‘Nil nisi bonum’, my foot

The full phrase, De mortius nil nisi bonum, is usually translated as “Speak no ill of the dead”, a commandment that has always struck me as odd.

The parallel phrase, De mortius aut bene, aut nihil (“Of the dead, either well or nothing”) is odder still – especially when the dead in question are wicked public figures who have left their footprint on history.

Saying either nice things or nothing about them means falsifying history, either by omission or by commission. Mercifully, commentators tend to ignore this injunction – as shall I, when writing about Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has died at age 75.

Our papers are full of obituaries written by people who aren’t guided by the two Latin phrases either. Their articles correctly identify Zhirinovsky as a fascist, his Liberal Democratic Party as a misnomer, and his personal demeanour as vile and clownish.

Avoiding thereby one falsifying pitfall, they stumble into another, by misreading the role Zhirinovsky so brilliantly played in Russian politics for over 30 years. Above all, they don’t realise that throughout his career Zhirinovsky never uttered a single word he wasn’t ordered to utter by the KGB/FSB, nor has he ever performed a single revolting antic, without a direct order from that sinister organisation.

One can sympathise with the obituarists. It’s hard for good Western people to understand the inner workings of evil regimes, especially those as secretive as Russia.

For example, The Times obituarist thus describes Zhirinovsky’s young years: “He studied at Moscow University where he learnt languages including English, German and Turkish, and then worked in Turkey as a translator.”

Any Russian of a certain age and education would instantly read the signs escaping Western observers. No graduate of Moscow University’s Institute of Eastern Languages could be posted to a ‘capitalist’ country (‘capcountry’ in our jargon), as a translator – especially if his CV was marred by Jewish ancestry.

He could only be posted there as a KGB spy under translator’s cover. And it was for espionage that Zhirinovsky was subsequently expelled from Turkey, which partly explains the particularly venomous hatred he always felt for the Turks and everyone resembling them facially.

“In the early 1970s he did military service in the Caucasus,” continues the obituary. As what, an infantry grunt? In fact, Zhirinovsky served as a political officer, meaning a KGB overseer of army units.

It was his sponsoring organisation that manufactured his political career that started during the chaotic interregnum of the early nineties. The éminence grise of Russian politics at the time, KGB four-star general Filip Bobkov, oversaw the transition of power from the Party to the KGB, and he infiltrated KGB reserve officers into every Russian institution.

Zhirinovsky’s party was one child sired by that underappreciated figure. Its role was to play the official bogeyman, a manifestly evil, fascist organisation deflecting public fury from the real powers that be.

With every seemingly insane pronouncement, every brutish act, every drunken escapade, Zhirinovsky was effectively saying to the people: “This is what you’ll get if you don’t support [the KGB’s chosen figurehead of the moment, be it Gorbachev, Yeltsyn or Putin].”

Yet many Russians wanted to get just that, a strong, faschisoid leader venting their own xenophobia, imperial ambitions, a sense of inferiority, disdain for the basic civilities of life – above all their frustration at what they saw as Russia’s humiliation at the hands of the West.

That’s why Zhirinovsky’s party attracted millions of votes at every election, polling at various times between 10 and 25 per cent of the electorate. His hysterical, hateful, spittle-spattering, vodka-fuelled diatribes tickled the nerve endings of many Russians in a peculiar way, only describable in the terms of social psychology or, in this case, psychiatry.

Little capers, such as brawling in parliament, punching a female deputy, throwing a glass of juice into an opponent’s face, public swearing to the full capacity of the unmatched Russian lexicon, would each be sufficient to end any political career in a civilised country. Yet Zhirinovsky thrived.

I remember watching a home video of his rant about Condoleezza Rice, then US Secretary of State. Zhirinovsky was flanked by two athletic bodyguards, as drunk as he was (if reliable rumours are to be believed, it wasn’t just their professional competence that attracted him).

