Making post-Soviet counterpublics: the aesthetics ofLimonkaand the National-Bolshevik Party

Abstract

This article focuses on the shaping of the aesthetics and ideology of Eduard Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) through the pages of the radical newspaperLimonka.In order to study the making of the NBP as a political and intellectual community, the piece discussesLimonka's editorial line, its graphic style, and the alternative cultural canon that this radical publication promoted, as well as several interviews with National-Bolshevik activists involved in this process. During its first years of existence,Limonkaproposed a selection of controversial artistic, literary, and political role models, and the creation of an alternative fashion and lifestyle. The article argues that by provocatively combining totalitarian symbols, the aesthetics and posture of the historical avant-gardes, and Western counterculture,Limonkaproduced a collective narrative that contributed to the shaping of a new language of political protest in post-Soviet Russia. This resulted in a complex combination ofstiob, a form of parody that involves an over-identification with its own object, and a neo-romantic impulse. This new discursive mode, which the article defines as “post-Soviet militantstiob”should be seen as part of a series of tactics of radical resistance to what the National-Bolsheviks saw as the dominant neoliberal discourse of the mid-1990s.