As the results come in it is clear that Vladimir Zhirinovsky has failed yet again to become Russian President.

 

He surged to prominence and even some significance in 1993 when his Liberal-Democratic Party won some 23% of the popular vote in the Duma elections. Before these important elections the Westminster Foundation for Democracy set up seminars at the Embassy to explain to Russian political parties how to market themselves. We agonised a bit over whether to invite Zhirinovsky’s party, and in the end decided to do so as a polite pluralist gesture.

 

To the consternation of all concerned on our side, Zhirinovsky himself appeared. He gave our experts and visiting MPs a spirited and pretty damn good lecture on modern campaigning in a country Russia’s size, citing his distribution of thousands of cassette tapes with his pronouncements – visionary pre-Internet viral marketing. 

 

And he duly did well, winning a goodly slab of votes from Russians already frustrated with the pain of transition. Was this not the end of reform and his springboard to some sort of seizure of power?

 

A group of senior British journalists in Moscow came to the Ambassador’s Residence for a briefing to hear our assessment; I recall some of them smirking in disbelief when the Embassy team argued that despite this strong showing he was going nowhere, and that Yeltsin/reform would not collpase.

 

We were more or less right. In the 1996 Russian Presidential elections and in subsequent elections in 2000 and again now Zhirinovsky made his familiar loud belligerent noise, and ended up nowhere.

 

What does Zhirinovskyism represent? His demands over the years have been the usual rubbish of noisy, slickly packaged, post-communist lumpen-populism (Down with Jews! Up with Saddam Hussein! Nuke Japan! Cheap Bras!).

 

Safe to say that his campaigns are not intended to present coherent policies. Rather they have been a carefully calibrated and well-funded spoiler aimed at discrediting democracy itself, as a way to give harder darker forces a way back into power after the collapse and discrediting of communism.

 

If democracy can be made to look farcical and above all chaotic, why insist on it? Surely Order, preferably without too much Law, is better?

 

This malevolent ploy worked very well in Belarus, where Zhirinovsky-Lite in the form of Lukashenko won power in 1994 and is still there. It also had a pretty good run in Poland with Andrzej Lepper, until his heavy defeat in the 2007 elections.

 

And in Russia too it seems to have worked well enough. Parties and institutions representing authentic (and efficient) modern pluralism have been marginalised in Russia by tendencies claiming to represent the Firm Hand needed to rule Russia ‘properly’ and to reassert Russian power more widely. With energy prices high and plenty of foreign investment coming in, this Putinish approach offers a feel-good factor which undoubtedly has broad appeal. And it is set to continue for some years to come.

 

I went to see Zhirinovsky once in 1994, accompanied by my youthful Embassy colleague Christopher Granville. We made our way up to his office past a gloomy shop selling kinky kitschy Heavy Metal music and trinkets.

 

His office on one wall featured a vast map of the world, Russia’s eleven time zones sprawling heavily across it. The great man eventually appeared, genial and energetic. He pulled out an extendable metal pointer and waved it at the map.

 

“Here [China] are one billion Yellows. Here [India] are one billion Browns. Here [Africa] are 600 million Blacks. Here in this little corner are 300 million Europeans.

 

Who is in the middle protecting you from all these people?! Russia! Let’s talk!”

 

So we talked.