Good riddance to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Russia’s clown prince

He wanted to see the Baltic States bombarded with toxic waste. He brawled in parliament. He encouraged Vladimir Putin to declare himself tsar. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, one of the most grotesque fixtures in Russian politics for over thirty years, is dead. It is the end of an era – and good riddance.

The 75-year-old died in a Moscow hospital of Covid, despite by his own account, having had eight vaccinations. Even in death, he is surrounded by a cloud of hyperbole and mythology.

Although never personally close to Putin, he nonetheless played a crucial role in the emergence of the debauched pseudo-democracy that has characterised the past twenty years. Indeed, in some ways Zhirinovsky died just as he had won: the invasion of Ukraine marks Putin’s final descent into the kind of ethno-nationalist imperialism that ‘Zhirik’ had so long advocated.

Back in 1989, as Mikhail Gorbachev was opening up the Soviet system, Zhirinovsky co-founded the Liberal Democratic party of the Soviet Union with Vladimir Bogachev.