That was how Sergey Kiriyenko, who oversees the Kremlin’s domestic policy team, reassured the crowd at the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia’s convention on December 13, 2024. In his address, Kiriyenko called the party “one of [Russia’s] foundational state-patriotic forces” and emphasized that it secured the second-highest number of seats in last year’s regional elections, trailing only United Russia.

In a speech that same day, LDPR chairman Leonid Slutsky repeatedly referred to the party’s late founder, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, describing the notoriously pugnacious figure as “an ordinary Russian man” who fought for his fellow citizens. (Slutsky didn’t mention that Zhirinovsky was born into a Jewish family with the surname Eidelstein.) “He spoke to people in a language they understood, never cared about being liked, and didn’t pander or grovel,” Slutsky continued, calling LDPR’s founder a “national treasure of Russia.” Amid all this praise for his predecessor, Slutsky also claimed that Zhirinovsky had always rejected the idea that LDPR was a one-man show.

A new leader

The right-wing, misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has been without its founder for more than three years now. Vladimir Zhirinovsky died in April 2022, and polling data published by the Kremlin-linked sociological institutes All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) and Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) show that his death actually had a positive effect on the party’s popularity: LDPR’s candidates are now (slightly) outperforming candidates from the Communist Party (KPRF).

While Zhirinovsky was alive, his party almost never placed second in national politics, and the same was true for its performance in regional elections. The current success is paradoxical: Aside from its founder, the party has had neither prominent figures nor a clear ideology that appealed to voters. LDPR campaigns were built entirely around Zhirinovsky’s theatrics, and his name always led the party's ballot lists, even in local municipal elections.

Liberal Democrats owe their party’s survival and recent electoral good fortune to the Kremlin’s support and the continued use of Zhirinovsky’s image in campaign materials. The Putin administration had time to prepare for this transition: Zhirinovsky’s death became an imminent concern in early February 2022 when he was hospitalized with COVID-19 and placed in a medically induced coma a few days later. With LDPR’s irreplaceable leader on life support, officials started looking for a successor. 

The potential candidates ranged from TV host and propagandist Vladimir Solovyov to LDPR member Mikhail Degtyarev, then the governor of the Khabarovsk region and now Russia’s minister of sports. However, Kremlin officials ultimately settled on Leonid Slutsky, the head of the State Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee. (Several journalists who reported on Russia’s parliament have accused Slutsky of repeated sexual harassment.)

Background

The Duma isn't safe Meduza publishes a leaked transcript from the Ethics Committee inquiry that exonerated a lawmaker accused of serial sexual harassment

7 years ago

Background

The Duma isn't safe Meduza publishes a leaked transcript from the Ethics Committee inquiry that exonerated a lawmaker accused of serial sexual harassment

7 years ago

Slutsky wasn’t an obvious choice: He hadn’t been an especially visible member of the party, and he didn’t belong to Zhirinovsky’s inner circle, among whom there were other potential successors (at one point, this included Zhirinovsky’s own son, Igor Lebedev, but he fell out of favor in 2021, was barred from running for the Duma, and changed his name). Zhirinovsky had also led several young and ambitious figures to believe they might fill his shoes one day — figures like Yaroslav Nilov, the head of the State Duma’s Labor and Social Policy Committee; Alexey Ostrovsky, the former governor of Smolensk; and the aforementioned Mikhail Degtyarev.

“He’s capable of managing operations. Charisma isn’t his strength, but that’s not a liability in the current climate. What counts is that many [of the bureaucrats and businessmen] ‘get’ him. He won’t go against the presidential administration. He’s easy to work with,” a source close to the Kremlin told Meduza. Another source with similar connections pointed out that Putin at least knew Slutsky as the chair of a key State Duma committee. In other words, he wasn’t just “some guy off the street.” “As for the rest of LDPR’s leadership,” the source explained, “the president probably doesn’t even know their names.”

At the time, the Kremlin was skeptical about the party’s future — some officials even assumed that LDPR would gradually end up in the political “scrap heap.” “Zhirinovsky carried every party list — even in municipal elections, not to mention regional parliaments. Without its leader, there was nothing,” one source in the presidential administration told Meduza, though the same source also said LDPR might have a future if it agreed to “exist on the Kremlin’s terms.” Trading what remained of the party’s autonomy for the Putin administration’s support and administrative backing in the regions was a perfectly acceptable arrangement for Leonid Slutsky. On May 27, LDPR’s congress elected him the party’s chairman.

The Kremlin understood that this appointment had weaknesses. First, the new chairman had no real experience in political battles. Second, LDPR — having lost Zhirinovsky — needed an image overhaul. To that end, the administration recommended trusted political consultants to Slutsky.

The first to advise the Liberal Democrats was Yevgeny Minchenko. But according to two sources close to the Putin administration, he lasted only a few months. “Slutsky quickly started complaining about Zhenya [to the Kremlin], saying he was full of himself, bossy, and always trying to make him do things,” one consultant close to the Kremlin told Meduza. Minchenko was replaced by Alexey Chadayev and Sergey Malakhov, who had helped create the New People party in 2020 and led its early campaigns. According to a Kremlin-linked strategist, the thinking went: “These guys created a party from scratch — they should be able to overhaul a different one.” But Slutsky didn’t click with them either.

In the spring of 2023, the Kremlin’s domestic policy team found new consultants for Leonid Slutsky and his party. Election planning fell to Ilya Gambashidze — a political strategist who worked on various regional elections and served as an aide to United Russia member Pyotr Tolstoy (who was later sanctioned by the West for running a disinformation network). Public messaging was entrusted to Lev Pavlyuchkov — another strategist who served as deputy head of South Ossetia’s self-declared government and ran campaigns in regional elections across Russia. 

A source close to LDPR’s leadership told Meduza that Pavlyuchkov was the one who came up with the name for the party’s new “Shoulder to Shoulder” movement and the talking points for Slutsky’s manifesto on “anti-fascism.” In that text, he claimed that “deep fascism” was invented by the Anglo-Saxons after World War I to combat Russia. The manifesto also claimed that the U.S. and the U.K. facilitated Hitler’s rise to power and sought to pit Germany against the USSR. Meanwhile, it was Gambashidze’s idea to create a “neuro-Zhirinovsky” — a primitive AI model that displays an Oz-like image of Zhirinovsky and responds to basic questions using his mannerisms. In the end, LDPR’s new leadership parted ways with these two strategists, as well.

“A parade of technologists trying to breathe in new life… What better proof could there be of a living thing — once centered on its brilliant creator — transformed into an artificial construct?” a regional party deputy told Meduza, speaking with regret.

A senior official in LDPR’s national leadership blamed the conflict with the political consultants on what he described as Slutsky’s “difficult character, to put it mildly.” The second reason, he added, was pressure from Maria Voropaeva, who initially worked as an aide to Slutsky before becoming the party’s first deputy head in January 2025.

“She likes to work with her own people. In the fall [of 2023], the party’s chief strategist became David Gubar, a competent consultant from Russia’s Far East who had worked with United Russia. But he’s a field operative at the regional level, not a federal-level player with a big team, [so his qualifications aren’t quite suited for working with the national leadership of a major party],” said a source close to the presidential administration, speaking to Meduza in February last year.

One consultant who had tried to work with LDPR described the party’s internal dynamics as follows: “A good specialist wants decent pay. And Masha, as the go-between with Slutsky, wants her cut. Naturally, the better the expert, the smaller [her] slice.”

The schism and the schismatics

In 2023, Slutsky and the Kremlin’s domestic policy team aligned around the shared objective of LDPR’s leader finishing second in the upcoming presidential election. By boosting Slutsky, the administration hoped to pressure the Communists into being more compliant. Despite KPRF’s support for the war in Ukraine, disagreements with the Kremlin persisted. (For example, the Communists managed to defend Khakassia Governor Valentin Konovalov against Moscow’s attempt to replace him.) Two years earlier, during the 2021 State Duma elections, KPRF had nominated several prominent politicians, including the regional figures Vyacheslav Markhayev, Valery Rashkin, and Sergey Levchenko (as well as former presidential candidate Pavel Grudinin, whose candidacy the Central Election Commission later revoked). The Kremlin was not eager to see such personalities in parliament.

To reinforce the campaign to lift Slutsky to second place in March 2024, a close associate of Sergey Kiriyenko joined LDPR’s election team: political consultant and Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration Vice-Rector Andrey Polosin. Even then, however, LDPR members and Kremlin officials continued to doubt Slutsky’s chances at the ballot box, aware that his polling numbers remained abysmal. In the end, Slutsky finished last among the registered candidates, losing not only to Communist candidate Nikolai Kharitonov but also to Vladislav Davankov of the New People party.

At the same time, a schism opened within LDPR. The “Old Guard” — State Duma committee chairs Yaroslav Nilov and Alexey Didenko, along with Mikhail Degtyarev, then the governor of Khabarovsk Krai — started losing their patience with the Kremlin’s handpicked party chairman.

LDPR’s Old Guard tried communicating its reservations to the Putin administration. For example, they criticized Slutsky for inviting Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin to a party gathering in early 2023. The mercenary leader declined the invitation, saying he’d “had extensive prior dealings” with Slutsky — “none of which left a favorable impression.” (It’s unclear what these past interactions were.) As damage control, LDPR initially claimed it wasn’t encouraging Prigozhin to attend. Later, Slutsky denied having invited him at all. In the end, the scandal over Prigozhin’s invitation completely overshadowed the event itself.

In February 2023, Slutsky angered LDPR’s Old Guard again when he called on all parliamentary parties to “unite.” “As long as the special military operation [the invasion of Ukraine] is ongoing, there can be only one party for all of us — the party of victory,” Slutsky argued. “What he was implying was that the parties — including LDPR — are no longer needed. Quite the leader, proposing to abolish his own party,” one of Slutsky’s critics with ties to LDPR’s leadership told Meduza. Grievances about such rhetoric were what critics within the party tried to convey to the Kremlin.

In response, Slutsky threatened behind the scenes at party events to strip his opponents of their parliamentary seats. Former deputy Vasily Vlasov spoke about this openly, telling journalists that Slutsky forced him out of the Duma because he asked too many “uncomfortable questions.” In addition to Vlasov, two more LDPR deputies also lost their Duma seats, though Slutsky’s main opponents — Nilov and Didenko — held on to their place in parliament. Still, Slutsky succeeded in removing them from the party’s supreme council, where he later installed Maria Voropaeva, his top aide.

According to a source close to LDPR’s leadership, Leonid Slutsky now effectively controls the party’s machinery and core finances, while his opponents have “suffered a bureaucratic defeat.” The source described the revamped LDPR as a “joint project of Slutsky, Voropaeva, and the presidential administration’s domestic policy team.”

However, another source with ties to the Kremlin insisted that Slutsky’s rivals within the party still wield some influence: “Yarik [Nilov] and Lyosha [Didenko] may not be on the council anymore, but they’re still committee chairs. They have their own relationships with [State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav] Volodin and their own access to the [Kremlin’s] domestic policy team. If the administration says to keep them as committee heads, Slutsky won’t have a choice.”

A dead man’s tale

The Kremlin’s own plans for LDPR involve its replacing KPRF as Russia’s second most popular political party. According to Meduza’s source close to the presidential administration, Putin’s domestic policy team sees the Communists as too difficult to manage “with their own ideology, their own loyalists, and the potential to slip out of control.”

Keeping Slutsky in line has proved easy, a source close to LDPR’s leadership explained to Meduza. In fact, polls by FOM and VTsIOM show that LDPR ranks second in popularity after United Russia. “The administration bought Slutsky off with polling data — that’s how they keep him loyal in domestic politics and make him manageable as a chairman. The subtext is clear: ‘This is the number two party, and it’s yours to manage.’ It’s possible to engineer such a result [to satisfy Slutsky’s ego],” said Meduza’s source. It was in this context that Sergey Kiriyenko attended LDPR’s congress last December and congratulated the party on winning the second most seats across Russia.

Even from the grave, Zhirinovsky’s image still helps maintain the party’s ratings. Last year, an official tasked by the Kremlin with lifting LDPR into second place in a regional parliament described his methods to Meduza as follows: “If nobody shows up to vote, there’s nothing to fake — you can’t pull numbers from thin air. So we started flooding social media with Zhirinovsky’s various divinations, viral videos of him, and tags like ‘LDPR is Zhirinovsky’s party.’ And the tactic worked.”

Political consultant Andrey Polosin also helped craft a campaign slogan for Slutsky that invoked LDPR’s founder: “Zhirinovsky’s mission lives on.” At the party’s most recent congress, Zhirinovsky’s image was omnipresent: photos and videos appeared on screens, and cardboard cutouts stood in the lobby. A source close to LDPR’s leadership told Meduza that the party relied especially on Zhirinovsky’s many “prophecies,” which have become the backbone of LDPR’s campaigning. “Ole Zhirinovsky is like The Simpsons — you can find a prophecy from him for any situation,” the source explained.

A political consultant working with the Kremlin told Meduza that he believes LDPR can make it into the next State Duma and even take second place — “if the president’s domestic policy team wants it.” Still, he says it’s only a matter of time before LDPR faces a crisis: “It’s a strong brand in its own right. Thanks to Zhirinovsky, it lasted longer than expected — and will keep going for a while on inertia alone. But that momentum won’t last. The 2026 campaign will make it clear — this isn’t the same LDPR anymore. They’ll end up like today’s Just Russia party.”

Three Meduza sources — two consultants close to the presidential administration and one LDPR insider — said they believe Leonid Slutsky will remain in charge of the party, despite his poor performance in the presidential election, and will likely lead LDPR’s list in the 2026 Duma elections. “Slutsky isn’t holding on because of any achievements or because he’s seen as deserving,” said the source close to LDPR’s leadership. “It’s just that no one inside the party is in a position to replace him. Yarik Nilov is a bureaucrat and an apparatchik — not a leader. That’s how Zhirinovsky deliberately built the party. Maybe they’ll add some outsiders to the lists — people who could eventually take over the party — but for now, there’s no one.”

The party needs recognizable figures and individuals engaged in active work that’s visible to voters. According to Meduza’s sources, possible candidates include former Party of Business leader and Rostselmash agricultural machinery mogul Konstantin Babkin and singer Grigory Leps, both of whom joined the party in late 2024. However, Meduza’s source stressed that talk of “replacing Slutsky with Babkin — let alone Leps — is absurd. One puts up financial support and gets a seat, while the other offers his public profile.”

A political consultant who works with the Kremlin told Meduza that Slutsky constantly projects “his insecurity and weakness” in public. He pointed out that even Slutsky’s tiniest gesture prompts “a wave of Telegram posts praising how cool and influential he is.” “A truly influential and confident man doesn’t need that kind of PR. It’s a sign of weakness to anyone in the know. And for those who aren’t in the know, Slutsky doesn’t matter anyway,” explained Meduza’s source:

It seems likely that both the party and the Kremlin will continue to rely on the legacy of LDPR’s late founder as a unifying symbol. According to a VTsIOM poll published earlier this month, 95 percent of LDPR’s supporters now say they trust Zhirinovsky. Additionally, his approval rating among Russians nationally has only grown since his death: in April 2022, 60 percent of respondents expressed trust in Zhirinovsky, while this April, that number rose to 66 percent.