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With or without KGB's help, the L.D.P. quickly proved it could stand on its own. Last December the party shocked Yeltsin's reformers by taking 64 seats in the parliamentary elections. Since then, Zhirinovsky has cemented his control over the organization. In April, at the L.D.P.'s Fifth Party Congress, the 340 Deputies unanimously voted to give him absolute power. They also extended his tenure as party chairman until the year 2004 and nominated him as their candidate in the country's next presidential elections. Evidence of a Zhirinovsky personality cult cropped up at the congress. A placard proclaimed him THE ONLY HOPE OF DECEIVED AND HUMILIATED PEOPLES. Copies of the party newspapers on sale offered readers a palm print of the chairman's right hand.
The speed with which Zhirinovsky has consolidated power within the L.D.P. has left many Russians wondering whether he would, if he became President, dispose of the country's democratic institutions just as quickly. As early as ! 1991 he proclaimed, "I say it quite plainly -- when I come to power, there will be a dictatorship." Such high-handedness is already causing problems among his supporters. In March, four Deputies from the L.D.P.'s 64-member parliamentary bloc pulled out. Among them was Victor Kobelev, once second to Zhirinovsky in the party hierarchy. A fifth dissident was later expelled from the party and, just last month, six more members broke ranks to create their own faction.
Zhirinovsky's momentum, moreover, may already be wearing thin. "He is still functioning on the level of the street-corner rallies we were involved in before the election victory," says Kobelev. "This kind of streetwise showing-off is inappropriate in the Duma." In April an argument in parliament between Zhirinovsky and dissident L.D.P. Deputy Vladimir Borzhyuk degenerated into fisticuffs. At one point, Zhirinovsky was seen actually banging Borzhyuk's head against the wall. Entertained as they now are by such debauched antics, the Russian public could eventually grow tired of his wild style and write him off as yet another samozvanets, or "pretender Czar," who failed to deliver on promises.
Still, the fact remains that when Zhirinovsky talks to ordinary Russians, they listen. His brazen but canny style was on fine display when TIME accompanied him on a visit recently to Shchelkovo, the rural industrial center 25 miles northeast of Moscow that he represents in parliament.
First stop for the L.D.P. convoy was the Shchelkovo District Administrative Office, located on a central square dominated by a huge statue of Lenin. With a pack of a dozen journalists at his heels, he paraded into the office of Nikolai Pashin, the head of the local administration. Wiping his face with his hands, tweaking his nose and interrupting his host several times to give orders to his aides, he listened as Pashin trotted out a list of ills afflicting the community. No problem was so large that Zhirinovsky wasn't ready with an instant solution. The district's atrocious road? "I'll see Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and slip these documents about the road to him." The lack of funds for new projects? "Everything is manageable." Wrangles over bureaucratic red tape? "I'll handle it all."