This article was first published in The eXile on September 18, 2003

On September 11, Great Britain have accorded political asylum to the most notorious refugee from Russia: to Boris Abramovich Berezovsky. I never met him personally. Once, in 1990s, we, members of National-Bolsheviks Party have staged a mass anti-Berezovsky demonstration in front of building of “LogoVaz” — his former headquarters.

In spite of that demonstration, he helped me little bit with money when I was imprisoned by Putin. Then it was a bottle of cognac.

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Adam Curtis, the British filmmaker whose many great films and blog posts for the BBC we’ve been ramming down our readers’ throats (in the parlance of our times) lo these past few years, has a new piece about Russian politics, punk and avant-garde that is a must-read. It’s the only work I’ve ever read that makes sense of Edward Limonov—the former eXile columnist and leader of the radical opposition—and places Limonov and his Kremlin nemesis, Vladislav Surkov, in the context of Russia’s post-Communist politics, and Russia’s wild punk rock avant-garde. (more…)

There are a lot of reasons why Russians–young Russians, young Muscovites in particular–poured out into the streets last Saturday to protest rampant election fraud in the Duma vote. For the past couple of decades, young Muscovites couldn’t be bothered with politics of any sort–they’ve been dealing with fraud-riddled elections going back to 1996, or 1993–take your pick of post-Soviet elections.  (more…)

With Russians on the streets protesting yet another fraud-riddled election, and Hillary Clinton lecturing the Kremlin on the evils of election fraud, we are reposting this important background story on Russian election fraud, and how the West, led by Hillary’s husband Bill, enabled and whitewashed Russia’s 1996 fraud-riddled, stolen elections, which assured that the hugely unpopular Boris Yeltsin, “the butcher of Chechnya” and the creator of Russia’s oligarchy, would remain in power for another term–thanks to the Chechens overwhelmingly “voting” “for” Yeltsin by an overwhelming 73% vote (of 1 million votes even though there were only an estimated 500,000 voting-aged people living in Chechnya at the time of the 1996 presidential elections). Yeltsin’s Western-backed victory allowed him to pick his own successor, Vladimir Putin, in 2000–and here we are today. Among the top whitewashers of 1996′s stolen elections was none other than Michael McFaul, President Obama’s nominee to become the new US Ambassador to Russia.

This article by Alexander Zaitchik and Mark Ames, about the West’s active complicity in Russian election fraud, in creating the template still used today by Putin, was first published in The eXile on November 30, 2007, on the eve of Russia’s 2007 Duma elections, the last time Russians voted in parliamentary elections until this past Sunday. (more…)

As the videos I’m posting below show, the mood in Moscow has definitely soured since I last reported on the anti-Kremlin demonstrations there in 2007-8. Back then, anti-Kremlin democracy protests were still confined to a smaller sliver of the population, although even at that time, as I wrote, there were early signs that discontent was starting to take root among Moscow’s student intelligentsia. That’s always a sign of danger to come for Russian regimes.

Yesterday, former eXile columnist Edward Limonov was detained as he got out of his car to lead a protest against the fraud-riddled elections. (more…)

UPDATE: Yasha was finally freed on bail just a few minutes ago, after two nights in jail, He just told me he’s exhausted and yet still quite shocked by how harshly the protesters were treated after the embedded reporters were out of the scene. Yasha will write up more as soon as he’s back home and able to focus again.

Exiled editor Yasha Levine was arrested late last night during the savage and unconstitutional police crackdown on Occupy LA. We call on the police and authorities to release Yasha, and release all protesters and media illegally arrested at the Occupy LA encampment and illegally imprisoned merely for exercising constitutionally-guaranteed rights. (Update: Latest word is that Yasha is going to have to spend another night in the Los Angeles County jail, and will be brought before a judge tomorrow and hopefully released, as bail is currently set at an incredible $5,000. The National Lawyer’s Guild is calling this illegal and a violation of state law. Updates below.)

The irony of the LAPD arresting Yasha Levine–a political refugee from Soviet totalitarianism– for the crime of reporting on a demonstration against oligarchy power, a demonstration protected by the Constitution, reveals again just how depraved and corrupted America has become. (more…)

An American correspondent stationed in Moscow just forwarded me a WikiLeaked diplomatic cable about me, The eXile, and the Kremlin media-stomping in mid-2008 that killed my newspaper and sent me fleeing home. The June 16, 2008 US Embassy cable–marked “CONFIDENTIAL”–correctly put the crackdown on The eXile in the context of a wider (and scarier) crackdown on other Russian media outlets that coincided with the handover of power from Vladimir Putin to the newly-”elected” President Dmitry Medvedev. The cable was given the highly-ironic header “MEDVEDEV ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS AND THE RULE OF LAW.” (more…)

Before heading back to Moscow in June 2008 to face the Kremlin “audit” of The eXile, which I knew meant the death of the newspaper at the very least, I worked out a deal with my editors at Radar magazine to blog about it for an American audience. I hoped at the very least that it might give me a bit of protection. (more…)

Read the sensational Vanity Fair profile on The eXile, and founding editors Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi: (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on November 13, 2003.

