There has inevitably been much speculation in the last two years about the ideological sources that have possibly influenced President Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine and his seeming desire to reconstruct a pre-1989 Soviet Union, or even a mythologized version of an older Russian empire. One source of inspiration for Putin has undoubtedly been the ‘Greater Russia’ ideas of Aleksandr Dugin. However, I suspect that another, perhaps more indirect, influence on Putin was the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultra-nationalist politician who died of Covid-19 on 6th April, 2022, aged 75.
Significantly, Putin attended Zhirinovsky’s funeral in a Moscow cathedral on April 8th, 2022, where he placed a bunch of red roses at the foot of Zhirinovsky’s coffin and made the sign of the cross. In one sense, this was Putin just playing to his public, and also to Russian nationalist sentiment and to the Russian Orthodox Church.
He was also paying public tribute to a man who had been both a Kremlin loyalist and a supportive member of the Russian Parliament for many years.
On the other hand, while I do not want to exaggerate the part Zhrinovsky’s ideas have played in Putin’s world-view, there were a number of interesting and highly controversial themes voiced by Zhirinovsky that have arguably contributed to Putin’s vision of a bolder and more assertive Russia. In 2022, for example, Putin described the war in Ukraine and its objectives as ‘absolutely clear and noble’, and one could almost hear Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s voice in those highly dubious assertions.
Fascistic?
I have long taken an interest in Zhirinovsky (1946-2022). Way back in 1994, when I was a postgraduate student, I gave a paper on the Extreme Right in Eastern Europe to a seminar of (what was then called) the European Research Centre at Kingston University, and Zhirinovsky featured heavily in my presentation.
As a scholar with research interests in the European extreme right, I had been inspired into turning my attention to Eastern Europe by a comment made by Vaclav Havel in 1992: ‘Society has freed itself, but in some ways behaves worse than when it was still in chains’. At the time, with all the increased political and economic volatility that appeared to be creating ‘Weimar’ conditions in Russia and elsewhere in the former Eastern Bloc, there was much interest in the new forms of extreme nationalism and neo-fascism that were emerging in various parts of the East, including in Russia. And the out-spoken figure of Zhirinovsky seemed to exemplify these patterns, with Western media commentators in particular expressing major worries about Zhirinovsky’s apparent appeal.
A common question posed at the time was ‘will Russia slip into a form of fascism?’
Many of these concerns appeared to be confirmed in the minds of Western journalists when Zhirinovsky’s mis-named ‘Liberal Democratic’ party picked up significant support in 1991, and again in the 1993 parliamentary elections in Russia, when he won the largest number of votes, with 22 per cent of the vote (in hindsight, this was to be the peak of his electoral success). Such questions back in the 1990s seemed, in the minds of some, to be over-the-top and paranoid. Yet, given the nature of what has become ‘Putinism’ in present-day Russia, perhaps they held more water than we were prepared to credit?
Zhirinovsky’s Creed
For me, the question of ‘fascism’ weighed heavily on my mind. As I noted back in 1994, Zhirinovsky was a xenophobe and an imperialist, and regularly called for ‘strong’ leadership and social order. Since the December, 1993, elections, he had been anxious to reassure journalists that ‘I am not a fascist’. He had also denied he was anti-Semitic (other far right elements in Russia at the time had expressed very public anti-Semitic sentiments).
Post-1993, he also watered down some of his more outrageous pronouncements of the previous three years or so. Ever since the formation of the Liberal Democratic party in 1989-91, Zhirinovsky had been the master of the shocking comment, the sarcastic jibe and the veiled threat. But, after 1993, he appeared to promote a milder version of the illiberal ideas he had expressed on numerous occasions.
Yet, as I argued back then, Zhirinovsky’s new, seemingly conciliatory, tones were something of a deliberate front, behind which still lurked a number of hardline rightwing ultra-nationalist ideas, some of which had roots that were evidently neo-fascist in nature and, moreover, partly drew upon certain themes that could be traced back to interwar fascist and Nazi ideas. Although Zhirinovsky much preferred in public to employ the terms ‘patriot’ and ‘nationalist’, in my estimation this was to disguise the fact that he had derived a number of his core beliefs and tactics from interwar fascist parties.
Thuggery
Protestors at Liberal Democratic party meetings were often dealt with in a very physical and thuggish way by the party’s supporters, reminiscent of the tactics of the Brownshirts of the 1930s, and Zhirinovsky seemed completely relaxed about this, and even encouraged such behaviour. In addition, as with some of the more successful neo-fascist parties in Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, Zhirinovsky was anxious to present his radical right ideas and policies as ‘mainstream’ and electorally ‘respectable’ in the new conditions of post-Soviet Russia.
Hence his rhetoric was designed to appeal to a number of audiences, such as disillusioned members of the former Soviet state security and military elites, including former KGB officers (indeed, there is persuasive evidence that KGB elements helped finance the creation of the Liberal Democratic party in the first place). Although he denied he had KGB connections, and controversy over possible KGB links led at one point to a serious split in his party, there is some tantalising evidence that Zhirinovsky retained close friendships with a number of former KGB and key army officers. He loved nothing better than to dress up in military clothes in the early 1990s. And Zhirinovsky’s oft-stated desire to make Russian ‘great’ again certainly appealed to those who still had an aching nationalistic nostalgia for the ‘glorious’ days of the former USSR.
