Listen To This Story

What unites the suspected killer of a turncoat intelligence officer, an arms trafficker who served 10 years in a US jail, and a lawmaker who snubbed accusations of sexual harassment?

Ask almost any Russian and they will bark out a short acronym — the LDPR, Russia’s oldest and largest nationalist party, which predated Trumpism by decades and now wants to rebrand itself as a middleman between the Kremlin and the growing legion of far-right groups worldwide.

Among the party’s most outspoken figures are Andrey Lugovoy, whom British authorities accused of slipping radioactive polonium into dissident spy Alexander Litvinenko’s teacup in 2006; arms baron Viktor Bout, prisoner-swapped for Brittney Griner and semi-biographically portrayed by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 movie Lord of War; and the LDPR’s current head, Leonid Slutsky, who was accused of groping female journalists in 2018.

Since the early 1990s, LDPR’s platform has been built on anti-immigrant sentiments, chauvinism, Russian exceptionalism, and phantom pains over Moscow’s lost imperial might.

It has thrived on scandal, attracted controversial figures, and used a Teflon-coated rhetoric that can withstand lie after lie after lie.

The first lie begins with what LDPR stands for — “The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia” — because there has been little that is either liberal or democratic about it.

Anton Shekhovtsov — who heads the Center for Democratic Integrity (CDI), a Vienna-based NGO — explains that the LDPR was originally a “fake party” concocted by the KGB in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Its purpose was to “imitate a pluralistic political system,” an assessment confirmed by former Soviet intelligence and communist party officials.

The LDPR’s founder and head, the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky, quickly gained popularity and a following thanks to his eccentric behavior, a penchant for fist fights, and outlandish claims.

He boasted that Moscow should rule lands from “Kabul to Istanbul,” and Russian soldiers would one day “wash their boots in the Indian Ocean.”

After the Soviet collapse in 1991, the LDPR became Russia’s first political party to reach out to far-right groups in Europe, including the National Front in France.

Shekhovtsov, author of Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir, says that Moscow has long used links with fringe groups and ultra-nationalists to gain leverage in the West.

Until his death in 2022, Zhirinovsky ran for president six times, always coming in second or third.

An election worker told this reporter that in 2012 Zhirinovsky had, in fact, won each vote in his district outside Moscow, and only the Kremlin’s massive vote rigging made Putin the “winner.”

While the Kremlin cracked down on hate crimes and jailed many leaders of the far right, the LDPR remained safe because its lawmakers largely followed the Kremlin’s party line.

Zhirinovsky portrayed himself as an overtly patriotic ethnic Russian who indulged in occasional antisemitic slurs — but was forced by a journalistic investigation to admit that his father was a Ukrainian Jew named Wolf Eidelstein. The admission caused little damage. Russian nationalists voted for him in droves.

“His base is disgruntled middle-aged men with lousy jobs who swill beer and yell at their TV set,” observed a former Moscow city hall official. 

The LDPR’s rhetoric never went beyond angry diatribes and hate speech — while dozens of smaller far-right and openly neo-Nazi groups mushroomed in Russia amid an influx of millions of migrant laborers from ex-Soviet Central Asia and Russia’s Muslim Caucasus region.

SOVA, a Moscow-based hate crimes monitor, reports that racially motivated attacks peaked in 2008, when militant ultra-nationalists killed at least 110 people and left 487 wounded.

And while the Kremlin cracked down on hate crimes and jailed many leaders of the far right, the LDPR remained safe because its lawmakers largely followed the Kremlin’s party line.

“All nationalist sentiments were suppressed a long time ago in the [Murmansk] region,” said Violetta Grudina, a fugitive ex-activist with late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund. “Everything was over by 2014.”

However, Zhirinovsky’s intolerant rants sounded offensive to Russia’s ethnic minorities.

Oyumaa Dongak — a fugitive political activist from Tuva, a Turkic-speaking, Buddhism-practicing province in south-central Russia — noted, “Even if something smart and reasonable slipped [into his speeches], it got lost in his ravings.”

Russians see Donald Trump as cut from the same cloth as Zhirinovsky, which, in their view, is not necessarily bad. They often refer to the current American president as “Zhirik” (“Little Fatty”), a friendly label that previously applied to Zhirinovsky.

Ethnic Russians comprise four-fifths of Russia’s population of 143 million (I’m not counting the millions in Crimea and other Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions), and Moscow still keeps trying to quietly assimilate dozens of indigenous minority groups.

In 2014, days after Moscow’s sham “referendum” in annexed Crimea, the LDPR urged Poland, Romania, and Hungary to do the same with Ukrainian regions that belonged to those nations before World War II.

Russians see Donald Trump as cut from the same cloth as Zhirinovsky, which, in their view, is not necessarily bad. They often refer to the current American president as “Zhirik” (“Little Fatty”), a friendly label that previously applied to Zhirinovsky.

“As a personality, he’s just like our Zhirinovsky,” Margarita Simonyan, head of the Kremlin-funded RT media group and one of the most outspoken Russian propagandists, told the newspaper Vedomosti last year.  

Zhirinvosky also pioneered political merchandise in Russia. He recorded several pop music albums, authored several bestselling books, and remains a household name.

However, there are some fundamental differences between the two: With his background in Turkish studies and law, Zhirinovsky “could be respected for being smart,” CDI’s Shekhovtsov said. “Content-wise, [Zhirinovsky and Trump] are very different,” he added.

In 2023, CyberZhirinovsky, a neural network based on his sound bites and speech patterns, was launched. The virtual “Zhirik” can answer questions and gets irritated if they are too repetitive.

Zhirinovsky’s death didn’t put an end to the LDPR’s popularity — it is still represented in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, and is part of a carefully curated “systemic opposition,” a handful of parties that create an illusion of alternatives to the ruling United Russia behemoth.

The LDPR’s new leader, Leonid Slutsky, is turning the party into a magnet for Ukraine War veterans and looking for ways to boost its popularity.

Days after his release as part of the Griner prisoner swap, arms trafficker Bout became part of the LDPR’s Supreme Council — and may become one of the party’s poster boys in the 2026 parliamentary vote.

Bout “remained human, a Russian citizen who didn’t snitch on anyone, who keeps bringing goodness to those he was in contact with,” Slutsky said at an exhibition of Bout’s paintings, including those drawn in jail.

In Russia’s latest parliamentary vote in 2021, the LDPR received 7.5 percent of the vote and secured 21 out of the 450 seats in the State Duma.

To boost the LDPR’s standing in the Kremlin’s corridors of power, this year Slutsky decided to turn it into a “party of diplomacy” that could mediate Moscow’s ties with far-right groups worldwide.

However, according to Shekhovtsov, the idea will hardly work out because Slutsky is blacklisted in the West and Russia’s image is too toxic for far-right politicians who hope to win a vote at home.

“The situation is very tricky,” Shekhovtsov said. “It may backfire against them.”