Reading the Western press accounts of the Khodorkovsky arrest has at times been as unpleasant as one of my famous giardia attacks. I’m not sure which version is more ridiculous: the mainstream line which portrays the YUKOS oligarch as some kind of billionaire Aung San Suu Kyi, a martyr to corporate good governance and liberal politics…or the simplistic flip-flop, which argues that Khodorkovsky was once a brutal thief, and therefore he’s getting his just desserts. (more…)

Last week, Obama moved another step closer to creating the ultimate retro-70s Middelbrow-ocracy when he appointed a loathsome overachieving hamburger-head named Cass Sunstein to a little-known but highly-powerful government post: director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—otherwise known as the “Regulation Czar.” Before the financial crash, we wouldn’t have thought much of how powerful a post like this is, and how it can shape our lives and help decide whether we have retirement money, a home mortgage, and a plutocracy-led society.

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(This article was originally published April 1, 1997)

On March 26th, communist leaders Gennady Zyuganov and Anatoly Lukyanov been seen entering dacha of famous writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Serebryany Bor. What for? We now know what for. (more…)

The eXiled Coat of Arms Is Back With A Vengeance

One month ago, our newspaper The eXile got stomped into extinction by some ham-fisted Russian government officials, who decided that since there’s a new president in the Kremlin who’s talking up some nonsense about a new “liberal era,” what better way to show your boss that you understand what he means by “liberal”—with a big wink-wink—than to shut down the only good thing that Russia (more…)

Limonov’s next move: organize Russia’s ex-cons

Russian summer is short and unpredictable. The only thing that is predictable about Russian summer is that it is short. Usually, the month of May is cold, July is hot and August looks like an autumn month. In 2008, the months of May and June were cold and this half of July was rainy and cold. Shitty climate, shitty weather, only the girls are pretty in Russia. (more…)

This article first appeared in The eXile in December 2007

OMON outside of Yabloko’s headquarters in St. Petersburg

ST. PETERSBURG — The morning air was icy and the mood tense as people gathered for Other Russia’s pre-protest press conference outside the Yabloko office. The protest itself was a few miles away and wouldn’t start for another hour, but it was obvious that something was going to go down, and soon. (more…)

In the autumn of 1998, I got a call from Edward Limonov asking me if I could do a favor for him. His newspaper Limonka—known for its mix of extreme politics and avant-garde aesthetics—was preparing to celebrate its fourth anniversary at the Mayakovskaya Museum.

“My boys begged me to bring Johnny Rotten to the party,” Limonov told me, laughing. “I know it’s a small chance, but maybe Mr. Rotten will think it’s interesting to speak before a group of radical Russian youths who worship him.”

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The world has two extremely opposite opinions about them: 1. The destiny of Jewish tribe is terrible tragedy. It is exceptionally tragical. The Jews are martyrs of History. They are persecuted by non-Jews.
2. The Jews are ruling the world with their enormous accumulations of money. Non-Jews are vampirised by them.

In 1997 prevailing first opinion. In the beginning of 20th Century have had prevailed the second. But what they really are, Jews? (more…)

On March 27, when news first filtered into Moscow that 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, a gang of Trekkoid computer geeks in San Diego, had “shed their containers” in a suicidal bid to reach the “Higher Level,” eXpats all over the city thought the same thing: man, people at home must really be bored. For eXpats, the news was life-affirming. For many of us, our best excuse for being here is that it gives us, however erroneously, a sense of being a participant in a society where people lead real lives and have real problems. More than one of us has suspected that if we were to go back home, there would be only one road to take to escape the sanitary life the West has to offer-get on the net, and die.

Now, suddenly, we had 39 solid reasons to be sure we were right to move here. (more…)

On February 4, at 12 noon, I have visited Mr. Dmitri Runzhe, head of Department of Press and Information in Moscow’s Media, in his office on 19th floor of skyscraper on Novy Arbat. His office was new, comfortable, with modern furniture, even pencils were foreign. It contrasted drastically with my own office of Editor-in-Chief of radical newspaper “Limonka.” My so-called “office” have a look of revolutionary committee headquarters in 1918′s Russia. It’s located in a basement. But even from that totally awful place we are under menace of eviction now. Radical bureaucrats asking me to pay a “debt” of 137 millions of rubles. So I came to Mr. Runzhe in attempt to get some financial help. I have received no help, but we talked for an hour. (more…)

Doctor Limonov studied first-hand love-making habits of different women, that he could compare their qualities, stretching from the time of 70s until now, geography of his copulations stretching across most of northern hemisphere. What follows is result of rigorous research.

Brazilian. Fernanda, 26, was of a Spanish blood. Black hair, darkish skin, with a heavy ass and massive thighs. Too well-educated, studied at university under professor-writer Jorge-Luis Borges. Not very good in bed because unflexible body. Complained of inconvenience of throwing legs too high and of general “cruelty” of treatment in bed. However, lovemaking with her was an intense experience, as she was a daughter of wealthy merchant and Edward-man was poor and unemployed. She called him with hate “Trotsky.” He fucked her with hate and “cruelty.” They met in the East Village of New York. (more…)

September 12, 1996. 2 p.m. Gogolevsky Bulvar, near metro Kropotkinskaya. I am walking alone. I am returning from a demonstration of protest against shameful, unjust Chechnya peace accord just concluded by General Lebed. Event took place near Russian White House. It was organized by my National – Bolshevik’s party. Slogans were explicit: “Lebed-The No. 1 Chechen of the Year!” “Lebed -to the jail bench!” “For what been killed our boys!” (more…)