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Russia's bold left stands up to Kremlin
Eduard Limonov's leftist National Bolshevik Party leads protests and spurs controversy.
By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the July 6, 2007 edition
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Moscow - Eduard Limonov has been called a fascist, a communist, and an ultranationalist. The Kremlin has repeatedly banned the leftist National Bolshevik Party (NBP) that he leads as an "extremist" organization and arrested over a hundred of its activists.
Yet for the past year, Mr. Limonov and his mainly youthful followers have been a mainstay of the Other Russia movement, a pro-democracy coalition led by chess champion Garry Kasparov. Other Russia has staged a series of high-profile street rallies aimed at forcing the Kremlin to ensure that upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections will be open and free.
"The Kremlin fears us because they think our party can become the avant-garde of a Russian [version of Ukraine's pro-democracy] 'Orange Revolution,' " says Limonov, a bespectacled and goateed novelist who lived in the US before returning home to take up radical politics in the early 1990s. "And that fear is not unfounded," he says. "Our existence is seen as a menace by a state that represents a handful of rich amid a sea of poor people."
As the Other Russia heads into its first anniversary conference this weekend, the coalition seems to be splintering and its hopes of fielding a single opposition candidate to oppose Vladimir Putin's yet-to-be-anointed successor appear in tatters. This week, one of the movement's main backers, the liberal former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, pulled out saying that "the Other Russia has fulfilled its mission," and will not be needed in the "next, decisive stage of the political struggle." Mr. Kasyanov, who has announced his own intention to run for president, said he would be seeking fresh opposition forces with whom to ally.
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