Limonov vs. Putin

by Edward Limonov

  Let us now turn to Moskovsky Komsomoletz of February 24th 2005. The material is “The hyperboloid of Engineer Yakemenko”. The subtitle: “How we’ll be saved from an American putsch”. The first page contains a resume of the text: “Spring 2008. Before the elections of Russia’s president 50 thousand people organized and paid by US emissaries block Manezhnaya, Red Square and Vasilievsky Slope as well as the Central Electoral Commission. Their mission is to put a candidate favored by the States on the presidential seat and to turn our country into a colony at any cost.

  But here a secret association enters the arena. It is not in vain that 300 million dollars were spent on its creation: 200 000 members of the super powerful organization gather in Moscow. Armed with blue plastic chairs they disperse America’s minions. The fatherland is saved. The victors are awarded with the right to cleanse the staff and occupy the liberated posts.

  Nonsense?

  However MK obtained documents that confirm the recently spread rumors: a grandiose plan to create a new youth movement was sent to the regions. It will be called Nashi. The mission is to save the Fatherland. To save it in the way described above. It has been several months now that a personage famous in the political circles has been traveling around Russia’s cities. His name is Vasily Yakemenko. He has already created a movement – the infamous Walking Together. After Yakemenko got the idea to create the Walking he was invited to work in the president’s administration – he became the chief of the section of public relations of the Department of internal policy. (According to another version Vasily was given the idea of a pro-Putin youth organization on Old Square and he has developed it at his best). And now Mr. Yakemenko is in a new role…

  February 10th 2005. A small hall in Kursk’s college of economy and law. There are a few dozens of students from Kursk and Orlov in the hall.

  Yakemenko is on the platform. ‘Turn off your cellphones. Listen carefully. Don’t ask me to repeat. My name is Vasily. I am 33 years old and my function is very simple.” Let us stop. Moskovsky Komsomoletz has banally registered Yakemenko’s speech on tape. And published the transcription with its comments. “I travel in different cities, Yakemenko goes on, – in twenty regions and I invite people from the street to these meetings. I don’t know anybody among you. And the only thing I want from these meetings is that I want to find people who think like me, who share my point of view and I propose to look for a solution in this situation.” Then Yakemenko describes the horrors of American expansion into Russia: “We learned that they have fixed the date when they will introduce an external government to 2008. And this is still an optimistic date because now we have information that this could happen earlier, in other words Russia will be turned into a colony. … Many people, from the old times, from the times of the USSR, think that Russia is a great country. … In reality we have nothing in Russia. We have no nuclear missiles and those we have are old and rusty… …

  Meanwhile in Russia there are growing organizations, based on which the Americans will create an analogue of the Serbian Otpor, the Georgian Kmara or the Ukrainian Pora. This is Limonov’s NBP and the Vanguard of Red Youth. We need to give an adequate response to them. To create our own organization. Now we don’t really have the name of the organization yet; more or less all the cities agreed on the word Nashi, but there is no clear monitoring of this situation. We didn’t even found the name yet; we could change it.

  Then what? We hang the city’s map on the wall and there we mark all the places where usually over 200 people gather. Accordingly if this is an institute, there has to be several such places (campus, faculty). In other words we have to control each of these places. And we have to mark each of these places with a red flag. In my opinion there has to be not less than 150 such flags for a city like Orel or Kursk. And then the person who stays after this meeting and considers that he can work in this organization for now, he removes the red flag and puts a blue one instead and writes his name. And this means that we have a sympathizer in this place. Now these people in the not-yet-created organization are called commissars. And the very first task we have before us is to gather commissars not later than by the end of February 2005.”

  Yakemenko was expatiating on this for a long time, showing a suspiciously gloomy sense of humor. Here for example: “It’s very simple: we can catch nine drug addicts in Kursk, hang them at night along the road on a birch with the inscription ‘Drug addict. Was hung by the Nashi for using drugs’. On the following day people will know that we did it. But this is an extreme nonsense that does not suit us. There has to be a group that seriously works on these issues. … Three times a week, on a facultative basis for now, for three hours you will have courses that will teach you: public relations, creation, the bases of leadership, rhetoric, technologies of directing mass actions… … And now I’m talking with those of you who will be a potential commissar. You have to go to a training camp in Seliger. Two weeks in the summer, in July. You will be 150 people from different cities.” Then the antifascist Yakemenko exposes one-hundred-percent fascist ideas and desires: “I have made such a camp, for only 400 people though, on Seliger and there was an obligatory activity called ‘morning jogging’. … Since Seliger is a beautiful place a lot of fat people go there. In cars, for fishing or for something else and naturally, when young boys, these 400 people, start to run on the road, the cars nervously hunk to them so that they leave the road and unfortunately they leave. But I hope that when you will be 3 000 people and maybe wearing t-shirts with ‘Yield’ written on the back, nobody will hunk you; they are no fools. I think everybody will stop and wait while you run on one side, then on the other, for two hours and there will already be forty cars standing, but they’ll have to wait.”

