Leadership Quote by Vladimir Zhirinovsky

It lands like a threat dressed up as certainty: not “we should,” but “we’ll surely,” the diction of inevitability that authoritarians love because it converts a political wish into a forecast. Zhirinovsky’s line is less a policy proposal than a flex of power - a promise that politics can overrule belief itself. The bluntness is the point: it’s meant to sound impossible, therefore frightening, therefore impressive to an audience primed to admire ruthlessness.

The phrasing is revealingly clumsy, too. “Western Christian and eastern religions, and also Islam” isn’t theological precision; it’s a geographic sorting of identities into manageable blocs. Religion here functions as shorthand for competing loyalties: transnational networks, moral authorities, and communities that don’t take orders from the state. Zhirinovsky’s longstanding brand was maximalist nationalism delivered as spectacle, and this is that formula applied to faith - sweeping, undeliverable, and rhetorically useful because it signals he’s willing to go further than the “soft” establishment.

Context matters: post-Soviet politics never fully resolved the Soviet legacy of controlling religion, even as the Russian state later partnered with the Orthodox Church as a pillar of identity. Zhirinovsky weaponizes that tension. By threatening all religions at once, he presents himself as the only true sovereign: above clerics, above scripture, above the West-East civilizational frame he name-checks. The subtext is simple and chilling: plural sources of meaning are a national security problem, and he’s the man prepared to extinguish them.