He was screaming foul invective, calling Miss Rice “a nigger slag” and inviting her to visit Spetsnaz barracks, where she would be “gangbanged until soldierly sperm will be coming out of her ears”. I am sure Miss Rice didn’t take that charming invitation, but Zhirinovsky’s viewers took the hint: nothing was off limits when the West was in the rhetorical crosshairs.

With the advent of Putin, electoral politics lost whatever little meaning they had hitherto had. The FSB was in full control, and only Putin’s sense of operating procedure kept his share of the vote under the 105 per cent customary under Stalin. Hence Zhirinovsky’s role changed.

He began to prime the public for the advent of the policy brewing in the bubbling cauldrons of the Kremlin’s inner sanctum. Outside observers didn’t realise that his new-style rants, although still hysterical and foul, were statements of Putin’s geopolitical aspirations.

Zhirinovsky was saying in public what Putin was at the time saying in private only. Zhirinovsky wasn’t extemporising. He was simply jumping the gun he knew was going to be fired soon.

As ordered, he began to ratchet up his anti-Western invective, making good Western people wince at such crudeness. They failed to realise that Zhirinovsky was enunciating the actual battle plan, which at the time still couldn’t be revealed in a language of realpolitik.

It was all there: Russia must fulfil her historical destiny by claiming what’s rightfully hers. The former Soviet republics, that goes without saying. But also, given half the chance, every erstwhile possession of the Russian Empire, including Poland and Finland.

That was to be followed by what the title of Zhirinovsky’s book identified as The Last Thrust Southwards, the conquest of Turkey and then everything all the way to the Indian Ocean. The West could be scared off with nuclear war, and it’s so decadent and cowardly that it would scare easily.

This is how Zhirinovsky put it in 2015: “One sharp shout from Moscow, and that’s it. Nato would be disbanded in 24 hours because otherwise all Nato capitals would be destroyed. They’d give it a think and say, ‘Fine, we’ll disband Nato to stay alive, to keep having fun…’ The Russian flag must be raised everywhere where the Russian army has ever been.”

Considering that the Russian army had been in such places as Paris and Berlin, the West should have heeded those words as a fair warning. Yet our politicians kept talking about understanding Russia’s hurt and resetting the mechanism of compassionate friendship and mutual cooperation.

They didn’t know the language Zhirinovsky spoke. When he talked about using giant fans to blow radioactive waste into the Baltics, they thought they were dealing with a madman. In fact, that was a metaphorical statement of actual policy, driven by hatred for Russia’s former colonies trying to break free.

Zhirinovsky was merely following orders. He was told to march half a step in front of the propaganda troops, leading the way and shining a floodlight on the pathway of advance. And sure enough, everything he said they repeated after an increasingly shorter delay.

Then Putin himself began to say the same things and in similarly elevated tones. And still the West took such pronouncements for mere bluster. It was all strictly for internal consumption, wrote our commentators. Putin would be crazy to act on his threats, and we know for a fact he is perfectly sane.

Zhirinovsky was consistently dismissed as a ‘clown prince’, a jester to the court of the strong leader we wished we had. That was music to his masters’ ears: their agent had played his part to perfection. The marks had swallowed the bait.

Away from the public eye, Zhirinovsky wasn’t at all the frenzied, half-crazy demagogue we saw on TV screens. A friend of mind, a New York journalist who was Zhirinovsky’s classmate at university, had many meetings with him in Moscow and interviewed him several times.

He told me Zhirinovsky was sensible, humorous and well-behaved in private, a far cry from his public shenanigans. That tallied with many other similar reports I’ve since heard, the last one from a former French ambassador who knew Zhirinovsky professionally. No wonder. Zhirinovsky was a master of KGB tradecraft.

Last December Zhirinovsky predicted the invasion of the Ukraine, and was only two days off in specifying its date. His seemingly insane rants became Russia’s actions – Putin tossed off the mask of a world statesman and unfurled the banner of naked fascist aggression.

The curtain fell; Zhirinovsky’s role was written out of the play. He was no longer needed. So he died, unlamented and – in the West – never properly understood.