If anybody cares, the eXile's columnist Eduard Limonov (who also happens to be the most famous red-brown in Russia) is in jail on gun-running charges.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ---------------------------
the eXile www.exile.ru February 20, 2002 Who Tolerates a Dissident? By Mark Ames (editor at exile.ru)
How dangerous is it to be a dissident in the post-Cold War era?
Judging by the case of Edward Limonov, a lot more dangerous than being a dissident during the Cold War.
Limonov has been sitting in Lefortovo Prison since April of last year. Initially he was charged with attempting to obtain illegal firearms and to form an illegal armed group. More charges were subsequently added. This past December, the FSB tacked on the amazing charge that Limonov was trying to overthrow the state of Kazakhstan! Altogether, according to Limonov’s attorney Sergei Belyak, he faces up to nearly 30 years in prison.
In January of this year, a separate case was brought against Limonov’s newspaper, Limonka (where I have previously published) as well as Limonov’s political party, the extremist National-Bolshevik Party, on charges of terrorism. The case against Limonka and the NBP was reportedly thrown out on a technicality, but the Russian state’s attack on one of its most famous cultural figures reached such hysterical proportions that it finally attracted the attention of the West. Or rather, one segment of one Western country: France’s cultural elite.
“It finally became too obvious even to the French that this criminal case was purely political repression and not because Limonov posed some kind of real danger or threat to the Russian state or to Kazakhstan,” said Belyak, who previously defended Duma deputy Vladimir Zhirinovsky. “The authorities went too far in their repression.”
Limonov is a dual French and Russian citizen. Yet it has taken this long for his case to come to France’s attention—and has yet to reach the ears of any other Western nation. In part this is due to Limonov’s unsavory reputation and radical anti-Western politics, including a famous tour of duty over Sarajevo with indicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadjic. Limonov has done little to elicit the Western press and diplomatic corps’s sympathy. Yet this does not detract from the story: a famous dissident writer jailed on trumped up charges in an increasingly authoritarian state.
In early January, Patrick Gofman, a Parisian writer and journalist who has known Limonov since he arrived in Paris in 1982, circulated a petition calling for Limonov’s release from prison.
“When we heard that Limonov was facing 23 years in prison or perhaps even more, we realized that he was not involved in a petty quarrel with the Russian government, but rather that this was serious,” Gofman said. “We started a petition with three Parisian writers, and from there it snowballed into something very impressive.”
The “Free Limonov” petition is a Who’s Who List of France’s cultural and literary heavyweights, some 70 figures spanning the political spectrum from the left to the right, from Russian emigres such as Vladimir Boukovsky, Alexander Ginzberg, and the widow of Andrei Sinyavsky to such luminaries as author Bernard Frank and Le Figaro literary critic Patrick Besson, who called Limonov “the best living Russian writer.” It includes many leading publishers, including Vladimir Dimitrijevic, director of l’Age d’Homme in Lausanne, one of the West’s oldest and largest publishers of Slavic literature.
“Limonov is one of Russia’s greatest artists,” said Dimitrijevic, whose house publishes everyone from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn. “He is a great writer and a very courageous man. I will always stand by a man who suffers for the truth.”
In mid-January, Limonov’s imprisonment became the subject of a France-1 television news feature, but since then there has been little news—and total silence from the French government.
When interviewed by the eXile, the French consul ostensibly handling Limonov’s case, Olivier Aribe, forwarded our request for an interview to First Secretary D. Nemchinov.
“We have absolutely no comment,” Nemchinov said. He repeated it with a laugh even though Limonov is after all a French citizen in a Russian prison.
Gofman and others says they find this attitude particularly disturbing, given the official French diplomatic support extended to Zacharias Moussaoui, a Moroccan immigrant who was arrested in the United States and charged with terrorism after reportedly attending flight training school in order to learn to pilot jet liners. Moussaoui is thought to have been assigned to fly one of the hijacked jets on September 11, but he was apprehended a few weeks before the attacks after raising suspicions.
“On the very day that Moussaoui was charged by the Americans with terrorism, the French publicly expressed concern and support to a French citizen because of their concerns of the death penalty in America,” Gofman said. “It’s not fair. Limonov hasn’t killed anyone, raped anyone or stolen anything.”
It is undeniably counter-intuitive. One immigrant is accused of participating in one of the bloodiest attacks in almost 200 years against France’s most important ally, America, and yet the government offers support due to concerns over America’s judicial process; another citizen, in spite of being one of France’s leading cultural figures, jailed on outrageous charges and subjected to a judicial system that the West has consistently attacked for its cruelty, arbitrariness, and corruption, is officially ignored by the government. Why?
Everyone interviewed for this article agreed that Limonov’s anti-Western writings, which strike many as loathsome, as well as France’s domestic politics, are responsible.
