Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 13, 1994 TAG: 9402160334
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ALAN COOPERMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Long
Two things happen when Russian nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky speaks to a Russian audience. First he is transformed. Then the audience is, too.
One-on-one, the man Russian democrats call a ``frightening fascist'' and German newspapers call ``the new Hitler'' is cool, calm and rational. He says he is for peace and nuclear disarmament, against racism or anti-Semitism, and seeks ``only cooperation'' with Western Europe, Japan and the United States.
Give him an audience, though, and watch him light up the sky. President Clinton is a ``coward.'' AIDS is a ``plague from the United States.'' If Germany and Japan don't stop harassing Russia, ``bombs will fall'' on their cities.
Such statements delight and excite many Russians, releasing deep resentments and soothing wounded pride like a magic ointment. All one has to do is believe in the ointment, and the ache goes away - at least for a while.
``I am very tired of this life, but I feel better when I listen to him,'' Ina Frolova, 65, said at a snowy campaign appearance in December. ``His program corresponds to the demands, the despair of the Russian population.''
In the 1991 presidential election, Zhirinovsky won 6 million votes. In Dec. 12 parliamentary elections, his Liberal Democratic Party got more than 12 million, nearly a quarter of the total. When presidential elections are held again in 1996, he expects to win.
Many reformers think December's big vote for Zhirinovsky was a protest against economic hardship, rather than a longing for fascism. They hope that he will not last long as a politician, that he is too mentally unstable to build enduring support.
But Zhirinovsky's appeal to many Russians is clear. He deftly strikes a chord that has been drawn tight by Russia's national humiliation and suffering. After decades of Soviet propaganda, and centuries of czarist expansion, the loss of empire hurts. So do economic disarray, rising crime and the feeling of being prostrate before the United States.
``Zhirinovsky's implicit message is, `We're going to get it back. Whatever we had, we're going to get it back,''' said David Wolff, a sociologist and Russian historian at Princeton University.
Other Russian politicians, including President Boris Yeltsin, also speak of Russia ``rising from its knees'' and becoming, once again, a great power.
But Yeltsin and fellow reformers undercut that message and reinforce feelings of inferiority by talking about Russia's desire to join the ranks of ``civilized countries.''
Zhirinovsky is especially popular with the military, elderly, unemployed and others who are suffering through Russia's post-Communist depression. His ascent has many parallels to Adolf Hitler's rise in Weimar Germany, although some observers think he lacks Hitler's charisma and is too mercurial to hold power.
Zhirinovsky speaks in a squeaky fast voice that sounds as if it were recorded and is being played back at high speed. He's slender, medium height, curly haired and attractive to many Russian women. He dresses well but distractedly - wearing, for example, a tuxedo to a midday news conference, or a shirt with French cuffs but no cufflinks.
He seems impatient standing in one place or speaking to one person, and he gives the impression of constant movement. No matter how fast he talks, it sounds like he's holding himself back, like he wants to go even faster.
Zhirinovsky is a master of the outrageous sound bite. To many listeners, though, his outrageousness only proves that he is something other politicians aren't. He is sincere.
In his autobiography and political manifesto, ``The Final March South,'' Zhirinovsky, 45, describes a childhood of hunger and deprivation in Alma-Ata, capital of what was then the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. While he was still an infant, his father died in a car crash. His mother took a job cleaning a cafeteria to feed him and his five older brothers and sisters.
At 18, he moved to Moscow with nothing but a small satchel and a basket of tomatoes and strawberries. He had no success with girls and no close friends, but was a good student. He graduated from the Institute of Oriental Languages, where he studied Turkish, and later got a law degree at night.
In 1969, Zhirinovsky went to Turkey as an interpreter. It should have been his big break, but he was arrested for handing out Soviet lapel pins, which the Turks considered propaganda. Friends think the embarrassing incident may be one reason he was never admitted to the Communist Party.
Zhirinovsky's extreme political views well up from his anger and resentment over his early life. It doesn't take a psychologist to figure this out. Zhirinovsky says it himself in the book.
``A childhood without joy, absence of close friends, bad living conditions, bad food, bad recreation, no Communist Party card, life in various regions - all formed the foundation on which my political personality began to mature,'' he wrote.
One especially strong, lasting resentment was of the brown-skinned Central Asian majority in Kazakhstan. When he asked his mother why their family lived with other families in a cramped communal apartment, she answered: ``We're not Kazakhs. It's hard for us to get an apartment here. They are given to Kazakhs first.''
His mother may have been paranoid; Russians usually received privileges, not the other way around.
But Zhirinovsky has made himself the champion of all such families, decrying the alleged discrimination against 25 million Russians who find themselves living in newly independent former Soviet republics.
