|
|
"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
|
Profile: Sad Vlad, a Hitler with a degree: Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Russia's would-be saviour
|
|---|
| Parent(s) |
Candidate
|
| Contributor | Hikikomori Blitzkrieg! |
| Last Edited | Hikikomori Blitzkrieg! Aug 27, 2011 09:13pm |
| Logged |
0
|
| Category | Profile |
| Media | Newspaper - Independent |
| News Date | Sunday, December 19, 1993 03:10:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | BY HIS own account, Vladimir Zhirinovsky came into the world with the help of a kitchen knife. The ambulance was late, Russia's saviour could not wait, and an uncle hacked his umbilical cord with the first sharp instrument he could find. The episode, related in his own slim but rage-filled autobiography and political testament, The Last Thrust to the South, is more than a personal detail. It has all the elements of what, 47 years later, would be the Zhirinovsky Phenomenon: grievance, impatience, a brutal solution.
The person of Mr Zhirinovsky and the politics of his absurdly-named Liberal Democratic Party are inseparable. He is the party. Both share the same treacherous foundation of anger and self-pity. Both revel in the details of real or imagined humiliation. Every setback, every slight is remembered, nurtured, exaggerated and, he tells supporters, ultimately avenged.
'Life itself made me suffer from the very day, the moment, the instant I was born. Society could give me nothing,' he writes in his autobiography, a work of such remorseless misery it veers towards comic parody. He describes growing up in a communal apartment: cooking in the corridor; stealing fruit to relieve hunger; queuing for the lavatory; gagging on the stench; being pestered by a drunken stepfather. 'Bad food, bad conditions and almost no education. No toys, children's books, no newspapers, no telephone. Nothing, I lived in a cave.' The last of six children, he was bullied constantly. However, in person he seems a comedian rather than a character from Dostoevsky. |
| Share |
|
|
2¢
|
|
| Article | Read Full Article |
|
| Date |
Category |
Headline |
Article |
Contributor |
|
|