There is a presidential election this year in France, and the Socialist-led government of Lionel Jospin is keen to woo the roughly 10 percent immigrant vote, most of which is Muslim. Offering support to Moussaoui both shores up the immigrant vote and helps to satisfy the decades-old French desire to plant a bug up America’s ass.
Supporting Limonov—a shock-politics critic of the West and Russian nationalist—appeals to a marginal French constituency, mostly on the right. There is some talk that the right-wing in France is pushing the French government to release Limonov and that there is some behind-the-scenes maneuvering—indeed Limonov wrote a letter from jail to conservative French President Jacques Chirac—but because the government is keeping silent, it is impossible to tell what, if any support, they are extending.
Is it more dangerous to be a dissident today than during the Cold War?
In 1974, Limonov, who had gained fame in Moscow’s unofficial and underground art world as a leading avant-garde poet, was subjected to repeated KGB harassment and finally expelled from the Soviet Union, along with what became known as the “Third Wave” of Soviet dissidents. Back then, the Western media and diplomatic corps persistently fought for the right of Soviet citizens to publish and express themselves openly, and fought for the rights of anyone jailed or punished simply for the crime of disagreeing. The reason, we said then, was that we believed that freedom of expression was every human being’s basic right-indeed that to differ and express was itself to be human-all the more so if that opinion or work of art upset the Powers That Be.
Cut to 2002. Edward Limonov, now one of Russia’s most famous public figures after more than two decades as a leading emigre writer in America and France, is once again the target of the KGB, today renamed the FSB. This time, however, they have him in jail, in the KGB’s infamous Lefortovo Prison—something even the Soviets would have been loath to do, given the negative press it would have attracted. And here is the difference between then and now—this time, the KGB is getting away with it. The West is officially silent. Most simply don’t give a shit as Russia has fallen off America’s map except in terms of how they can help us kill ragheads and how they can make a few of our oligarchs a little richer. The press is aggressively ignoring the Limonov story. Even Johnson’s Russia List won’t publish articles about Limonov’s incarceration.
“I am sickened by how these left-leaning journalists are so willing to support the Chechens and criticize Russia,” Gofman said. “Yet when it comes to Limonov, they are deeply silent.”
What has changed? In the first place, a KGB officer now runs Russia, and he’s the West’s friend.
More importantly, the West—in spite of its previous pronouncements—only supports dissidents who support the West. Grigory Pasko, NTV, TV-6, even Chechen separatism all have found sympathetic ears in the Western press and diplomatic corps. And all are, not coincidentally, pro-Western (at least the non-Wahhabite Chechen guerrillas are).
Gusinsky and Berezovsky, owners of NTV and TV-6, are widely known to have been key figures in the plundering, impoverishment, and soaring death rate in Russia during the 1990s, not to mention being linked to high-profile gangland hits. Chechen separatists kidnapped thousands of innocent Russians during Chechnya’s three years of de facto independence, and terrorized its own citizens. The present war was precipitated by a Chechen invasion of Russian territory. While the Russian state’s response to all three has been brutal, at least there was some basis for it.
Limonov has harmed no one and has stolen nothing. He is a dissident against both Putin’s emerging neo-liberal dictatorship and against Western hegemony. His views were extremist, but not linked to a single death or injury. He called for renationalizing property, boycotting Western goods, and attacked Western-leaning liberals as stooges. He managed to build a significant following among Russia’s alternative youth, particularly artists and writers.
“It is not possible to put a man like this in jail and to separate it from his writings and what he is,” said Dmitrijevic.
Limonov arrived in New York in 1974. He quickly grew into the role of a dissident within the dissident movement, arguing that the West was in many ways just a more sophisticated version of the Soviet Union, with more sophisticated propaganda, and just as little tolerance for true dissent. America didn’t want to hear that. He found it nearly impossible to publish his political writings in the United States, so he turned to novels.
The Americans were reluctant to publish his first three novels, including It’s Me, Eddie and His Butler’s Story, both of which shunned standard anti-Soviet emigre literature in favor of a kind of debauched hyper-egoist anti-American stance. The books are funny, incisive, and vexing. This was not what America wanted to read about itself from an ungrateful Soviet emigre.
The positive reception his novels received in France inspired him to move from New York to Paris with his then-wife, singer Natalia Medvedeva, in 1982. He was granted French citizenship in 1987, after taking France’s avant-garde literary scene by storm; in 1986, French Cosmopolitan even named him one of France’s top 40 leading cultural figures. Limonov wrote for several radical French publications, first siding with the left, then with the right.
