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"From the moment of my birth, I have always walked alone," writes Zhirinovsky. "I grew up in a situation where there was no kind of warmth from anybody -- not from relatives or from friends and teachers. I lived the greater part of my life without almost a single happy day . . . It seems to have been my fate that I never experienced real love or friendship."
These passages come from Zhirinovsky's autobiography, The Last Thrust to the South, a book that James Billington, U.S. Librarian of Congress, calls "in some respects psychologically an even more unstable work than Mein Kampf." In it, Zhirinovsky recounts in extravagant detail the injustices of an emotionally and economically deprived childhood in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan.
A visit to Alma-Ata and conversations with several of those who knew him as a boy reveal a quite different picture. He writes, for example, of living in squalor with his mother in a filthy communal apartment where he had to endure the indignities of a communal toilet ("it smelled bad"). Yet the two-story house was, at the time, one of the best in the city, constructed during the 1930s for elite Russian workers. "Zhirinovsky complains there was no hot water, but it was a rare house in Alma-Ata that had hot water then," recalls Vladimir Rerikh, a documentary-film director who was also born and raised in Alma-Ata. "His house actually had its own sewerage and toilet facilities, which was even more of a rarity than hot water in those days."
Despite his claim of having had "almost no education," the school where Zhirinovsky spent 11 years was actually the most prestigious institution of its kind in Alma- Ata. His fellow students came from the families of top party functionaries and KGB officers. Indeed, as classmate Yuri Anoshin explains, the school, following a popular practice of factories and government offices at the time, was "adopted" by the local KGB administration. This enabled Zhirinovsky and his peers to enjoy such rare amenities as flowers, potted palm trees, upholstered armchairs and pet canaries.
The future L.D.P. leader was not always popular among his classmates. One of them, Nikolai Salatov, recalls a student-court session in which two younger pupils were put on trial for stealing car parts from an automobile repair shop. Zhirinovsky acted as prosecutor, and even though such pilfering was common, he turned the proceedings into a show trial, delivering a shrill speech about the need to punish the boys. Enraged, his peers waited until after class and beat the tar out of him.
"We considered him such a small fry, we didn't think he was fit for wiping our feet on," recalls Dyusenbek Nakipov, who grew up in the same neighborhood. "We sent him to buy cigarettes, and he would ask, 'May I join you guys?' The usual answer was, 'Get the fout of here,' or just a kick in the butt."