Rising Czar?

By Kevin Fedarko

What to do? We have lost our way.

From afar, the Demon cries out,

He is leading us astray.

-- Alexander Pushkin

When it comes to expressing his feelings, Vladimir Zhirinovsky is not exactly bashful. After flying last week from Moscow to the city of Nizhni Novgorod, Russia's bad-boy politician was dismayed to be confronted at the airport by demonstrators calling him a fascist. The chairman of Russia's Liberal Democratic Party does not brook such displays of disrespect. With an entourage of 20 people, including several menacing bodyguards, he paid a visit to the office of the region's most prominent politician, Boris Nemtsov -- only to be informed that the governor was out of town.

Undaunted, the group barged into Nemtsov's office and began rifling through his drawers and filing cabinets. Then Zhirinovsky plopped down in the governor's chair and put in several calls on Nemtsov's hot line to the federal authorities in Moscow to complain about his unfriendly reception. No one would accept the calls, but before he left, three hours later, Zhirinovsky made sure his visit wouldn't be forgotten. He threatened to have the governor's entire staff imprisoned or executed. The week, however, was still young. On Thursday night, Zhirinovsky claimed he had escaped "an assassination attempt" on a highway south of the capital, in which one "terrorist" was killed. Major General Vladimir Fyodorov, the chief of Russia's traffic police, denied the story and insisted that Zhirinovsky had been involved only in an "ordinary road accident." Fyodorov also claimed that a few hours later in Moscow, Zhirinovsky attacked a policeman after he had tried to ticket one of the politician's bodyguards. According to Fyodorov, Zhirinovsky twisted the guard's arm, ripped up the ticket and then tried to tear the epaulets off the officer's uniform.

While such theatrics might seem acceptable from a road-touring rock band, they are usually enough to scuttle the career of most politicians. But Zhirinovsky is no ordinary politician. In the three years since this obscure Moscow lawyer careened into the national spotlight, his career has combined the shrewd manipulation of an instinctive demagogue with the abandon of a swinging Sybarite. Zhirinovsky has slugged fellow lawmakers in the halls of parliament, hobnobbed with ex-Nazi storm troopers in Austria and posed, au naturel, for photographers while cavorting in a steam bath in Serbia. He has been kicked out of or denied access to nearly half a dozen European countries. He has threatened to restore Russia's imperial borders, annex Alaska, invade Turkey, repartition Poland, give Germany "another Chernobyl," turn Kazakhstan into a "scorched desert" and employ large fans to blow radioactive waste across the Baltics.

To Western eyes, the incendiary rhetoric and exuberant loutishness of this barnstorming Bonaparte have marked him as something of a buffoon. But to many Russians, Zhirinovsky offers a kind of touchstone for their deepest yearnings and frustrations. Less than three years after throwing off the communist yoke, Russia is ensnared in a financial, political and spiritual crisis as great as any in its thousand-year history. The economy is tottering like a besotted barfly. Crime and corruption are rampant, and citizens who once took pride in their nation's world-class stature now find themselves shoved to the margins of the world stage and forced to swallow a mortifying demotion from superpower to global beggar. While Yeltsin seems increasingly isolated at home behind the Kremlin and liberal politicians drone endlessly about mastering inflation and listening to the IMF, Zhirinovsky is one of the few leaders who speak in a language that average Russians can understand.

Despite his astonishing displays of excess, there seems to be a kind of brutal calculus behind the madness. "If I behave like the good-natured intellectual I really am," Zhirinovsky told TIME editors last week, "I won't get votes. It's war out there, and I'm out to win." Yet the loud applause that greets his vision is no longer confined to the fringes of the Russian nationalist movement. After a stunning success last December when his Liberal Democratic Party won 25% of the vote in the party preference poll, dealing a major blow to Yeltsin and the embattled democrats, Zhirinovsky has seen his support edge toward the mainstream. His followers now include military officers, well-groomed young men from the new commercial classes and middle- age, postcommunist apparatchiks.

His ascendance has not been without growing pains. In the past few months, discord has broken out in the ranks of his party and a number of dissidents have pulled away. Still, the L.D.P. has mustered impressive leverage in parliament. Moreover, as Yeltsin's power base grows shakier, Zhirinovsky's brand of shoot-from-the-hip populism has enabled him to bully his way into the small group of candidates vying to be the next President of Russia. "There is a great danger that someone like Zhirinovsky could take over," says Yuli Guzman, a parliamentary Deputy from the democratic Russia's Choice bloc. "He is not just a clown in the eyes of ordinary folk."

