The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  A coping mechanism and way of public expression distinctive to this generation in the waning years of Soviet and Eastern European communism, conscious of the emptiness of Soviet symbology and language but pessimistic about its opportunity to foment change, was an attitude colloquially called stiob. Alexei Yurchak defined stiob as “an ironic aesthetic . . . [that] differed from sarcasm, cynicism, derision or any of the more familiar genres of absurd humor [in that it] required such a degree of overidentification with the object, person, or idea at which [it] was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two. The very practitioners of stiob refused to draw a line between these sentiments . . . refusing the very dichotomy.” Stiob was parody so deadpan, so straight-faced, that it became indistinguishable from the real thing.10 The authorities would be aware of and reactive to traditionally or literally dissident language. But since the “highly formalized language . . . [of] late socialism” meant that it was more important to reproduce approved phraseology “than to concern oneself with what [the words] might ‘mean’ in a literal sense,” Yurchak explained, official lingo proved a useful Trojan horse in which to insert subversive meaning.

  In a journal article on stiob, Dominic Boyer and Yurchak wrote, “In the post-Soviet period the meaning of this term widened considerably, and today is often used in Russian media to refer generically to irony, sarcasm and absurd humor.” The oft-noted tendency of postcommunist Eastern Europeans to hold those attributes may also go a long way toward explaining that generation’s fondness for Frank Zappa.

  An inexact parallel in contemporary American life was Stephen Colbert’s past embodiment, on his Comedy Central show, of a Bill O’Reilly–esque right-wing blowhard. The comparison is inexact because The Colbert Report was clearly presented as a comedy program, with an audience explicitly let in on the joke. Imagine an unknown Colbert, in undercover character, hired as an actual Fox News commentator. Musicians showed a particular skill at this sort of thing—the Slovenian band Laibach, who in 2015 became the first Western band to play a concert in North Korea, remain well-known practitioners. In 1987, Kuryokhin managed to have published in Leningradskaya Pravda an ideologically impeccable attack on rock music, written in irreproachable Soviet jargon: rock musicians, he wrote, show a “complete lack of talent and very little skill in playing musical instruments. [The] deafening noise . . . reveals overall helplessness, the silliness of their texts reveals banality . . . their false pathos reveals social inadequacy. . . . It is time that the Komsomol takes a very serious look at this problem.” The confused reaction of officials, wrote Boyer and Yurchak, proved that “a text written in that language . . . could be simultaneously an exemplary ideological statement and a public ridicule of that statement.”11

  Another Western analogue would be the articles in parody newspapers such as The Onion that, because of their pitch-perfect parroting of journalistic jargon, are mistakenly shared as real news.

  The centrality of the official antifascist line made it an ideal target for stiob actions. To the stiob generation, “all political doctrines and sentiments (multiculturalism as well as conservatism, liberalism as well as socialism, fundamentalism as well as atheism) [were] equally corrupt, deformed, and hypocritical,” wrote Yurchak. And if fascism were divorced from its sacrosanct place in the Soviet hierarchy of evil, it too could be repurposed as just another empty ideological aesthetic.

  Is Limonov, then, a subtle and committed practitioner of stiob (though to ask the question is to misunderstand the game)? Journalist Matt Taibbi, the co-editor (with Mark Ames) of the amoral expat journal The Exile in Moscow in the 1990s, described Limonov’s imprisonment as having been “for faux-fomenting real revolution, or really fomenting faux revolution.” Is he, as Ames has described him, an opportunist and self-promoter, “a cynical marketing whiz looking to . . . maintain his fame?” Were he and Letov examples of a tendency of a kind of aging contrarian to find in political strength-worship a culmination of the libertarian self-sufficiency that defined their dissident youth? Perhaps he should simply be taken at face value—actions and words do exist independent of intent—as the French writer-provocateur Michel Houllebecq once wrote of himself, as a “nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist: to lump [him] in with the rather unsavory family of ‘right-wing anarchists’ would be to give [him] too much credit.”

