Russia Watch (II) I Zhirinovsky Up Close
Young, Cathy
Zhirinovsky Up Close by Cathy Young T wo years ago, a columnist in one of Moscow's liberal papers quipped that tapes of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's speeches were outselling those of professional...
...Several attempts by LDP dissidents to oust Zhirinovsky, whom they accused of collaborating with the Soviet regime and turning the party into "a pro-Communist puppet group," failed...
...Some Western and East European observers, too, are saying that the xenophobic Zhirinovsky vote represents "the real Russia," the Brechtian implication being that the democrats ought to dissolve the people and appoint a new one...
...A 1992 appeal to soldiers and officers in the party newspaper promised a host of benefits to active-duty and retired servicemen—not just priority allocation of land, housing, and business loans, but special legal status including reduced criminal penalties for military personnel and permission for officers to "bear arms and use them in any circumstances...
...Actually, Zhirinovsky's performance shouldn't have been that much of a shock to anyone in government or the media—which, unlike most Russians, had had access to the opinion polls of the last ten days of the campaign...
...It was December '91, with the shops barer than ever and the Soviet Union gasping its last, and Zhirinovsky was talking to voters in the hall of a Moscow movie theater...
...He warned that if the West persisted in recognizing the Baltics and other ex-Soviet states, Russia could retaliate by sending arms to separatists in Northern Ireland, Quebec, or Spain (that was when World War IV came up...
...Some highlights: the 1993 "Program Theses" call for "a socially oriented and regulated planned market economy" and "structural economic reform and the adoption of market methods without economic or social turmoil...
...I was appalled to find that a former school friend of mine had a picture of Zhirinovsky on her desk and voted for him in 1991...
...So who is this man who wants to recapture Alaska and Finland and rid Moscow of traders from the Caucasus and Central Asia...
...Later I came up and asked if we could do an interview...
...Barring multiple personalities, one may surmise that he has sought to corner the brown-shirt vote while maintaining a sufficient veneer of respectability for his more squeamish fans to be able to claim that he has been unfairly maligned...
...Zhirinovsky makes it easy to dismiss him as a maniacal buffoon...
...Minutes later, he was praising David Duke and Jean-Marie Le Pen...
...Z hirinovsky's history is as paradoxical as his speeches...
...A 1992 proposal pledged, in the stock phrases of "right" and "left" authoritarians, to crack down on "speculators and middlemen" and revive industry...
...He also said that as a lawyer, he held the rule of law in the highest esteem and opposed the death penalty...
...Then, a small row erupted as one of the radicals lashed out at the conference sponsors for giving a platform to a known KGB stooge such as Zhirinovsky...
...Some Moscow skeptics think the ban was imposed because the numbers boded ill for the proYeltsin Russia's Choice bloc led by Yegor Gaidar: a December 10 poll disclosed the day after the election showed 20 percent planning to vote for Zhirinovsky, to Gaidar's 19 percent...
...But clearly, for all the buffoonery, Zhirinovsky is shrewd...
...I never did the interview—and I lost the card...
...The same day they make you commander of the Jewish army," Gdlyan retorted...
...Because, Zhirinovsky replied, "the values of liberal democracy suit us best: the primacy of the individual over state or ethnic interests...
...Zhirinovsky Up Close by Cathy Young T wo years ago, a columnist in one of Moscow's liberal papers quipped that tapes of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's speeches were outselling those of professional comedians...
...He's got a very good program...
...My sympathies, I confess, were ignorantly leaning toward Zhirinovsky, partly out of disgust at the promiscuous way that charges of KGB ties were hurled about in Moscow politics...
...Zhirinovsky and his party may get 30 to 40 percent of the vote, because they remain the only option for people of radical left and radical nationalist views...
...I havetoo little faith in the human capacity to engineer long-term scenarios to be persuaded...
...He has never joined any of the "red-and-brown" opposition blocs such as the National Salvation Front, and thus avoided not only getting lost in the anti-Yeltsinite crowd but being crushed along with it after October 4. (He had not expressed any support for the Supreme Soviet...
...LDP voters, the theory goes, simply succumbed to mass hypnosis...
...For many educated urban Russians, Zhirinovsky's success will reinforce the old feeling that they are aliens in the savage land of Ivan the Barbarian...
...At least one observer predicted—even, it turns out, overestimatedZhirinovsky's success days after the Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow and a forthcoming book on American feminism...
...T he next time I saw Zhirinovsky, he was famous, or infamous, having snagged about seven million votes in the Russian presidential election with pledges of cheap vodka and imperial glory...
...1 The American Spectator February 1994 83...
...The Moscow daily Kuranty reports that at the ill-fated election-night gala, a triumphant Zhirinovsky ran into Armenian-born democrat Telman Gdlyan—whose New Russia bloccouldn't get on the ballot—and guffawed, "So, when are they gonna make you commander of the Armenian army...
...Speakers included Arnold Trebach of the Drug Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., several bearded Russian radicals, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party...
...The Central Election Commission had prohibited the release of polling data by the media after December 1, ostensibly so as not to influence voters...
...He pushed his card at me and said, "Call me if you want...
...One time I heard him speak, he warned that the West's meddling in Russia could lead to "World War IV" and spoke of his party's thwarted efforts to alleviate the food crisis in Moscow by selling meat: "Our meat, the meat of the Liberal Democratic Party...
