The clown prince of Russian politics is dead

Remembering Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the man who gave the Kremlin its blueprint for Russian nationalism and abrasive public diplomacy

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the long-time leader of the misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, died on Wednesday at the age of 75 after a long battle with the coronavirus. Though he lost six presidential races, Zhirinovsky nevertheless exerted colossal influence on Russian politics, helping to shape how the Russian state looks and behaves today. Earlier this year, shortly before he was hospitalized with COVID-19, Zhirinovsky publicly predicted Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, getting the date wrong by just two days. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev looks back at Zhirinovsky’s unique role in post-Soviet Russian politics.

Late last year, as the Kremlin mocked the West for warning that Russia was about to attack cities across Ukraine, Vladimir Zhirinovsky took the podium during a session of the State Duma and delivered a characteristically rambling speech, prophesizing that Moscow would move from saber-rattling to “a different program” at 4 a.m. on February 22. “I’d like 2022 to be a year of peace, but I speak the truth,” he said.

Zhirinovsky was off by just two days, but illness prevented him from witnessing the war unfold as he predicted. Two weeks before the full-scale invasion, he was hospitalized with COVID-19 in Moscow. For the next several weeks, news outlets covered his worsening condition. In late March, false rumors about his death spread, leading Zhirinovsky’s fellow party members to draft legislation that would criminalize the dissemination of unverified reports about their leader’s demise. They finally submitted the bill to the State Duma on April 5, a day before Zhirinovsky’s actual death.

Russia’s first populist

Zhirinovsky took up politics back in the Soviet era, joining composer Vladimir Bogachyov’s Liberal Democratic Party initiative in 1989. At the time, Zhirinovsky had written the platform for his own project, the Social Democratic Party,” but he happily adopted the new, more popular prefix and became a “liberal.” In March 1990, at the Liberal Democratic Party of the Soviet Union’s constitutive congress, the new group declared itself to be “centrist,” avoiding direct opposition to the ruling Communist Party. “We’re not with the right-wingers or the left-wingers,” Zhirinovsky explained at the time.

Come October, Bogachyov called a new congress and announced that LDPSS would now openly oppose the Communist Party. He also sought to expel Zhirinovsky (then the party’s chairman) for allegedly “collaborating with the state security agencies.” A Russian politician who cut his teeth in the early 1990s told Meduza that rumors circulated about Zhirinovsky acting as “a KGB plant.” Meduza was unable to verify these allegations.

In the end, however, the party kicked out Bogachyov instead, and Zhirinovsky promptly established himself as the group’s unchallenged leader. The following year, he participated in the first presidential elections in Russia history, finishing third with 7.81 percent of the vote. Though he lost the race, Zhirinovsky used his campaign to begin developing his own patented speaking style — a defiant, often deliberately offensive approach to public engagement that would sustain his public prominence for years to come. In his first presidential bid, for example, Zhirinovsky’s primary slogan was a call to nationalists: “I want to raise the [ethnic] Russian question.”

“155 million Russians live in humiliating, offensive conditions! They are the most spat-upon ethnic group!” Zhirinovsky argued in a presidential debate in 1991. The man who would win the race, Boris Yeltsin, did not attend the event, for which Zhirinovsky accused him of “treachery,” calling Yeltsin a “radical” and a “revolutionary” bent on “destroying the state.”

Viktor Khamraev, who used to report on parliamentary politics for the newspaper Kommersant, told Meduza that Zhirinovsky’s rhetoric was scandalous at the time. “This style of speech was something you heard from people fighting in line over something […] but a presidential candidate wasn’t supposed to talk like that,” said Khamraev.

A few months after the election, in August 1991, when senior officials within the Soviet government, the Communist Party, and the KGB tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhirinovsky’s party endorsed the attempted coup d'état.

After losing the rebellion and then the entire country, LDPSS was reborn as LDPR. The party now campaigned on two not-easily-reconciled issues: restoring the state within the borders of the USSR, and “the Russian question” (code for Russian ethnic nationalism). “They’re planning to surround Russia with the Chinese, Muslims, Germans, and Balts, and then — tightening the noose — they’ll eliminate the Russians completely within the next 50 years,” LDPR literature warned voters.

More than ever, the party was now built around Zhirinovsky’s own personality cult. He practiced a kind of politics that was largely absent in the Soviet Union, buying airtime on television to deliver improvised, energetic messages. In one speech, he might “philosophize about market economics with progressive, liberal verve,” but devote the next broadcast to the “oppression of ethnic Russians” in former Soviet republics and Russia’s own national republics. And then, in the next speech, he might praise the cultures of those same ethnic minorities.

Zhirinovsky also loved to appear before crowds, returning repeatedly to Moscow’s Sokolniki subway station to address the public for 60 or 90 minutes at a time. He managed to pepper these speeches with both democratic principles and imperialist nostalgia.

Leveraging a populist platform and campaign strategies that were still novel in Russia, Zhirinovsky lifted LDPR to remarkable success in the early 1990s. The party finished in first place in Russia’s 1993 parliamentary elections with 23 percent of the vote. Afterward, politician and former Supreme Soviet opposition deputy Yuri Karyakin famously pleaded, “Russia, wake up. You’ve gone nuts.”

