Go back to front pageSAN FRANCISCO -- Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian political extremist known for his ultranationalism and anti-Semitism, made a studied attempt last night in San Francisco to radically change his image at his first public audience in the United States.
In an exclusive interview with the Free Press before his public address, he went on record with a freshly minted liberalism, declaring, "I am not an anti-Semite" and "I would not like to be a dictator."
"Don't be afraid of us," Zhirinovsky, who many have called the most dangerous man in Russia, said. "We don't want communism and we don't want to destroy your country or our country."
Zhirinovsky, clearly playing to his San Francisco audience, even called for an end to war and "brotherhood with the West."
As 800 people, including many Russian Jewish emigres, demonstrated outside the heavily guarded Sheraton Palace Hotel, Zhirinovsky repeatedly denied to a World Affairs Council audience that he or his party are for Russian expansionism, a return to a Soviet dictatorship or the aggressive use of nuclear weapons -- all of which he has advocated at one time or other in the past.
In the December 1993 parliamentary elections, Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party won nearly 25 percent of the vote and became the largest faction in the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament.
Studiously avoiding the inflammatory rhetoric for which he has come to be known around the world, Zhirinovsky painted a convincing picture of the economic crisis in Russia. As he often has in the past, he predicted that in the next six months Russia's economic crisis will reach such disastrous proportions that it will either precipitate a civil war, which would inevitably draw in the United States, or necessitate early elections, which he said his party would win with an overwhelming majority.
As reporters and spectators attempted to draw him out on such sensitive subjects as anti-Semitism and nuclear war, Zhirinovsky parried every thrust with a skillful series of platitudes tailored to his audience.
Espousing constitutional democracy, private property rights, multiculturalism, nonagression and law and order, Zhirinovsky said little that would have been out of place in the speech of a centrist U.S. politician.
Zhirinovsky, who has often spoken of the threat posed by Jews, Arabs and Muslim fundamentalists, told the Free Press that "America's strongest point is its respect for the rights of minority groups and even for sexual minorities."
The greatest weaknesses of the United States, he said, are that "you want to rule throughout the world," and that American society is "based on your dollar, not on your moral principles."
Asked why he had come to the United States, a country which he has referred to as "the empire of evil," he said he wanted "to change the image that the press has made out of Zhirinovsky" and to tell "the real truth about the situation in Russia."
Western press reports have portrayed Zhirinovsky as a dangerous cross between a goon and a buffoon. His performance Monday showed otherwise. He adeptly projected an image of reason and moderation, positioning his Liberal Democratic Party as a centrist democratic alternative to the former Communists and the reformers, who he refers to as "radical democrats."
He complained the United States has been duped into supporting the present government on the grounds that it is creating democracy and a free market.
"They have nothing in common with democracy," he said. "They are 100 percent communist."
After three years under President Boris Yeltsin, he said, "the state sector is destroyed by 70 percent, and the private sector still hasn't been constructed, and the financial system has been destroyed completely."
At the protest rally outside, called by a number of Jewish community groups, including the Jewish Community Relations Council, Representatives Tom Lantos and Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, deplored the State Department's granting of a visa to a man who they said had been described as "beyond the pale" by Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
"I have a long way to go before I believe a shred of what he says," said Lantos, after hearing of the new, moderate Zhirinovsky.
"Although we respect his right to express himself, we cannot allow him to muddy the waters as to the impression he leaves of who he is," said Pelosi. "We cannot allow him to go back to Russia and say, "I had good table manners, they accepted me."
Nonetheless, Zhirinovsky's restrained presentation to the World Affairs Council audience was accepted without jeers and even with mild applause. Toward the end of the evening, he even allowed himself to drop his habitual scowl and crack a few jokes that drew laughter from the Russians in the audience.
Zhirinovsky's visit, which has been arranged by businessman Vitaly Grinberg, a Russian Jewish immigrant from Huntington Beach in Southern California, will take him to New York today for what a spokesman described as private meetings. Zhirnovsky and others in his large entourage insist they are not in the United States to raise funds.
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