VASSILY SHANDYBIN

The visual effect produced by his comically bushy eyebrows, great flapping ears and huge bald dome of a head is memorably peculiar. Then he opens his mouth. To liken the sound that issues forth to a foghorn is not to do it justice.

No, the ensuing din is loud enough to raise the dead from their slumbers and terrorise the living. What the voice says is even more extraordinary. Mr Shandybin is, in his own words, "a simple worker" with a simple worker's instinct for speaking his mind, however unpalatable the result.

A giant amongst the pygmies of the Russian parliament, he is the country's most popular communist and a national institution in his own right. And he turned 60 last week. Dennis Skinner, the famously left wing British Labour MP, rejoices in the nickname "the Beast of Bolsover". Mr Shandybin is "the Beast of Bryansk".

If celebrity in today's Russia is measured by the frequency with which one's rubber effigy appears in the weekly television satire show, "Puppets", then this wild man is a superstar.

He must be the best known backbench politician in the land and, as one friend put it recently, "you only have to mention the name Shandybin and not only do you get instant recognition, you raise a smile as well".

As for his political creed, what it lacks in subtlety, he makes up for in volume and passion. His is the voice of serfs rising up against their masters or the roar of the workers storming the Winter Palace and raising the red flag.

He may be angry, but there is no doubt that his anger comes from the heart. I have called him a Beast before. In a previous email from Russia he was the Beast to Daria Aslamova's Beauty.

For his denunciation of the vampish Queen of Russian journalism as a latter-day courtesan I even described him as "Neanderthal". His looks do have something of the caveman about them. But I now think that I did Mr Shandybin an injustice.

In his own terms he is far too successful a politician to deserve such cheap abuse. Week in, week out, his wit and wisdom win the man acclaim. Stirring oratory it isn't. But it certainly gets him noticed. "The Jewish mafia have seized the banks and the oil and gas. All that was left for the Russian mafia were tiny factories.

"I don't drink wine, only samogon (homebrewed spirit). Wine and vodka are just fakes. Wherever you go, you drink a bit and the next day you're ill.

"Everybody comes to see me. In Soviet times there was a queue to see Lenin's mausoleum. Now there's a similar queue to see me. The poor, the destitute, the sick, they all come."

He recently called for Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to be tried for their crimes by a popular court on Red Square's Place of Execution Part of his appeal is explained by his pig-headedness.

There is nothing reconstructed about Mr Shandybin. He is red in tooth and claw, the way a Communist should be. In a country as ambivalent as Russia is about its history, he evokes a nostalgia for the past which is as thrilling as it is harmless.

There is an old-fashioned decency about the man as well. You believe him when he says "if someone offers me a bribe, I'll smash his face in". Many Russian politicians would be lying through their teeth if they made the same boast.

The same goes for his claim that the place he wanted to celebrate his birthday most of all was back home at the Bryansk Red Arsenal where he worked for 35 years.

Watching him on TV sing the praises of the Russian working man and his supposed skill at making metal fleas with wings so delicate that they can fly, he suddenly struck me as a figure from the enchanted world of Russia's fairy tales.

He was both gentle giant and childlike but golden-hearted peasant. Anxious to wish the great man happy birthday in person, I gatecrashed one of last week's parties in his honour. And quite a knees-up it turned out to be.

Disappointingly, there was not a drop of samogon to be had for love or money in the basement of a Moscow restaurant done up in the style of a decadent classical temple. But guests were serenaded on arrival by a military brass quintet and the tables groaned with food.

The birthday boy himself was on fine form and seized the opportunity to pay his respects to the British working classes via the Telegraph. He had always admired the English proletariat, pioneers of world socialism, he told me.

"But British workers are not living through the best of times either at the moment," he sighed. "At least when the Soviet Union still existed, the British working class could say that we can have a revolution, we can seize power, like the Russians."

"Our time will come eventually," he said. "I still believe we can build a world without capital and capitalism." I looked round the restaurant. Gathered together in one room in honour of Mr Shandybin were many of the radical bogeymen who terrified the Russian middle classes and alarmed Russia-watchers the world over through 1990s.

There was "the black colonel", Viktor Alksnis. "Mad Vlad" Zhirinovsky, not a comrade of Mr Shandybin's but a fellow enfant terrible whom, amazing but true, the West once took seriously, made an appearance too.

The only man with a voice as loud as Nr Shandybin's, Viktor Anpilov, a Bolshevik rabble-rouser who used to lead his shocktroops of enraged grannies into street battles with the police, was also in attendance.

Russia's Human Rights Ombudsman, the Communist, Oleg Mironov, another controversial figure, turned up as well. Then it dawned on me. The real secret of Mr Shandybin's popularity is his status as historical curio or caricature.

A decade ago he and the other barbarians were still camped out at the gates and hungry for power. Nowadays they do TV chat shows and throw parties for each other in swish Moscow restaurants.

Very many happy returns of the day for last week, Vassily Ivanovich! Somehow I fear we will not see your like again.