Russian Ultranationalist Gets U.S. Visa : Politics: Vladimir Zhirinovsky is expected to arrive Friday. Several groups urge he be kept out.

The Clinton Administration granted a visa Tuesday to Russian ultranationalist legislator Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky for a visit to the United States, rejecting arguments that doing so will indirectly help give him political respectability.

Zhirinovsky is expected to visit the United States for 14 days beginning Friday. He is scheduled to speak in San Francisco on Monday and is also expected to stop in Los Angeles, New York and Washington.

A White House official said Zhirinovsky will not meet with any member of the Clinton Administration during his trip.

State Department spokesman David Johnson emphasized that, in granting the visa, the United States “neither endorses his views nor supports his ambitions.”

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow also said in a statement, “The U.S. government finds many of Mr. Zhirinovsky’s views anathema.”

Over the last few years, Zhirinovsky has aired some openly racist and extremist views of the United States. He has written that some time in the next century, America’s white population will perish, swamped by blacks and Latinos, and that the United States will go the way of the Soviet Union.

“We will not gloat when California joins Mexico, when a Negro republic is created in Miami and when the Russians take back Alaska, or when America dissolves into a Commonwealth of New States,” he wrote. “The factories will close down. There will be no medicine, no food, and you Americans will emigrate to Europe, to Japan and to Russia.”

Over the last year, a number of European countries--including France, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, Norway and Spain--have denied Zhirinovsky visas because of his demagogic and inflammatory rhetoric.

But Administration officials said they granted a visa because there are no solid legal grounds for turning him down.

U.S. immigration law “does not favor excluding persons on the basis of beliefs, statements or associations,” Johnson said at a briefing. “We have a long and respected tradition of allowing freedom of speech to all persons.”

U.S. officials also apparently decided that turning down the visa might help Zhirinovsky portray himself as a martyr.

He bragged recently that if the United States refused to let him on American soil, it would boost his personal popularity.

“The greater the resistance we meet, the more popularity we will have,” said Zhirinovsky, who was elected in December to the Russian Duma, or lower house of Parliament.

Russian polls have shown that Zhirinovsky has a core of support of between 5% and 20% of the Russian population--not enough to win the presidency in the 1996 elections, but enough to give him a continuing political role.

Several U.S. groups had urged the Clinton Administration to keep Zhirinovsky out of the country.

“It is not his ideas we fear so much as the respectability that Zhirinovsky would gain back home from a U.S.-sanctioned visit,” the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles said in a recent letter to Secretary of State Warren Christopher. The center noted that in July, Zhirinovsky met in Moscow with Canada’s leading neo-Nazi, Ernst Zundel.

The National Conference on Soviet Jewry also criticized the Clinton Administration’s action.

“It should be noted that in addition to the pejorative and denigrating comments he has made concerning Jews, Mr. Zhirinovsky has disparaged other religious and ethnic minorities living in Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union,” the conference said in a statement.

Staff writer Richard Boudreaux of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.