Leadership Quote by Vladimir Zhirinovsky

A promise like "We'll limit in all ways the work of religious faiths which are foreign to us" isn’t theology; it’s border policy disguised as moral hygiene. Zhirinovsky’s genius as a political provocateur was his knack for turning cultural anxiety into an actionable verb: limit. Not debate, not regulate, not “ensure security,” but an all-encompassing squeeze that implies the state has both the right and the practical means to police belief.

The phrase “foreign to us” does the real work. It’s elastic enough to mean non-Russian, non-Orthodox, non-traditional, non-loyal. It converts pluralism into an invasion story, where faiths are framed less as communities than as hostile infrastructure. That vagueness is a feature: it invites listeners to project their own fears onto the target, then rewards them with the comfort of a unified “we.”

Context matters. In post-Soviet Russia, religion re-entered public life not just as spirituality but as identity scaffolding. The state’s growing partnership with the Russian Orthodox Church made “traditional” faith a proxy for nationhood, while “nontraditional” groups could be painted as cults, Western influence, or Islamist threat. Zhirinovsky, a nationalist showman with an authoritarian palate, is signaling that freedom of conscience is conditional: tolerated when it flatters the national story, suspect when it complicates it.

The intent is less about managing religion than managing belonging. It’s a line designed to normalize discrimination by wrapping it in the language of collective self-defense.