  And this is how Yakemenko depicted their future to the students on February 10th 2005: “You have learned the technologies of leading the masses, you can lead people, in 2-3 years you have created the most powerful organization, in comparison to which Komsomol is a child’s play and sucks. Let’s suppose that you have received a significant quantity of harshly led people – 200 or 300 thousand – this is a huge number and 10 thousand are enough for each city, there were 6 thousand in Georgia in the Kmara organization, which removed the legally elected president Shevarnadze.” Then Yakemenko depicts the situation of a Russian Maydan. Spring 2008.

  “Let’s suppose America supposes that they will gather about 50 thousand people who will be able to block some squares in Moscow and decide of the outcome of the elections in their favor. It means that we have to show them 200 thousand. We have to convince them that there won’t be a civil war.” Then Yakemenko transfers his thoughts to the Ukrainian Maydan. And says very frank things, considering that he says them on February 10th and on January 29th there was an attack on the NBP headquarters, in which soccer fans recruited by the Nashi took part: “ If I had to solve the question on Maydan, considering the general lack of will, I would have solved it very simply-I would have contacted my colleagues from Spartak’s fans movement (notice “my colleagues”, Yakemenko is not a soccer fan but he speaks about the fans – Nashi’s comrades-in-arms. - E. L.), they would have gathered 5 000 sympathizers with these blue plastic chairs that they use to fight in the stadium and we would have brought them to Kiev and with these blue chairs they would have driven out those 100 thousand who came to Maydan to the Dnieper River and they would have jumped on these blocks of ice on the Dnieper in their white trousers like polar bears.” Yakemenko told this in front of his people not expecting that journalists would record him; otherwise he would have abstained from racist and fascist statements. Moskovsky Komsomoletz is a yellow newspaper and although sometimes it executes the orders of the special services, however it can’t refuse a sensation.

  Yakemenko continues to seduce the students with Dolce Vita pictures of their future life: “ Then in 2008 the Russian president will negotiate with you. You will receive the right to elect anyone you want. You will receive a mandate for power; you will be able to have any p
ost you want. Instead of the 450 idiots who siege in the State Duma, 450 young people, poorly educated, 23-25 years old, so what.” Such a statement can be clearly defined as fascist, the young and uneducated against the old, the rich and the wealthy is the favorite subject of the early revolutionary German National Socialism and of the Italian fascism. Was Vladislav Surkov realizing this when he started to execute his project? Yakemenko was realizing how it could end. I cite the same article in MK: “ It will have an interesting end: I will be in The Hague next to Slobodan Milosevich, obviously as a theoretician, Kursk and Orel leaders will be in prison.” In other words Yakemenko, realizing the magnitude of the project, also realizes its illegality. An international tribunal – this is what he sees in perspective and not only a mandate for power as an alternative to the future. “In 2012 you will have to elect your president. Here is a plan I’m proposing to you.” Then he promises the students will be protected by the president, in the following expressions: “I make sure, while you’re still weak and disorganized, that the local power doesn’t harm you. If you will get in trouble we will solve these problems. The president knows about the creation of this organization. I’m telling you, the country lays its hopes on you. The president is ready to risk in order to give this to you. You are given millions of dollars for this!”

  In other words already on February 24th the country received important information from Vasily Yakemenko about the fact that the president approved the creation of a youth organization proposing to use methods punishable by the tribunal in The Hague for the leaders and by detention for the participants, i.e. a criminal organization.

  On March 1st 2005 Yakemenko sent a statement about the creation of the Nashi youth movement to the media. It makes sense to reproduce it here in its totality: “On the eve of the 60th anniversary of Russia’s Victory in the Great Patriotic War several regional youth organizations decided to create a political movement. The Walking Together and I personally supported this healthy reaction to the growing popularity in the pseudo-intellectual circles of the political corrupter of youth Limonov and his wannabe nazis. Khakamada and her Committee-2008, the youth Yabloko, Berezovsky, Makashov and other amoral individuals have gathered under the Hitlerian flags of social-nationalism that the National-Bolsheviks wave. For us, the open statements and the impunity of the carriers of the XX century’s plague, which killed 20 millions of Russians, Tatars, Belarusians and Jews, is a personal offense. We will put an end to the union of oligarchs and anti-Semites, Nazis and liberals. In order to solve this problem we are starting a new project – the Nashi youth movement. No pasaran! Victory will be ours!

