“The New against the Old,” a programmatic article by Aleksandr Dugin from the first issue of Limonka, the official newspaper of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party (NBP), radical political organization/countercultural movement.
Post-Soviet
1994
Limonka was the official newspaper of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), the political party-cum-countercultural movement founded by the provocative émigré writer Eduard Limonov and the mystical artist-philosopher Aleksandr Dugin in 1994 as an attempt at combining radical right-wing and left-wing culture and ideology. The party started as a response to the constitutional crisis of 1993 and had the goal to produce a specific kind of counter-intelligentsia or counterpublic in order to fight Yeltsin’s radically neoliberal rule, which was then seen by many as fundamentally repressive, and protest the disastrous consequences of the shock therapy. The NBP took the form, in its various incarnations and at different stages of its existence, of a radical art political project, an armed revolutionary organization, and (later on and somewhat paradoxically) of a street avant-garde of the liberal opposition against Putin. Limonov and Dugin wanted to attract to the party what they saw as “the most dangerous elements of society.” Because of this, the party attracted among its rank and files an absolutely eclectic (and potentially incompatible) group of people: marginals, ultranationalists, anarchists, and even radical leftists. Or, as Aleksey Tsvetkov (a key figure in the NBP during the 1990s—see artifact #) put it: “hooligans who wanted to be poets and poets who wanted to be hooligans). Limonka was commonly sold in independent record stores and included articles about current politics, alternative art and music, critical theory, early Soviet culture, German Nazism and Italian Fascism, 1970s terrorist groups, and translations and commentaries of such authors as Jean Genet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, William Burroughs, and Daniil Kharms. In its graphics and content, Limonka returned to the aesthetics and posture of the historical avant-gardes, and it followed the principle of “the more radical, provocative, anti-bourgeois, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, and anti-Western—the better.” Limonka (from lemon) is a slang name for a hand grenade and an allusion to the party founder, Limonov (a pseudonym), and to the series of articles he authored for the Russian press at the time, which he used to call limonki against his political opponents (Yeltsin, Zhirinovsky, the Russian intelligentsia, etc). “The New Against the Old” (Novye protiv starykh), is an article-manifesto by Dugin from the first issue of the newspaper. In it, Dugin lays out some fundamental principles of his “conservative revolutionary” conception of politics: namely, the distinction between “the old” and “the new”—where the old are those individuals or groups (liberals, communists, fascists, conservatives) who, independently of their political affiliation, want to maintain the status quo, while “the new” are (again, independently of their politics) those who fight against it. These new rebels, the future constituency of the NBP, according to Dugin are to be found among all kinds of “marginals”—disenfranchised youths, war veterans, anarchists, neofascists, punks, and rockers.
Limonov, Eduard and Dugin, Aleksander (Aleksandr)
Russia and former Soviet Union
Aleksandr Dugin, “The New against the Old,” Limonka 1: Nov 1994