Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a firebrand Russian nationalist, party leader and presidential candidate who built a considerable following during the chaotic post-Soviet 1990s with promises to restore the glory of Soviet empire, has died at a hospital in the Moscow region. He was 75.
His death, of covid-19 complications, was announced by Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma.
Mr. Zhirinovsky was widely characterized as a bombastic buffoon and bigot with a penchant for violent behavior toward women and journalists. But he was a crudely effective survivor of Russia’s political scene for three decades — rabidly captivating in a nation of mostly colorless politicians.
By any measure, his Liberal Democratic Party, known as the LDPR, was almost comically misnamed, given its illiberal and undemocratic ideals. Nevertheless, the niche he filled represented a small but significant part of the Russian population that was angry and disoriented by the pace of change after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
Russia was staggered by the sudden transition from communism to a market democracy. With a handful of fabulously wealthy oligarchs and masses of poor pensioners, the former superpower struggled to establish the rule of law, modernize its aging factories and arrest the collapse of a decayed economy.
Mr. Zhirinovsky played on feelings of envy, fear, nostalgia and resentment. He was overtly antisemitic — even though he eventually acknowledged his father’s Jewish roots — and he blamed darker-skinned ethnic minorities and Jews for Russia’s woes. He had an instinct for the TV sound bite, and, in raspy, emotional appeals to Russians, he billed himself as “the last hope of a cheated and humiliated people.” He spoke of reviving a Soviet-style dictatorship if necessary to rebuild Mother Russia and guard it against foreign rivals armed with missiles or merchandise.
“For the past thousand years, Russia has been surrounded by enemies fighting a declared or undeclared war against us,” Mr. Zhirinovsky told a gathering of supporters in 1994. “Americans are cunning. They have learned the experience of Napoleon and Hitler, who came to Russia with a sword. They came with pantyhose, chewing gum, McDonald’s, pornography and horror movies — and they were welcome.”
Trained as a lawyer, Mr. Zhirinovsky had run in every presidential election since founding the LDPR in early 1991 — when it became only the second officially registered political party in seven decades of Communist Party rule.
In the Russian republic’s June 1991 presidential election — the first direct presidential elections in Russian history — Mr. Zhirinovsky garnered 6 million votes, or nearly 8 percent. He lost by a wide measure to an established leader, the pro-reform Boris Yeltsin, but his tally was considered an astonishing show of support for an obscure neophyte. Two years later, the LDPR won 23 percent of the votes cast in parliamentary elections, more than any other party, making it a power to reckon with. He sat for years in the Duma.
Mr. Zhirinovsky was credited with influencing Yeltsin’s foreign policy, in particular the quest to reclaim great-power status and protect the interests of the approximately 25 million ethnic Russians living abroad.
As he ran for high office, Mr. Zhirinovsky focused on reducing the surging crime rate, expanding the welfare state and restoring Russia’s hegemony in its sphere of influence. He laced his speeches with a retrograde, macho humor, joking about free vodka and “group sex” if his party triumphed at the polls. “Political impotence is finished!” he declared in 1993 after voting in legislative elections. “Today is the beginning of orgasm. The whole nation, I promise you, will feel orgasm next year!”
More darkly, he spoke of Jews “infecting the country” through media control, selling the organs of Russian children to Westerners and prostituting Russian women.
His 1993 autobiography and political manifesto, “The Final March South,” was also rife with vulgar remarks about women and minorities. Before crowds, he lobbed insults at American politicians — with the rare exception of 1996 Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whom he praised as a “brother in arms” for labeling the U.S. Congress “Israeli-occupied territory.”
Rivals tried to dismiss Mr. Zhirinovsky as deranged or a stooge of the old KGB security apparatus or some other secret cabal working to undermine a fledgling democracy, but he managed to find a devoted audience.
“You do not understand the psychology of our people,” he told a newspaper in 1995. “Our voters love a bit of contrast, a shock to the system. So if you journalists wrote every day that I was just a normal democrat with a normal program, quiet, intelligent, educated — I would be finished immediately.”
Mr. Zhirinovsky, who had long obscured his background and denied any Jewish descent, was in fact half-Jewish. According to records uncovered in 1994 by a journalist on assignment for the Associated Press and CNN, he was born Vladimir Volfovich Eidelshtein in Alma-Ata, the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (now Almaty, Kazakhstan), on April 25, 1946.
