Before there was a Donald...

He has been described as an unconventional way-out politician, a bombastic leader, a populist who cannot keep his mouth shut for more than a minute. He is brash, he is confrontational, he has been deemed unpredictable, he has used fierce nationalist rhetoric throughout his campaigns, and some of his many followers have even described him as a fascist although he has strongly rejected such innuendos, and by the very nature of his unpredictability he has even been considered as a worldwide threat especially after deciding to run for the maximum office to which any politician can aspire.

No, we are not talking about Donald Trump. We are talking about an offbeat Russian politician whose name is Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky.

Just like Donald Trump, Zhirinovsky is so unconventional and unpredictable that even his wife has a very hard time trying to figure him out and trying to guess what he will come up with next. Indeed, he has been dubbed “the Russian Donald Trump”. In September 2016, inspired by Donald Trump's signature proposal, he proposed building a border wall and banning Muslims from entering Russia. These are not the ravings of a sane man who has gone mad. Zhirinovsky has always been like this, and it is likely he will go to his grave as is.

It is instructive to quote an introductory comments that appeared in the Playboy magazine edition of March 1995, announced in the front cover with the catchy title “ZHIRINOVSKY! Crazy for power, mad for sex, an amazing Playboy interview”:

He was an unknown lawyer from the provinces, a political amateur with a tainted past, living in a country accustomed to gray-haired career Communists who die in office. So, when Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky ran for president in 1991, in Russia's first free elections -promising cheap vodka for men and flowers for women- no one gave his campaign a chance.
Then reality hit: The onetime political nobody placed third with 6.2 million votes, behind President Boris Yeltsin and former Soviet Premier Nikolai Ryshkov. Two years later, in December 1993, Zhirinovsky's ironically named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia
placed first in the nation's parliamentary elections, with 12.3 million votes -nearly 23 per cent of the ballots cast.
In just three years, Russia's trouble making upstart had catapulted to worldwide fame. Yet, despite Zhirinovsky's impressive political rise, it is tempting to write him off as a Russian twist on Ross Perot, a master of the populist sound bite whose celebrity is, at best, ephemeral. That would be a mistake. In a “New York Times Magazine” cover story, Russian documentary filmmaker Stanislav Govorukhin, himself an outspoken nationalist, called Zhirinovsky “a talent from the ranks of Stalin and Lenin” who is so “scary” and such a powerful orator that he is likely to be a frightening contender in Russia's next presidential election, in 1996.
If nothing else, Zhirinovsky's LDPR victory has helped him capture the international forum he craves. He travels the globe hawking his provocative platform, which has included restoring imperial Russia's borders, invading Turkey, repartitioning Poland, destroying Germany and Kazakhstan, “saving the world” from the spread of Islam, exposing Jewish “conspiracies” and even using giant fans to blow nuclear radiation across the Baltic nations. He has threatened neighboring countries with nuclear war, bragged that Russian soldiers will “wash their boots in the Indian ocean” and blamed most of Russia's problems -from rising crime to bad government- on ethnic minorities.

Sounds familiar?

The Playboy article goes on with an extensive interview where Zhirinovsy lays out bare and hides almost nothing.

The interview that was carried out at the time by the reporters of Playboy to Zhirinovsky was quite revealing and it could stand out for its historical significance. However, it is quite unfortunate that by its very nature as a magazine catering to the entertainment for men featuring nude models, Playboy magazine is banned as a reference source in mainstream academia and unavailable at the public libraries and also the libraries of mainstream universities, and Playboy is unable to share a shelf with other printed publications such as The New York Times or The Washington Post, making it very difficult for analysts and sociologists to document themselves on a major social phenomenon that seems to be repeating in America, with the notable exception of those who work for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency whose work is to gather all available information that is being published and disseminated, especially any materials that can provide an understanding to the psychological profiles of important politicians and heads of state (perhaps after removing all the nude pictorials, although it is likely that even that is retained at the CIA and the NSA for “completeness”).

Just as the ill informed American head of state who trusts the tabloids more than he does his intelligence agencies and tells his followers “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” then mentioning the French cities of Nice and Paris and the Belgian capital Brussels (the three European cities were attacked by terrorists over the past two years) suggesting that an attack had occurred Friday February 17th in Sweden only to receive the Twitter reply from former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt “What has he been smoking?”, Zhirinovsky loves to create controversy by coming up with some of the most fantastic and bizarre comments yet to be imagined. He hasn't changed a bit.

The Washington Post has described Zhirinovsky as a man “who has been trafficking in jingoistic, racist and downright kooky statements since the early 1990s”, adding that “Zhirinovsky loves to tout his similarities with Trump; they share a penchant for outrageous, misogynistic and nationalistic pronouncements. Zhirinovsky has even said he wants a DNA test to see whether he is related to Trump, according to Reuters”.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Zhirinovsky did run for office to become the President of Russia. And as mentioned above, he actually came close to achieving such goal after his party, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, shocked Western observers and the then pro-Western Kremlin by winning the most votes in the 1993 election. Perhaps one of the reasons Zhirinovsky was not able to become the President of Russia was that social media, i.e. Twitter, had not been invented yet and was not around at the time. Call it Zhirinovsky's bad luck.

Regardless of the opinion many Americans may have of Russian democracy, it stands out that the Russians rejected Zhirinovsky altogether, thus saving themselves and perhaps saving the rest of the world of a clear and imminent danger. Which is much more than can be said of American democracy where even after losing by two or three million votes in the popular vote a lunatic can still get into the White House and begin to wreak havoc everywhere.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, here he is, the one and only ZHIRINOVSKY:

😝 😝 😝 😝