  Or, as Ames wrote in an impassioned defense, was Limonov a principled, almost pathological contrarian, and the criticism of his political theater the cowardice of aesthetic dilettantes? Ames described a call he received from Limonov on the occasion of Limonka’s fourth anniversary: the paper was throwing a party at the Mayakovsky Museum, and Limonov wanted to invite his old hero Johnny Rotten. Rotten, through his agents, begged off, citing jet lag and Thanksgiving plans. Limonov, said Ames, was a living contrast to formerly extremist artists like Rotten who had been co-opted into the bourgeoisie.

  After the departure of Dugin from the National Bolshevik party—he went on to become a Kremlin-funded primary ideologue of the Russian incursions into Ukraine—and Limonov’s prison term (“For a man who sees himself as the hero of a novel,” his biographer wrote, “prison is one chapter that can’t be missed”), the latter disavowed the more xenophobic and far-right rhetoric of the NBP, which was banned by the government in 2007. As promiscuous in his political alliances as in his personal life (he’s been married six times), in 2010 he joined forces with the chess champion and Western-style liberal Garry Kasparov in an umbrella group they called the Other Russia. “Russia is rich in generals without armies,” Kasparov told the Times. “But Limonov has foot soldiers. He commands street power.” But the Other Russia coalition crumpled in the wake of its ineffectual resistance to the election of Dmitry Medvedev in 2008, and the Times found Limonov seeming lost, adrift, “a performance artist who could not perform.” The massive anti-Putin rallies of 2011 were largely attended by a serious, Western-looking urban middle class, not a ragtag collection of contrarians and ironists. “Limonov held his own rally alongside,” said Curtis, “obviously hoping that he would be the vanguard for this new insurgency.” But Limonov was a man of the anarchic 1990s. The role of “virtuous opposition figure,” wrote Carrère, turned out to be a kind of booby prize, the only option left for a would-be political leader trumped by more cynical Putinists on the right and by genuine idealists on the left: “the defender of values he doesn’t believe in (democracy, human rights, all that crap), alongside honest people who embody everything he’s always despised.” But the nouveau bourgeois protesters had their own chosen mouthpiece, the blogger Alexei Navalny, and wanted consistency, not chaos. “[Limonov] and his supporters were completely ignored. The protests swept on past them.”12

  In 2012, Curtis proposed that Limonov’s true political legacy could be found in the half-Chechen fixer Vladislav Surkov, a member of the stiob generation who wielded more actual power than any of his counterparts in the opposition. Surkov became the mastermind of “managed democracy,” helping to create both Putin’s party and its Potemkin opposition. He co-opted Limonov’s paramilitary nationalist youth movement, forming the similar Kremlin tool Nashi, which used slogans borrowed from the NBP. Meanwhile, he wrote essays on conceptual art, ghostwrote lyrics critical of the government for a rock band, and dispensed patronage in the art world. His aesthetized, amoral power games took the stiob attitude of the interchangeability and hollowness of ideology to another, more insidious level, replacing apathetic stiob detachment with a puppetmaster’s will and a nihilist’s ruthlessness.

  Ames asked Limonov “what happened to that punk-fascist element in the National-Bolsheviks after he got out of jail [in 2003] and he told me: ‘Why would we bother playing with fascism anymore when the Kremlin is already fascist? We are an opposition party. And today the most radical position of all is to fight for democracy and elections—against Putin’s fascism. It’s far-right fascism that is banal and opp
ressive now.’ To quote Yegor Letov’s great anthem: ‘Я всегда буду против!’ (‘I will always be anti-!’)”

  Maybe. But for all his contrarian rhetoric, Limonov’s greatest fetish was always for power. A friend once told him that his “habit of dividing the world into failures and successes was immature and . . . [would] only result in perpetual unhappiness.” To have aligned with the emasculated Russian liberal left must have seemed like a final miscalculation, leaving him politically sidelined, an inconsequential relic. “A shitty life” was his assessment to Carrère in 2009.

