INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
He was 75.According to Russian media reports, Zhirinovsky, who had been in declining health for some time, had been gravely ill for weeks
after contracting Covid-19, despite claiming to have received eight vaccine doses.In one of his last public appearances in late December,
This will not be a peaceful year
which despite its name espoused a rambunctious ultranationalist populism, Zhirinovsky carved out a unique space for himself within the
President.His provocative policy positions proposing the military conquest of Central Asia and the Middle East, bombarding the Baltic states
with toxic waste and dropping nuclear bombs on Japan and Britain, were matched by his outrageous personal conduct, including engaging in
fistfights in the Russian parliament, physically attacking political opponents and on one occasion instructing aides to rape a pregant
supporting President Vladimir Putin on key issues
Jewish father and Russian mother in 1946, in Almaty, then the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan, Zhirinovsky would later write of how his early
life informed his later politics.Growing up in the bleak postwar years left Zhirinovsky, later a fervent anti-Communist, disillusioned with
the Soviet system from a young age
studies, graduating with a degree in Turkish language and literature, before taking a clerical position in a publishing house.The party he
Zhirinovsky ran on a populist ticket railing against separatists in the national republics, and the Communist Party apparatus
He won almost 8% of the vote.His political zenith came two years later, when the LDPR topped the polls in the 1993 State Duma election, with
23%, and over 12 million votes, against the backdrop of the painful post-Soviet transition
political talk shows that came to dominate Russian state TV after the annexation of Crimea and the break with the West in 2014, Zhirinovsky
maintained his role as the court jester of Russian politics
Putin, along with many other dignitaries, reduced to tears of laughter.Ever the consummate survivor, even Zhirinovsky could not escape the
The 2020 arrest for murder of the Khabarovsk governor Sergei Furgal, an LDPR member, was seen as a warning shot fired against the party
At the State Duma elections the year after, the LDPR turned in one of its weakest ever performances.Outside of elective politics,
Zhirinovsky found time to write several dozen books, ranging from Last Dash to the South, in which he advocated for Russian troops to subdue
a number of popular Russian songs, alongside some of his own compositions
He is survived by three adult children.
