San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ultranationalist politician championed Russia
VLADIMIR ZHIRINOVSKY 1946-2022
Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, a veteran Russian politician who served as both ultranationalist firebrand and clownish provocateur in the Kremlin’s carefully managed political system, died on Wednesday. He was 75.
The chairman of Russia’s lower house of Parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, told lawmakers that Zhirinovsky had died “after a serious and lengthy illness.” Zhirinovsky was admitted to a hospital in Moscow with COVID-19 in February, the Russian Health Ministry said.
Zhirinovsky led the Liberal Democratic Party, one of the first parties to emerge to compete with the Communist Party in the early 1990s, when it achieved a stunning upset by coming in second in parliamentary elections in 1993 behind the ruling Russia’s Choice bloc of President Boris N. Yeltsin.
Zhirinovsky did that by condemning the excesses of both the Communist past and the emerging kleptocracy, but he never again achieved similar success; he instead remained in the limelight mostly through outrageous antics that both shocked and entertained Russian voters.
He gained so much attention throwing a glass of orange juice at opposition politician Boris Nemtsov on live television in the 1990s that it became a signature move, in which he doused other politicians from time to time in parliament.
He once suggested that Russia take back Alaska and was an avowed fan of Donald Trump. “Long live Donald Trump!” Zhirinovsky said at one point during the 2016 American presidential campaign, while admonishing Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent, to withdraw, accusing her of being a warmonger.
During a televised Russian presidential debate in 2018, he demanded that the moderator remove a liberal female candidate because, he said, she was an “idiot” and a prostitute, using a more vulgar term.
Zhirinovsky failed repeatedly in running against President Vladimir Putin in presidential elections. Yet he remained a central player in Putin’s system of “managed democracy,” in which parties that were nominally part of the opposition were actually serving the Kremlin.
Zhirinovsky championed Russia’s continued imperial ambitions. He once said that he dreamed of the day when Russian expansion would have Russian soldiers washing their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. He used to personally lead his party faithful through a recent Moscow museum exhibition that lauded the country’s expansion under the Romanov dynasty, lingering in front of the maps that showed the progression of territorial gains.
With the invasion of Ukraine, his once fringe views had gone mainstream, analysts said. “He was one of the creators of the discourse about the new Russia being a great power, which was always perceived as populist clowning or fake ideology, but which suddenly turned into such a tragic reality,” said Kirill Rogov, a Russian political analyst.
On Dec. 27, Zhirinovsky gave a speech to Parliament that appeared to foreshadow Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, predicting that a turning point in the country’s history would come on Feb. 22.
“This will not be a peaceful year,” Zhirinovsky said. “This will be the year when Russia finally becomes a great country again, and everyone must shut up and respect our country.”
The invasion began on Feb. 24, but by that time Zhirinovsky was too ill to comment publicly.
Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky was born on April 25, 1946, in Soviet Kazakhstan. His father, who was Jewish, was deported from western Ukraine after it was captured by Stalin; his mother was an ethnic Russian.
Zhirinovsky started his career as a lawyer, but as soon as the Soviet system allowed for some degree of political pluralism, he joined the democratic whirlwind of the newly emerging, independent Russia.
He ran for president six times, never winning more than 10% of the vote but setting a vitriolic tone in the country’s politics.