  And so, with power in mind, he pivoted toward Putinism. For decades Limonov had advocated for the annexation of Crimea and the return to Russia of all the territories—especially those with residual ethnic Russian populations, such as the Baltics, eastern Ukraine, and northern Kazakhstan—lost in the disintegration of the USSR. As the Ukrainian antigovernment “Euromaidan” protests of 2013–14 climaxed, he called on Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych to crack down. When Putin moved into Crimea, Limonov publicly and vociferously cheered, urging him to openly employ the Russian army to seize eastern Ukraine (including his hometown of Kharkov). Alexey Pesotsky, a member of his Other Russia party’s executive committee, wrote that the “Russia Without Putin” opposition slogan had become an “empty mantra” and that Putin “has started to make steps in the last years that deserve respect. It is difficult to deny Putin’s accomplishments, such as preventing a war in Syria, victorious Olympic Games in Sochi and the reunification of Crimea with Russia.” The Other Russia, which had for years been denied official registration and whose freedom-of-assembly rallies had regularly ended in arrests, was suddenly granted permission to organize public gatherings.

  The party splintered, with some volunteering to fight in eastern Ukraine and others leaving, denouncing what they saw as Limonov’s accommodation. Limonov traded insults with the classic-rock musician Andrey Makarevich, a onetime Kremlin supporter who wrote songs in support of Ukraine and performed in the war-torn region. (Limonov called Makarevich old and impotent, and Makarevich offered to “prove his sexual prowess” to Limonov in person.) Limonov turned up in “Novorossiya” (the separatists’ aspirational name for southeastern Ukraine), still unable to resist the allure of the military encampment. Instead of writer-as-leader, he became writer-as-cheerleader—not Havel, or even D’Annunzio, but Pound. Whether out of a fear of irrelevance or a simple alignment of goals, the arch-oppositionist and revolutionary fantasist had been co-opted into the regime, finally aligned with the side of arms and cynical power.

  A hot and dusty haze hung over the road to the old silver-mining town of Barnaul, by the Mongolian border. We were well off the main Trans-Siberian line, so Andrei had put us on a bus. There was a north–south train line from Novosibirsk, but, Kostya explained, the line ran in sections, and you had to change trains at each station.

  After Dostoyevsky’s release from prison in 1854, he was still forbidden from returning to Russia proper and took a tutoring job in Semipalatinsk (now Semey in Kazakhstan, home of the Soviet atomic bomb test site). He married his first wife, the widow Maria Isaeva, and moved with her to Barnaul.13 He reminisced with fondness about that time and the region in the opening of House of the Dead:

  Barnaul was also the urban jumping-off point for Limonov’s abortive Nat-Bol training camp, established with the vague goal of fomenting Russian separatist rebellion in Kazakhstan.

  One may find a blissful existence in Siberia. The climate is excellent; there are many extremely wealthy and hospitable merchants; many exceedingly well-to-do natives. Young ladies bloom like roses, and are moral to the last extreme. The wild game-birds fly about the streets and positively thrust themselves upon the sportsman. The amount of champagne consumed is supernatural. The caviar is marvelous. In some parts the crops often yield fifteen-fold. In fact it is a blessed land. One need only to know how to reap the benefits of it. In Siberia people do know.

  The farther we got from Saint Petersburg, the more catch-as-catch-can the venues became. In Barnaul it was a classic rock bar. The owner, who introduced himself as Michael Rappaport, had a collection of reel-to-reel bootlegs of Quiet Riot, White Lion, and Queen labeled and stacked on metal shelves in the dressing room. His “vice president” was a young guy whose band did ska and reggae covers of classic Soviet rock and schmaltz—Kino, Akvarium, Alla Pugacheva. Michael bought two of each of our records and sent us over to the local Intourist hotel, where the desk clerk had us listed as “two foreigners, from Michael Rappaport.”

  In the morning we were incapacitated by stomach cramps, which brought with them all the additional symptoms you might expect, and I considered calling ahead to cancel that night’s show. Was it the water? The multi-fruit juice on an empty stomach? The zinc tablets? Who knows, but the effects were gone two hours later, and we made it back to Novosibirsk for the third time in three days. That night’s show was at a chrome-andmirrors dance club called Lebowski Bar, with a mosaic of the titular character on the dance floor and murals from the movie on the walls. A group of teenage girls celebrating a birthday ran to the front of the room to clap for our faster songs, melted back into the shadows for the ballads, and called me to their table afterward for shots of a hideous red, flavored vodka. The club stiffed us on the guarantee, and I slept poorly on the airless train.

