The Overlooked Legacy of Vladimir Zhirinovsky?

After his Liberal Democratic Party of Russia got 23 percent of the vote in Russia's parliamentary (Duma) election, Vladimir Zhirinovsky got a lot of press in the Western news media--because his party's near-quarter of the vote for Russia's legislature went with Zhirinovsky's image as an ultra-nationalist fascist "crazy man" who spoke of such things as Russia retaking Alaska from the U.S. by force and using large fans to blow radioactive waste into the Soviet Union's ex-Baltic republics, all while keeping the press in soundbites and anecdotes that were obscene or threatening or violent. Especially given the tendency to draw comparisons between post-Communist Russia and Weimar Germany, not least in perceptions of a country suffering profound political disorientation amid world-historical defeat and economic calamity possibly leading to the triumph of the extreme right, many thought it possible that Zhirinovsky or someone like him would become Russia's next President.

Of course, the next election saw Zhirinovsky's party's position in the country's parliament collapse as the Communists emerged as the principal opposition, and Yeltsin won the election of 1996, while the country started stabilizing politically and economically about the turn of the century. Zhirinovsky and his party remained in parliament, but they never recovered their early '90s-era position in Russian politics, or their hold on the world's attention. (Indeed, Google's Ngram viewer shows how mention of Zhirinovsky plummeted after 1996.) An occasional piece of theatrics on his part still grabbed attention, but for its intrinsic interest, or evocation of back when he was taken more seriously, rather than because anyone thought "This is the next Iron Man of Russia." And indeed, Zhirinovsky's death in 2022 seems to have been almost unacknowledged by the media in the West.*

Still, looking back from 2024 I am struck by how the combination of political stances like Zhirinovsky's theatrics and vulgarity have since become standard for what cowardly members of the press euphemistically call "populists." I doubt that those who have blighted the world in recent decades by becoming heads of government sought to deliberately imitate him, but they certainly thought along similar lines, played to the public in similar ways, and redefined political culture in the process, such that Zhirinovsky could seem to have been ahead of the curve, and in his conduct a glimpse of what the twenty-first century had in store for us had we but understood--Zhirinovsky conquering the world, so to speak, through personal style rather than any military force at his command.

* Admittedly this may have been partly because of the cause--the COVID pandemic. It seems that the press, which early on turned to downplaying the pandemic, has not been overeager to call attention to the deaths of public figures as a result of said virus.