zhirinovsky's russian empire

Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire - Zhirinovsky, centre, in Russian army uniform, surrounded by members of his 'personal guard' during the official unveiling of a statue of Marshal Zhukov in Moscow in 1995 Credit: AP

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has died aged 75, was a member of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), an openly racist and nationalist organization that advocated the establishment of a Greater Russia within the borders of the old Tsarist empire.

Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire

In 1993 the LDPR set off alarm bells in Western capitals when it won 23 percent of the vote in Russian Duma elections, winning more votes than any other party in 64 of 87 regions and defeating the reformist bloc led by Yegor Gaidar.

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Zhirinovsky's program was aimed at Russians who were angry and humiliated by the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and frightened and confused by the "shock therapy" economic reforms introduced under Boris Yeltsin that led to a decline in living standards.

His speech mixed aggressive racism with imperial nostalgia. Jews were a favorite target. During the campaign he accused them of starting both world wars (although they competed with Great Britain for that honor - "the most barbaric country on the planet"), and said they sold the organs of Russian children to foreigners and engaged in prostitution. . Russian women.

He threatened to "drop 100 bombs" and "create new Hiroshimas and Nagasakis" on any country making territorial claims on Russia, awaiting "the day when Russian soldiers can wash their shoes in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean". Demands the return of Alaska, Finland, Poland and other former parts of the Tsarist Empire.

Zhirinovsky poses with a bottle of vodka and a new pop CD in a Moscow nightclub in 1999 Credit: Mikhail Metzel/AP

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His social agenda, meanwhile, included promises of cheaper vodka for men and better underwear for women, and he joked that if his party won the election, there would be "group sex" and more orgasms. "Today is the start of the climax," he announced after the polls closed. "The whole nation, I promise you, will experience great excitement next year!"

The success of the LDPR encouraged Zhirinovsky to challenge Boris Yeltsin for the presidency, and in February 1996, a few months before the presidential election, there was widespread alarm when he was placed second in the polls. Campaign film footage shows him promising a campaign rally: "Help us, and you won't have to vote again!"

But in the end, he got 5.7 percent of the votes in the first round and is in fifth place.

Since then, the fortunes of the LDPR have been relatively stable, with the party typically winning about 11 percent of the popular vote in Duma elections (7.5 percent in 2021), while Zhirinovsky has continued to run for president, most recently in 2018, when he. won 5.6 percent of the vote.

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When he continued to play the role of "Mad Vlad", many saw him as a stooge of the Kremlin. For Putin, Zhirinovsky and the LDPR, which have chosen to support Putin's United Russia party on key issues, have their use as representatives of the political "opposition", allowing him to pretend to be a democracy when more serious opponents can be threatened, imprisoned or expected. bad

In 2015 Putin presented Zhirinovsky with the Order of Alexander Nevsky, while in 2020 Zhirinovsky returned the compliment by suggesting that Putin take the title of North Korean-style supreme leader when he steps down as president of Russia.

Zhirinovsky is widely seen as a kind of licensed jester for the regime, a potty-mouthed standard bearer for the kind of aggressive revisionism that fueled Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

So Zhirinovsky's leadership of December 27 last year may or may not have the predictive power claimed by his supporters to predict the exact day the attack began. "At 4 o'clock in the morning on February 22 you will feel our new policy," he told the Duma. "I want 2022 to be peaceful. But I love the truth. It won't be peaceful. It will be a year when Russia becomes great again.

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Despite his anti-Semitism, Zhirinovsky was actually half-Jewish and was born Vladimir Volfovich Eidelstein on April 25, 1946 in Alma-Ata (now Almaty, Kazakhstan). Volf Eidelstein's father was a Polish Jew whose mother, Alexandra, was married for a few months. . Before Vladimir was born.

What happened to Wolf Edelstein is not known. Some accounts say he died in a car accident when his son was young, while others claim he left the country and settled in Israel.

In fact, Vladimir took the surname of his mother's first husband - Andrei Vasilievich Zhirinovsky - who died more than a year before Vladimir was born. When confronted with a birth certificate bearing Eidelstein's name in 1994, Zhirinovsky denied the document was a forgery.

In 2001, however, Ivan, in a memoir titled Close Your Soul, admitted that his father was indeed Jewish, but insisted that this was meaningless: "Why should I reject Russian blood, Russian culture, Russian land and falling in love. Jews are just A drop of blood?"

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Like Zhirinovsky, he enrolled in the Turkish Studies Department of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University. He later earned a law degree and worked in various positions in state agencies and labor organizations.

As the Soviet political system began to open up somewhat under Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhirinovsky turned his attention to politics, but in 1989 gave up his bid to be nominated for a seat in the Duma. Instead he became the director of Shalom, a state patronage. A Jewish cultural organization, which may or may not be a KGB factory.

Suspicions that he had ties to the KGB (a charge he denied) resurfaced in 1991 when his LDPR became the first "opposition party" to be legalized in the Soviet Union.

Zhirinovsky burst onto the national scene and international consciousness in June of the same year when he ran for president and finished a surprising third, winning six million votes, behind Boris Yeltsin and Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov.

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After the high-water mark of the LDPR's events in the 1993 Duma elections, Zhirinovsky settled into life as a Duma member (and sometimes deputy speaker) and the clown prince of Russian politics, sometimes actively violent.

In early 1994 he published Last Bid for the South, a book he described as "the essence of my world view, the juice of my brain", a collection of autobiography and geopolitical mumbo-jumbo whose most consistent theme, as one reviewer noted, was , "an obsessive interest in toilets and extras such as underwear, uniforms and bathrooms."

Later that year, on a visit to Strasbourg, he was seen spitting, abusing, and throwing flowers and pebbles at Jewish students protesting outside the Russian consulate. France, she complained, treated her like an unruly dog: "You can show me to the toilet and tell me where to pee."

Very few non-ethnic Russians made it into his good books. Alaska, he suggested, was a good place to put Ukrainians; The Baltic countries should be reclaimed as suitable dumping grounds for nuclear waste; Mandatory birth control should be introduced in the North Caucasus, especially in Muslim Russia, to prevent the spread of terrorism.

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Candidates for using Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal include Chechen villages, Japan and Britain, which he suggested could trigger a tsunami if a nuclear bomb were dropped in the Atlantic Ocean.

Women were often the targets of his incitement – ​​and worse. In 2007 he suggested that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should be sent to Russia where "a section of us will happily barrack her overnight..." (the rest of the quote is unprinted).

In 1995 he assaulted a fellow female member of the Duma, holding her in a headlock, and in 2014 he assaulted a pregnant journalist who asked him about Ukraine and shoved two of his aides for "raping that woman".

Zhirinovsky, left, presents a gift to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein at Hussein's residence in Baghdad, 1995 Credit: AP

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His admirers include Saddam Hussein whom he sent armed volunteers from a group called the "Falcons of Zhirinovsky" to help in the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq received lucrative oil allocations from its former dictator.

In 2016 he urged Americans to vote for Donald Trump, calling him "a gift to humanity" and warning that US cities would be destroyed "like Hiroshima" if Hillary Clinton became president. Speaking about taking a DNA test to see if he was related to Trump, he said he felt the Great Disruptor was "somehow close to me".

In early February this year Zhirinovsky, who claimed to have had eight Covid-19 vaccinations, was hospitalized with the virus and later fell into an induced coma. His death was confirmed in April

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