked up. There was tension, an audience gathered, earphones for simultaneous translations were put on and, to the surprise of the decorous gathering, persistent interjections came from a member of the public whom the moderator refused to recognize.

The topic was listed as ''Central Europe,'' but the English term gives a wrong impression. The writers were not dealing with a geographic unit whose borders, with some compromises, could be limned. What they spoke of, with some heat, was an emotional and intellectual concept usually referred to by the German term Mitteleuropa.

In Central Europe, Mitteleuropa is in, which explains the heat and public interest.

The Main Speaker

The panel's composition gives an idea of the geographic flexibility of the notion. Its main speaker was Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet of Lithuanian birth and American residence. There was also Adam Michnik, a Polish ''historian by training and dissident by profession,'' in his words, who was elected to the Polish Parliament in the Solidarity landslide June 4.

Mr. Michnik's remarks were translated into Russian for the benefit of the conference interpreters, who don't count Polish among their languages, by a fellow panelist, Viktor Yerofeyev, a Soviet essayist who occasionally teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Hungary was represented by George Konrad, Peter Esterhazy and Miklos Meszoly, novelists. From Soviet Estonia, a distinctly noncentral part of the Continent, came Paul-Eerik Rummo, poet and playwright.

Danilo Kis, a Yugoslav novelist whose father was a Hungarian Jew and his mother a Montenegrin, came from his home in Paris. Claudio Magri, an Italian writer and professor, represented Trieste, the port of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose borders contained much of Mitteleuropa.

H. C. Artmann, a poet, was on the panel but declined to participate. ''As an Austrian, I'm not a Mitteleuropaer because we had the good fortune to regain our independence in 1955,'' he explained and fell silent for the rest of the debate.

An Informal Federation

Mr. Artmann touched on the heart of the matter. Mitteleuropa is an informal federation of losers, of nations or individuals who have been deprived of autonomy or sense of importance, condemned to live on memories.

In his keynote speech, Mr. Milosz, a Nobel Prize winner, said: ''Probably a basic difference between the two halves of Europe is that between memory and lack of memory. For Western Europeans, the past in question is no more than a vague recollection of a misty past. For us - I say us because I experienced the consequences of that pact between superpowers myself - that division of Europe has been a palpable reality.''

Mr. Milosz was speaking of the German-Soviet pact of August 1939, which set the stage for Hitler's attack on Poland and the outbreak of World War II. He continued:

''Therefore, I would risk a simple definition of Central Europe: all the countries which in August 1939 were the real or hypothetical object of a trade between the Soviet Union and Germany. The reduction to the role of an object of history creates sufficiently deep traumas and explains our wariness when we think of the two big neighbors. Independence from the Eastern Big Brother probably is not equated with an unreserved acceptance of the West.''

An Unexpected Defender

Mr. Milosz was heckled by an unexpected defender of the Soviet Union's role in history. He was Edward Limonov, a poet and author who left the Soviet Union in 1974 and after a long stay in New York moved to Paris.

Mr. Limonov challengingly reminded the former Polish diplomat that Poland in 1935 signed a nonaggression treaty with Germany, and when Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia in 1938 it helped itself to a part of the victim's territory. Mr. Milosz did not reply.

Mr. Limonov explained afterward that he believed in defending ''historical justice'' more than the Soviet Union. Eastern Europe is not a victim of the Soviet Union but of the German aggression that led to the division of Europe, he said.

''How many Soviet soldiers died in liberating Auschwitz?'' he asked. ''You never here about that on TV.''

In a sign of shifting times, the Soviet emigre's rallying to his former country's defense was followed by a spirited attack on the Soviet Government by Mr. Yerofeyev, who lives in Moscow. Proclaiming his solidarity with the people of Eastern Europe, he said, ''We've been living our lives in an occupied country for a long time.''

He continued, to applause: ''I'm of a generation that always called them 'they.' 'We' always meant people who oppose the Soviet empire.'' A Transmission Belt

The 42-year-old essayist thanked Mitteleuropa, especially Poland, for having been a vital informal transmission belt to the Soviet Union. ''Through them we found out about the cultural and political values of the West,'' he said. ''It led to a revolutionary situation in Russia today.''

The Wheatland Foundation also intended for there to be discussion of another struggle, the Arab-Israeli conflict. But virtually all Arab writers boycotted the Israeli panel's discussion, although all its participants had been chosen from the peace movement.

A challenge to the Israelis came from Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist. Emphasizing her Jewishness, she urged the Israelis to learn from white South African writers like herself. ''People have to be ready to lay their lives on the line,'' she said.

''What do you want me to do, assassinate Yitzhak Shamir or commit suicide in front of the Defense Ministry?'' asked Yoram Kaniuk, an Israeli novelist. Other angered Israelis said their Government did not ban the opposition and added privately that they knew of no life-endangering acts by Miss Gordimer