It was vintage Ilyushkin, but what worried Bennett was the size and reaction of the enormous crowds. They were drinking it in and chanting for more.
Sergei Ilyushkin might look like a fool, but he was no novice. A disciple of the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a man once known throughout Western diplomatic circles as Mad Vlad, he had been well schooled in the seductive art of political propaganda by one of history’s underappreciated masters.
Bennett still vividly remembered the 1994 Time magazine cover story on Zhirinovsky entitled “Rising Czar,” describing Zhirinovsky as a rabid anti-Semite and dangerous demagogue who “threatened to restore Russia’s imperial borders, annex Alaska, invade Turkey, repartition Poland, give Germany ‘another Chernobyl,’ turn Kazakhstan into a ‘scorched desert’ and ‘employ large fans to blow radioactive waste across the Baltics.’ ”
Ilyushkin embraced Zhirinovsky’s vision, and then some.
Both men had been born in Alma-Ata, central Asia, in the spring of 1946. They’d grown up side by side and in many ways were inseparable. Both graduated from Moscow State University in 1969. Both served in the Red Army until 1973. Both served for a time in Soviet military intelligence. After getting out of the military, both had gone to law school and become lawyers before becoming politically active. Together they had launched the woefully misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, or LDPR, just as the Soviet Union was breaking up.
Badly underestimated by Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, Zhirinovsky had roared out of nowhere in 1991 to run for president and stunned the world by placing third, behind Boris Yeltsin and Nikolai Ryzhkov. By 1994, the LDPR had Washington and NATO in near-panic mode after it captured 25 percent of the vote and Zhirinovsky was made deputy speaker of the Duma.
As a senior Russian government official — and a constant thorn in President Yeltsin’s side — Zhirinovsky had quickly struck up a close friendship with Saddam Hussein, regularly traveling to Baghdad until it fell. But it was Adolf Hitler he seemed to most admire.
Over the years, Zhirinovksy counted German and Austrian neo-Nazis as pals. He denounced the U.S. Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory.” He urged the Russian government to “set aside places [on]… Russian territory to deport this small but troublesome tribe [known as the Jews],” effectively calling for Jews to be rounded up in new concentration camps in order for Russian society “to survive.”
What’s more, he vowed to execute at least one hundred thousand political prisoners the moment he took office, even as he remained one of the highest-ranking leaders in Russia.
Shortly after the regime change in Iraq, however, Zhirinovsky mysteriously disappeared and was eventually presumed dead by Russian authorities. Ilyushkin, his deputy and thus the ranking member of the LDPR in the Duma, assumed Zhirinovsky’s position as deputy speaker of the Russian parliament and soon proved himself an equally radical — yet far more effective — politician.
For years it had been unclear where the LDPR got its funding. Ilyushkin was proving to be a prodigious fund-raiser of late, but it had long been rumored that the KGB and Soviet military intelligence had provided the initial seed money to get the party off the ground and fuel Zhirinovsky’s and Ilyushkin’s political ambitions. The CIA had never been able to nail it down for sure, but according to McCoy, it wasn’t implausible.
Put simply, Zhirinovsky had been the KGB’s man. Part of his platform was to hire a total of one million agents to serve in the KGB (now known as the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB) the minute he was elected president. That, in part, was how they had recruited perhaps their most deadly ally — Yuri Gogolov, the former commander of the elite Russian military force known as Spetsnatz who was now believed to be recruiting disaffected Russian military and intelligence officers to support the Zhirinovsky-Ilyushkin political platform.
In addition to pledging to rebuild Russia’s intelligence capabilities, Zhirinovsky, Ilyushkin, and Gogolov vowed to buy all the guns, tanks, ships, and planes the country could possibly afford as soon as the LDPR swept into office. They promised to raise military pay, buy new uniforms, and rebuild the famed Russian cavalry units of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What’s more, they pledged to scrap or simply disregard all the arms treaties with the U.S. in order to rebuild Russia’s strategic nuclear forces until they were the best in the world.
None of this was conclusive proof that Zhirinovsky had been bought and paid for by the KGB and the Red Army. But it was close. Zhirinovsky was their biggest fan, and they were his.
Ilyushkin and Gogolov, not surprisingly, had picked right up where Zhirinovsky left off. The LDPR was now the second-biggest political party in the entire country — just behind Vadim’s own Russian Unity Party — and without question the most dangerous. Avowed Fascists, they hated the U.S. They hated Jews. They vowed to rebuild Mother Russia, restore her glory, and bring back the czar. And now they were center stage.
Bennett turned up the sound to find the voice of a young British reporter translating Ilyushkin’s speech.
“We have all witnessed yet another act of American barbarism — will it ever end?” bellowed Ilyushkin. “In the 1980s, the Americans shot down an unarmed Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf. In the 1990s, they bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan. And the Chinese Embassy in Kosovo. Then came Afghanistan and Iraq. And now, because Putin and Vadim said nothing, did nothing — because we have allowed the arrogance of the Americans to go unchecked — it has come to this.
“Innocent Russians are dead. Women and children are dead. The Americans refuse even to apologize. The American president won’t even pick up the phone and say he is sorry, or offer compensation to our grieving families. Will we do nothing?”
“NO!” the crowd roared.
“Will we bow before American masters and cower like whipped dogs?”
“NO!” the crowd roared again.
“Will we allow Russian weakness to invite more aggression, or let the Jews who run America and Israel and the world banking system suck the lifeblood out of our economy and leave Russian workers without jobs, without homes, without food?”
“Nyet, nyet, nyet, nyet,” came the fervent chants.
Bennett didn’t need to wait for that translation.
“One million wealthy, while 150 million are in chains. This is what Putin and Vadim have brought you. Weakness. Shame. Poverty. Corruption. I know you are sick of it. You are frightened. You are angry. They call me an extremist. That is OK. If that is what we need to prevent the Americans and the Jews from stealing our country, then let us be extreme. We have tried it their way,” Ilyuskhin continued, his arms raised to the sky. “Now I ask you: give me a chance. That is all I ask. Can I do worse than they have? Can you honestly believe that I would do worse than Yeltsin, Putin, and Vadim? I love this country, as you do. I love Russia more than anything on earth. And when I am done, she will be great again. I promise you that. When I am done, Mother Russia will live again. She will be respected, and she will be feared.”
The crowd erupted, surging toward the platform where Ilyuskhin paced like a man possessed. Sky News now had wide shots of Red Square and the adjoining streets.