On Tuesday the leader of LDPR came to a meeting with the top person in the country, being an ordinary leader of a Duma’s faction, and left the presidential office in a capacity of the main expert for corruption. It has been many to receive an offer to work for the head of state, but Vladimir Zhirinovsky seemed to be perplexed with such an unexpected turn: he had wanted to bring to the Kremlin his usual sack with the votes of his electors, and the master asked him to take personal part in struggle with corruption.   

The shorthand record of the “lawyer’s son” meeting with the candidate of science, published on the official Kremlin’s Web site, proves the lack of common conceptual language. Zhirinovsky only hints at his readiness to sift through a mass of documents with the purpose of checking it for “corruptionability”, while the President speaks about “permissiveness of this or that formulation”. While Zhirinovsky speaks about laws of direct action, Medvedev speaks about the electronic circulation of documents. Then Vladimir Volfovich remarks in a philosophical way that then “there would be no circulation of money” and …there the quotation stops. The picture looks like Dmitry Medvedev felt uncomfortable talking with this person in a highbrow way. 

Really, the faction of liberal democrats is a “very material girl”. It’s enough just having a glimpse at the party’s history to get convinced that the “LDPR’s gold” will be converted into power. The positions in the Duma’s hierarchy – from half-forgotten Committee for Labor and Social Issues, headed by Sergei Kalashnikov in the first convocation, to the vice speaker post by Zhirinovsky himself – have always been turned into money successfully. Anyway, Saddam Hussein used to receive in Baghdad not a like-minded person in terms of “socialist revival” (such is the translation of “Baas”, Hussein’s party), but a status-holding person from the Russian parliament. Among the ruins of the overthrown regime the Americans found the documents proving that the generosity of our domestic “defender” might have had equivalent expressed in barrels of oil and dollars.        

And what about written acknowledgement by ex-MP Alexei Mitrofanov in 2004? That paper promised that before 1st of May (a few months after parliamentary elections) he would have offered material assistance to LDPR in the size of 2 million euros. It appears that such things are promised usually for a passing seat in a party ticket. Good is usually done silently and in advance, and not as paying off a debt.

Or take a “prominent” and looking like a bodyguard Sergei Abeltsev, who in 2005 was involved in a case of extortion of 600,000 euros through his assistant Valery Belozyor from the chair of Epinbank – no one was even surprised with him being in that criminal context.      

One may recall a celebrated case of hundreds of apartments and cars in the regions registered to Zhirinovsky’s name. It turned out then that that way suited him better when controlling the party’s property. One may also look back at 1999 where LDPR was withdrawn with its brand, by the central elective commission, and replaced with a list of Vladimir Zhirinovsky under the name “Zhirinovsky’s bloc”, where people with dubious reputation were just thrown out. And in the party’s failing ticket the most striking authority was held by a famous criminal authority Anatoly Bykov. Remembering all that, it’s clear that it is possible to invest the political capital of the faction into struggle with corruption, but this only can be done exactly on the expert level, as they know perfectly how it gets done.