NONFICTION - Aug. 13, 1995

ZHIRINOVSKY: Russian Fascism and the Making of a Dictator by Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, translated by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (Addison-Wesley: $25; 272 pp.). The $64,000 question: Is Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, founder of the political party that received the most votes in Russia’s 1993 parliamentary elections, indeed the next Hitler? According to Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, biographers of Yuri Andropov and Boris N. Yeltsin, the answer is . . . quite possibly. Like Hitler, Zhirinovsky is an angry demagogue who constantly vents racist, anti-Semitic, and ultranationalist statements, who promises anything and everything to the common, uneducated citizen; who loves to perform for the media, to invent scapegoats, and to provoke governments both foreign and domestic. Solovyov and Klepikova conclude, however, that Zhirinovsky, unlike Hitler, is primarily an opportunist, dedicated not so much to a Greater Soviet Union--the coat of arms of his Liberal Democratic Party shows Russia controlling not only Poland and Finland but Alaska--as to personal glory and political revenge. Zhirinovsky’s politics of resentment, a product in part of his unhappy, deprived childhood as an ethnic Russian in the Asian republic of Kazakhstan, hardly seems a solid platform on which to build a governmental career, but the same was said of Hitler, and no amount of mockery or refutation, nor the revelation of Zhirinovsky’s hypocrisy (he is half Jewish), seems to have diminished his popularity; a Russian documentary entitled “How to Kill Zhirinovsky,” which showed the filmmaker (a la “Roger & Me”) pursuing the politician armed only with a microphone, was intended as satire, but some viewers chided the interviewer for failing to pack a lethal weapon. This biography is a disturbing account of a disturbed man . . . whose next book, according to his press agency, is called “I Spit on the West.”