78 The Economist April 16th 2022
Obituary Vladimir Zhirinovsky
He likedtodressinbrightcolours.Acidicyellow,fluorescent
red and purple were his favourites for a jacket. His top shirt
button was always undone, his tie loose, his suit crumpled and co
vered in his last dinner. On occasions he wore a bow tie; some
times a Soviet military uniform, replete with medals. The leader of
the rightwing and misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir
Zhirinovsky was first and foremost a showman. He was after fame,
money and sex—not political office. But he played an important
role in Russian politics, stripping it of meaning, faking opposi
tion, turning it into buffoonery and providing an outlet for na
tionalism and xenophobia.
Zhirinovsky was a prized guest at Moscow’s political beau-
mondeparties. Actors loved to do imitations of him in variety
shows. His eccentricity, his direct slightly twitchy manner was ea
sy to mimic; his every utterance a caricature of the scandalised,
embittered, vodkaswilling dolt of Moscow’s back streets—dis
gruntled in equal measure by personal misery, sexual frustration
and the humiliation of his oncemighty nation.
His fans called him “Zhirik”, a nickname better suited to a cir
cus clown. Stage characters don’t talk about the biography of the
actors who play them. He was born in 1946 in Almaty, then the cap
ital of Soviet Kazakhstan, to an ethnic Russian mother and a Uk
rainian Jewish father, Volf Edelstein, who had been deported from
western Ukraine and who later emigrated to Israel. “My mother
was Russian, my father was a lawyer,” he said of his background.
He burst onto the stage in late 1993. Russia had just stepped
back from the edge of a civil war. Street battles between a Stalinist
fascist coalition and President Boris Yeltsin ended in the presi
dent’s favour after he shelled the parliament building where the
hardliners were holed up. It seemed, at last, that Russia could
forge ahead with creating a marketoriented democratic system
and living in peace with the world. At a televised party held on thenight of the parliamentary elections in 1993, liberals were sipping
champagne and congratulating each other on their victory.
Zhirinovsky gatecrashed their celebrations when his ultra
nationalist party topped the poll with 23% of the national vote,
compared with the 15.5% attained by proWestern liberals. “Rus
sia, come to your senses, you have gone bonkers,” said Yury Karya
kin, a liberal deputy and literary academic. A scholar of Dostoyev
sky, Karyakin took Zhirinovsky for a real threat. He did not recog
nise in him one of the novelist’s favourite types—those who revel
in scandals, make mockery of any value, and break taboos.
In Zhirinovsky’s 1995 electoral campaign a nearly naked dancer
in an erotic floorshow gyrated to the song: “I’m looking for a man
who will spank me, spank me...” In the same campaign he threw a
glass of orange juice at Boris Nemtsov, the liberal opposition lead
er who was murdered in 2015. “We must always exploit the worst
in the people. Such is the fate of the opposition,” he once said.
He was not, of course, opposition in any real sense. His party
was brought into being by the Soviet kgb, which in the spring of
1990 reluctantly concluded that the communist monopoly on
power was over and some version of multiparty democracy had to
be accepted. But Russia’s security services—going right back to
tsarist times—had vast experience of manipulating and fostering
tame “opposition” groups. After the authorities had announced
that noncommunist political parties could be legally registered, a
mysterious group called the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia
sprang into existence.
His party was meant to split the democratic electorate. But as a
showman in search of an audience, Zhirinovsky sensed that pop
ular demand was in the field of imperial nostalgia and ressenti-
ment—a mixture of frustration, jealousy and resentment. His elec
torate was the disenchanted and the lumpenised. He had a knack
for articulating their basic instincts, forbidden desires and dark
thoughts. He told them he dreamt of a day “when Russian soldiers
can wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean”.
While he was entertaining the public with his antics, those
with real political power looted their own country. As Kirill Rogov,
a chronicler of postSoviet politics, noted, Zhirinovsky’s confident
dominance on that stage kept real rightwing nationalists with
their permanent hangover and stern gloominess at bay, thus
shielding the Russian centrist kleptocratic bureaucracy from a
nationalist revanche.
Perhaps it was partly his success that made the Kremlin realise
just how fertile that nationalism and xenophobia were. As it came
to adopt his slogans of imperial resurgence, Zhirinovsky spotted
another fertile ground—the resentment of Moscow by the regions.
His Liberal Democratic Party became a refuge for populists across
the country who rivalled and rattled Kremlin nominees. The
Kremlin responded with its usual thuggery and repressions.
He, in turn, warned them of the growing rage. “Do you want a
Maidan, like in Ukraine? Then you will get one! Just one match will
be lit somewhere, a fire will erupt everywhere, the people will not
stand for it...Don’t try to bring people to the boil; don’t provoke
conflict out of the blue. You have no shame and no conscience.”
The Kremlin took his warning of rising anger in Russia seriously
and doubleddown on nationalism, xenophobia and aggression.
Zhirinovsky understood the Kremlin’s intentions because he
taught them the language in which they spoke. Last December he
made an eerie prediction. “At 4am on February 22nd, you will feel
[our new policy]. I would like 2022 to be a peaceful year. But I love
the truth. For 70 years I have been telling the truth. It will not be
peaceful. It will be a year when Russia becomes great again.” He
was out by two days: Vladimir Putin launched his invasion in the
small hours of February 24th. By then he was already in hospital
and did not join in the fascistic frenzy. It is not known exactly
when he died, but his act was over and he took his exit just in time.
He was a cynical jester, not a war criminal. As Russia descended
into darkness, there was no room for his bright colours.nHighly methodical madnessVladimir Zhirinovsky, the court jester of Russian politics
was 75. His death was announced on April 6th