An Evening of Talk with Mr. Nice Guy

Derided and often dismissed as a buffoon, Vladimir Zhirinovsky knows how to tailor his image to different audiences. During a dinner with TIME editors at Moscow's Metropole Hotel, Zhirinovsky repeatedly insisted that he was a "moderate" and that his more extreme statements were intended only to call his countrymen's attention to Russia's dire condition.

As part of the charm offensive, Zhirinovsky brought along his attractive, dark-haired wife Galina, a biologist, and their 23-year-old son Igor, in lieu of the two senior aides who had been invited. "He's complicated, but he's predictable," Galina said with a laugh. Zhirinovsky barely touched the vodka and wine that were proffered. And when loud music from a French fashion show in an adjacent ballroom threatened to drown him out, he raised his voice without missing a beat.

Zhirinovsky had simple -- but often implausible -- answers for every challenging question. His publicized meeting with an Austrian Nazi, he said, was a "setup." His claim that Russian troops would someday wash their boots in the Indian Ocean meant only that chaos in Muslim countries would require Russian peacekeeping within 20 years. He glibly promised that within months of taking office, he would end homelessness, unemployment and crime.

Try as he might to sound reasonable, Zhirinovsky could not quite conceal his real sentiments. He rejected accusations that he was anti-Semitic, yet a few sentences later he allowed that there were too many Jews among Russia's democratic forces. Nor could he help speaking disparagingly of non-Russians from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Zhirinovsky chastised Russia's new rich, but his entourage included two young bankers from St. Petersburg who were scrupulously recording the scene with a video camera.

It was a carefully modulated performance, yet whenever he touched on his hot-button issues he began to wave his arms and wag his finger as if he were at a street-corner rally. Zhirinovsky justified his frequently bizarre behavior as "tactical." "It's the sorry state of affairs in this country that forces me to take so tough a stand to avert something even worse," he said. "If there were a healthy economy and security for the people, I would lose all the votes I have."