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Vladimir Zhirinovsky

Russian politician (1946–2022)

Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky (Russian: Владимир Вольфович Жириновский), né Eidelstein (Russian: Эйдельштейн) (25 April 1946 – 6 April 2022) was a Russian ultranationalist politician and the leader of the populist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) since its creation in 1992 until his death. He was a member of the State Duma since 1993 and leader of the LDPR group in the State Duma from 1993 to 2000, and from 2011 to 2022.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky in 2021

Quotes

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  • The policy of my party is to make Russia stronger and to restore to it some of its original territories. The West wants Russia to remain as it is now, that is why they have launched these canards. They want to cut my political base by confusing my supporters. The fact is, more than what I can do in Russia, they are worried by the influence I could have in their internal politics. But I want them to realise that if they persist in their policy of weakening Russia, and continue to support the drunken traitors who run our government, everything will end in agony and anarchy. It won't be good for Russia. It could be much worse for the West.

Quotes about

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  • When Leninism committed suicide, essentially nothing took its place. Except "transition" and "reform." In 1983, one perceptive scholar, surveying the ostensible hollowing of Communist ideology, had predicted that Russian nationalism "could become the ruling ideology of the state." A decade later, warnings about nationalism became highly fashionable. But such prophecies went unfulfilled. To be sure, Boris Yeltsin sought to rally liberal nationalists with his campaign for Russia's rebirth, which, however, turned out to be more collapse. Hardline nationalists drifted toward the re-established, aging Communist Party, whose cynical leader, Gennady Zyuganov, had conveniently been away "on vacation" when the president bombed the parliament in October 1993, and returned to fill the void in the "opposition." A chauvinistic grouping, led by the media clown Vladimir Zhirinovsky, also garnered a limited protest vote, for a time, while a handful of avowedly fascist associations, some affiliated with the reconstituted Communists, engaged in sporadic acts of violence, most of which went unpunished. But the pundits, mesmerized by the rhetoric and confusing the existence of chaos with the possible onset of powerful dictatorship, were wrong: the much-feared red-brown (Communist-fascist) coalition failed to materialize.
    • Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 (2008), pp. 188-189
  • Vladimir Zhirinovsky, sincerely, in his own way, in special, unique ways, tirelessly fought for the authority of Russia.
  • When the post-Soviet experiment in electoral democracy and market economics turned out disastrously for Russia after 1991, movements like Pamyat (“memory”) revived this rich Slavophile tradition, now updated by open praise for the Nazi experiment. The most successful of a number of antiliberal, anti-Western, anti-Semitic parties in Russia was Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s badly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), founded at the end of 1989, with a program of national revival and unification under strong authority combined with wild-eyed proposals for the reconquest of Russia’s lost territories (including Alaska). Zhirinovsky came in third in the Russian presidential election of June 1991, with more than 6 million votes, and his LDP became the largest party in Russia in parliamentary elections of December 1993, with nearly 23 percent of the total vote. Zhirinovsky’s star faded thereafter, partly because of erratic behavior and bizarre statements (plus the revelation that his father was Jewish), bt mainly because President Boris Yeltsin held the reins and ignored parliament. For the moment Russia limped along as a quasi-democracy under Yeltsin and his handpicked successor, the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin. If the Russian president were to lose credibility, however, some extreme Right leader more competent than Zhirinovsky would be a much more plausible otucome than any kind of return to Marxist collectivism.  
  • Founder and longtime leader of one of the country’s oldest political parties, he did a lot for the establishing and development of Russian parliamentarism and domestic legislation, and sincerely strove to contribute to solving the most important national problems. And always, in any audience, in the most heated discussions, he defended the patriotic position, the interests of Russia.
  • Zhirinovsky is an evil caricature of a Russian patriot. It's as if someone wanted to use this figure to show Russian patriotism to the world as a repulsive monster. Apart from the financial support he received, the reason Zhirinovsky had so much success in the elections is that by that time all the democratic parties, groups and leaders had completely abandoned Russia's national interests. They remained indifferent to the cruel poverty and hopelessness which has afflicted the majority of the population as a result of Yegor Gaidar's technocratic reform--after so many years of communism, yet another heartless experiment performed on the unfortunate people of Russia.
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