The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  This conflation of punk and fascism in the official imagination led to confusion and mistrust that exists to this day. Battles between so-called Fa (right-wing) and Anti-fa (progressive) groups similar to those recalled with a kind of nostalgia in England today are present, visceral, and dangerous in the former Eastern Bloc, especially in its periphery.

  Like the Soviet press, willfully or not, misinterpreting the British punks’ swastikas, mistranslations become more aggressive in a world in which provocative concepts are available cross-culturally to people with vastly different frames of reference with which to interpret them. It’s so easy to airlift an ideology, complete with a fraught vocabulary, wholesale off the Internet that it’s equally easy to miss the context. The analogy is going to be inexact at best if one doesn’t share the precise historical prejudices at play—and, I suppose, even if you do: I couldn’t say precisely why something that feels OK for Patti Smith in 1978 would be off the table for a Russian in 2012, and the short answer may be that it should have been off the table for her as well. The result is a scattershot shooting gallery of offense: look at the tense, ongoing battle over the use of the word “gypsy,” which many Roma consider an ethnic slur, others embrace, but which most Americans and British use freely. I heard an Asian American in Beijing brag about “jew[ing] down” a cell phone salesman. It’s enough to make a guy say, “Fuck it” and buy everyone a Redskins jersey.

  One man’s life, in particular, makes a useful fable demonstrating the confusing way in which “punk” has been understood in the context of Russian political and cultural life. The writer, provocateur, founder of the quasi-fascist National Bolshevik Party, and self-identified “punk” Eduard Limonov has long blurred the line between radical politics and large-scale performance art. Because of the centrality of his experience with and interpretation of Western punk to the aesthetics of his politics, he provides a contrast with the later generation of young people, similarly inspired by Western punk but to radically different effect, who constitute the contemporary Russian punk scene. Limonov, exhilarated by characters like Johnny Rotten and of a Soviet generation mistrustful of any ideology, understood punk as an amoral license for confrontation and offense for its own sake. Today’s punks (excepting, maybe, our friend Andrei), inspired by the anarchist, progressive politics of bands like Crass and Fugazi, imbibed not only aesthetics but a set of ideals and a progressive moral sensibility.

  Limonov was born Eduard Savenko in 1943 in Kharkov and grew up in its gritty and violent Saltovka neighborhood, which he described in his third book, Memoir of a Russian Punk. In the 1960s “punk” meant petty theft and hooliganism, and Limonov describes an aimless world of gang scuffles, drinking, and run-ins with the “trash,” or cops. His own father was a secret police officer who ran train convoys “transport[ing] punks to labor camps and prisons” in Siberia. So it was with a kind of oedipal commitment that he managed to get himself exiled from the Soviet Union by 1974. “Rat out your degenerate friends or go into exile,” the KGB reportedly told him. He went to New York and managed to embed himself in the Lower East Side punk scene, befriending and idolizing scene luminaries including Richard Hell, Marky Ramone, and, yes, Patti Smith. It was a debauched period he used as material for his first books, It’s Me, Eddie and His Butler’s Story, which became sensations in France and Germany6 and sold more than a million copies in Russia. The exposure to the provocative downtown art world of 1970s New York shaped his self-conception permanently. To this day, he wears the “torn black sleeveless T-shirt or a button-down black T-shirt, black fake jeans unraveling at the seams, and Keds-like shoes” of an aging SoHo artist and “is clearly proud of being the sort of Iggy Pop of the right-wing literary world,” according to journalist Mark Ames, a longtime Limonov apologist. He already had a nom de punk, thanks to a friend who had dubbed him “Limonov” or “lemon” because “he was very pale, almost yellow.” He explained with no little pride that to a Russian ear the word sounds like “something punk, like Johnny Rotten.”

  The Dutch, French, and Italian editions of It’s Me, Eddie were titled, in reference to Limonov’s bisexual adventures, The Russian Poet Likes Big Negroes; the German, succinctly and inaccurately, Fuck Off, America.

