Very briefly before we go into Part II of the 1994 Zundel Trip to Russia:
Mark Weber has been qualified, I understand, to give at least partial expert testimony for the defense. I don't have full details yet, but this is promising. Few people are a walking encyclopedias as IHR's Mark Weber is. I'll let you know as soon as I know more.
Here now is Part II of the Zundel Report from Russia:
Obstacles in Political Work
Will Zhirinovsky one day be president of Russia? I don't know. For one thing, his life is in constant danger. He is surrounded by security guards. It costs just $20 to get a man killed in Moscow. If you are a politician with bodyguards, it can cost $500. If you are really well guarded, like a banker or a well-to-do business man, it will cost $800. There are more guards employed by Russia's many private security firms than therefore soldiers in the entire US Army.
Zhirinovsky explained to me that his party organization, in this vast country of Russia, is overstretched, understaffed and under-financed. Political organizers face all kinds of problems that we in the West can hardly relate to. Photocopiers, for example, are hardly known in Russia outside the major cities. Also, they don't have private print shops. If someone needs handbills for a political meeting, they have to turn to the former state and Communist Party-run print shops, which printed local newspapers, books, and so forth. Nearly everyone I spoke with asked for help. Above all, they asked for printing and duplicating equipment.
So the problems Russians face in building a democratic, self-governing society seem almost insurmountable. Still, Zhirinovsky and his party are better off than most because at least his office is computerized, with photocopiers and fax machines, and he has a very capable, multilingual staff.
I interviewed most of Zhirinovsky's important advisors. One is a former diplomat with the United Nations who spoke beautiful, accentless English. For eight years he was president of the Soviet United Nations Association.
Zhirinovsky's second in command is a retired Red Army general staff officer, a 17-year veteran named Kamerov. He is a well-mannered, handsome man who struck me as very capable and very efficient. (I spoke with him through an interpreter, because he doesn't speak any English. Incidentally, in all the nationalist political groups I visited, I encountered what seemed like an uncanny Red Army presence, nearly always former high-ranking officers.)
I also met and spoke with one of Zhirinovsky's foreign policy advisors. This man, who looks like Russia's last emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, had been a magazine publisher. In his magazine he made some rather nasty remarks about Zhirinovsky supposedly being Jewish. He also published a cartoon depicting Jews as hairy-legged, hairy-tailed rats. (Russians seem to like their anti-Semitism raw.) Well, a Jewish prosecutor in Moscow who understandably didn't like this derogatory, stereotypical depiction of Jews, charged the publisher under the equivalent of Canada's "hate laws," and had him locked up. He spent four months in jail, where he suffered two heart attacks and was punched around a bit.
Well, the one man who publicly came to his defense, organizing demonstrations outside of the jail, was none other than Vladimir Zhirinovsky. He was also the only one to show up in the police court to defend him. Zhirinovsky and his supporters demanded freedom for this Russian dissident writer/publisher to state his mind, even though what he had done was distasteful. Zhirinovsky said he wanted freedom in Russia, that this was the new Russia, and so on.
So I asked this man who was, after all, freed from jail thanks to Zhirinovsky, "but you criticized him. How come you're now here?" He replied: "I couldn't find a job after coming out of jail, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky hired me, even knowing all those things about me." And he added, plaintively: "I thought that was a very Christian act and a very Christian spirit." That was his answer to my question: "Is Zhirinovsky a Jew or a half-Jew?"
Even though I give people the benefit of the doubt, I think that if I had been in Zhirinovsky's position, I would have thought twice before hiring a man like that. I know it's easy to be cynical about something like this, but I think that this was an act of principle. Zhirinovsky is a man who sincerely believes in human rights and who, therefore, fought for human rights. As a human rights activist myself, and as someone whose own human rights have been denied many times, I say, for the time being anyway: I'm with Zhirinovsky on this one.
I was surprised to learn that Zhirinovsky didn't have much "outreach" to the Russian masses. He has the outer trappings of a western politician, but apparently he has not reached out to the masses on a grass-roots level. Perhaps no one has advised him yet how populist political campaigning works on the ground.
Zhirinovsky seems to be trying to build a following from the top, largely through bluster and propaganda. Maybe it's just that, as he says, he doesn't have the means. As he puts it: 'We have no middle class. We have no rich people, except Communist Party apparatchiks and gangsters. Where do I get financial support from? The little people, who have little to give?"
It was really something to see the support he gets from the "little people." Volga fishermen would come in the door, shyly clutching some worn-out old rubles, getting their names written in the party registration book, getting their party card, and so on.
It was very moving to be present in Russia to witness a few of these first, infant steps in such an obviously painstaking process of building a democratic society. I was very humbled and proud to be there at such a moment.
Tomorrow: Part III of A Zundel Trip to Russia