Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the Russia essays.
Several days into my trip, I had a meeting with Vladmir Zhirinovsky, one of the most famous, infamous Russian politicians of the past twenty years. In 1990 he founded the Liberal Democrat Party (LDPR), the first real independent political opposition to the Communists. In the 1993 parliamentary elections, the LDPR gained about 23% of the vote. Zhirinovsky had positioned himself as a kind of Huey Long of Russian politics, with a comic touch. He once promised to give out free vodka to one and all if he were elected president.
He is an unapologetic nationalist who wants to remake Russia into an independent superpower. In 1994, he ran for President against Boris Yeltsin. The powers that be were frightened enough of him to orchestrate a powerful advertising campaign against him and the Communists who were Yeltsin’s main rivals. Zhirinovsky lost and has since seen his power and popularity dwindle, although he and his party continue to garner a big enough share of the vote to remain a force in the Duma (the Russian parliament).
Zhirinovsky is a walking contradiction. He is half Jewish, but often spouts anti-Semitic remarks. He is quite intelligent, very well-educated (his knowledge of literature and history far exceeds that of your average American politician), yet his nationalism often rings crude and demagogic. He was good friends with Saddam Hussein and he is proud of this.
He is an aspiring actor and musician (he recently recorded some hip hop songs he wrote), and he happily engages in public fights with other politicians, sometimes coming to blows with them (on one famous occasion throwing orange juice in the face of a rival). Some see him as a buffoon, many see him as quite lovable and embodying something very Russian. He happens to admire my books, and so a meeting was set up at his offices in the Duma.
In person, he was as I had imagined. Larger than life (physically and personality-wise), he struck me as the kind of politician you might have met in 19th century America. As soon as the “meeting” began, he launched into a two-hour monologue, broken up only by the constant puffs on his cigars that he chain-smoked, the breakneck translations of my interpreter who tried to keep up with him, and my own occasional comments. His politics veered left and right. At one moment he sounded like Noam Chomsky as he dissected American foreign policy; at another moment he sounded like Pat Buchanan (with whom he is friends), as he railed against the immigrants he thinks are ruining Russia.
He wore his emotions on his sleeve. In America, political appeals to emotions tend to be rather subtle and expressed through codes. Karl Rove likes to find emotional hot-buttons embedded in certain words, like the often used “liberal”–associated with words such as “taxes”–or around issues like abortion. Using these coded words protects the politician from seeming too obvious in his demagoguery; he can have plausible deniability: “Well, I never meant it that way.” These forms of manipulation are insidious and exist on the left and right. They’re used by the politically correct on both sides.
Zhirinovsky is a relic of an era when demagoguery was more open, more obvious and quite theatrical. It reveals to me how primitive Russian politics can seem, although this primitiveness is charming and appealing. It comes from a leader who wants to infect you with his own emotions, rather than heat you up with veiled language and codes. On the charming side, it brings to mind a kind of latter-day Andrew Jackson; on the dark side, it can veer into something Hitlerian.