#6347 Day in progress
[Second Issue of the Day]
#5
From salon to cell: Russia's enfant terrible on terror
charges
July 10, 2002
AFP
In earlier times the prosecution of a writer by Moscow's security services would have been the occasion for worldwide protests, but the trial of former author and enfant terrible Edward Limonov has aroused curiosity rather than anger.
Limonov scored a minor victory over the FSB (former KGB) Tuesday when a judge overruled security arguments and said that the writer's trial should be open to the public rather than held in camera.
Few in Russia were cheering, however. For one thing the greying, crop-haired writer, head of the neo-fascist National Bolshevik Party (BNP), is charged with forming an armed group for terrorist purposes and with fomenting revolution.
And for another, he has long renounced his literary ambitions, despite having 16 titles to his credit and once being lionised in French publishing circles.
Limonov's immersion in right-wing politics began immediately after his return to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, though only four years earlier he had acquired French nationality with the support of left-wing friends and intellectuals.
He founded the ultra-nationalist BNP -- which as its name suggests is a Nazi-style formation with Stalinist pretentions -- in May 1993, and became an outspoken supporter of Serbian nationalism in the Balkans.
During the 1992-95 Bosnian conflict he allowed himself to be filmed "fighting" on the side of the separatist Serbs -- in fact firing off a few symbolic rounds from a hillside above the besieged city of Sarajevo, under the approving gaze of the Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
Among his proposals is the creation of a Russian Liberation Army among the non-Russian republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose grouping formed by 12 former Soviet republics after the demise of the Soviet Union.
He was arrested last year after four BNP militants were found in Siberia in possession of two Kalashnikov automatic weapons and ammunition, saying Limonov had ordered them to defend the Russian-speaking population in neigbouring Kazakhstan.
Charged with planning terrorist actions, he faces 20 years in jail if found guilty.
Now 59, Limonov (born Edward Savenko) had an unruly reputation even as a youth.
In 1966 he left his native Ukraine for Moscow where he lived without the requisite permit, earning his living sewing trousers while he tried his hand writing prose and poetry.
In 1974 he emigrated to the United States where he worked in a range of jobs from stone-mason to butler, and began publishing.
Highlights of his stateside sojourn, he said later, included picketing the New York Times to demand that they publish his stories and joining the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
In 1980 he published his best-known work "Eto Ya, Edichka" (It's Me, Eddie), a personal manifesto subsequently translated into 15 languages.
His following in France continues to support him, with writers Patrick Besson, Bernard Frank and Gabriel Matzneff, along with former Soviet dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexandre Guinzbourg and Maria Rosanova signing a petition on his behalf addressed to President Vladimir Putin.
But Limonov, married four times, says he no longer sees himself as a writer.
"I'm exclusively involved in radical politics," he told the English-language Russia Journal a few months before his arrest.
"If books of mine are published, they're in the diary genre, which doesn't try to be literature."
He was unequivocal in his admiration for the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, "a great man, ... Russia's Caesar at the most difficult time of its history."
Once, he said, "despite everything, we had a mighty state that gave orders to half the world. Now it's one endless chain of disasters and catastrophes."
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