Radar's March issue investigates how cult Russian novelist Eduard Limonov, backed by an army of punked-out teens, is taking on Vladimir Putin. Mark Ames talks to the controversial writer about his real-life Fight Club, and his hope for a new Russia

This article is from the March issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here

There is no particular mystery to why most of us have never heard of Eduard Limonov: In the United States we have no one to compare him to. We have avant garde poets, and iconic novelists who have made their names by writing in shockingly frank detail about their sex lives. We have had political opposition leaders willing to put their lives on the line to confront the brutality of the establishment. We have shock merchants, and performance artists, and radical youth movement leaders. We probably have even have performance artists who claim that their dream is to take over their country. But we don't find all of those in one person—a writer whose biography is worthy of the lead role in an epic political novel about his homeland. Russia, however, does. Meet Eduard Limonov.

Limonov has been to jail. He risks assassination every day. But he is also a celebrity and married to a 31-year-old television star who looks quite a bit like Angelina JolieFor the past year, the Western media have been very attentive to Other Russia, the opposition party that has been the only real opposition to Vladimir Putin's increasingly authoritarian rule. Much of that press attention has gone to former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who is often described as the group's leader—but in fact he and Limonov share that title, though they are dramatically different in style and background.

While Kasparov is easy for Western journalists and audiences to relate to, Limonov can be—as he readily admits—a bit tougher to figure out. To his followers, thousands of punked-out youths from around the country who constitute much of the organization behind Other Russia, he is a national hero. He has been to jail. He risks assassination every day by his political enemies, and now lives under the constant protection of bodyguards. But he is also a celebrity: His debut novel, It's Me, Eddie, has sold more than a million copies, and he is married to a television star more than three decades his junior (he is 64, she's 31) who looks quite a bit like Angelina Jolie. (In the style of many of his girlfriends, she shaved her head for him when they got together.)

His career as a political leader has also been rather strange—he created a party called the National Bolsheviks in the mid-'90s that flirted with fascism and ultranationalism (he was accused by Russian authorities of trying to raise a private army to invade and reclaim part of Kazakhstan for Russia), before settling on a leftist, pro-democracy tack and then being folded into Other Russia. In short, he is ignored in the West at least in part because he is so insanely interesting. Radar's March issue profiles Limonov. This is an exclusive, online-only Q&A with him.

RADAR: How would you describe Other Russia's politics and aims to an American who's clueless about Russian politics?
EDUARD LIMONOV: We're a handful of people who haven't been subjugated by Putin. In Russia there are two sorts of people: the overwhelming majority who are subjugated and who are becoming subjects, and those citizens who are resisting. Other Russia is in the latter group. We are also a revelatory force, yes? We are revealing the cruelty of this regime. When people see or hear about our protest marches, and they hear about the beatings and the repression, they suddenly are forced to understand that they live in a terrible, violent state. That's what we do. We're paying with our sufferings, but it's necessary.

What is Other Russia's basic program?
Very simple: We want to have free elections, we want Putin's group out of power.

When Putin gave his big preelection speech in November at Luzhniki Stadium, he clearly singled out Other Russia as something evil, anti-Russian, backed by the West and Russia's enemies. It seemed like a call to really crack down on your organization. Are you guys nervous since the political situation seems to be getting unstable?
What we see is repression. But it's difficult to say whether the repression will continue after the presidential elections in March. Maybe it will go back to the level it was at before the parliamentary election campaign started ... or maybe there will be more oppression and it will intensify. I'm refusing to predict.

Speaking of presidential elections, what do you think of Putin's handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev? Why do you think Putin chose him over the others?
You know, I have no people inside the Kremlin, so it's difficult for me to say what Putin's intentions are. But in my opinion, Medvedev was chosen because Putin trusts him and he could influence Medvedev easily, which may not be the case with Sergei Ivanov [a fellow ex-KGB officer, former Defense Minister, and onetime front-runner to succeed Putin].

