Machine-guns and a Competition for the best Revolutionary Project: The Trial of Eduard Limonov

The article examines the trial of Eduard Limonov 2001–2003. The writer and founder of the radical National Bolshevik Party was charged with, besides other offenses, terrorism and instigating an uprising against the constitutional order of the Russian Federation. The text “Theory of a Second Russia,” falsely attributed to Limonov and brought forward against him by the prosecution as one of its main pieces of evidence, imaginatively devises an uprising of the Russian minority in Kazakhstan, and the building of a second Russia which subsequently attacks the first. Most likely that theory was originally destined for a “competition for the best revolutionary projects” in the party newspaper Limonka, to figure in a column clearly blurring the lines between literary and political writing. In presenting this whole issue to the reader in a detailed fashion, I also discuss pertinent notions of a more general nature, such as the “aestheticization of politics” and political myth.