His father, Volf Isaakovich Eidelshtein, was a Ukrainian Jew from Kostopil in western Ukraine, and his mother, Alexandra Pavlovna (née Makarova), was an ethnic Russian from Mordovia.

His paternal grandfather was a wealthy industrialist in Kostopil,[10] who owned the largest sawmill in present-day Ukraine and was head of the local Jewish community.

Abandoning the family, Zhirinovsky's father, Volf Eidelshtein, immigrated to Israel in 1949 (together with his new wife Bella and his brother), where he worked as an agronomist in Tel Aviv.

Zhirinovsky's father was a member of the right-wing nationalist Herut party in Israel, and died in 1983 when he was run over by a bus near Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv.

[17][18] Yakovlev wrote in his memoirs that KGB director Vladimir Kryuchkov presented the project of the puppet LDPSU party at a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev and informed him about the selection of the LDPR leader.

Eduard Limonov of the National-Bolshevik Party introduced the two men to each other and the FN later "provided logistical support [to the LDPR], including computers and fax machines".

On 6 February 2012, Zhirinovsky released a 30-second election video on the Internet that featured him on a sleigh harnessed to a black donkey representing the country.

[35] Zhirinovsky was sanctioned by the UK government on 12 September 2014 in relation to actively supporting the use of Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

"[41] On 23 August 2014, Zhirinovsky said Russia should abolish political parties, instead favouring an autocratic system in which the leader would be chosen by the "five to six thousand wisest people" in the country.

"[10] In the early 1990s, Zhirinovsky proposed setting up large fans on the Russian border to blow airborne radioactive waste into the Baltic states.

[63] Also in the 1990s, Zhirinovsky threatened to remove restrictions on arms sales to Iran and proposed selling the disputed Kuril Islands to Japan for US$50 billion.

[57] In 2008, during the resulting political row between the United Kingdom and Russia, he suggested dropping nuclear bombs over the Atlantic Ocean in an effort to flood Britain.

[57] In a 2002 video,[67] a drunken Zhirinovsky, hugging two young men, threatened George W. Bush using offensive language against a war in Iraq, promised him a cell in the Butyrka pre-detention facility, and suggested to strike on Tbilisi, or some other targets instead in coalition with Russia.

He called the United States a "flea market" filled with "cocksuckers, jerkers, and faggots", and claimed that Russian scientists were able to change the gravitational field of the Earth and sink the entire country and elect a President in the US loyal to Russia.

"[68] Zhirinovsky said he dreamt of the day "when Russian soldiers can wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and switch to year-round summer uniforms"[69] following Russia's conquest of Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey and occupation of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean.

After Aslan Abashidze was ousted from his position as leader of Ajara, an autonomous Georgian region power, in 2004, Zhirinovsky worried that similar revolutions would occur in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

In a high-profile incident in August 2004, he departed on a campaign to promote a tourist season in Abkhazia aboard a cruise ship which was briefly intercepted by a Georgian coast guard vessel.

[64] In 2005, Kazakhstan declared Zhirinovsky persona non grata on the territory of his historical homeland, due to his controversial speech about the change of the Russia-Kazakhstan border, in which he questioned the Kazakhs' place in history.

"[76][77] Sergei Abeltsev, Zhirinovsky's former bodyguard and State Duma member from the LDPR, added: "The deserved punishment reached the traitor.

[80] After war broke out between Russia and Georgia in 2008, Zhirinovsky argued in favour of Russian recognition of Abkhazian and South Ossetian independence.

[82] Writing about Marine Le Pen, Zhirinovsky in 2011 said that she could out do her father because "Instead of saying that Islam is terrorism, she simply insists that France is a secular nation that will not stand for hundreds of thousands of Muslims practicing their religious traditions.

"[85] At the same time, he derided the Russian Academy of Sciences for anarchism and having scientists so old that their brains and reproductive organs no longer worked, telling the "elders" to go home and collect their pensions.

[86] On 4 April 2014, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, McDonald's fast-food restaurant franchises in Russia were unable to continue operating after being cut off by their Ukrainian franchisor.

[93] In November 2015, after a Turkish F-16 fighter shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M jet near the Syria–Turkey border, Zhirinovsky said in a speech to the Duma that Russia must detonate a nuclear bomb on the Bosphorus to create a 10-meter-high tsunami wave to wipe out at least 9 million Istanbul residents.

[94][95] In August 2016, Zhirinovsky prayed for the Republican U.S. presidential election nominee, Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton, whom he considered dangerous, in order to take his party's ideology global.

"[99] In a speech on 27 December 2021, Zhirinovsky appeared to almost predict the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine of 24 February 2022, stating: "We shouldn't saber rattle, [we] need to say: let's comply [with the conditions demanded by Russia], and if you refuse , then we can apply another agenda .

The then-head of the Rodina faction, Dmitry Rogozin, demanded that Zhirinovsky be deprived of his post as vice-speaker of the State Duma and that a criminal case be opened against him, and Savelyev filed a statement with the prosecutor's office.

[105] During the 2008 televised presidential debate, Zhirinovsky threatened Nikolai Gotsa, representative of Democratic Party of Russia candidate Andrei Bogdanov, with violence, saying he was going to "smash his head" and ordering his bodyguard to "shoot that bastard over there in the corridor".

[106] At an April 2014 press conference in the Duma, Zhirinovsky made violent verbal threats against Stella Dubovitskaya, a pregnant Rossiya Segodnya journalist, who asked him about possible sanctions against Ukraine in the wake of Russia's Crimean annexation.

[126][127] In a statement after Zhirinovsky died, president Vladimir Putin said he "always defended his patriotic position and Russia's interests before any audience and in the fiercest of debates".