Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky (1946-2022) was the founder and longtime leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), one of the first opposition parties registered in the late Soviet period. Born in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, he finished third in Russia’s first presidential election in June 1991, and the LDPR’s strong showing in the December 1993 Duma elections, when it won the largest share of the party-list vote, made him a symbol of resurgent Russian nationalism. He ran for president five more times and sat in the State Duma from 1993 until his death on April 6, 2022.

Despite its name and its imperial, often xenophobic rhetoric, the LDPR functioned for three decades as a loyal “systemic opposition” that voted with the Kremlin on key issues and channeled nationalist sentiment into a controlled party. Zhirinovsky cultivated ties with European far-right parties and repeatedly called for the absorption of Ukraine and other former Soviet territories, themes that anticipated Kremlin messaging after 2014.

Sources

• Shenfield, Stephen D. Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements. M.E. Sharpe, 2001.
• Umland, Andreas. “Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky in Russian Politics: Three Approaches to the Emergence of the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia 1990-1993.” PhD dissertation, Free University of Berlin, 1997.

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