...And so it went, as Zhirinovsky pro82 The American Spectator February 1994 fessed devotion to "liberal values such as a free market economy" and claimed that he had gotten food prices to drop 30 percent just by touring a Moscow farm market...
...That very evening, I saw the man on the news at a press conference of some "Centrist Bloc," warning that anti-Communism was divisive and democratic groups should work not only with each other but with the ruling Communist Party...
...I eventually learned that the founding conference of the LDP in late March had gotten extensive television coverage...
...Days before the election last December 12, he promised that under his policies every Russian woman would have a man of her own: living standards would rise, male mortality rates would plummet, and presto—a husband in every bed...
...I was beginning to suspect that thebearded radical had a point: it was early 1990, and liberal democrats were generally not welcome on Soviet Central TV...
...Those who have to be arrested will be arrested quietly at night...
...Because of the ban on many radical [authoritarian] parties," economist Boris Pinsker told me at the time, "there's a serious danger that the remaining ones will gain tremendous strength...
...Typical Bolshevist tactics...
...Unlike Zhirinovsky, who was on the air a total of 220 minutes the last week of the campaign, these parties lacked the money to buy TV time...
...He said that while he was no anti-Semite one had to admit that Russian Jews were not terribly loyal to Russia (Jews in other republics, he added, had a much better record in this regard) and that whenever he was bashed in the press, the article was usually signed by a Jewish name...
...the latter barked from his seat...
...As mentioned before, the fact that signs of his growing strength were withheld from the public didn't help...
...In an LDP gazette in early 1992, the "good" Zhirinovsky reemerged, warning that new presidential elections were needed to avoid getting "our own Pinochet": "Personally, I wouldn't want dark forces to come to power...
...I may have to shoot 100,000 people, but the other 300 million will live peacefully...
...She pointed to a leaflet next to the photo, with slogans of civil liberties and free enterprise...
...So Zhirinovsky's post-election soft-pedalling of his rhetoric is not just last-minute repackaging but a part of his persona all along...
...I was surprised that he would risk alienating his followers, who probably believe in shooting pickpockets...
...In May 1988, Zhirinovsky spoke at the founding conference of the Democratic Union, the first independent political group in the Soviet Union to openly declare itself an opposition party...
...The fact that, according to Jewish activists in Moscow, this symbol of extreme Russian nationalism was active in Russia's nascent Jewish cultural movement in 1988-89 has already been reported...
...This may or may not be true...
...crushed October rebellion...
...In fact, it's likely that many people who might have been scared into voting had they known that Zhirinovsky could emerge as the winner stayed home...
...To discuss the LDP program may be superfluous, since there's no evidence that it bears any more relation to reality than did the old USSR Constitution...
...Zhirinovsky has vowed to bring exchange rates to one ruble to a dollar (no, he hasn't shown charts illustrating how he will do that...
...n the New York Russian daily Novoye Russkoye Slovo, Moscow commentator Valery Lebedev suggests that Zhirinovsky is in fact a KGB man—who else could have worked, as he did in the 1970s, in the foreign section of the Soviet Peace Committee?—handpicked to lead a party created as a replacement for the moribund CPSU...
...The government made other dumb moves, from banning pro-Supreme Soviet parties which could have siphoned off some of Zhirinovsky's support to giving virtually no television coverage to pro-reform parties that did not march in lockstep with the Yeltsin line, such as the bloc of market economist Gregory Yavlinsky...
...I first heard of him, or rather, I first heard him in April 1990, at a Moscow conference on drug legalization...
...Zhirinovsky slugged him...
...Gdlyan was about to hit back when the great man's bodyguards barred his way...
...They distort what he says," she firmly assured me...
...This is sad...
...Following the remarks of the pro-legalization Trebach, Zhirinovsky brusquely stated that Russia did not need to be a testing ground for any more social experiments after the one launched in 1917, and wanted only to join the family of civilized nations...
...Another explanation for Zhirinovsky's success focuses on fellow LDP candidate Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a hypnotist whose televised sessions have been said to cure anything from warts to cancer if you stared at the screen...
...While Zhirinovsky is now emphatic on the subject of his fully Russian parentage, he didn't sound quite as certain two years ago, when his usual reply to questions about his background was, "Mama was Russian, Father was a lawyer from Poland...
...Today, we have ethnic democracy: Georgian democracy, Moldavian democracy...
...The deeper causes, dissenters such as Yavlinsky and fellow economist Larissa Piyasheva believe, lie in the fact that the reforms of the past two years could have been less painful and much more productive if they had been not less but more radical, if there had been more real privatization, and less opportunity for "nomenklatura capitalists" to plunder the country...
...In perspective, though, Zhirinovsky got the votes of 14 million of Russia's 105 million eligible voters (twice as much as he did in 1991...
...The LDP's impressive assets may or may not come from laundered CPSU money and/or from Saddam Hussein...
...He proposed adopting a social democratic platform (DU was more capitalist-leaning) and was elected a member of the party's coordinating board, but soon quit and started building a party of his own...
...He denied charges of Russian chauvinism, and pointed out that at his side was LDP general secretary A. Khalitov, a Tatar...
...A woman in the audience (about half of which seemed to be curiosity seekers) asked why the party was called liberal democratic...
...In another appearance around that time, he sounded a different note: "When I come to power, there will be a dictatorship...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
