An Infectious Madman : Russian leader commands the attention of his country, the world : !ZHIRINOVSKY! <i> By Vladimir Kartsev (Columbia University Press: $24.95; 198 pp.)</i>

Mikhail Gorbachev calls Zhirinovsky “a nobody.” Alexander Rutskoi finds him “unworthy of serious discussion.” Yegor Gaidar thinks he’s “a mental case . . . a fascist and a scoundrel.” Andrei Kozyrev sees him as “a clear-cut medical problem.” And Alexander Solzhenitsyn labels him “a caricature of a Russian patriot.”

However, on that December night in 1993 when the Kremlin reported the returns for the Russian parliamentary elections, we saw the dismayed faces of those and other leaders of Russian political life, and the victorious smile of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. It was a special night: People in Moscow were glued to their sets awaiting the election results. According to preliminary exit polls, it appeared that the pro-reform party “Russia’s Choice” would win, so the shattering success of Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) was like thunder on a sunny day, jumbling all the cards in the political game.

Zhirinovsky, the child of a Soviet country-bumpkin family, now found himself commanding the attention of Russia and much of the world. His name hasn’t left the news since: One day he gathers a group of journalists to talk about the slaughter of our boys “to help our brothers, the Serbs,” then poses almost nude before a group of photo-journalists and to the crowd’s delight shares his secret erotic fantasies; the next day he shocks the public with grandiose plans of conquest, promising to take back Alaska by force, and to wash the boots of Russian soldiers in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

Russia’s democratic press, brushing off Zhirinovsky’s behavior as “silly clowning,” has largely dismissed him as “a mental case.” As the journal Ogonyok put it, Russia simply lost its senses on election day. This insider’s account of Zhirinovsky’s rise to power, however, argues persuasively that it is foolish to underestimate his strength and potential. As Vladimir Kartsev writes, Zhirinovsky is not as ridiculous as he appears: he knows full well what he is doing, and he has incredible energy and sense of purpose, moving toward his goals like a tank.

Time and again, Kartsev emphasizes that Zhirinovsky’s public stance--his constant hysteria, wild and coarse behavior, frothing at the mouth and trembling hands--is all posturing, a mask he consciously wears as a marketing ploy.

Kartsev is not the first to have figured this out: Over a year ago, “Spider,” the lead singer of the Russian rock group “Metallic Corrosion,” told me that Zhirinovsky is a “political rock-star” who knowingly uses all the devices of show-business, unlike the “scum-bag democrats,” whose failure to understand Russia’s new way of life lost them the elections.

Kartsev’s tale, however, is uniquely intimate, for from 1982 to 1989, he was director of Mir, one of the leading Soviet publishing houses, and in 1983 he hired Zhirinov sky as a lawyer. For over six years, Kartsev and Zhirinovsky worked side by side, during which time Kartsev got to know his co-worker quite well: his relationships with friends, his biases, even his love life. At one point Kartsev unwittingly discovered that Zhirinovsky was surreptitiously organizing the LDPR right before his eyes in the Mir publishing house. Kartsev’s account of this period is fascinating: We see how a modest attorney, a schemer and a lawyer, inspired by the beginnings of perestroika, is suddenly transformed into a national spokesman.

Even in his early years at Mir, Zhirinovsky would make speeches during meetings with magic promises of free apartments, free food, free entertainment, free transportation and even free cars, thus working the staff of almost 700 people into a frenzy. It was during these seances of mass hypnosis, Kartsev contends, that Zhirinovsky honed his demagogic skills, learning how to infect the public with his own anger and hatred by deftly pushing the limits of intensity.

A surreal experience I had with Zhirinovsky while interviewing him for a French documentary in 1993, however, has led me to believe that Zhirinovsky is doing something more calculated than simply venting his internal anger. We met him at the Liberal Democratic Party convention, where he was listening to the incoherent speeches of his colleagues. Behind his sizable team of body guards--”Zhirinovsky Falcons”--hung the enormous emblem of the LDPR, which oddly resembled the Mexican flag: an eagle with its wings rapaciously spread, except instead of snakes its talons clutched a ribbon with the insignia “Law and Order.” During the break we went to interview Zhirinovsky, who at first refused wearily, then relented after an aide whispered to him “France . . . television.”

Initially the interview was agonizing. I asked him questions that I thought were sharp and to the point, and he brushed them off like a heavy-weight boxer shooing away flies. And then something happened that exemplifies the “Zhirinovsky phenomenon.” He was suddenly inspired as if by some greater power: His eyes shone with a kind of higher meaning, his voice filled with music, his words flowed freely.

At that moment the interview was over--one does not ask questions of a prophet--and Zhirinovsky continued with his inspired monologue: He talked about AIDS in Africa and the environmental catastrophe in South America, about the domination of Paris by Arabs and the fall of French culture. Poor Russia was caught in a web of capitalist conspiracy, the aim of which was to turn Russia into a new Africa, to trade its countless natural resources for Coca-Cola, etc.

He spoke for over an hour, and we barely managed to change videotapes. The break had officially ended long ago, but no one paid attention to time: The delegates came out of the auditorium in groups to join the crowd listening to Zhirinovsky. Their eyes shone with tears, everyone united by the impulse to save Russia from danger. When Zhirinovsky rhetorically asked the crowd for the 10th time, “Is that the kind of freedom Russian needs?” the crowd roared “No!” I paused a moment, thinking, “Maybe he’s right.” Then I caught the icy cold glare of one of his young ideologues and the trance was broken. Ever since, I shudder when I think of the talent of Zhirinovsky the Ratcatcher. I believe at that moment he was sincere.

Kartsev’s story begins with the captivating details of Zhirinovsky’s school years in Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, where he lived with his mother, an uneducated cleaning woman and amazing go-getter who managed to win her son entry into the prestigious Moscow Institute of Oriental Languages by obtaining the recommendation of the district Komsomol (or Young Communist League). At the Mir publishing house, Kartsev reports that he and his deputy always engaged in amicable, “honest fights”; Kartsev even rescued Zhirinovsky several times, risking his own career when Zhirinovsky fell victim to investigations by the district Communist Party and the KGB.

One night before New Year’s Eve, Zhirinovsky showed up in Kartsev’s office to chat. “You’re a director, a writer, a Ph.D., a big shot,” he said. “I’m a nobody. The Communist Party and Soviet nomenklatura have ruined my life. I’m already past 40, with no decent apartment or dacha , a piece of junk for a car, and a salary of 180 rubles that I have to pay alimony out of. But, say, do you want to make a bet? One day you will write a book about Vladimir Zhirinovsky!”

In one sense, Zhirinovsky won that wager. But in another, Kartsev has written as much about himself as about Zhirinovsky. What’s most striking in these pages is Kartsev’s nostalgia for the “good old days.” This phenomenon is well-known to specialists in Eastern European studies, and Chinese studies even uses the term retrospective utopia. If the Western idea of utopia always looks toward the future and technological progress, in Russia people believe that life was always better before: Life was better under the Tsar than under Stalin, better under Stalin than under Brezhnev, and of course better under Brezhnev than now.

Everyone is nostalgic, from former Party big-wigs to former dissidents. Everyone has forgotten with surprising ease about waiting in line for hours to buy sausage, about mass informing, slave labor on collective farms and the anti-Darwinian process of selection, when the stupid taught the smart and the untalented led the gifted. Such is the Slavic-Soviet soul! There is even a joke about two drunkards reminiscing about how nice it was to drink in Brezhnev’s time: the vodka was better, the sardines were tastier and they themselves were younger. The first says to the second, “Communism passed us by like a bullet!,” and the second says, “At least we got to enjoy it. Think of our poor kids. . . .”

According to Kartsev, Zhirinovsky’s sudden popularity stems less from his rare gift for manipulating the masses than from the “fiasco” that capitalism has been in Russia. For all the evidence he gives, however, I can’t accept his conclusion that a “moral vacuum” and state of “chaos” have given way to an unprecedented political, economic, social and cultural breakdown, leaving the majority of Russians destitute.

True, the good old patriarchal Moscow is now unrecognizable. There seems to be a huge, powerful magnet over the city drawing people from all over the world like moths to a flame. Many wings are singed, but the candle burns on! Moscow is now a city of new freedom, new dangers, new money--a city of youth with all the generosity, cruelty and unpredictability that implies.

Unfortunately, Kartsev sees nothing in this new world but evil and violence. He believes this evil is the result of a conspiracy, a malicious design of the “democrats” working together with the “Mafia” and “the West.” He compiles a bizarre list of “evidence” for this conspiracy which incomprehensibly includes price deregulation, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Germany, corruption, plane crashes and inflation. Zhirinovsky’s name suddenly appears at the end of the list as the staunchest critic of the “democrats.”

The quotation marks are Kartsev’s, and they reveal a fealty for his subject that grows as this biography progresses. By the book’s end, it becomes clear that the former boss has become a spiritual follower of his former employee, united by a distinctly Russian mix of persecution complex and hidden pride: “We must be truly great if the whole world hates us and wants to destroy us.” Or as Dostoevsky the Wise remarked 100 years earlier in “Diary of a Writer,” for him Christ is Russian, and if he is not, then he does not need that Christ.