  In the 1980s, he spent a few years as a literary celebrity in Paris. “We were used to Soviet dissidents being bearded, grave, and poorly dressed,” said French writer Emmanuel Carrère, who met him during these years and wrote a kind of “biographical novel” about him in 2011. “And here was this sexy, sly, funny guy, a cross between a sailor on leave and a rock star. . . . He sang Stalin’s praises, which we chalked up to his taste for provocation.” With the fall of the Soviet Union, he returned to Russia and immediately set about making himself infamous. He was invited by the clownish populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, founder and leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, to join the LDPR shadow cabinet. After a brief stint as minister of the interior, though, he instead founded his own National Bolshevik Party (NBP), also known as the Nat-Bols. (“The name made no difference to Limonov,” NBP co-founder and “ideologist” Alexander Dugin told the New York Times. “He wanted to call it ‘National Socialism,’ ‘National Fascism,’ ‘National Communism’—whatever. Ideology was never his thing. . . . The scream in the wilderness—that was his goal.”) The party unveiled a flag that was simply a Nazi flag with a hammer and sickle in place of the swastika. “Certainly it was irritation, provocative, outrageous punk, our flag,” Limonov wrote. He named the party’s newspaper Limonka, a pun on his name that was slang for a hand grenade. The Nat-Bols combined the far left, the far right, and the far out. “There’s no longer any left or right,” he told an interviewer. “There’s the system and the enemies of the system”—and by “system,” he explained, he meant Western liberal democracy.

  The party slogan was “Russia is everything—the rest is nothing.” Limonov’s young skinhead bodyguards referred to him as “Leader,” a term once used for Stalin. Party ideology was haphazard, opportunistic, but always oppositional. Party members were, said the New York Times, “part Merry Pranksters, part revolutionary vanguard,” who

  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.” . . . 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. . . . 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.

  The mixture of the absurd, the righteous, and the belligerent was intoxicating to the disaffected youth of Russia’s provincial cities, and in the pre-Internet era that ethos reached people via copies of Limonka, which became a shared secret, a window into a garish underground, like heavy metal or science fiction. “There was every reason to be blown away by its gaudy layout, vulgar drawings, and provocative headlines,” wrote Carrère, describing the impact of the newspaper on the writer and NBP party member Zakhar Prilepin. “Limonka dealt less with politics than with rock and roll, literature, and above all, style. What style? Fuck you, bullshit, up yours style. Majestic punk.” Prilepin explained to Carrère,

  You have to imagine what a provincial Russian city is like. The sinister life young people lead there, their lack of a future, and—if they’re at all sensitive or ambitious—their despair. All it took was for a single issue of Limonka to arrive in a city like that and fall into the hands of one of these idle, morose, tattooed youths who played the guitar and drank beer under his precious posters of The Cure or Che Guevara, and it was a done deal. Very quickly ther
e were ten or twenty of them, a whole threatening gang of good-for-nothings with pale complexions and ripped black jeans who hung out in the squares. . . . [Limonka] was their thing, the thing that spoke to them. [Limonov] said to them, “You’re young. You don’t like living in this shitty country. You don’t want to be an ordinary Popov, or a shithead who only thinks about money, or a Chekist. You’re a rebel. Your heroes are Jim Morrison, Lenin, Mishima, Baader. Well there you go: you’re a nazbol already.” . . .

  [They] were the Russian counterculture. The only one: everything else was bogus, indoctrination and so on. So of course the party had its share of brutes, guys recovering from military service, skinheads with German shepherds who got their kicks from pissing off the prilitchnyi—the upstanding citizens—by giving the Nazi salute. But the party also included all the frozen backwaters of Russia had to offer in terms of self-taught cartoonists, bass players looking for people to start a rock band, amateur video freaks, and timid guys who wrote poetry in private while pining after girls who were too beautiful for them and nursing dark dreams of wasting everyone at school and then blowing themselves up, like they do in America. Plus the Satanists from Irkutsk, the Hell’s Angels from Kirov, the Sandinistas from Magadan.