  Krasnoyarsk has a reputation as one of the more beautiful Siberian cities, and our approach confirmed that. There was more mountainous terrain than I’d seen in weeks, and my ears popped. When Chekhov reached this point in his journey, he wrote to his family:

  In [my] last letter . . . I said that the mountains around Krasnoyarsk resembled the Don ridge, but this is not really the case: looking at them from the street, I could see that they surrounded the town like high walls, and they reminded me strongly of the Caucasus. And when I left town in the early evening and crossed over the Enisei, I saw that the mountains on the far bank were really like the mountains of the Caucasus, with the same kind of smoky, dreamy quality. . . . The Enisei is a wide, fast-flowing, lithe river, more beautiful than the Volga. . . . So the mountains and the Enisei have been the first genuinely new and original things I have encountered in Siberia.

  It was another famous gulag town: Lenin spent a “couple of months” here during a period of exile, according to Ian Frazier, and “the research he did [in Krasnoyarsk] helped in the writing of his Development of Capitalism in Russia.”

  Our handler Yegor, wearing an obscene shirt advertising the American punk band NOFX, had a deadpan idea of what constituted local landmarks: our first agenda item was a hike out to the local hydroelectric dam, next to which was a truck parked atop a thirty-foot pedestal with the words “Glory to Work” painted on its side. Next he pointed out a twenty-four-story office building left incomplete in the late 1980s on which work had just begun again. The local council had been planning a metro as well, but then the government changed hands, and the new mayor “spent all the money on fountains instead.” Yegor pointed out a bronze sculpture of three elk, coated in leafy ivy like giant Chia Pets, and life-size “electronic trees” whose LEDs flashed in the night. “The mayor likes stuff like that,” he said. “Especially fountains.” But the mayor had just been elected to the Duma, the parliament in Moscow, “so probably he won’t go to jail.”

  Intrigued by Yegor’s bluntness, I asked him what he thought of the recent anti-Putin protests, and he repeated the same glum assessment I’d heard elsewhere: the protests are just against Putin and only for the urban elite, there are no alternatives, all the other presidential candidates were “just part of the same gang,” allowed to exist by the Kremlin as a (so to speak) Potemkin opposition. Navalny, the opposition blogger who got a lot of attention in the Western press, was a “bastard” only in it for money and attention.

  Were there, I asked, any politicians he liked? “Zhirinovsky”—the radical populist and xenophobic nationalist—“is the only one who says anything interesting, but he will never
get elected,” he answered.14

  “Sick and twisted as he was, I liked Zhirinovsky,” said Taibbi. “I knew that, for the greater good, he should probably be shot, but he’s at least funny—really funny, funnier than anyone in American public life. . . . His party was the Oakland Raiders of politics—the place you go when you’ve fucked up one too many times. Its Duma headquarters had a great reputation for parties.”

  We drove to one of the genuine landmarks of Krasnoyarsk, a chapel on a hill that appears on the ten-ruble note (alongside the hydroelectric dam). “Here,” said Yegor, gesturing to his left, “are drugs.”

  In those beautiful wooden houses?

  “Well, rich people too, but also gypsies on drugs.”

  The main road is Ul. Sovietskaya. It would be nearly impossible to get lost in any major Russian city, I thought: just ask for the intersection of Sovietskaya, Lenina, and Karl Marxa and you are guaranteed to find a train station and a giant square. Was there—to cross off the last box in Russian street-name bingo—also an Ul. Pushkina? Not in Krasnoyarsk, but, as if to make up for it, there was a Pushkin statue.

  We passed the “Island of Sport and Recreation” and picked up Yegor’s three cheerful and enthusiastic friends, who placed my guitar across their laps as they sat in the backseat.

  “He”—Yegor indicated the guy sitting behind him—“loves to change guitars for drugs.”

  Sorry?

  “He sells guitars and buys drugs.”

  The guy with my guitar in his lap?

  “He used to make a living playing Internet poker, but they blocked Americans last year, and now it’s harder for him to make money.”

  The chapel hilltop looked out over a vista reminiscent of Los Angeles: hot, hazy, ringed with hills and apartment towers. Dozens of brides and grooms in shiny suits were posing for photographs. A pair of caged white doves, off duty as props, fluttered on the hood of a jeep. A peddler sold magnets, custom-stamped coins, and heart-shaped locks that lovers could attach to the iron fence.