PERSPECTIVES ON A CHANGING RUSSIA : A Window on a Troubled Soul : A preemptive Marshall Plan could save us from having to confront another Hitler in Zhirinovsky’s demagogic ascendancy.

Barely two months after Boris Yeltsin delivered what seemed like a decisive blow against his conservative opponents, a more dangerous challenge to democracy has emerged in the figure of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the champion of Russia’s politics of resentment.

The man who would be Fuhrer promises a new Russia cleansed of Western influence. Like Hitler before him, Zhirinovsky equates the collapse of his country’s former empire with national humiliation.

“Don’t try to turn us into an African country,” he snarled in an interview. “Don’t think we’re so stupid. We’ll close your McDonald’s. If you want to go ahead and poison people, do it to your own blacks at home.”

Aggressive, egocentric and demagogically racist, the 47-year-old Zhirinovsky shocked the world when his Liberal Democratic Party took first place in last week’s legislative elections in Russia, with nearly 25% of the vote. If he allies himself with a powerful bloc of hard-line communists and apparatchiks who also did well at the polls, Zhirinovsky could become an important powerbroker in Russian politics.

He keeps his message simple: Punish democratic “traitors,” restore hurt Russian national pride by rearming and reannexing lost territories, and provide cheap vodka and sausages for a populace traumatized by economic shock therapy.

Three years ago, he was a complete political unknown. Six months later, with the backing of the Communist Party and KGB, he appeared out of nowhere and received 7% of the vote in the 1991 Russian presidential election.

Then, many Moscow liberals dismissed him as a buffoon. But his words could cast a mesmerizing spell on disoriented and embittered Russians. As Moscow psychologist Zarina Preobrazhenskaya put it, “Zhirinovsky says out loud what many Russians secretly believe.”

As it turned out, there are millions more such Russians than the polls had predicted: angry youths, impoverished elderly and career officers and defense-plant engineers, workers in the ailing Ural Mountains rust belt, ethnic Russians who dislike non-Russians and countless others who crave simple solutions to complex problems.

Zhirinovsky offers a cure for social discontent: territorial expansion. He says that, if elected president, he will rebuild the giant Czarist-era empire, which included Poland, Finland and Alaska. He spoke with machine-gun intensity about how the United States had swindled Russia out of Alaska. “Who was it that discovered Alaska?” he asked rhetorically. “Who tamed it? The Russians! Who tricked the czar? We’ll find documents to prove that they pumped the czar full of narcotics when he sold Alaska!”

For Zhirinovsky and other ultranationalists, America represents a force both intimidating and degenerate, all-powerful yet doomed before the inevitable triumph of a renewed Russia. Again we hear echoes of Hitler, who disparaged Jews, communists and democratic states while simultaneously exaggerating their ability to manipulate the fate of the German nation.

Zhirinovsky accuses the United States of bleeding Russia dry while predicting a complete reversal of fortunes at some future date. He revels in his dream of an ethnically chauvinist Russia overwhelming a multicultural United States.

“You Americans,” Zhirinovsky said, “your own country has really gone to hell. Southern California will soon become all Mexican. They’ll force you to speak Spanish. That’s one half of America. The North, meanwhile, will become Black America. Then you’ll have to seek refuge in Russia.”

It’s tempting to dismiss someone who publicly makes such outrageous comments. That was the path taken by Yeltsin and the democrats before last week’s elections. A similar mistake was made by many Germans during the Weimar Republic.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States helped rebuild a shattered Germany. The Marshall Plan helped avert another round of political polarization, earned Americans tremendous goodwill in Germany and created new markets for U.S. exports. This example remains a good model for Washington’s relations with Moscow.

The United States could better guarantee its own security by channeling capital into converting Russian military industry rather than by spending money on unnecessary U.S. military projects simply in order to prop up the aerospace industry. Much of what passes for U.S. aid to Russia is actually taxpayer money that winds up in the pockets of innumerable American consultants, companies and institutions.

By contrast, an effective policy based on an understanding of how serious the stakes are would ensure that Russian production facilities are rebuilt, so that today’s woefully underpaid worker in Volgograd doesn’t feel compelled to vote for Zhirinovsky for president. But if the United States succumbs to the temptations of isolationism such as that promoted by Ross Perot, the outcome could be much more frightening than anything in the Cold War.