  Limonov issued provocative policy proposals, including polygamy and mandatory childbirth for women (“like military service for men”)—and then retracted them: “Fuck, I even forgot I wrote that.” Indulging a Hemingway-esque infatuation with the military, he appeared, wrote Marc Bennetts in The Guardian, in a documentary film “shooting a machine gun into a besieged Sarajevo in the company of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić.7 The incident . . . shown at Karadžić’s trial at the Hague, cost Limonov publishing contracts in both Europe and the US.” The Nat-Bols embarked on a program of what Limonov referred to as “velvet terrorism.” These were direct actions of the kind the anarchist writer Hakim Bey calls “poetic terrorism”: situationist, absurdist public pranks, in which, as Bey says, “the audience reaction or aesthetic shock [is] at least as strong as the emotion of terror . . . art as crime; crime as art.”

  “I’ve always loved bright and handsome gangsters,” Limonov said of one of the Serbian paramilitaries, echoing Rebecca West’s swoon over Yugoslav masculinity in general—“beautiful, with thick, straight, fair hair and bronze skins and high cheekbones pulling the flesh up from their large mouths, with broad chests and long legs springing from arched feet. These were men, they could beget children on women, they could shape certain kinds of materials for purposes that made them masters of their worlds”—and the Serbs in particular.

  Nat-Bols doused a politician in mayonnaise, occupied the Ministry of Health, rushed the Ministry of Finance yelling, “Return the money to the people!” and scattered leaflets encouraging Putin to “Dive After the Kursk”—the Russian Navy submarine that sank with its crew in 2000. As far back as Memoir of a Russian Punk, Limonov had been taken with the romance of a small, disciplined group in a time of anarchy, writing about himself (as he usually does) in the third person: “Eddie-baby is convinced that if the leading people in the state are liquidated, there will be chaos in the country and a well-organized gang can seize power. . . . Eddie-baby doesn’t see anything impossible about his idea. Lenin and the Bolsheviks also had a very small gang in 1917, but they still managed to seize power.” The authorities took him seriously, and he wound up serving two years in prison for smuggling arms as part of a supposed plot to take over northern Kazakhstan (“We live in a terrible climate. . . . Russia should swallow Kazakhstan territory if we want our children to have sunshine,” he later explained), and the Nat-Bols were outlawed in 2007 after seizing the reception office of the Kremlin.

  Limonov’s time in 1970s New York, and specifically its punk scene, remains his aesthetic and nostalgic touchstone. He “was never political,” an old friend told the Times. “New York politicized him. This city was his awakening.” Limonov himself told the Times, “The Ramones, I knew them. Not just Joey. All of them. It was a rich life then. . . . It was a great time, a legendary time. I have now a certain nostalgia. It’s exciting, and dangerous of course, what we’re doing now. But to have lived in the seventies in New York, it means a lot. Still.” In one of several defenses of Limonov, Ames explains the through line between the provocations of the early punks and Limonov’s reinterpretation in the political sphere of what he understood to be their modus operandi:

  He told me that the first English poetry he translated into Russian after moving to New York was the lyrics of Lou Reed. Reed, both as singer of The Velvet Underground and as a major figure in Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, was aggressively anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal, taking much of his aesthetic from the sado-masochist underground, from the violent fringes of society, from fascism and revolutionary aesthetics, in order to confront contemporary Western culture. Soon after Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, Limonov fell in with the punk movement in New York, which also agitated against liberal middle-class culture and values, relying heavily on violence and the threat of violence, though also more often than not on outrageous humor. Limonov never changed his heart or tastes; indeed, much of his sympathy with the skinheads goes directly back to The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Lou Reed, a Jew from Long Island who carved a giant iron cross in his skull and strutted around stage in a black leather uniform singing “Kill Your Sons.”

