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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Moonbats, Russian Style |
| 2005-05-02 |
| The National Bolshevik Party (NBP), which is Russia's oldest radical youth organization, was created in 1994 by radical writer Eduard Limonov, Eurasianism ideologue Aleksandr Dugin (who soon left the party), and rock musicians Yegor Letov and Sergei Kurikhin, as well as other counterculture personalities. Although according to its own statistics the NBP has 30,000 to 50,000 members and has branches in 24 key Russian regions as well as in the Baltic states and other former Soviet states, the party has no official status, as the authorities persistently refuse to register it. It has a network of regional and international websites and requests that its new members possess Internet skills. The NBP's leader and its cult figure is Eduard Limonov, 62, a man with an unusual history and one of the few Russian politicians with no links to the Soviet and post-Soviet ruling elite. Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Limonov was a member of the Soviet literary underground in the 1960s. In 1974 he emigrated to the United States, where he became close to American Trotskyites and anarchists. It was there that he wrote his best-selling novel "It is me, Eddie," (Eto ya, Yedichka), which has been translated into 15 languages. Limonov soon moved to Paris, where he became a member of the French avant-garde literary salons and joined forces with French and European leftist and neo-rightist political radicals, including French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the late 1980s he began to publish his articles in the national-patriotic press in the Soviet Union and in 1992 moved back to Russia. In 1994 Limonov launched the extremist ultranationalist newspaper "Limonka," which quickly began to attract various groups of young people frustrated by the hardships of reforms and embittered at the West. Armed by his political experience in the West, Limonov proposed the creation of "revolutionary party of a new style" that could attract young people with a combination of extremist ultranationalist propaganda and "direct action" as practiced during the Maoist student protest in France and other European countries in 1968. Limonov suggested calling the new party the National Bolsheviks, as he believed that communism as a word has been compromised by the reactionary policy of the Communist Party, which he also blamed for "losing the USSR." |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |