BREAKING: RUSSIAN tRUMP IS DEAD; U.S tRUMP TO FOLLOW
Russian tRump, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, ultra-nationalist Russian politician whose provocative stunts and calls for ‘a new assertiveness’ were an influence on Putin, HAS DIED OF COVID-19 complications
thetimes.co.uk
Russian tRump, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a veteran ultra-nationalist and showman of Russian politics who predicted the invasion of Ukraine almost to the day, has died aged 75.
Zhirinovsky, who led the far-right Liberal Democratic Party for 30 years, had been dubbed “Russia’s Trump” by some for his ideological views, which included demands for the reconquest of former Soviet republics and for countries including Japan and Britain to be hit with nuclear weapons. He had been in intensive care with Covid-19 since early February.
Announcing his death, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s parliament, called Zhirinovsky “a bright, talented politician” and “a man who deeply understood how the world works and foresaw many things”.
Zhirinovsky gives a vodka toast in 2008 after taking part in an exercise at a shooting range
ALEXANDER NATRUSKIN/ALAMY
ObituaryIn December last year, the ultra-nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky made a prediction in the Russian parliament. “At 4am on February 22, you will feel [our new policy],” he warned. “It will be a year when Russia becomes great again.” The speech went viral, adding to speculation about whether President Putin would invade Ukraine. In the end Zhirinovsky’s prediction seemed uncannily accurate: the invasion began just two days after the date he had named.
Zhirinovsky, who became a household name in Russia and the subject of much global attention in the 1990s, was never famous for the accuracy or consistency of what he said about anything. The point, for him, was always to attract attention. He was an early example of what became a familiar phenomenon: the populist leader who cares little for questions of truth, understands exactly how to secure maximum coverage, and wins a diehard following by claiming to represent those who feel excluded or impoverished by global change.
Many who watched his stunts and listened to his deliberately outrageous rhetoric saw him as merely comical. He promised free vodka during his presidential election campaign in 1991, was often drunk in public, was pictured slam-dancing in a Moscow disco and brawled during TV debates. He proposed variously to blow radioactive waste over the Baltic states, take back Alaska from the US and detonate nuclear weapons in the Atlantic to flood Britain. Always good for a sensational soundbite, he requested $1,000 a minute for interviews at one stage. Among his media nicknames were “Vlad the Mad” and “the Clown Prince”.
Yet others, listening to the darker side of some of his outbursts, warned that he should not be underestimated. He suggested deterring crime through summary executions. Despite his own Jewish family heritage and work with a Jewish organisation during the Soviet period, Zhirinovsky became openly antisemitic, throwing rocks at Jewish protesters and associating with far-right leaders in Europe. He was misogynistic too, once physically attacking a female MP. Among his proposals was the legalisation of polygamy to end Russia’s demographic decline by providing husbands for what he called “ten million lonely women”.
Zhirinovsky was a fiery advocate whose fringe nationalist views became mainstream
MARAT ABULKHATIN/RUSSIAN STATE DUMA PHOTO SERVICE/TASS/ALAMY
Whatever people thought of his behaviour, he retained a core appeal for those who felt most resentful and insecure after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His Liberal Democratic Party, said to have been created with the help of the KGB, won the largest vote — more than 22 per cent — in the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections. He was especially popular among male voters, including former members of the armed services. “The Russian people,” he declared, “have become the most humiliated nation on the planet.” Zhirinovsky blamed much of it on a conspiracy by the West, and began to articulate a vision of a new Russian assertiveness that was increasingly influential in the Kremlin.
He said that Russia should aim to expand into territories including Finland and the Baltic states, and argued that Moscow needed to assert itself towards the south in particular, dreaming of a day when “Russian soldiers can wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean”. Zhirinovsky’s views and popularity were said to have been used by the Kremlin to intimidate former Soviet republics trying to chart an independent course. Putin, as president, began to use language about the creation of, say, a Eurasian Union as an “independent centre of global development, rather than the periphery of Europe or Asia”, which echoed the kind of rhetoric Zhirinovsky liked to use.
Details of Zhirinovsky’s life often remained murky — deliberately so from his point of view, given controversies about his Jewish ancestry and relationship with the Soviet authorities. He was born in 1946 in Almaty in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. His mother was a canteen worker. His father, Volf Isakovich Eidelstein, was a lawyer who worked for an enterprise producing clothing and footwear. His parents’ marriage ended soon after he was born and his father emigrated. In his autobiography, Zhirinovsky claimed he lacked love and attention as a child. Once, asked about his nationality, he replied that “my mother is a Russian while my father is a lawyer”. Zhirinovsky initially used his father’s surname, but is believed to have changed in the 1960s to using Zhirinovsky, the name of his mother’s first husband.
He studied at Moscow University where he learnt languages including English, German and Turkish, and then worked in Turkey as a translator. In the early 1970s he did military service in the Caucasus. After moving to Moscow he is believed to have held semi-official jobs in state institutions. By the late 1980s he was a member of a state-sponsored Jewish cultural group while still apparently denying his own ancestry. Only in 2001 did he finally confirm that his father was Jewish and later visited his grave in Israel.
In the early 1970s he married Galina Lebedeva, a lawyer and daughter of a retired general. Their son, Igor (now surnamed Lebedev), became a politician in Zhirinovsky’s party. He is also survived by another son, Oleg, and a daughter, Anastasia.
As the Soviet Union liberalised under Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhirinovsky began to show political ambitions and co-founded the Liberal Democratic Party in 1989, the first notionally opposition party to be permitted. That led to speculation that its creation had been steered by the security services and that Zhirinovsky was either a member of or close to the KGB, claims he denied.
With President Putin in 2016 after receiving the medal of the order for merit to the fatherland
MIKHAIL METZEL/TASS/ALAMY
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His party split partly over the KGB allegations but Zhirinovsky created his own version and, as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he stood for the post of Russian president. He won 7.8 per cent of the vote and his influence seemed to be gaining strongly in 1993 when his party was the most successful in parliamentary elections as “shock therapy” economics impoverished millions while a lucky few, often through corruption, became fabulously wealthy.
That was the peak of the party’s success but Zhirinovsky remained a vocal presence. He seemed to find an accommodation with the growth of Putin’s hegemony though he was often seen as a Kremlin loyalist. In his latest presidential campaign in 2018, Zhirinovsky was pictured seated on a throne with gifts from Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein on display. In TV debates, in which Putin pointedly refused to take part, Zhirinovsky attacked the other candidates, prompting furious reactions in a way seen as useful to the Kremlin, making Putin seem above the fray. The election was inevitably won by Putin while Zhirinovsky came third with just 5.7 per cent.
When it came to foreign policy, he now had less reason to be critical. The Kremlin under Putin was moving towards the kind of violent assertion of new Russian ambition that, when Zhirinovsky had proposed it in the 1990s, had been dismissed by many as the eccentric ravings of a figure permanently distant from influence and power.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Russian politician, was born on April 25, 1946. He died of complications from Covid-19 on April 6, 2022, aged 75 |
