The Other Russia

  Edward Limonov

  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 ideal: 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

  THE RED EYED MONSTER: THE FAMILY

  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.

  You are already shaving and this, damn it, humiliating serf-like dependency on your parents’ living space, you are registered here, registered, damn you all bastards, like a serf! And when will you have your own cage where you could hang whatever you want – say an NBP flag?! When, never!… You will never have 25 thousand dollars. There is nowhere where you could bring your girl. What fulfilling life are you talking about. Pensioners have not only a pension, they have apartments, this is why the authorities, agencies and crooks are kind with them, convincing them of selling it, giving it for rent, they need pensioners.

  The family: a sticky, warm dung mud, where it is good to lay off for two days, from physical blows in a fight and from moral wounds. But family weakens the person like consumption, exhausts with its potatoes and meatballs, its weak helplessness. Tomorrow some strangers will break in, cops, there is even nothing to defend yourself with. And to defend your mother, your sister? With them you feel even more vulnerable.

  In books and movies there are courageous cool heroes. In the beginning of the century there were national socialists, fascists and Bolsheviks, they conquered their own countries at first and later foreign as well. They marched in regular ranks, beautiful, in the rolling of the drum and the banners rustle, young, and the earth laid itself under them, like a woman, gleefully. The father came in: “Again reading about your fascists! This never happened, never!” He is sitting in the kitchen and barks…

  All the above mentioned is only an attempt to recreate the feelings of an adolescent boy, a young
man in a family. To this could be added the pathologies, they are often present in life, – a fatting mom, a mom with bags, like a weight lifter, not a woman but some kind of a can, a beast of burden, a camel; the vomit of a grunting father, but let’s avoid the black stuff. The result of my reflections: Soviet power, the bitch, has successfully enslaved the family with an apartment. Everybody was chained, anchored with an apartment. Because an apartment in the freezing Russian climate is a permit for life. Registration, apartment, job – that is the assortment of the rusted heavy chains, with the help of which the modern Russian is chained to his place, unmovable and less free than the Russian of the XVII or XVIII century. Then, one could run away to the Don, to the Kazaks, to Pugachev. Where can you run with the lieutenant-colonel Putin, round-ups everywhere and not free anywhere.

  Letters to our newspaper “Limonka”, being the editor in chief, I have read them for five years, all breathed anger and disgust for the Russian reality and the family. The boys were not satisfied by their petty, bleak (or even vile) parents. A criminal song atmosphere predominated: “I’ve killed my mom/ and chopped my dad/ my sister student/ I’ve drowned in the bathroom.” These same emotions were perfectly expressed by the American director Oliver Stone in the movie “Natural Born Killers” (We have gleefully reviewed it in the first issues of “Limonka”). In the movie the character Mickey has brought a bloody pluck from the meat store to the family of his future girlfriend. Mickey is a delivery man. A vile vulgar dad in family underwear, wanting his daughter, a pathological mom, the little brother – a family of monsters. They live on earth with some kinds of rectums, stinky sausages, exchanging yells. The newly enamored couple murders the parents and flees. Through the grotesque shines the unbearably authentic solar hatred to the family.

  With a Russian family everything is even worse then with the American one. As a rule, children have nothing to be proud of their parents for (skulls -are they called colorfully and rightly by the punks), – in their predominant majority life victims and victims of the catastrophic “reforms” that took place in the country. The living space in the RF is now even more unattainable than under the soviet regime, as a result children sit too long in the family, unwillingly they live with the parents longer than it is healthy. An uncomfortable situation is created when the grown up children live with the aging parents, breathing to each other in the back of the head, using the same toilets, forcibly sharing each other’s intimate life. The mother, by her nature considers the son as her propriety and wants to prolong her power over him. And the father over his daughter. And it is possible to do in a single apartment. The result of this common living can be seen in Chechnya (especially seen during the 1st war). It is not the fighting qualities of the Chechen fighter that dominated over the qualities of the Russian soldier, but the Chechen upbringing of the man significantly dominates over the upbringing of the boy in a Russian family. From there appeared the “our boys” phenomenon, who are being captured by the cruel Chechen bearded men.

