World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [74]
In October 1998, for example, Gen. Albert Makashov, a Communist Party representative in the Russian Parliament, accused Jews of ruining the country’s economy. “Who is to blame?” railed Makashov in recorded testimony before the Duma. “The executive branch, the bankers, the mass media are to blame. Usury, deceit, corruption, and thievery are flourishing in the country. That is why I call the reformers Yids.” A “Yid,” he elaborated in an editorial in the newspaper Zavtra, is “a bloodsucker feeding on the misfortunes of other people. They drink the blood of the indigenous peoples of the state; they are destroying industry and agriculture.” Makashov subsequently led two fiery rallies in which he shouted, “I will round up all the Jews and send them to the next world!” A few months later, Viktor Ilyukhkin, Communist chairman of the Russian Parliament’s security committee, blamed Jews in Yeltsin’s government for effecting “a genocide against the Russian people.”
When asked by Yeltsin to censure Makashov and Ilyukhkin, Gennadi Zyuganov, head of Russia’s still powerful Communist Party, endorsed them instead. In a letter to the Ministry of Justice and the national security chief, Zyuganov declared that Zionism is among the “most aggressive imperialist circles striving for world domination.” “Communists . . . rightly ask how it can be that key positions in a number of economic sectors were seized by representatives of one ethnic group. They see how control over most of the electronic media—which are waging a destructive campaign against our fatherland and its morality, language, culture and beliefs—is concentrated in the hands of those same individuals.” Zyuganov has also said, “Too many people with strange sounding family names mingle in the internal affairs of Russia.”
Anti-Semitism is moderate in Moscow compared to other parts of Russia. “At least in Moscow there’s some regulation,” explained the distressed leader of the local Jewish Association in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, where a synagogue was recently vandalized and the name of the neofascist group, Russian National Unity, painted on the walls. Aleksandr Barkashov, the leader of the group, subsequently told a rally in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) that he was changing the name of his organization to “Movement Against the Jews.” Anti-Semitism is probably most intense in Krasnodar, a city along Russia’s southern border that is home to numerous Cossacks. Since his coalition’s landslide election in 1996, Communist-Nationalist governor Nikolai Kondratenko has openly spewed anti-Semitic hatred. “What is the result of Zionism?” boomed Kondratenko’s deputy governor in 1998. “The result is the collapse of Russia. Native Russians never would have allowed all these reforms to happen.” And the governor himself recently proclaimed to cheering crowds: “Why haven’t we revolted against that scum, a bunch of people for whom Russia, Russians, patriotism, the land of Russia is something alien? Their policy is the losing one, and those who will continue torturing Russia will burn more than just their tongues.”
23
During Russia’s 1998 election campaign, calls for renationalization of the oligarchs’ holdings—widely viewed as “stolen” from the Russian people—were everywhere.
24 Like Yeltsin before him, Vladimir Putin most likely would not have won the presidential election without the oligarchs’ massive funding and media support. Not surprisingly, Putin did not campaign on a renationalization or anti-Semitic platform. Once in power, however, Putin made sweeping promises to “bring the house in order” and “move the oligarchs away from power,” gaining popularity with every new attack on the oligarchs.
In particular, Putin recently turned on Jewish media moguls Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris