The Zhirinovsky Threat

A DANGER TO RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY

In the ongoing drama of what Russia is to be, state or empire, democracy or autocracy, Vladimir Zhirinovsky has shouldered his way to center stage with a bellicose, attention-grabbing performance. Some Russian and Western observers have quickly concluded that this ultranationalist is a bit player, thrust forward less by his own devices than by the inadequacies of Russian reformers in the December parliamentary elections. Yet it would be dangerous to dismiss Zhirinovsky, with his rash, outlandish statements to the press, as a self-destructive clown. His writings and the statements by key ideologues of his Liberal Democratic Party, as well as his electioneering skills, make him a potent threat to Russian democracy. Postelection surveys indicate voters support his ideas, and not just as a protest against economic conditions.

Zhirinovsky and his year-old Liberal Democratic Party surfaced in June 1991 when he drew six million votes, almost eight percent of the total election returns, to finish third in the Russian presidential election won by Boris Yeltsin. Two and a half years later, in December’s parliamentary elections, his populist television campaigning garnered the LDP nearly 25 percent of the vote. Russia’s political leaders and intellectuals, along with the West, were aghast to find this demagogue commanding a strategic position in the new 450-seat assembly, along with a fairly large bloc of hard-line, anti-reform communists. Although mutually hostile on a number of key issues, the communists and the LDP are proving capable of selective cooperation. Together they voted to release those who had led both the 1991 coup against former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and the October 1993 insurrection in the parliament. Zhirinovsky instigated the surprise anti-Yeltsin maneuver fully aware that freeing Aleksandr Rutskoi might empower a more centrist rival for the political leadership of nationalist forces.