  Russian boys sit in warm nests some good five-ten years more then it is needed and the influence of the weak, kind, hundred kilos’ Russia’s Slav mom transforms them in dough as comes the recruitment age. From snoting age the Chechen boy revolves around men. Ours spends too much time among women. The Russian family stifles the man. (Of course, there are exceptions, often more manly boys come from villages and small towns) For a good formation of the man, the boy needs to be taken as early as possible from the family. It is a harmful place, like the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

  My parents were not so bad but still I made up some day that in reality I was their adopted son. My parents discovered it and got offended. Actually, it is a common phenomenon, when the children are depressed by the normality of their parents. They want their father to be a hero: a box champion, a revolutionary, an intelligence general, a fighter, say even a bandit. And here you’ve got an untidy type who eats raviolis… The majority of children learn to live the mediocrity of their parents. The best ones don’t. A political party such as NBP takes the boy away from his family, gives him examples to follow and essentially competes with the family for the soul of the boy. Families often lose to us but we don’t always win either. To our profound regret. Because in its essence the family is a dead end. The influence of parents-losers (and in the predominant majority they are losers), sometimes, fierce sadists and more often wet-eyed masochists, during the 20-25 years spent by the boy in the family irrevocably kills his manly strength. In the French language there is a common word “mere-castratrisse” mother-castrator that came from freudism. That is a castrating mother, removing in the figurative sense the testicles, the manly element. This is precisely said about this type of women like “soldier mothers”. That is a manly element is developed in them and they simply attempt to replace with their manly element the manhood of their sons, in the figurative sense to castrate them.

  The family in Russia is the strongest social institution. They say that in China it is even stronger. The majority of embezzling of public funds acts, acts of corruption, stealing are committed for the sake of the family. The Russian functionary steals governmental money, as a rule, not for wasting it in the “Yar” restaurant, but for the building of a spacious country-house, acquiring of an apartment for the family members, for children and grandchildren. The newly arrived Russian businessmen are banal in the area of taste and preferences: a Mercedes for himself, a Mercedes for his daughter, a country-house for himself, a country-house for the son and the family. Of course the revolution should end all this bullshit, but for a successful, deep, irrevocable revolution, for irrevocable transformations to happen in society, we need to destroy its strongest molecule: the family. It is possible to do. Far from always in history of mankind did society exist in its present form. It can also exist without a family.

  How many crimes were ever committed in the name of the family! How many workers did not participate in strikes, “caring” for their family (and in half of the cases, justifying with it their cowardice), how many men did not respond to offenders with a blow for a blow (“I have a family!”), tamed their pride. How many guys did not participate in the wars of the last ten years and step aside of active participation in political parties in the name of the god damned family! All the while it is because of this cowardice that their own children do not respect them! Each generation of commoners voluntary bears the heavy fetters of family. Supposedly raising the children and in reality smartly and cowardly hiding behind the children. The kids will do without you, man. You’re lying! We had a young military in the party who sent us from province perfect military articles on the state of things in the army. Once we proposed him to teach our guys what he knew himself. He kept silent for a long time and then orally transmitted that he cannot, he referred to his family – a wife and children. Each commoner needlessly sacrifices himself for his family, so that his children could repeat the same, also needed by no one, invented “heroic act” – sacrifice themselves for their own ones. This chain of lies needs to be broken. And the children don’t actually need their parents as much as the commoner or the hard worker makes himself believe. And the goal of political activity, political actions, and in the end of war (if it is started for ideological reasons) is to create a new, better then the prewar society where children (and yours too!) will live far better than today.

  This is what in 1999 the newspaper of the Latvian department of NBP in Riga “General Line” in the article “Family Against the Party” wrote about family:

  “When I mentally go through those who moved away from the party in different times I come to one shattering conclusion: in 99% of the cases it was the work of the family. The parents or the wife, or just the family clan. Leaving for ideological reasons is an exception.