A TIME investigation of his past has revealed that much of Zhirinovsky's up- from-poverty life history has been embellished or distorted. There is evidence that Zhirinovsky's father may have been Jewish and that his son tried to cover that up -- this from a man who expressed fears of a future in which "150 million Russians have to obey" 2 million Jews. Moreover, suspicions that the KGB was instrumental in his rise to power persist. Such discrepancies do more than simply call into question Zhirinovsky's personal honesty and integrity; they also suggest that by elevating his life to the level of myth, he may be attempting to lay the foundations for a personality cult.

"From the moment of my birth, I have always walked alone," writes Zhirinovsky. "I grew up in a situation where there was no kind of warmth from anybody -- not from relatives or from friends and teachers. I lived the greater part of my life without almost a single happy day . . . It seems to have been my fate that I never experienced real love or friendship."

These passages come from Zhirinovsky's autobiography, The Last Thrust to the South, a book that James Billington, U.S. Librarian of Congress, calls "in some respects psychologically an even more unstable work than Mein Kampf." In it, Zhirinovsky recounts in extravagant detail the injustices of an emotionally and economically deprived childhood in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan.

A visit to Alma-Ata and conversations with several of those who knew him as a boy reveal a quite different picture. He writes, for example, of living in squalor with his mother in a filthy communal apartment where he had to endure the indignities of a communal toilet ("it smelled bad"). Yet the two-story house was, at the time, one of the best in the city, constructed during the 1930s for elite Russian workers. "Zhirinovsky complains there was no hot water, but it was a rare house in Alma-Ata that had hot water then," recalls Vladimir Rerikh, a documentary-film director who was also born and raised in Alma-Ata. "His house actually had its own sewerage and toilet facilities, which was even more of a rarity than hot water in those days."

Despite his claim of having had "almost no education," the school where Zhirinovsky spent 11 years was actually the most prestigious institution of its kind in Alma- Ata. His fellow students came from the families of top party functionaries and KGB officers. Indeed, as classmate Yuri Anoshin explains, the school, following a popular practice of factories and government offices at the time, was "adopted" by the local KGB administration. This enabled Zhirinovsky and his peers to enjoy such rare amenities as flowers, potted palm trees, upholstered armchairs and pet canaries.

The future L.D.P. leader was not always popular among his classmates. One of them, Nikolai Salatov, recalls a student-court session in which two younger pupils were put on trial for stealing car parts from an automobile repair shop. Zhirinovsky acted as prosecutor, and even though such pilfering was common, he turned the proceedings into a show trial, delivering a shrill speech about the need to punish the boys. Enraged, his peers waited until after class and beat the tar out of him.

"We considered him such a small fry, we didn't think he was fit for wiping our feet on," recalls Dyusenbek Nakipov, who grew up in the same neighborhood. "We sent him to buy cigarettes, and he would ask, 'May I join you guys?' The usual answer was, 'Get the fout of here,' or just a kick in the butt."

There was also gossip about his possible Jewish parentage -- an issue that could have explosive implications for a politician in this country where anti- Semitism is still widespread. According to Zhirinovsky's own account, his father was Volf Andreyevich Zhirinovsky, a legal adviser with the Turkish- Siberian railway, who died in a car crash before Zhirinovsky was born. But an American reporter working for the Associated Press and CNN recently unearthed a set of alleged family documents in Alma-Ata suggesting that Zhirinovsky's real father was a man named Volf Isaakovich Edelshtein, a name most Russians assume to be Jewish. Zhirinovsky claims the documents are forged, and has vigorously denied Jewish heritage.

In any event, after completing high school in June 1964, Zhirinovsky boarded a plane for Moscow to attend the prestigious Oriental Languages Institute at Moscow State University. The move was surprising for a provincial boy with no family connections, and it has fueled speculation that he must have had help from his school's KGB sponsors. Suspicions increased when Zhirinovsky, after studying Turkish and English for five years and then landing a job as a translator in the Turkish city of Iskenderun, was kicked out of the country eight months later.

The circumstances of his expulsion are not clear. According to Nuzhet Kandemir, the Turkish ambassador to the U.S., Zhirinovsky was arrested and expelled from Turkey in 1969 as a KGB agent. Students back at the Oriental Languages Institute heard that the Turks had thrown him in prison for passing out Soviet badges to Turkish boys and that, after the Soviet consulate sprang him on bail, Zhirinovsky jumped bail. It was widely assumed that the KGB had played a role in his release.

