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Though Zhirinovsky has always claimed that he rejected the Communist Party out of principle, in fact he applied to join the party organization at his law firm in 1981, but was turned down. "He was terribly offended," recalls Yevgeni Kulichev, Zhirinovsky's old boss. "He started writing signed complaints and anonymous denunciations, and he leveled all sorts of accusations at us." The incident exacerbated the strain between Zhirinovsky and his firm; he eventually left in the wake of allegations that he had accepted an improper gift from a client in the form of a pass to a vacation resort. "We offered him the chance to quit quietly," says Kulichev, "so he did."
His next job, as a legal adviser for the Mir publishing firm, was to serve as the springboard for his political career. In 1987, as Mikhail Gorbachev's tentative experiments with democracy were gathering steam, Zhirinovsky put himself forward as an independent candidate from his publishing company for the city's district Soviet. His promise-anything bluster drew the attention of Communist Party authorities, who were worried by this troublesome nonparty populist. Zhirinovsky was disqualified from the election by party officials and Mir management, who cited a letter from the law firm where he had worked, questioning his ethical and moral qualities.
Nevertheless, the flirtation with politics launched his new career. Zhirinovsky spent much of the next two years in Moscow attending rallies, giving speeches, drafting programs and steeping himself in the heady milieu of the "informal" political movements that were sprouting in the capital. It was during this period that he was spotted by Vladimir Bogachev, founder of a fledgling organization called the Liberal Democratic Party. Impressed by Zhirinovsky's rhetorical flair, Bogachev gave him the largely symbolic post of chairman in March 1990, intending to keep the real levers of power to himself.
It did not work out that way. The party was shocked when its new chairman began expounding an increasingly heated repertoire of hostile themes -- the evils of Western culture, the meddling of foreigners, the conspiracies of Jews. By October, members succeeded in expelling the irksome lawyer from their midst. But Zhirinovsky got his revenge by stealing the organization's name when he registered his own party in April 1991. "I wish I had had an abortion," says Bogachev, "because I was the one who gave birth to Zhirinovsky."
The sudden emergence of the new L.D.P. brought more charges of KGB connections. An official at the Ministry of the Interior, the KGB's longtime rival, insists that "Zhirinovsky was a KGB creature from the very outset . . . Otherwise, there could have been no way to set up his own party when the Communist Party was still in charge." Anatoli Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg, has charged that Zhirinovsky's party was engineered by the KGB and that Zhirinovsky was handpicked by the secret police to head it. Zhirinovsky denounces such theories as slanderous.