Edward Limonov
The Other Russia
Future outlines
“The mountains are clothed in gardens. Narrow valleys, broad plains between the mountains. “These mountains were naked rocks before,” the older sister says. “Now they are covered with a thick layer of soil, and groves of the highest trees grow on them between the gardens; below in the moist hollows are coffee tree plantations; above – date palms, fig-trees, vineyards are mixed with sugar cane plantations; on the fields there is wheat as well, but more of rice.”
“So what is this land?”
“Let’s rise higher for a minute, you will see its borders…”
“But we are in the middle of a desert? Says Vera Pavlovna, surprised.
“Yes, in the middle of a former desert, – this side is called New Russia”
“This is where Odessa and Kherson are?”
“Once they were, and now, look, here is where the New Russia is.”
N. G. Chernichevsky “What to do?”
Petropavloskaya fortress, 1862
“I HAVE A DREAM…”
I almost forgot that I have written the book “Disciplinary Sanatorium” where I reflected on the arrangement of modern society. Today this came to my mind as I received a letter in which a guy from Siberia keeps asking what do we, the NBP, want, what society do we want to build. In the West a monotone and long life by the standards of the Western civilization is considered to be happy. That is no hard work, some function related to papers, an uninterrupted career during the whole life, then the pension age and then the comfortable existence of a pensioner and death in the deep debility of the old age. The governments of Western countries subjugate the person, leaving him only one permitted autonomous activity – the chase after females. In all the rest the Western man is extremely limited in his life by laws. Man was enslaved and domesticated. There was a different regime in the USSR but even there man was enslaved and domesticated. Actually the modern man was accustomed to the fact that everything is forbidden to him, that he only needs to work all his life like crazy and then to die without rebelling. A quality life is considered to be the life of a well-fed slave. The ideaclass="underline" a family – a couple living in marriage. In reality it should not be this way. A being who is condemned to die from his birth should not be some kind of crazy pack mule or that blind horse that goes harnessed in a circle drawing water from the river and pouring it out in irrigation ditches and on fields. We need to rebel. We have to invent, to reckon for us, for our group, for the people that we consider ours, another life model and to impose it. But first of all we need to build a new nation. Everybody keeps saying around here: “Russians”, “We are Russians”, “I am Russian”, “for Russians”. But under this label there are a lot of different people hiding. It turns out that Yeltsin is Russian too, and the blue-gray drunkard, and the dirty bum and the active spermatozoid Kirienko. And if they are Russians then I am not Russian. So what do we have to do? We have to select the people for a new nation. It should be called something else, not Russians but say, “Eurasians” or “scythes”. It is not that important but the new nation should be built on other principles, not by the color of hair or eyes but the courage, the loyalty to the belonging to our community.
We will need children from the new people. Many children will be needed for the nation to grow fast. This is why we should allow many kinds of families: those that lead to an unusual multiplication. Permit polygamy, free associations. Women should get pregnant continuously and to bear fruits. As for the children they will be provided for and raised by the community. They will live and be raised among adults. And already from the age of, say, ten years old. Today children are rotted in boring schools and their brains and memory are forcibly supplied with dust that nobody gives a shit about. Education will become short and will be different. Boys and girls will be taught to shoot from grenade throwers, to jump from helicopters, to besiege villages and cities, to skin sheep and pigs, to cook good hot food and to write poetry. There will be sportive competitions, fighting, a free combat without rules, running, jumping. They will read Nikolai Gumilev’s poetry and Lev Gumilev’s books, entire generations will be, according to the precepts of Constantine Leontiev, taught to love the East. To understand the beauty of the blue steppe and the red mountains. And all the vileness of concrete barracks in snow, the vileness of Moscow suburbs.
Will we produce weapons? Of course, we will. We will wage wars. But not like those before, not front on front. Ours will infiltrate their territories, familiarize their people with our way of living and ideas and the healthiest and strongest ones among them will become ours, our nation. And then our forces will invade and finish off those who don’t agree.
We will need land. The frozen Russia is caught in the clutches of uncreative, stupid administrators, poor in spirit. We will have to leave Russia, to build a nest on the fresh central lands, to conquer them there and to give rise to a new, unseen civilization of free warriors united in an armed community. Roaming the steppes and the mountains, fighting in southern nations.
Many types of people will have to disappear. Alcoholic uncles Vasias, cops, functionaries and other defective material will die out, having lost their roots in society. The armed community could be called “Government of Eurasia”. Thus the dreams of the Eurasians of the 30s will be realized. Many people will want to join us. Possibly we will conquer the whole world. People will die young but it will be fun. We will burn the corpses of the heroes.
And what is the sense of making a revolution if the objective is just to seize the ministerial posts, the vulgar cabinets. We will have to change everything. And to invent us a New God, possibly some Tungusian meteorite or an iron planet in the cold universe. Our god will be the one who gave us death. Maybe our god will be death. So, like Martin Luther King, I have a dream. But his dream was poor, wretched…
Lecture 1
Your father is an engineer or a hard worker – angry, skinny, unlucky, drinks from time to time. Or maybe there is altogether no daddy in the family, the mother in a worn fur-coat. The eyes always wet, hysterical, exhausted, speaking with a voice in which are echoed all the woes of the world. You always pity your mother but no respect whatsoever for your father. He is nothing, always drunk, arguing with the television. A stinky brother (version: a stinky grandma) after him you are disgusted to enter the bathroom. A two-rooms apartment: too much furniture plus the carpets, the rugs, the mats, the blinds. Little light.
The constant: “Turn out your music!” “Take off this pornography from the wall!”, “I’m feeding you!” and other lamentations, the joys of family living. There are not many books, only yours: Hitler, Lenin, Dugin, Limonov, “Limonka”… The family, bitchy guts, a putrid appendicitis, a group of bodies clutched together in a mutual embrace of fear: “Sasha, don’t go out on the street, there are some guys on the porch!” The family teaches to fear, to shake, to shit from fear. It is the school of cowardice.
An apartment that was obtained with hellish difficulties or bought with enormous difficulties, a cooperative one, in the last years of Soviet power. The parents have spent all their lives on this apartment. They have economized, saved, collected, bought. Then they happily put life into the little cube of concrete, a honeycomb in the multi-entrance, multi-apartment human hive. With love they drilled, glued, years on end selected the door handles. A year was spent on the arrangement of the lodgings. Another three on the installation of the windowsills and the windows. In for years people conquer kingdoms, World War Two lasted five years and here you’ve got the lodgings. They filled it with old rags and squeezed in a camp bed for you. An apartment is like a prison cell where the co-prisoners are not chosen, like a rock around the neck is this apartment that cannot be left and that is why the life style of some South Butusovo for some reason has to be yours and you, the South or some other district you despise it to vomiting.