  Vasily Yakemenko.”

  Once again, now as stated by the News.ru.com agency, let us turn to the raid on the NBP headquarters.

  “On January 29th at 10 o’clock the NBP headquarters were attacked. There were about 40 attackers. They arrived in a microbus and two cars with tainted windows that have never parked here before (and that disappeared right after the attack) were also present near the house. The attackers were yelling Nazi (!) slogans and were armed with wooden bats – sawed handles from shovels with the price tags still on them. Two nazbols were beaten but the attackers did not manage to get inside thanks to a well-organized defense. The nazbols managed to detain five attackers. The police officers that arrived after some time brought the five to Lomonosov’s police station. A criminal case was opened on the arrested on article 213 (delinquency).

  On March 5th an unidentified group of young people sawed open the door to the NBP office on Maria Ulianova Street. The National-Bolsheviks barricaded themselves inside. The attackers were attacking them with gas. According to the NBP an operator from the First Channel was present with the attackers. The police was informed about the attack however the police arrived only two hours after the call was made. The law enforcing bodies arrested nine participants of the attack on the NBP headquarters. They confiscated six baseball bats, two crowbars and gas. As people in the NBP affirm the thugs were thoroughly videotaping a dozen of syringes and twenty vodka bottles they have brought with them.” (Here we feel the RUBOP at work, they teach the Nashists: a typically RUBOP discrediting trick: syringes and vodka. Only heroin bags are missing. I also remember the FSB that cleaned up the Theater Center on Dubrovka in such a way that Barayev who was shot in flight holds an intact cognac bottle in his hand. The special services’ gloomy humor. - E. L.) “Besides, News.ru.com goes on, - they have beaten a nazbol who was on duty in the headquarters with a baseball bat. This is Yakov Gorbunov, a veteran of the Chechnya war. His jaw was broken and an eye was injured. NBP members affirm that members of the Nashi new pro-Kremlin movement created under the aegis of the president’s Administration are behind these incidents. In particular, as News.ru.com was told in the NBP office the attack was made by soccer hooligans from the Moscow Gladiators group hired by the Nashi movement.

  We remind that on one of his press conferences Vasily Yakemenko stated that the principal task of the Nashi was the fight with ‘Nazis’ to whom he related the NBP. … On April 10th in Moscow the NBP member Yakov Gorbunov who suffered during the raid on the NBP headquarters on March 5th was attacked. He was attacked by unidentified people on Maria Ulianova Street and was beaten with iron bars on the head. After this the criminals got into a car and drove away. The NBP consider that this was an act of vengeance from the Nashi because the veteran of the Chechen war Yakov Gorbunov testified against them about the recent attack on the nazbols’ headquarters. These testimonies on the participants of the March 5th attack on the NBP headquarters resulted in the opening of criminal cases. Earlier the Kommersant journalist Oleg Kashin and the leader of Moscow’s youth Yabloko Ilya Yashin who was beaten on a Nashi’s event in Solnechnogorsk have affirmed that the Nashi movement has attracted soccer hooligans as its combat detachments. Komsomolskaya Pravda also wrote that one of today’s leaders of the Nashi is Alexey Mitryushin, a former soccer fan.”

  From the announcements of the media on March 9th 2005: “The initiator of the Nashi youth movement who directed the constitutive conference of the movement in Podmoskovie on February 26-27th Vasily Yakemenko has refuted the declarations of the NBP that the individuals who raided the headquarters of the National-Bolshevik Party on March 5th “were fulfilling the functions of a group of physical defense”. V. Yakemenko emphasized that the Nashi have nothing in common with radicals and extremists: “This contradicts the principles of our organization – nonviolence and antifascism.” It was the same Yakemenko who, in Kursk on February 10th, was explaining how he would have solved the Maydan problem by brining 5 thousand “colleagues”, soccer fans, with plastic chairs. And they would have chased down 100 thousand people with these chairs.

  On 03.15.05. Pravda-Info publishes on its site the results of an investigation by the Atington group called “The Secret Mission of Vasya the Killer”. The subtitle: “We received information about the individuals who made a pogrom in the NBP headquarters”. “The power is trying to create a new ‘black hundred’ from the most destructive elements among youth movements – soccer fans. For the first time ‘the new recruits’ of the power have announced about themselves by a pogrom in the NBP headquarters, where dozens of young people have broken the metal door and harshly beaten two young people who were there as well as the journalist of an Internet publication. Simultaneously with this act of deterrence similar events took place in Saint Petersburg, Kaliningrad, etc.