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Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party And The Nazi Legacy 63
Chapter 3 Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party and the Nazi Legacy: Titular Nations vs Ethnic Minorities
Andrei Rogatchevski
Background
The National Bolshevik Party (Natsional-bol’shevistskaia partiia, or NBP), founded by the writers Aleksandr Dugin and Eduard Limonov as ‘the most left- wing among the right-wing parties and the most right-wing among the left- wing parties’ (Limonov 1996a),1 is one of the most interesting (although highly controversial) phenomena in Russia’s recent political history. The NBP burst onto the Russian political scene in the early 1990s with self-styled ‘legislative initiatives’, such as establishing an institute of Russian sheriffs (empowered to shoot first, without warning, and to deliver the culprit dead or alive) and broad- casting executions of Russian criminals on television.2 The party members threw tomatoes at the NATO Secretary General in 2002 (in protest against the NATO expansion), and mayonnaise at the Chairman of Russia’s Central Elec- toral Commission in 2003 (to attract public attention to the issue of unfair gen- eral elections). They also attacked and unlawfully occupied the premises of various Russian ministries and major companies in 2004-06, as a sign of op- position to their unpopular policies. This led to harassment by the police and security services, a number of high-profile court trials, and ultimately the par- ty’s ban in 2007, at a point when it reportedly had some 57 000 members, many of them very young, in more than 50 regional party branches in Russia and abroad (including Belarus, the Czech Republic and Canada). Yet Limonov and many of his associates have remained active in politics. Now that Limonovites are successfully forming the so-called InterBrigades to supply military and hu- manitarian aid to the breakaway republics in Eastern Ukraine,3 it is perhaps an
1 Translations are mine, unless indicated otherwise. 2 For a detailed account of the NBP’s activities on the verge of the new millennium, see Rogatchevski (2007). 3 Between May 2014 and April 2015, over 1,500 people joined the republics’ armed forces with the InterBrigades’ assistance. The Brigades’ title is obviously meant to suggest parallels with the Spanish Civil War. For more details, see
© Andrei Rogatchevski, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004366671_005 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC-ND License. 64 Rogatchevski opportune time to engage in an in-depth study of various aspects of the NBP’s activities, as its influence on the Russian (and Russia’s neighbours’) affairs is likely to grow.
Is the NBP a Neo-Nazi Party?
These days, the NBP (or rather its successor, the Other Russia
4 For the party´s website, see