Although it is difficult to determine when Zhirinovsky first encountered Vladimir Putin, or when Putin had his first contact with the Liberal Democratic party leader, it is surely significant that Putin was himself an ex-KGB officer, who had served in the former Communist East Germany, and obviously felt that the collapse of Communism in the East had been a disaster, something he has stated on a number of occasions over the years. In April, 2005, for example, in his state of the nation annual address to the Russian parliament and people, Putin had claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union ‘was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’.
‘Strongman’ Politics
One can certainly see how Zhirinovsky’s ideas and assertions may have appealed to Putin’s own evolving sentiments. Zhirinovsky once said that Russians were the most insulted, disgraced and abused nation in the former Soviet Union, and in the crises of the 1990s many Russians clearly liked this message and appreciated its populist and highly simplistic themes. Zhirinovsky’s brand of ultra-nationalism was a creed nourished on the economic, social and political discontent that had swept Russia since perestroika. In particular, Zhirinovsky, always with an eye on what captured media headlines, presented himself as a potential ‘strongman’ and demagogue who would ‘save’ Russia and restore what he saw as its former glories. Many Russians had increasingly lost faith in the ‘experiment’ with Western-style liberal democracy and the promises of their political leaders. Zhirinovsky claimed that he understood the ordinary concerns of the ‘man in the street’ more than the extravagantly rich and semi-detached new liberal elites who were now running the country.
Zhirinovsky became adept at the quick sound-bite, and the media seemed to lap this up. One of his favourite sayings was ‘Less Democracy, More Economy’, and he regularly asserted that Russia had become a nation of ‘155 million street-cleaners and dustbinmen’. Some of this took on near-absurd levels; he threatened, for example, to dump nuclear waste in the Baltic states if he came to power, and to ‘nuke’ Germany and Japan. However, during the course of the 1990s, he became a household name in Russia, and often stirred up controversy, and thus headlines, at every opportunity. He became a regular guest on Russian TV shows.
But, more significantly, Zhirinovsky frequently returned to an emphasis on the ideas of ‘Empire’ and ‘strong’ leadership. He called over and over for the restoration and indeed expansion of the Russian Empire, and often argued that Russia was in need of a new dictator. He also promoted the idea of ‘protecting’ Russians outside Russian borders. Interestingly, Zhirinovsky could back up his campaigns with strong financial resources; he was able to buy expensive broadcast time on Russian TV during elections and had some wealthy, if anonymous, backers.
His semi-autobiographical book on foreign policy, The Last Push to the South (published in 1993) read disturbingly like Hitler’s Mein Kampf in its sections on the need for aggressive territorial expansion. Only 143 pages long, it was nevertheless full of odd geopolitical theories and contained a notably apocalyptic vision of the future of the world and the need to strongly defend Russian culture. Although he toned down his language after 1993, the ‘real’ Zhirinovsky would often still slip out. When on a tour of Europe and the Balkans in 1994, there was much ranting and raving from Zhirinovsky about the need to ‘deal’ with Russia’s enemies and to re-draw the map of Europe. He also attempted to play the ‘pan-Slavic’ card.
Although that particular tour rapidly turned into a public relations disaster for Zhirinovsky in Western media coverage, very little of this filtered back to the press on his home-ground in Russia, and he remained a popular ‘character’ in Russian politics. In fact, during the rest of the 1990s and into the early 21st Century, Zhirinovsky’s ‘extreme’ version of ultra-nationalist Russian politics increasingly provided a kind of role-model for other ambitious Russian politicians, and became part of the mainstream in the country’s politics. New and younger voters were especially targeted. The Liberal Democratic party, for example, opened a ‘Rock’ shop which sold rock music memorabilia to Russian youths, and Zhirinovsky himself regularly emphasised his vision of a future Russia in the hands of the ‘young’. This is a refrain that has been eagerly adopted by other more recent Russian political parties and candidates, including those backed by the Kremlin.
Xenophobia
Furthermore, Zhirinovsky frequently complained about the influence of ‘outsiders’ and ‘foreigners’ in the Russian media, declared that ‘the defence of white Europe is a mission of the Russian people’, and asserted that mixing cultures ‘is genocide’. He was very critical, in a conspiratorial way, of what he saw as the West’s interference in Russian affairs. Again, much of this found a sympathetic ear in Putin’s Kremlin.
In one sense, Zhirinovsky remained on the margins of Russian politics for a long time and was often dismissed as a ‘clown’ by his critics. But, despite this, he carved out a long career as an MP, and one can argue that his once extreme ideas were adopted more and more by younger and very ambitious Russian politicians, including (I would suggest) Vladimir Putin. Putin’s deliberate cultivation of an image of himself as a ‘strongman’ and ‘saviour’ for Russia has many parallels with Zhirinovsky’s approach. And, clearly, both men shared delusions of Russian imperial conquest. Significantly, in one of his last appearances before MPs, Zhirinovsky predicted Russia would invade Ukraine and said 2022 would be a year ‘when Russia once again becomes great’.
Tellingly, if one reads Putin’s speeches and pronouncements on his vision of a ‘reborn’ Russia, with his claims that the country should ‘liberate’ peoples who are really ‘Russian’, there are some striking echoes of Zhirinovsky’s ideas at work in Putin’s stance. While it would be foolish to portray Putin as solely reliant on the late Zhirinovsky’s ideas (he clearly draws on a range of other ultra-nationalists and their writings), one can still see some very interesting similarities between the ideas of the two Vlads.
Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics
(All images: Wikimedia Commons)
Note: An earlier draft of this blog was first published here in April, 2022.
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