Whatever happened in Turkey, the incident left a bad odor with the ; authorities and seemed to set back Zhirinovsky's career. Even though he graduated with a red diploma of excellence, he was not offered the kind of lucrative employment that his academic record warranted. Instead, he was drafted into the Soviet army.

Returning to Moscow in the spring of 1972, he spent two years working with delegations from French-speaking countries, then joined a state-run law firm that handled inheritance and pension cases for Soviet citizens with relatives abroad. "He was not much of a lawyer," recalls a former associate. "He disliked responsibilities and shirked any job that might entail them, but he loved to be in the thick of things and loved making public speeches." What he did have was the gift of gab. "Boy, could he talk!" says another colleague. "Whenever he stood up, there was a whisper in the audience: 'Now Volodya is going to show 'em!' The only problem was that he could never offer a reasonable solution."

Though Zhirinovsky has always claimed that he rejected the Communist Party out of principle, in fact he applied to join the party organization at his law firm in 1981, but was turned down. "He was terribly offended," recalls Yevgeni Kulichev, Zhirinovsky's old boss. "He started writing signed complaints and anonymous denunciations, and he leveled all sorts of accusations at us." The incident exacerbated the strain between Zhirinovsky and his firm; he eventually left in the wake of allegations that he had accepted an improper gift from a client in the form of a pass to a vacation resort. "We offered him the chance to quit quietly," says Kulichev, "so he did."

His next job, as a legal adviser for the Mir publishing firm, was to serve as the springboard for his political career. In 1987, as Mikhail Gorbachev's tentative experiments with democracy were gathering steam, Zhirinovsky put himself forward as an independent candidate from his publishing company for the city's district Soviet. His promise-anything bluster drew the attention of Communist Party authorities, who were worried by this troublesome nonparty populist. Zhirinovsky was disqualified from the election by party officials and Mir management, who cited a letter from the law firm where he had worked, questioning his ethical and moral qualities.

Nevertheless, the flirtation with politics launched his new career. Zhirinovsky spent much of the next two years in Moscow attending rallies, giving speeches, drafting programs and steeping himself in the heady milieu of the "informal" political movements that were sprouting in the capital. It was during this period that he was spotted by Vladimir Bogachev, founder of a fledgling organization called the Liberal Democratic Party. Impressed by Zhirinovsky's rhetorical flair, Bogachev gave him the largely symbolic post of chairman in March 1990, intending to keep the real levers of power to himself.

It did not work out that way. The party was shocked when its new chairman began expounding an increasingly heated repertoire of hostile themes -- the evils of Western culture, the meddling of foreigners, the conspiracies of Jews. By October, members succeeded in expelling the irksome lawyer from their midst. But Zhirinovsky got his revenge by stealing the organization's name when he registered his own party in April 1991. "I wish I had had an abortion," says Bogachev, "because I was the one who gave birth to Zhirinovsky."

The sudden emergence of the new L.D.P. brought more charges of KGB connections. An official at the Ministry of the Interior, the KGB's longtime rival, insists that "Zhirinovsky was a KGB creature from the very outset . . . Otherwise, there could have been no way to set up his own party when the Communist Party was still in charge." Anatoli Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg, has charged that Zhirinovsky's party was engineered by the KGB and that Zhirinovsky was handpicked by the secret police to head it. Zhirinovsky denounces such theories as slanderous.

With or without KGB's help, the L.D.P. quickly proved it could stand on its own. Last December the party shocked Yeltsin's reformers by taking 64 seats in the parliamentary elections. Since then, Zhirinovsky has cemented his control over the organization. In April, at the L.D.P.'s Fifth Party Congress, the 340 Deputies unanimously voted to give him absolute power. They also extended his tenure as party chairman until the year 2004 and nominated him as their candidate in the country's next presidential elections. Evidence of a Zhirinovsky personality cult cropped up at the congress. A placard proclaimed him THE ONLY HOPE OF DECEIVED AND HUMILIATED PEOPLES. Copies of the party newspapers on sale offered readers a palm print of the chairman's right hand.

The speed with which Zhirinovsky has consolidated power within the L.D.P. has left many Russians wondering whether he would, if he became President, dispose of the country's democratic institutions just as quickly. As early as ! 1991 he proclaimed, "I say it quite plainly -- when I come to power, there will be a dictatorship." Such high-handedness is already causing problems among his supporters. In March, four Deputies from the L.D.P.'s 64-member parliamentary bloc pulled out. Among them was Victor Kobelev, once second to Zhirinovsky in the party hierarchy. A fifth dissident was later expelled from the party and, just last month, six more members broke ranks to create their own faction.