Moscow State Institute of International Relations political scientist Igor Krylov later wrote that analysts at the time agonized over the nation’s supposed “lumpenization” but largely overlooked the crucial role of LDPR’s paid promotions on live national television. These advertisements, Krylov explains, targeted five key electorates: women, young people, senior citizens, soldiers, and Russians living immediately outside Russia. Combined with Zhirinovsky’s “virtuoso demagogic skill” in televised debates, LDPR and its leader became a phenomenon.

A talented showman in a sea of gray

Zhirinovsky openly and skillfully embraced populism, but he also maintained his own “fundamental, unwavering vision,” a former LDPR functionary told Meduza. “It concerned the state: he was against national [ethnically determined] regions. His deliberate anti-Western rhetoric, meanwhile, was what his relationship with the Kremlin demanded. And he played that role well, frightening the West.”

A penchant for clownery transformed Zhirinovsky into a folk legend, making him the hero in countless half-invented stories and jokes. For example, he was credited with the line that Russian soldiers would one day “wash their boots in the Indian Ocean” and the slogan: “a man for every woman, and a bottle of vodka for every man.” Television shows celebrated his antics, though Zhirinovsky himself denied having said many of the phrases attributed to him. He cultivated this eccentric image consciously, however. That persona was often aggressive and even downright nasty. For instance, in 1995, in the middle of a televised debate with Nizhny Novgorod Governor Boris Nemtsov (a true liberal politician, unlike LDPR’s members), Zhirinovsky emptied a glass of orange juice in the face of his opponent.

In the late 1990s, Zhirinovsky tried to recruit a handful of other colorful characters to LDPR, courting writer Eduard Limonov and popular television anchor Ivan Demidov (who would later become an apparatchik in the country’s ruling political party, United Russia). The two men joined LDPR’s “shadow cabinet” but only briefly. “They realized that Zhirinovsky hogs the blanket and doesn’t let anyone else in his party rise,” a former LDPR official told Meduza.

LDPR’s “one-man rule” soon became apparent to everyone. Zhirinovsky would even subject his subordinates to competitions to see who could down a bottle of vodka in a single gulp, who could consume half a pig in one sitting, and so on. “The games were quite cruel,” the former party member recalled with a sigh.

According to Konstantin Kalachev, LDPR’s leader quickly realized his political “ceiling,” learning that he could not win more than 10–15 percent of the votes in any national election. Instead of vying for a larger share of the electorate, he tailored the party and his own political career to appeal to his base: middle-age and older men with secondary educations, low income, and often a military or criminal background. “The believed him completely,” Kalachev says. “These were provincial people. In the capital, he did lousy with votes. Imperialist rhetoric (but without the red banners) really worked on these guys. In focus groups, LDPR’s supporters called Zhirinovsky the bravest and most honest politician in Russia. And for others he was a talented showman against a background of gray jackets.”

The Kremlin’s biggest supporter

By 1995, LDPR was already voting in sync with the Kremlin on all significant issues. For example, the party opposed Boris Yeltsin’s impeachment and supported the administration’s nominations for prime minster, from Sergey Kiriyenko to Evgeny Primakov.

A former colleague at LDPR and a former official who worked in the presidential administration under “domestic politics czar” Vladislav Surkov told Meduza that Zhirinovsky’s collaboration with the Kremlin accelerated when Vladimir Putin took office. “He actively bargained for preferential treatment for the party, for nominating people from LDPR to serve as business representatives, in exchange for support on crucial issues,” the former Kremlin official told Meduza.

In recent years, Zhirinovsky’s displays of loyalty to the Kremlin only intensified. In 2016, when receiving a medal from President Putin, he recited the line, “God save the tsar!” At other times, he urged Putin to adopt the titles “supreme leader” and “emperor.” A source inside LDPR told Meduza that Zhirinovsky believed such behavior was “the key to political survival” in Russia.

LDPR’s leader had a keen sense of popular sentiment, but he also understood very well that what matters most is how the votes are counted, not how the ballots are cast. For example, when public outrage sparked mass protests in Khabarovsk against the arrest of Governor Sergey Furgal, Zhirinovsky rushed to support his fellow party member. “But the Kremlin made it clear that this behavior was not appreciated, and he understood quickly,” says Meduza’s source at LDPR.

Journalist Viktor Khamraev calls Vladimir Zhirinovsky a trendsetter in contemporary Russia politics, noting that his abrasive, pugilistic style is now the blueprint for the Kremlin’s behavior at home and on the world stage. “Fighting, scandals, public rudeness toward your opponents — it’s all become the norm of Russian politics. Everyone today operates like he did. Just look at our diplomats and listen to them. Now they talk exactly like Zhirinovsky,” Khamraev explains. He says he used to believe that such imperialist clownery would essentially “inoculate” Russian society against right-wing views by making it impossible to take this ideology seriously. Khamraev now admits that he was wrong: “It seems it wasn’t a vaccine but some kind of hormone that under Putin started developing in the blood.”

Story by Andrey Pertsev

English-language version by Kevin Rothrock