His mother, Alexandra, described in some reports as a cafeteria worker, had a first husband with the surname Zhirinovsky, but he died of tuberculosis 18 months before Vladimir was born, records showed. Alexandra then married Volf Eidelshtein, a Polish Jew, five months before Vladimir was born.
Although Mr. Zhirinovsky said he was an infant when his father died in a car accident, the AP and CNN report could find no records to substantiate that. (Other reports say Volf Eidelshtein left the country and settled in what became Israel.)
When he entered politics, Mr. Zhirinovsky described both parents as Russian. When confronted in 1994 with a birth certificate with his Jewish last name, Mr. Zhirinovsky said it was forged and “prepared against me.”
It took another seven years before he fully admitted his Jewish heritage in a second memoir, and then he said he identified ethnically as Russian. “Why should I reject Russian blood, Russian culture, Russian land and fall in love with the Jewish people only because of that single drop of blood that my father left in my mother’s body?” he wrote in his 2001 book, “Ivan, Close Your Soul.”
He had legally changed his surname by the time he entered the Institute of Oriental Languages, affiliated with Moscow State University. He completed his studies in Turkish in 1970 and worked toward a law degree at night at Moscow State University.
He held law-related jobs for the state-run legal agency Inyurkollegiya and then the Mir publishing house of science texts, but he was not a model employee. He irritated co-workers with his political harangues and became a self-appointed worker advocate seeking extravagant benefits from his bosses, former superiors of his told The Washington Post in 1994.
By several accounts, he sought membership in the Communist Party, essential for career advancement but was turned down by managers because of erratic behavior. According to reporting in The Post, local party chieftains received a confidential letter accusing Mr. Zhirinovsky of having lost his position at Inyurkollegiya because of a kickback scheme related to an inheritance case he handled.
As the political system began to open slightly under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, Mr. Zhirinovsky was the ultimate opportunist. He attended any party gathering that would allow him to speak. After being deemed untrustworthy or a nuisance by many organizations, he started his own Liberal Democratic Party.
His unflagging energy whipped up feisty crowds in Russia, and he made pilgrimages to right-wing politicians and dictators around the world, bragging at times, for instance, about his “good friend” Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. He was declared unwelcome in France and Germany for his saber-rattling invective against those countries.
The belligerent speaking style spilled over into more disturbing behavior. He had a track record of assault, and most notably attacked a fellow member of parliament, Yevgeniya Tishkovskaya, pulling her hair and holding her in a headlock in 1995. In 2014, he threw a female reporter into the back of his car and shouted for his aides to “violently rape” her. He lost at least two defamation suits over the years.
In more recent years, as Vladimir Putin systematically dismantled any real political opposition through arrests and intimidation, Mr. Zhirinovsky and his party were allowed to hang around as useful foils — offering a facade of competitive races and political choice, while Putin held all the cards.
LDPR often sided with the ruling United Russia party on critical matters. In 2018, during a vote on unpopular pension legislation that raised the retirement age by five years, Mr. Zhirinovsky said he was against the amendment but then called it “inevitable.”
Mr. Zhirinovsky always knew the limits of his influence and popularity, which kept him in his lane but allowed him to sail through many iterations of the Kremlin elite over the decades, said Dmitry Oreshkin, a Russian political scientist.
“He has always been a systemic person,” Oreshkin said, referring to “systemic opposition,” critical voices that are tolerated by the Kremlin and ultimately vote and act as directed by the Kremlin. “Zhirinovsky always played for Putin, or more precisely, he always played for the NKVD [the Commissariat for Internal Affairs] or the KGB, or the FSB, whatever you prefer. He always understood the rules of the game.”
His death puts the future of the LDPR in question as it relied heavily on Mr. Zhirinovsky’s flamboyant persona. His son, Igor, briefly served in parliament and led the LDPR’s parliamentary faction, although father and son were said to have had disagreements over finances and appointments.
Mr. Zhirinovsky’s wife of more than 50 years, biologist Galina Lebedeva, once told reporters that in contrast to his public persona, her husband was “very quiet and peaceful” at home, where he puttered around in slippers and a jogging suit. She said he never forgot birthdays and anniversaries and “asks others before changing the television channel.”
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Vladimir Zhirinovsky, ultranationalist Russian political leader, dies at 75 - The Washington Post
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