When I last saw you, the Kremlin was preparing a potential criminal case against you for supposedly violating the recent court-ordered ban against the National Bolsheviks, the political party you founded in 1994 and which now is functionally part of the Other Russia coalition. Is anything new happening with that case?
Happily, I don't see any movement on that for now. But they're working on it. Before the new year, they confiscated the print runs of several of our newspapers, and they probably will try to connect those to the National Bolsheviks, and since the party is banned, the newspaper for it is also banned. They try constantly to come up with all sorts of accusations. They make searches, they detain people, and they're trying to find something to prove our alleged activity.

The authorities have been going after the National Bolsheviks hard for many years now. You've had roughly a couple hundred of your activists already go through the prison system over the years. Has it gotten worse in the past month or two?
They're becoming more repressive, yes. But they're using pretexts—as you see with [Other Russia activist] Mikhail Gongan, whom they arrested and are charging with supposedly breaking the conditions of his parole. For others, they've planted drugs during searches. They're just falsifying these searches.

I've noticed that unlike most people in politics, you don't like to waste your time guessing what your opponents are doing, because you like to set your own agenda, and if you're trying to guess their moves, then you're letting them set the agenda. Is that right?
Yes, absolutely. You cannot build a political movement on guesses.

What do you think of Time magazine naming Putin "Man of the Year"?
I think Time magazine isn't endorsing the person Putin, they're just saying that Putin is very popular in this year. And it's no wonder. Everyone's certainly worrying what's going to happen in Russia.

But isn't it a case of Time bootlicking?
I don't think so. Look, when they named Mr. Stalin or Mr. Hitler, it wasn't bootlicking.

But in 2001, Osama bin Laden should by this criteria have been named Man of the Year.
For me, Putin is much more dangerous than bin Laden—for me, because he's repressing my organization, and he's looking to break us in Russia. That's why I look at Putin with a deep hate. Maybe I feel less hate toward Bin Laden. [Laughs.]

Your followers these days seem very committed. How are they different from those in the 1990s?
They've gone through a rough process of natural selection.

You mean they're tougher than they used to be?
Each time we're repressed, there's some choice for our party members: Will they keep going, or will they drop out? It's a constant weeding-out process. It constantly tests their spirit, their willingness, their courage. Somebody who doesn't want to keep going, he'll stop. Certainly my supporters today are much tougher than 10 years ago.

Speaking of suffering and paying, what are the ugly statistics for Other Russia and the National Bolsheviks?
Statistics are difficult to keep here—full statistics. But, for example, just in November up to the December 2 elections, we had about 80 cases of violent attacks on our people, detentions, etc. On my table right now, I have an eight-page list of different cities of such attacks—Voronezh, Irkutsk, Samara. You see, I'm just reading off the list and turning pages—Tula, Rostovskaya Oblast, Komsomolsk-na-Amure, Nizhnii Novgorod, Krasnoyarsk, etc. This list isn't even Other Russia, it's just a list of what happened to my supporters in that one-month period.

So this list just concerns your followers, the limonovtsy?
Yeah, those are just limonovtsy. Eighty incidents in just one month.

And of course one of those is an incident where one of your followers was beaten to death.
Yes, Yuri Chervochkin.

I read stories that Chervochkin's funeral was a rather frightening scene.
It was very controlled. Every square meter of the small town where he was buried was under police control. And the cemetery—it was a big cemetery, by the way—was packed full of undercover police. It was very disgusting.

Was it frightening at all? I read one report where even the journalist seemed rather frightened by the sense of police terror.
We had a few hundred people who came to the funeral, mostly from Moscow—me, Garry Kasparov, a lot of others. It was very terrible but necessary experience.

Getting to Kasparov, on the surface you two seem very different politically and personality-wise. He's tied in with American neocons and organizations, he writes op-eds for the Wall Street Journal. And you've been a radical left-wing revolutionary going back most of your life, even when you were a novelist and poet. How do the two of you get along with such different outlooks?
It's political necessity. We don't look at our programs and don't evaluate our ideologies. We just work to create a democratic Russia. That's what we need in order to have political life. And our alliance is a good idea. It has a good future, I believe.

