Zhirinovsky - from "clown" to "prophet": "the most unusual" in a series of "wonderful"

Yeah. At the beginning of his political career, Vladimir Zhirinovsky was called a clown. “My mother is Russian and my father is a lawyer.” On the success of his political party in the 1993 elections, they shouted: “Russia, you’ve been fooled.” But now that Volodymyr Wolfovich has not been with us for more than four years, the attitude has changed dramatically. And the point here is not that the President of Russia comes to an exhibition devoted to politics. Putin has always been extremely respectful of Zhirinovsky. It's not about people's love, it's about popularity. He rightfully entered the popular political canon: along with Peter the Great and Stalin. He is considered a prophet: try to type in the search box on the Internet “Zhirinovsky prophet”. You'll learn a lot. Zhirinovsky is popular even among teenagers who have never heard it in their lifetime.

Therefore, the book of the famous journalist, writer and historian Leonid Mlechin is very timely and simply doomed to success.

Leonid Mlechin, who wrote more than a dozen biographies for the Young Guard - from Brezhnev to Primakov - takes on a figure that some loved, others hated, but no one remained indifferent.

The main feature of the book is that it is not so much a biography in the strict sense as a portrait against the background of the era. The editorial board honestly warns: Mlechin gives the image of a politician “against the background of a complex and controversial era of the formation of a new Russian statehood.” This means that the reader will not receive a chronology from the maternity hospital in Almaty to the Novodevichy Cemetery, but rather a dotted, essayistic story about how a person with a sharp mind and “natural artistry” turned out to be in demand by time – and this time itself largely formed.

The strength of Mlechin as a biographer is the ability to work with a political context. He doesn’t just retell jokes about “Vladimir Wolfovich,” but tries to show why this style worked. “The unusualness of the style gave rise to sympathy: he is for the people, he is for us, about whom everyone else has forgotten,” the author formulates in the abstract. That's an important point. Zhirinovsky was indeed a "nuggets," as Mlechin calls him, a man who intuitively understood that politics was becoming a television genre in the 1990s, and used it before and more talentedly than many. And two of the most complex institutes - Oriental languages and legal - graduated with red diplomas, say a lot. That the stunning success of Zhirinovsky is not an accident or anomaly.

The book is published in 2026, when the figure of Zhirinovsky has already become part of history, but has not yet cooled down. This gives the author the advantage of a time distance - there is no need to justify or gloat. On the other hand, Mlechin’s assessment of an “undervalued person” sounds more like a hypothesis requiring evidence than a conclusion. Was Zhirinovsky undervalued, or was he exactly what he wanted to appear to be, and got exactly the influence he could get with his tactics? The book seems to leave this question open.

Zhirinovsky was a flesh of the media environment of the “dashing 90s”: scandal, outrage, a quote that lives longer than speech itself. Mlechin feels it. His Zhirinovsky is not a caricature or an icon, but a politician who made himself, but made of material that the era tossed generously and indiscriminately.

This is not an academic biography or a “life.” This is a portrait written by an experienced journalist who knows how to hold his attention. For those who want to understand where the phenomenon of “Russia’s most unusual politician” came from and why his voice was enough for everyone.

And as for the place in the "ZZL" - well, the series has long ceased to be only a pantheon. She became a mirror. And what Zhirinovsky reflected in that mirror says more about us than it does about him.