Zhirinovsky's momentum, moreover, may already be wearing thin. "He is still functioning on the level of the street-corner rallies we were involved in before the election victory," says Kobelev. "This kind of streetwise showing-off is inappropriate in the Duma." In April an argument in parliament between Zhirinovsky and dissident L.D.P. Deputy Vladimir Borzhyuk degenerated into fisticuffs. At one point, Zhirinovsky was seen actually banging Borzhyuk's head against the wall. Entertained as they now are by such debauched antics, the Russian public could eventually grow tired of his wild style and write him off as yet another samozvanets, or "pretender Czar," who failed to deliver on promises.

Still, the fact remains that when Zhirinovsky talks to ordinary Russians, they listen. His brazen but canny style was on fine display when TIME accompanied him on a visit recently to Shchelkovo, the rural industrial center 25 miles northeast of Moscow that he represents in parliament.

First stop for the L.D.P. convoy was the Shchelkovo District Administrative Office, located on a central square dominated by a huge statue of Lenin. With a pack of a dozen journalists at his heels, he paraded into the office of Nikolai Pashin, the head of the local administration. Wiping his face with his hands, tweaking his nose and interrupting his host several times to give orders to his aides, he listened as Pashin trotted out a list of ills afflicting the community. No problem was so large that Zhirinovsky wasn't ready with an instant solution. The district's atrocious road? "I'll see Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and slip these documents about the road to him." The lack of funds for new projects? "Everything is manageable." Wrangles over bureaucratic red tape? "I'll handle it all."

In the middle of the conversation, the L.D.P. leader suddenly had a brainstorm. On a recent trip to Yugoslavia, he said, he made valuable contacts with Serb businessmen who could be of use to his district. His Serb friends could be persuaded to put up a mini-bakery or mini-dry-cleaning service in Shchelkovo. "What you need are little things which are of immediate use to the people," he explained. "A mini-bakery would bake excellent bread." He turned to his chief of staff, Gennadi Kazantsev, and said, "Put it all down!"

A woman bureaucrat timidly asked, "How much will it all cost?" Zhirinovsky seemed insulted. "We're not talking about money. It's all for free! I saved the Serbs from bombing, so they can't do enough to show me their appreciation."

Later that day, Zhirinovsky made a token visit to a factory, walking through a deserted mill with endless rows of silent weaving machines. As a German television crew watched, he delivered one of his patented anti-Western tirades. "This factory stands idle because of Western interference in our affairs!" he shouted, shaking his finger directly at the German camera. "You have worked to ruin this country."

Despite the showboating and snake-oil promises, the Zhirinovsky whirlwind offered something new for the people of Shchelkovo. His listeners seemed genuinely charmed by his sense of humor, his flair for dramatic gestures, his bravado. This is, after all, the first time many of them had actually seen their elected representative, and the notion that he seemed to be taking an interest in their affairs clearly disarmed them.

If there is an explanation for Zhirinovsky's unique appeal, perhaps it is to be found in the parallel between the young boy who grew up feeling rejected, humiliated and despised and a nation that has just emerged from seven decades of dictatorship feeling abused, deprived and defeated. Little wonder that ordinary Russians respond to this man; his feelings of persecution, which he has honed to an exquisitely raw edge, reify their own dislocated sense of what has happened to their country and their lives. And by projecting the angers and fears of his dysfunctional childhood onto the national stage, Zhirinovsky has managed to transform his personal antipathies into a political world view that resonates throughout an entire country. Says Alexei Mitrofanov, the L.D.P. "shadow" foreign minister: "Zhirinovsky is a mood. He is a state of the soul."

It is difficult to say what may happen once Russians have had a better look at this rabble-rousing politician who is part showman, part shyster. Despite the fact that the country seems to have stabilized during the summer's torpor, there is an underlying sense that the balance of power could shift at any moment. But whatever happens, Zhirinovsky has changed the style and conduct of Russian politics irretrievably. No national political figure has done more to sound the alarm about the fragility of Russia's young democracy, or its vulnerability to irresponsible leadership. As for what that might mean, perhaps the best sense of what lies ahead can be found by turning back to Pushkin's poem:

Skyward soar the whirling demons,

Shrouded by the following snow,

And their plaintive, awful howling

Fills my heart with dread and woe.

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington, John Kohan/Moscow and Yuri Zarakhovich/Alma-Ata