Whose idea was it to have this alliance? Did Kasparov approach you, or did you approach him?
It was mutual. You may remember, but after I came out of prison, I created a movement called Russia Without Putin. This was in early 2004. But I couldn't manage to bring in the democrats and liberals into my coalition at that time. At around the same time, Kasparov got disappointed by his own efforts with his Committee 2008 [a front organization Kasparov helped set up to ensure that Putin did not stay in power after his term ends in 2008]. That didn't work out, so he set up the United Civil Front and started to look for allies, and he had the Committee 2008, which didn't work because it was a narrow liberal alliance, and liberals in Russia are too weak and are not supported by the bulk of the population.

Why are liberals and Western liberalism so unpopular in Russia these days?
It's easy to understand if you consider that 70 million people who had their life savings in the state bank lost everything overnight because of the "shock therapy" policies of [liberal] prime minister Yegor Gaidar in 1992. So the anti-liberalism is a logical consequence of this. Gaidar is a liberal; Gaidar bankrupted most of the people, or at least that's how most people think. So most Russians think that liberals are bad.

One thing I've noticed watching Kasparov's rhetoric change over the past six months is that his own politics seem to have moved closer toward National Bolshevism. He now talks about taking down the oligarchs, returning the lost bank savings you just talked about. He speaks more about protecting Russia from waves of Chinese immigrants. He's adopted this populist left-right rhetoric that's a contrast from the Reagan/Thatcher-style politics that he used to espouse. Do you think he's been influenced by you?
He's not only been influenced by us; I think he's been looking at what's going on in our country, he's understanding what's popular here, in my opinion. But certainly he's been influenced by some of our ideas.

One of the biggest and most influential innovations that your National Bolshevik Party brought to Russian politics is bringing youth activists into the scene, doing actions that weren't paid for or scripted by people in the back rooms—throwing eggs and tomatoes at very scary and powerful people. This really seemed to change the way all the other parties conducted politics in Russia.
Yeah, I think that's right. But the thing is that some of what you are talking about has to do with our early years. For the past eight years we're not throwing tomatoes or eggs, we have other tactics—sit-ins and peaceful occupations of buildings and so on. But basically, sure, I can say that I created some of the strategies of contemporary Russian radical politics.

The traditional parties, like the Communists or liberal parties like Yabloko, have also tried setting up youth wings that imitate the National Bolsheviks, but not with the success you've had. Then the Kremlin set up Nashi—or "We"—as its youth organization. What do you think of Nashi?
Nashi's primary objective is to break our organization. That's why they were created. It was the Kremlin's response to the National Bolsheviks.

They've also physically attacked you; for example, at the Communist youth meeting your party.
I welcome witnesses, but I don't expect much from help from Western journalists. I prefer to have my Russian media reporting on our activityYes, there've been many assaults on our activists, and some of these attacks have been carried out by big mobs attacking us—up to 50 people attacking at a time. But then lately they've been assaulting us less often in mass attacks. The last time was when they attacked me on April 13, 2006.

Nashi activists attacked you?
There are several Kremlin youth groups that are essentially the same, so it doesn't matter the actual name—Nashi, Locals, Young Guard, whatever. This last attack took place at the Tagansky Court, April 13, 2006.

What happened?
I had seven of my party members in prison for one and a half years. I was at a court hearing, and when I left we were attacked by 40 people waiting for us in the courtyard. It was a day when we fought the court's decision to reject our appeal of their decision not to register the National Bolshevik party as a political organization.