In 1991, after the first official publishing in the Soviet Union of his controversial 1979 novel It’s Me, Eddie sold nearly 1.5 million copies, then-President Gorbachev re-instated Limonov’s Russian citizenship.
And that was the year, from the point of view of the West, that Limonov went bad. He sided with Serbia during its wars with its neighbors and the West, fighting alongside the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia and publishing his war correspondence. He joined the shadow cabinet of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultra-nationalist, anti-Western LDPR in 1992 as its Minister of Interior, sided with the anti-Yeltsin rebels in 1993, and formed the National-Bolshevik Party in 1994 with radical-intellectual Alexander Dugin and Yegor Letov, lead singer of the punk group Grazhdanskaya Oborona, whose genius as a lyricist is matched only by his ability to attract wanton violence at his concerts on a level that would cause most Western punks to piss in their Dickeys.
Over the past decade, Limonov has been smeared with the fascist, racist, and anti-Semite labels, even though there is no substantive proof to support these accusations. (Similarly, even the eXile has been attacked as a fascist, pro-Nazi, and anti-Semitic newspaper by its many detractors ranging from goyim like former Clinton tool Michael McFaul and commentator Peter Ekman to leading members of the Western press corps. In spite of the fact that our staff is nearly 40% Jewish, this accusation has stuck in many influential circles.)
These smear tactics have gotten so irrational and out of hand that famed Russian privatization adviser Anders Aslund recently attacked Georgetown professor and Yeltsin-era critic Peter Reddaway in print as an “anti-Semite” in part because Reddaway had called Limonov an “enlightened radical”. It was so outrageous that many usually urbane academics publicly came to Reddaway’s defense. Sure these attacks are funny and insane, but multiply them by every foreign media correspondent, diplomat, and Russia watcher, and you begin to quantify Limonov’s problem.
Many in the Western media and academia will say off the record that they think Limonov got what he deserved.
Limonov is an alien to such people. He was shaped by the avant-garde, in particular Russian avant-garde writers of the 1920s such as Daniil Kharms and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as the Anglo-American avant-garde of the 60s and 70s. 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 more often than not 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.”
Russian artists, going back to the Romantics like Lermontov and Pushkin, up through Dostoevsky and experimentalists like Kharms, have always had a way of borrowing their aesthetics from the West, Russifying them, and taking them one step too far, which is why they are generally superior to our Western artists. The same could be said of Limonov.
A conference-hopping American academic, a Volvo-chauffeured Western correspondent whose Moscow life consists in going from sushi bar to hotel lobby sucking up to sleazy oligarchs, an unscrupulous FSB agent who wouldn’t bat an eye at extracting a bribe from a black-ass fruit trader but recoils in horror at Limonov’s freak show and descriptions of homosexuality—all are equally incapable of placing Limonov in context. Through their simplistic moral lenses, he is repulsive. He’s where he belongs. And no one is going to waste their time on him.
Last April, after completing a book on jailed Krasnoyarsk aluminum baron Anatoly Bykov, Limonov left for the Siberian region of Altai. On April 7, more than 50 counter-intelligence goons surrounded the dacha where Limonov and a few others were staying; at 4 a.m., they raided, dragged them out and made them lie face-down in the snow, and—failing to find anything besides the royalties Limonov received for his Bykov book—hauled him straight to Lefortovo Prison.
The case against Limonov rests on a sting against two teenagers busted in Saratov for trying to acquire illegal arms. After a few months of coercion, they changed their story and accused Limonov of putting them up to it. This is the basis for the case against Edward Limonov.
Since then, the case has snowballed, until just over the past two months, the accusations and attacks reached a boiling point. Today, with so many leading French figures lining up behind him, Limonov’s supporters are hoping that the French government will work to free him.
Meanwhile, Limonov is running in the March 31 elections for a vacated seat in the state Duma in Dzherzhinsk, considered to be among the most polluted cities in Russia. He will face off against candidates from the Communist and pro-Kremlin Unity parties.
It is the kind of story that generally attracts the “bizarre-Russia-story” type of feature for most correspondents. Jailed writer and French citizen runs for Duma seat in most polluted city in Russia.
The foreign press corps may or may not pick it up. The fact is that many find Limonov loathsome, and as they find us nearly as hateful, and as Limonov wrote regular columns in this newspaper on themes ranging from why he hates the West to comparing the vaginas of different nationalities, he is doubly cursed. And he wrote them in intentionally broken English, just to take one last shit on his Western reader’s face.
I can never get over the fact that a friend of mine is rotting in prison, someone with whom I spent every other Sunday afternoon for some five years, when I’d come to pick up his latest article. With his constant pacing, and a girl between half and one-third his age somewhere in the back of the apartment, it was never boring. Now he’s confined to a small cell, working hard, according to his lawyer, on his memoirs….