A War Made in Russia by Sergei Medvedev

Author:Sergei Medvedev [Medvedev, Sergei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509558414
Published: 2023-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Zhirinovsky legitimized the four main elements of Russian fascism, the principal one being the idea of offence, on which the difficult moral complex of resentment is based. Nietzsche called resentment ‘the moral of slaves’, the envy of the loser, the helpless hatred of the slave towards his master, whom he considers to be the root cause of all his misfortune. Zhirinovsky talked about offence before it became politically fashionable. Furthermore, at the start of the 1990s, the political and economic elite were in a state of ecstasy about the possibilities that were opening up, and about the plasticity of reality and the ability to change everything in an instant. Yes, there were seizures of property by ‘raiding’ [scams that led to businesses being illegally taken over, often by gangs – Tr.], bankruptcies, people eking out a semi-starving existence, street crime and ethnic conflicts on the country’s fringes; but mostly the Soviet past and the rotten system were blamed for all this, and the West was seen as the example and the civilization of the future. In those days, a large part of the population did not feel offended by the outside world, and were more likely to want to join it.

Zhirinovsky was the first to speak publicly about Russia being offended and humiliated. I remember my surprise the first time I saw in Moscow a huge election poster for the LDPR on a billboard that proclaimed, ‘For Russians, for the Poor!’ At the time, I thought: ‘Why are Russians poor?’ Compared to Central Asia, Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine, Russia in the mid-2000s looked like an island of prosperity. It was attracting investment, building its clumsy capitalism and accepting migrants. However, Zhirinovsky cleverly played on the narrative of the post-Soviet losers, and by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century all the political elite were talking about how Russia had been offended. It was at this point, in 2005, that Putin started to bemoan the collapse of the USSR as the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’.

Out of this feeling of being offended grew the second element of Zhirinovsky’s fascist clowning: revenge for the Empire. His election slogan from 1993, ‘I Will Raise Russia Up from Its Knees!’ had predated by a good fifteen years what was to become one of Vladimir Putin’s favourite slogans. The idea of the reconstitution of the USSR runs like a red thread through his speeches: ‘Our wish to all the former Soviet republics: you have wandered around, but that’s enough. It’s time to come home.’ Twenty years later, these outrageous statements seriously came home to roost in Putin’s declarations about ‘presents from the Russian people’ given to the republics of the Soviet Union, which would have to be given back.

The third horseman of Zhirinovsky’s Apocalypse was expansionism. One of his most famous sayings, about the Russian soldier washing his boots in the Indian Ocean, may have been apocryphal (our hero rather listlessly denied it) – but

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