  The use of Nazi imagery for shock was rampant in the UK punk scene. Steinholt gives such examples as “the Sex Pistols’ ‘Belsen Was a Gas,’ Siouxsie Sioux’s and Mark E. Smith’s swastika armbands, [and] the origin of band names such as Joy Division.” Johnny Rotten also toyed with swastikas as a fashion statement. “I believe [NBP membership] could be given to Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten (the Johnny Rotten of 1977) and such membership would be accepted,” Limonov said. While denying that he necessarily still considered himself a punk (“How can one be a punk after 60? That would be silly”), he explicitly confirmed, in his essay “Punk and National-Bolshevism,” the influence of his youthful heroes on the NBP’s aesthetic:

  Punks were skeleton of Party organizations in first years of our existence. Loud denial of so-called values of civilization, grotesque, trash, screamings, some borrowings of Rightist aesthetics, were common for New York City punk movement of 1970s as well as for first National-Bolsheviks in 1990s. . . . Newspaper of National-Bolsheviks Party “Limonka” was in 1990s the most radical and most punkish of whole world. With its slogans like “Eat the Rich!” or “Good bourgeois is a dead bourgeois!” or “Capitalism is shit!” We were in punk tradition, what else? . . .

  NBP’s actions, however non-violent, are bearing aesthetics of punk, for example occupation of Bolshoi Theater on May 7, 2004, the day when Putin was inaugurated. Putin was expected at Bolshoi that evening, so National-Bolsheviks erupted on stage, took over president’s box. They were burning fires as football hooligans, wearing flags and screaming slogans. That was beautiful. That was punk. . . . Many heavy books will be written on subject “NBP and Punk.” I just made a sketch.

  Limonov may not be a punk anymore, he said, but “I believe that I am most punkish person on whole territory of Russian Republic and probably on all territory of ex-Soviet Union too. Maybe Shamil Basayev is comparable to me,” referring to the deceased Chechen terrorist who claimed responsibility for the infamous Beslan school massacre.

  Musicians were prominent in both the leadership and membership of the NBP—one account of an NBP rally noted that “Mr. Limonov’s speech drew a number of leather-clad rockabilly fans and thrash metal musicians.” Yegor Letov, whose Independent obituary called him “the father of Russian punk” and whose unimpeachable countercultural and dissident status included forced commitment to a mental hospital, was issued NBP membership card number four. He and Sergey Kuryokhin of the legendary band Akvarium8 became two of the NBP’s most prominent members, running its “cultural wing,” and the party became a magnet for a certain strain of the aging avant-garde. Letov’s presence and credibility, said Limonov,
gave the party “thousands of recruits over the years.”

  Kuryokhin was also a fluent practitioner of absurdist pranks like “proving” on a talk show that Lenin had transformed into a fungus after ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms.

  But their motivations and goals were not entirely in sync. The narcissistic Limonov saw himself, Steinholt argues, as the auteur of “a massive Gesamtkunstwerk that would cement his position” as a provocateur, “concentrating first and foremost on ideological taboos.” Letov, on the other hand, was a psychedelic nihilist, combining “glowing, universal misanthropy [with] anti-social tendencies” and a weakness for “territorial nationalism”—the old self-destructive and self-hating Russian patriotism at work.9 “Letov, as all punk artists, proved to be inconsistent, capricious, and unpredictable,” said Limonov, not without sympathy. “He quarreled with us in 1996, came back to party later, then went to his own punk solitude. Sometimes he is declaring himself Red and National-Bolshevik, sometimes he makes believe he doesn’t know us.” In the last years of his life, Letov cycled through ideologies—he left the NBP for Zyuganov’s revanchist Communists and then, as his political notoriety crippled his performing career, he renounced politics and, feeling misunderstood, retreated into a sullen silence.

  There is an implication in the commentary that Kuryokhin, for his part, was taking the piss: one of Kuryokhin’s longtime associates told Steinholt “that his jokes had finally gone too far and made him friends among the wrong kinds of people.”

  Limonov, Letov, and Kuryokhin all belonged to what filmmaker Adam Curtis calls “a post-political generation,” raised in the stagnant Soviet 1970s, “who retreated from all conventional ideologies, both communist and western capitalist, and instead turned to radical avant-garde culture . . . to try and protest against the absurdity of the system . . . something they believed politics was incapable of doing. . . . Limonov has explicitly said that his aim is to take ideas and attitudes from avant-garde art and music and use them to try and create a new kind of confrontational politics.”