Profile : A Clown That Everyone Is Now Taking Seriously : * Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s political credo is Russia for the Russians and vodka on every corner. Nobody in the federation’s political spectrum is laughing at him now.

A raucous, milling crowd gathers in the foyer of the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, shifting and jostling around a short, chubby-faced man speaking so fast that he sometimes becomes incoherent.

For hours on end, his vocal chords seemingly made of steel, he pours out an unending stream of rapid-fire facts, figures, names and opinions, his wildly gesticulating hands stopping only occasionally to mop the perspiration from his face with a wet handkerchief.

This is Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky, 45, the leader of the tiny and inappropriately named Liberal Democratic Party. Zhirinovsky is the darkest nightmare of politicians on both ends of this country’s political spectrum who see him as a prospective new dictator--a populist who could climb to power on the future shambles of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government.

As fears grow that popular uprisings will break out across Russia this winter and that the military will seize power in order to restore law and order, the only politician with national status openly willing to front such a junta is Zhirinovsky.

“Future politics in this country is impossible without me,” he said. “Either I will lead the country no later than next April, or the military will take over to prevent the utter collapse of everything. And then they will have to take me on to provide legitimacy for their rule.”

Formerly an obscure lawyer, Zhirinovsky first gained wide publicity with a bold challenge to Yeltsin in Russian Federation elections last June.

Seen at first as something of a clown, he received 6.2 million votes, in part by promising cheap vodka--”at every corner, around the clock if I win.” His total, while only 7.8% of the votes cast, put him in third place in the presidential election and turned him overnight into a serious political figure, prompting some Soviet analysts to compare his rise to Adolf Hitler’s early career.

Now, only two men in the vastness of Russia profess to know precisely what the government should do--Yeltsin and Zhirinovsky.

And as Yeltsin loses supporters--only 15% of Russians say they unconditionally support his leadership and policies today compared to 29% in July, according to recent opinion surveys--many are falling into Zhirinovsky’s lap.

Like Yeltsin in his past fights against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Zhirinovsky promises swift, painless and radical changes for the better, compared to his rival’s tortuous and divisive approach to the market economy.

But while Yeltsin exploited the people’s hatred of the overbearing political “center” in the Kremlin, Zhirinovsky appeals to the irrational but widespread fear of capitalism.

And he runs his never-ending election campaign with unflagging energy, appearing almost daily in lobbies, streets, dingy movie theaters, factories--any place where there are enough people willing to listen to his simple solutions for their problems.

“Yeltsin’s economic program is a good start--only you’ve got to do exactly the opposite to what he proposes. Freeze the prices, stop privatization,” Zhirinovsky told a recent news conference. “I have a solution for all these Asians,” he said of the country’s Muslim population during another diatribe. “Pack them off to their native lands.

“Russia is for us, Russians. After that, we’ll build a second Great Wall, like the Chinese did--they were clever boys, you know. Let the Muslims bring their goods to the gaps in this wall. From then on, our own merchants will carry them into our lands. In this way we’ll prevent their demographic explosion from undermining Russia.”

“Russians should reassemble their empire, which was built over millennia,” he said. “But we should change the direction; we have been too preoccupied with the drive into Europe. Our true road leads south, to the warm seas, to the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. We started out quite right by going into Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t have done it under the Red banner; these people don’t understand ideology.”

Even to Soviet ears, many of Zhirinovsky’s arguments sound like strange stuff. But for distraught shoppers now spending more hours in lines than at their workplaces, he offers something even more elusive than bread and sausage--hope.

And he talks and acts with almost biblical confidence in his coming victory. “I will immediately declare a dictatorship--the country cannot afford democracy for now,” he said. “I will stabilize the situation in just two months. First of all, I will provide food. I am a realist--I don’t promise 10 brands of sausage in the shops. There will be maybe two or three, but these I guarantee.”

As Zhirinovsky’s public support mounts, so does the criticism leveled at him by politicians and commentators who repeatedly compare him to a modern Hitler.

“This brand of politicians is nothing new in history,” Nikolai V. Ivanov, a well-known campaigner against Soviet organized crime and pro-democracy reformer, commented. “They prosper by demagoguery, they exploit real problems, they adapt to changing circumstances. They can completely rework their image within hours to satisfy their audiences. . . . All this was amply demonstrated by Adolf (Hitler) and others like him in other countries.”

Vladimir K. Varov, the chairman of the political reforms subcommittee of the Russian Supreme Soviet, also has an unflattering view of Zhirinovsky.

“When people of Zhirinovsky’s type talk about supplanting leaders like Yeltsin,” he said, “they are simply being political vultures, circling over the battlefield in anticipation of the (political) corpses to be devoured. And look at the tools he says he will use: brute force, reliance on state bureaucracy, coming to terms with the Communists--ugh!”

To his supporters, however, he is almost a home-grown Messiah.

An elderly woman, sitting patiently through all of Zhirinovsky’s two-hour press conference in one of Moscow’s run-down movie theaters, commented that unlike Yeltsin, with his bodyguards and limousines, Zhirinovsky had come to the theater on foot.

“His heels are quite worn out, did you notice?” she said. “He understands how we live. . . . “

As for his theory on building a new Chinese Wall--”That’s just a slip of the tongue,” she said. “But did you hear him saying there are mountains of work to do in the country while Yeltsin promises unemployment? I tell you, those people on top think only of themselves; Vladimir Volfovich thinks about us. His larder is as empty as mine, and when he comes to power, he won’t have to rely on advisers to find out what we need.”

Along with painting an appealing personal image, Zhirinovsky intoxicates his listeners with the illusory return of superpower status--the ability to cut Asian or Baltic upstarts down to size and to launch a triumphant drive to the “warm seas.”

That great-power approach, as well as his promises of plentiful vodka, have won him particularly strong followings among the military. More than 50% of the military in many garrisons voted for him in last summer’s elections, and he says that 70% of soldiers and police back him today.

However, Zhirinovsky sees his main political base in small businessmen willing to give him all the support and money he needs to stay in politics.

“You see, these guys come to me because I’m their last hope,” he explained in a recent interview. “They are increasingly convinced no one cares about them, the biggies have all the game to themselves. That’s why they come to me and offer moral and financial support.”

In the past, even when the numbers have betrayed him, Zhirinovsky has fallen back on sheer will.

Last spring, having failed to obtain the required 100,000 signatures for his candidacy in the presidential race, the indomitable lawyer went to the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature. There he harangued its deputies for hours on end, treating them to bursts of Turkish--one of the four foreign languages he speaks--and promising to talk to world leaders without interpreters as proof of his intellectual attainments.

The amused lawmakers gave him the go-ahead to run--only to goggle incredulously at the result a few weeks later. But by that time, Zhirinovsky needed no sympathy from the Supreme Soviet to continue.

“All that the democrats are doing is wrong,” he declared. “They did not get the mandate to destroy the state, but that’s what they are doing now. When we get the mandate next April, we will rebuild this state within its 1977 borders (as defined in the 1977 Soviet constitution, including all 15 of its former constituent republics). And we won’t even need force in the process,” he said.

Viktor Grebenshikov is a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau.