Leadership Quote by Vladimir Zhirinovsky

What looks like a cranky throwaway line is actually a neat piece of nationalist engineering. Zhirinovsky’s “We don’t need this religious cosmopolitanism. It’s no good” weaponizes a vague enemy category - “cosmopolitanism” - that’s done hard labor in Russian and Soviet political vocabulary for a century. It doesn’t name a policy problem; it names a contaminant. The phrase invites listeners to feel that something soft, foreign, and meddling has seeped into the national body, and that firmness is the cure.

“Religious cosmopolitanism” is especially sly. It can mean almost anything: interfaith tolerance, minority rights, foreign-funded NGOs, “Western values,” missionary work, even the idea that a believer’s loyalties might stretch beyond the nation-state. By stapling “religious” to “cosmopolitan,” he collapses spiritual pluralism into political disloyalty. The message isn’t just “religion should be traditional”; it’s “only religion that serves the nation is legitimate.”

The blunt tag line - “It’s no good” - is populist shorthand, the kind of anti-argument that signals confidence and demands agreement. No evidence, no nuance, just a moral verdict. That’s the intent: to make complexity feel like decadence and to cast cosmopolitan openness as an elite indulgence ordinary people should reject.

Contextually, it fits Zhirinovsky’s career-long posture: performative outrage as governance-by-mood, where identity panics are framed as common sense. The subtext is a loyalty test: choose the nation’s approved tradition, or be suspected of being someone else’s citizen.