Liberal with his threats, democratic when it suits

VLADIMIR Volfovich Zhirinovsky has taken another step towards political ascendancy. While calling himself a liberal democrat, he is really akin to a Fascist. He is 'liberal' only in the largesse of his threats to foreign states and to foreigners in Russia; 'democratic' merely insofar as parliamentary methods might secure his further advance on power. Observers noted the inappropriateness of his party's title and concluded that he was a buffoon.

This was his reputation among nearly all Russians until recently; his sexual boasts and ridiculous poses at public meetings confirmed his clownish image. But popular opinion was turning towards him before his party's remarkable success in Sunday's elections, and it is not hard to see why. Zhirinovsky is not ignorant or stupid. He kept clear of October's violence and even supported Boris Yeltsin's proposals on the constitution. And he has cultivated friends in high places, especially in the security police and the army. Almost certainly his rise to prominence under Mikhail Gorbachev was supported by KGB leaders who felt he might eventually be useful to them. Now it is clear that Zhirinovsky exploited them more than they exploited him.

He has a range of talents not usually associated with idiotic demagogy. He speaks four languages well enough for interviews with the international press and has edited his own newspapers for several years. It is easy to scoff at him for self-importantly naming them after himself (one is called Zhirinovsky's Falcon). It is harder to deny him credit for literary and editorial expertise.

Yet what is really striking about him is the shrewdness of his message. The programme of the grotesquely misnamed Liberal Democratic Party is strikingly similar to the programme of the Communist Party of the Seventies, without the references to Marxism. Zhirinovsky harps on about Russia's unique contribution to global history as well as her humiliations in days of yore. He shows contempt for world capitalism and advocates a 'third way'. He barely disguises his anti-Semitism. His speeches resound with condemnations of the pornography allowed in Yeltsin's Russia. And he affirms a willingness to act as a 'stern father' towards his own people in order to restore national pride, order and prestige.

He has picked up bits of Communist ideology and reshaped them to his needs. He plays on the themes of Russian greatness, implying that he could be a new tsar. But he is also a man of the street: his autobiography emphasises the ordinariness of his background and the lack of understanding shown to him by parents, teachers and employers. The would-be ruler tells his audience that he knows what it is to be ruled unjustly.

The more he has been derided and denounced, the greater has been his publicity. His strategy is to appeal to those who held jobs in the old regime. The institutions and methods of Communism might well be restorable by him, at least partially, if supreme power falls into his lap.

Yeltsin has to look out for himself. Zhirinovsky as a politician is far more formidable than were Ruslan Khasbulatov and Alexander Rutskoi. He outmatches them in patience, astuteness and sense of mission. The struggle between Yeltsin and the new pretender to his throne will be bitterly engaged, and the world is the worse for the emergence of this Russian wolf.

The writer is professor of Russian history and politics at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

(Photograph omitted)