His death, from complications of Covid-19, was announced by Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma. Mr Zirinovsky has been widely described as a bomber and a bigot with a tendency to be violent towards women and journalists. But he was a crude effective survivor of the Russian political scene for three decades – fascinated with rage at a nation of largely colorless politicians. In any case, his Liberal Democratic Party, known as the LDPR, was almost comically wrong, given its unfree and anti-democratic ideals. But the position he held represented a small but significant portion of the Russian population that was angry and disoriented by the pace of change following the break-up of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Russia was shocked by the sudden transition from communism to a market democracy. With a handful of super-rich oligarchs and masses of poor retirees, the former superpower struggled to establish the rule of law, modernize its aging factories and stop the collapse of a declining economy. Mr. Zirinovsky played with feelings of envy, fear, nostalgia and indignation. He was openly anti-Semitic – although he eventually acknowledged his father’s Jewish roots – and blamed the dark ethnic minorities and Jews for Russia’s suffering. He had an instinct for biting the sound of television and, with furious, emotional appeals to the Russians, described himself as “the last hope of a deceived and humiliated people.” He spoke of reviving a Soviet-style dictatorship if needed to rebuild Mother Russia and protect it from foreign adversaries armed with missiles or goods. “For the last thousand years, Russia has been surrounded by enemies who are waging a declared or undeclared war against us,” Zirinovsky told a rally in 1994. “The Americans are cunning. They have learned the experience of Napoleon and Hitler, who came to Russia with the sword. “They came in tights, chewing gum, McDonald’s, pornography and horror movies – and they were welcome.” Trained as a lawyer, Mr. Zirinovsky had run in all presidential elections since the LDPR was founded in early 1991 – when it became only the second officially registered political party in seven decades of Communist Party rule. In the June 1991 presidential election in the Russian Republic – the first direct presidential election in Russian history – Mr. Zhirinovsky received 6 million votes, or almost 8 percent. He lost heavily to an established leader, the pro-reformer Boris Yeltsin, but his account was seen as a stunning show of support for a dark neo-enlightened. Two years later, the LDPR won 23 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections, more than any other party, making it a force to be reckoned with. He sat in the Duma for years. Mr Zhirinovsky was credited with influencing Yeltsin’s foreign policy, in particular his attempt to regain power of the great power and to protect the interests of the approximately 25 million Russians living abroad. As he rose to prominence, Mr Zirinovsky focused on reducing the rising crime rate, expanding the welfare state and restoring Russian hegemony to its sphere of influence. He blunted his speeches with a retrograde, macho humor, joking about free vodka and “group sex” if his party triumphed at the polls. “Political incompetence is over!” said in 1993 after voting in parliamentary elections. “Today is the beginning of orgasm. The whole nation, I promise you, will feel the orgasm of time! “ More obscurely, he spoke of Jews “infecting the country” through media control, selling the organs of Russian children to Westerners and prostituting Russian women. His autobiography and political manifesto of 1993, “The Final March South”, was also full of vulgar comments about women and minorities. In front of the crowds, he insulted American politicians – with the rare exception of Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whom he praised as a “brother in arms” for calling the US Congress “Israeli-occupied territory.” Opponents tried to dismiss Mr Zirinovsky as a troublemaker or as a vessel of the old KGB security apparatus or some other secret clergy that worked to undermine a fledgling democracy, but managed to find a loyal audience. “You do not understand the psychology of our people,” he told a newspaper in 1995. “Our voters love the opposition a little, a shock to the system. “So if you journalists wrote every day that I was just a normal democrat with a regular schedule, quiet, smart, educated – I would end immediately.” Mr. Zirinovsky, who had long since concealed his background and denied any Jewish origin, was in fact a half-Jew. According to records revealed in 1994 by a journalist commissioned by 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, who is described in some reports as a cafeteria worker, had a first husband named Zirinovsky, but died of tuberculosis 18 months before Vladimir was born, according to records. Alexandra then married Wolf Eidelshtein, a Polish Jew, five months before Vladimir was born. Although Mr. Zirinovsky said he was an infant when his father died in a car accident, the AP and CNN report could not find any file to substantiate it. (Other reports say that Wolf Eidelshtein left the country and settled in what became Israel.) When he entered politics, Mr. Zirinovsky described both parents as Russian. When confronted with a birth certificate with his Jewish surname in 1994, Mr. Zirinovsky said it was fake and “prepared against me.” It took another seven years for him to fully acknowledge his Jewish heritage in a second memoir, after which he said he identified himself ethnically as a Russian. “Why should I reject Russian blood, Russian culture, Russian land and fall in love with the Jewish people just because of this drop of blood that my father left on my mother’s body?” wrote in his book in 2001, “Ivan, Close Your Soul”. He had legally changed his surname when he entered the Institute of Oriental Languages, which is affiliated with Moscow State University. He completed his studies in Turkish in 1970 and worked for a law degree at night at Moscow State University. He held positions related to the law for the state legal service Inyurkollegiya and then the publishing house of scientific texts Mir, but he was not a model employee. He annoyed his colleagues with his political character and became a self-appointed workers’ advocate seeking too much benefit from his bosses, his former superiors told the Washington Post in 1994. According to many accounts, he sought to become a member of the Communist Party, necessary for the development of his career, but was rejected by the directors due to irregular behavior. According to a report by The Post, local party leaders received a confidential letter accusing Mr. Zirinovsky of losing his position at Inyurkollegiya over a bribery case involving a inheritance case. As the political system began to open up slightly under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, Mr. Zirinovsky was the ultimate opportunist. He attended any party gathering that would allow him to speak. After being judged unreliable or annoying by many organizations, he founded his own Liberal Democratic Party. His irresistible action has stirred up insane crowds in Russia and paid homage to right-wing politicians and dictators around the world, sometimes boasting, for example, about his “good friend” Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. He was declared undesirable in France and Germany for his aggressive aggression against these countries. The martial style of speech was transmitted to more annoying behavior. He had a history of assault, most notably attacking a colleague in parliament, Yevgeniya Tishkovskaya, by pulling her hair and holding it by the head in 1995. In 2014, he threw a female reporter in the back of his car and shouted for his assistants to “Rape violently”. He has lost at least two defamation lawsuits over the years. In recent years, as Vladimir Putin systematically dismantled any real political opposition through arrests and intimidation, Mr. Zirinovsky and his party have been able to wander around as useful foil – offering a facade of rival tribes and political elites. all papers. The LDPR has often sided with the ruling United Russia party on critical issues. In 2018, during a vote on unpopular pension legislation that raised the retirement age by five years, Mr Zirinovsky said he was against the amendment, but later called it “inevitable”. Mr Zirinovsky has always known the limits of his influence and popularity, which have kept him in the lane but allowed him to cross many Kremlin elites over the decades, said Dmitry Oreskin, a Russian political scientist. “He has always been a systemic person,” Oreshkin said, referring to the “systemic opposition”, the critical voices that are tolerated by the Kremlin and ultimately vote and act as directed by the Kremlin. “Zirinovsky always played for Putin, or more specifically, he always played for the NKVD [the Commissariat for Internal Affairs] or the KGB, or the FSB, whichever you prefer. “He always understood the rules of the game.” His death calls into question the future of the LDPR as it relied heavily on Mr Zirinovsky’s ostentatious personality. His son, Igor, served briefly in parliament and led the LDPR parliamentary faction, although father and son are said to have had disagreements over finances and …