``Today Russians are being told in some places: `Get out of here, you're occupiers, you're colonizers!' When it was Russians who gave everything to those nations and raised them from primitive societies to the space age!'' he said on Election Day. ``We brought them to outer space, and they're spitting in Russians' faces.''
Zhirinovsky boasts of Russia's superiority, reflecting a dark side of the national psyche.
``He does not appeal to the high motives in the Russian people. He appeals to what's lowest,'' said Aron Belkin, president of the Russian Psychoanalytic Association.
``In our consciousness, militarism is very deep. In my childhood years, I was educated in a military spirit. We were told, `Compromise is weakness, strength is attack.' We were raised on war heroes. ...'' Zhirinovsky, in his speeches and television appearances, draws out that militaristic feeling.
``Like it or not, we in Russia are all children of totalitarianism. If Zhirinovsky gave his speeches to Englishmen, he would get nothing.''
The Liberal Democratic Party's platform calls for Russia to re-establish an empire and expand across the former Soviet Union.
Zhirinovsky's autobiography goes farther: its title refers to his desire for Russian troops to march through Turkey, Afghanistan and Iran to the shores of the Indian Ocean.
``How I dream that Russian soldiers could wash their boots in the warm water of the Indian Ocean and change to summer uniform once and for all,'' he wrote.
Some of his supporters do not share that dream.
``I understand him, because it's true that all over the world Russians are treated as, well, not really people,'' said Ludmila Karamushka, 45, an unemployed computer programmer. ``But when he says we'll take back land from others, that's absurd.''
Opponents are pushing for Zhirinovsky to be prosecuted under a Russian law against ``war propaganda,'' but are unlikely to succeed because he has parliamentary immunity.
Zhirinovsky's party holds 64 seats in the 450-seat Duma, the powerful lower house of Parliament. But his self-destructive behavior has reduced the chances of his forming a majority coalition.
In one tantrum on the floor of Parliament, he told independent lawmakers they should ``sit and read the Bible'' while his party made the important decisions.
Another day, he had a fistfight with a reformist lawmaker over who would be served first in the cafeteria. He has threatened to jail Cabinet ministers and said his rivals should be sent to mental hospitals.
Zhirinovsky also has alienated the media.
One reason is that he says too many reporters are Jews and more blond, blue-eyed Russians should appear on TV.
Another reason is greed. Zhirinovsky routinely charges for sit-down interviews. His aides told The Associated Press the standard price was $300 for 10 minutes.
The Liberal Democratic Party's election campaign was built around expensive television advertising that Zhirinovsky says was paid for by individual contributions from thousands of supporters. But Russia has no campaign-finance disclosure laws, and Zhirinovsky's opponents allege that the party's funds really came from shadowy businesses, German neo-Nazis, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Early last year, Zhirinovsky visited the Iraqi leader, condemned allied military action against Iraq and sent a small contingent of Russian volunteers to fight alongside Saddam's soldiers.
He also has met with extreme rightists in Germany.
Among the nationalist leader's close aides are Alexander Vengerovsky, 40, an electronics and computer specialist who says he used to work in a secret military research institute, and Sergei Abeltsev, 32, who claims to be a former agent of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency.
Both were elected to Parliament on Zhirinovsky's party ticket. Abeltsev, a huge man with a shaved head and a taste for black clothing, is the security minister in Zhirinovsky's ``shadow Cabinet.''
Some of the party's candidates for Parliament did not know each other and seemed to have little in common. Besides Zhirinovsky, the only well-known one was Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a TV faith healer.
``We are united by the idea of patriotism and preserving a strong, powerful Russian state,'' Zhirinovsky's campaign manager, Viktor Kobelev, said in a room full of cigarette smoke and soda-can ashtrays at the party's headquarters.
The grimy building is two blocks from the former KGB headquarters, the infamous Lubyanka Prison. Outside, a torn poster shows Zhirinovsky standing next to a pile of garbage in the street, proclaiming, ``I will bring order to Russia.''
Zhirinovsky's cheaply furnished offices are on the fourth floor, up a wide, dark, crumbling staircase.
Below them is a heavy metal store, named Rock Shop at Zhirinovsky's, where teen-agers in black leather jackets with lots of zippers sell T-shirts and cassette tapes. A member of the party said it opened the store because ``our whole direction is oriented at youth.''
Vladimir Pchelkin, 26, head of the Youth Division, said it sponsors soccer teams, theater outings and a children's camp but has given up wearing blue military-style uniforms and providing security at Zhirinovsky rallies.
``People were getting the wrong idea, calling us fascists,'' he said.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB