Russian Loses Round, Gets in Fight : Moscow: After bill that would have expelled party defectors from the Duma fails, Zhirinovsky accosts a onetime ally.

Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky suffered a setback Friday with the defeat of a proposed law that would have forced the growing number of high-ranking defectors from his neo-fascist party to give up their seats in Russia’s Parliament.

The bully boy of Russian politics reacted in typical fashion. During a recess of the Duma, the lower house of Parliament, he accosted one of the defectors in a hall and got into a fistfight. Witnesses said two Zhirinovsky bodyguards grabbed the arms of the defector, Vladimir Borzyuk, while the neo-fascist leader smashed Borzyuk’s head against a wall.

Zhirinovsky attacked another lawmaker, Valery Borshchyov, who tried to intervene. “You scum, I’ll have you rot in jail!” Zhirinovsky was heard yelling at him. “I’ll tear your beard out hair by hair!”

Before lawmakers and security guards restored order, Zhirinovsky snatched and destroyed the tape recorder of a Moscow magazine reporter who was trying to capture the sound of the fray. The journalist’s glasses were also broken.

Since Zhirinovsky’s party stunned the world with its strong showing in the December parliamentary elections, there has been little relief from his extremist statements and outrageous behavior, which Russians are coming to regard as his natural manner of expression.

But behind Friday’s fistfight--Zhirinovsky’s second at the Duma this year--was his frustration over a steady trickle of defections that have undermined his considerable power to shape the country’s laws.

Calling for a revival of Russia’s empire and a brutal crackdown on crime, Zhirinovsky’s misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party won 24% of the vote in the December elections. It holds the second-largest bloc in the 450-seat Duma, after the reformist Russia’s Choice movement. Members of the extremist party head five of the Duma’s 23 committees.

When the Duma first convened, Zhirinovsky could do something no other political leader could do--deliver every vote from his bloc on every issue before Parliament.

But then cracks appeared in the Liberal Democratic facade. Viktor Kobelev, who ran the party’s election campaign, launched an effort in February to oust Zhirinovsky as party leader. He was later joined by Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a well-known television hypnotist, and four other Duma members outraged by their leader’s rude behavior and imperialist statements.

Zhirinovsky reacted by holding a party congress last weekend, expelling the dissidents and having himself declared party chairman with dictatorial powers until the year 2004. Then in the Duma, he introduced a bill that would expel from that body any lawmaker who breaks from the party whose ticket he was elected on--and replace him in the Duma with another member of the ticket.

The bill was defeated Friday after it gained little support outside Zhirinovsky’s party, and Kobelev predicted that other Liberal Democratic lawmakers will soon quit and become independents.

Zhirinovsky’s setback in the Duma is only one sign of his waning fortunes. The party gained little support in recent local elections across Russia and is so poor that it has appealed to the government for 1 billion rubles (about $575,000) in annual subsidies. Public opinion polls continue to show that most Russians don’t trust Zhirinovsky.

Among opponents of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, he has been upstaged in recent weeks by former Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, leader of last October’s armed anti-government rebellion. Rutskoi and other hard-liners walked out of prison in February thanks to an amnesty pushed, ironically, by Zhirinovsky.