Getting back to Kasparov, for some reason in the Western media, they try to make Other Russia out to be an entirely Kasparov-run affair, and when it comes to you, they seem to downplay your role in the party. It gives the sense that Western journalists are afraid of you. I know of one Western correspondent who said he finally met you after 15 years working the Moscow beat, and he was clearly afraid all that time to meet you, but when he finally did interview you, he was surprised at how nice and civilized you turned out to be. Why are so many Western journalists afraid of Limonov?
First of all, we don't work for Western journalists. We work for our people. Western journalists are present as witnesses. Kasparov has his attitude toward Western journalists and the West and the United States. My attitude is, yes, I welcome witnesses, but I don't expect much from help from Western journalists. I prefer to have my Russian media reporting on our activity. It's much more helpful for us. Unfortunately, though, we're less and less free here. As a rule, I don't think that politicians should look much at journalists. In my opinion, the journalists are just a small part of our job. For a journalist, I have a press attaché.

With all this new wealth of the past several years, Muscovites have become voracious consumers. People are now totally wrapped up in buying shit. How does this materialistic craze of the past five to six years affect Other Russia's chances?
It doesn't affect my thinking whatsoever, because we are not even allowed to participate in the elections. We are in a struggle against a police state. Most of the population of every country is not politically active. It's a typical story. But changes in political systems of any country are usually done by a minority of people, not by the majority, not by people who are affected by consumerism or some other craziness. But I'm not even considering this. We now have 22 million people in Russia who earn less than 2,800 rubles per month, and this gives us an enormous army of poor to support us. That is information from the Levada Center (a think tank), which is pretty reliable, and according to them we have 22 million people really, really poor. It's just over $100 per month to live on. And if you factor in our high prices here, it's awful.

Russia now has one of the worst wealth gaps in the world.
I don't object to rich people being rich, but I am against the poor being so poor as they are here. There are too many poor here. But that's a problem that we'll try to solve down the line. For now, our objective is to allow a free parliament where all political parties are allowed to compete and express themselves. We need free elections in which all parties can participate. Now we have what is really a one-party system. The only make-believe opposition party in parliament is the Communist party. But the rest, the other three pro-Kremlin parties—Zhirinovsky's party, Just Russia, and United Russia—are all three heads of the same dragon, yes? And they have more than 80 percent of the seats in the new parliament. I want to change the system first, and then to proceed to other tasks.

A lot of journalists still accuse you or your party of being fascist or having a fascist streak.
You constantly bring up what journalists write about me. Actually, I can only repeat what I said before: I don't work for Western journalists. They are free to think what they believe about me, but I'm not worrying about it. For me, the most important thing is to be liked by my own people, and I think my people like me more and more. That's what I see constantly.

You spent about two and a half years in jails and prisons as really the first political prisoner under Putin. When they locked you up, did you think you'd ever get out of jail? Were you afraid you'd be there for the rest of your life?
I thought I'd get 15 years in prison, but it happened that I got four years. But I wanted to get out one way or another. I said to myself, "I will survive."

How did the other prisoners and the warden treat you?
It was all right. Listen, this is becoming boring for me. Invent something if you have to!

In your novel His Butler's Story, which you published in the early 1980s, you said that you had 25 years left to do the things in life you wanted to do: write a lot of books—and you've written dozens of books and poetry collections, create a political party and take over a state, lead a revolution, and fuck all the girls that you wanted to fuck.
That's a lot of girls. [Laughs.] But you see this was a kind of vision.

And start a cult or religion.
I'm getting closer to that, too. I just wrote a book about this called Heresy. When it's published, you'll see what it's about.

Have you fucked all the girls you've wanted to fuck?
Not all of them. [Laughs.] I still want some more.

When you turned 55, I asked you to write about your secret to staying young and healthy, and you wrote that the main secret was getting rid of your aging wife, finding yourself a young girl, and fucking her. Do you still think that way?
Yes, I still think that way.

Your current wife, Katya, is quite beautiful, but before her you were dating a lot of teenagers. Do you miss the teenagers at all?
We'll see what happens next.

Chairman Mao used to pack his bed full of teenage girls every night. He didn't necessarily have sex with them, but he just wanted to cuddle with them to keep himself young and full of enthusiasm.
Maybe, maybe. Okay, that's enough. I have to go eat something!

This article is from the March issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here