Vladimir Putin's Holds Direct Line Q&A Session

​"Yes, every country has its own interests, but they should not be advanced via egotistical political methods," Putin said, adding that many of Russia’s partners are beginning to realize this.

"We need to sit at the negotiating table and not just contemplate but actually develop contemporary, up-to-date mechanisms of international and European security," he said.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/russia/201806071065184890-putin-direct-line-hightlights

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

Dear friends of the Russia & America Good Will Association (www.raga.org) and antiwar colleagues! 

Urgent matters first:

1. My friend and RAGA associate James George Jatras sent the following appeal:  

Dear Friends:
The petition below was posted on the White House website today. It is self-explanatory.  Please go to the link to sign. Distribute widely via email and social media.  Thanks, Jim

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/president-donald-trump-should-hold-early-summit-russian-president-vladimir-putin

I signed it myself and posted it on RAGA facebook. I suggest you do likewise.2. CONGRATS to Ed and Tatiana Lozansky, RAGA's old-time peace-loving friends !

Read about them Celebrating 1982: A Pivotal Year
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/21/celebrating-1982-pivotal-year/
or here https://www.facebook.com/RAGAforPeace/

3. Ed Lozansky's persistent efforts to promote US-Russia friendship do not go without resistance. Smear campaign against Ed Lozansky continues unabated. This time Ksenia Kirillova, a Russian journalist living in the USA, suggests that it was Lozansky who had formulated the Kremlin's strategy of undermining American democracy. One would think that Radio Svoboda's (Freedom!) task should not be contrary to any peace-promoting efforts. The link is in Russian, but I am sure much of the same stuff Kirillova says one can find in any US paper. https://www.svoboda.org/a/29229380.html

4. RAGA also joins in supporting 2018 PEACE PRIZE NOMINEES
<<We are pleased to announce that our Founding Members have nominated seven outstanding Americans to be considered for the Foundation's 2018 Peace Prize. They are Daniel Ellsberg, Nancy Mancias, Colman McCarthy, David Swanson, Sharon Tennison, Sally-Alice Thompson, and S. Brian Willson.>> https://mailchi.mp/uspeacememorial/2018-peace-prize-nominees?e=1b14d9bd2d

About half of the nominees have been quoted either in RAGA Antidotes or in my own writings. All deserve recognition!

5. When I was a student at the University of Moscow, around 1957, there appeared a very mellow, romantic, and totally unpolitical song, Moscow Nights,which soon became very popular in the USSR and world-wide. Since the song is about relaxing Summer time, I hope you'd enjoy it right now, performed by Dmitry Hvorostovsky, a world-renown opera singer who recently passed away, and Anna Netrebko, likewise a famed opera singer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D_UepJMizs) Moscow Nights - Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Anna Netrebko | Russian Songs with English Subtitles:

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​This comes on top of daily news coverage of each and every candidate’s activities in the field and invitations to appear on leading television talk shows and interviews which are dispensed by media producers at their option. And it is rounded out by advertising paid for by the electoral headquarters of the 8 candidates. The net result is that domestic politics are jostling with Olympics coverage and international news for the attention of the broad Russian public, and will continue to do so until the Day of Silence, 17 March, when the campaigns shut down in anticipation of the balloting the next day.

In the West, during the run-up to his disqualification as a candidate by the Central Election Commission in December, election news from Russia carried by mainstream media centered on Alexei Navalny. He was characterized as posing the only real threat to Vladimir Putin’s hold on power through his popular exposes of official and corporate corruption disseminated virally on social media and youtube. All others in the race were put down as Kremlin controlled and tolerated only to give sham elections an appearance of authenticity.

​When his candidacy was rejected due to a criminal conviction, Navalny issued a call to boycott the election. He launched unsanctioned street demonstrations in Moscow and elsewhere, leading to scuffles with the police. Some of his supporters and Navalny himself were arrested and later released.  But the protests were all on a small scale and Western media quickly lost interest.

Now attention was refocused on the 36 year old celebrity candidate Ksenia Sobchak, Russia’s own Paris Hilton, a television personality who brought glamor, youth and a novel “vote against all” or “none of the above” slogan in support of her candidacy. It bears mention that Sobchak would be the first female candidate for the Russian presidency since 2004,  In December 2017, she was quickly slotted into the race by winning support from the pro-Liberal “Civic Initiative” party, giving her a nation-wide organizational presence and reduced requirements for gathering signatures of supporters to be registered.

In her first speeches on the campaign trail, Sobchak called out the abuses and inefficiency of the Russian bureaucracy. But her main fire was directed against the very stability of the Putin regime with its immutable elite and opposition leaders who have moved from middle age to pension age before her eyes and seem intent on remaining in office to the very end.  To this she added a number of foreign policy positions drawn from the Liberal opposition that were sure to win her the attention and support of the West even if they ran against the clear preferences of the vast majority of the population as spelled out in the polls: namely her condemnation of the reunification with Crimea as a violation of international law and her insistence that there was no threat to Russia from NATO expansion.

Indeed, while her fellow candidates were traveling around their vast country to meet with voters, earlier this month Ksenia Sobchak made a trip to the United States, where among other activities, she was feted at the Center for International Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C. Her talk was piquantly entitled “Russia’s Post-Authoritarian Future.”

In the big order of things, Sobchak’s foreign policy positions and her cultivation of political support in the U.S. is border-line treasonous behavior that falls into the tradition of the Liberal Opposition leaders in the Parnas political movement, Boris Nemtsov and Mikhail Kasyanov.  In 2011, Nemtsov famously traveled to Arizona to see U.S. Senator John McCain and lend his support to American sanctions against Russia over alleged human rights abuses. Put inversely, Sobchak’s American hosts receiving her in the midst of the presidential elections were necessarily guilty of egregious meddling in Russian domestic affairs.

​The first poll results in January gave Ksenia Sobchak about 1% of the electorate and little has changed since. However, in the same time frame there was great dynamism in the popular support for the candidate of the Communist Party, Pavel Grudinin, trending well over 10% and putting him in second place after Vladimir Putin (70%). Despite their habitual disregard of the Communists, Western journalists took an interest. The fact that Grudinin was not a Communist Party member made his personality all the more intriguing.

Surprisingly friendly articles about Grudinin began appearing in The Financial Times among other mainstream outlets.  They highlighted the fact that he had made his mark as director of a prosperous farm complex in the Moscow region where he paid his workers more than double the national average salary and offered pre-school care, subsidized housing, free medical care and other social benefits from the Soviet era which he pledged to generalize across the country if elected. Grudinin was speaking the language of European Social Democracy or Scandinavian welfare state, if you will, making a very agreeable contrast with the orthodox Communist ideology of the Party standard bearer in the previous four presidential elections going back to 1996, Gennadi Zyuganov.

With a likable demeanor, quiet self-confidence and enjoying the support of the country’s largest full-scale national political machine after the United Russia ruling party backing Putin, Grudinin very quickly found himself in the crosshairs of the Kremlin elites.  The main news broadcasters Pervy Kanal and Rossiya-1 initiated regular coverage of a protest movement against Grudinin over allegations impugning his management of the Lenin State Farm that is his model for the future development of Russia:  it was said that he had wrongfully cheated more than half of the farm’s cooperative members-employees out of their shares during the 1990s and that the wealth of the farm came not from selling strawberries and other produce but from windfall profits in the disposal of some of its land holdings to developers. A second line of attack is that Grudinin had not declared a couple of bank accounts he held abroad.

From polls taken in mid-February, it would appear that this constant barrage of negative news halted the trending in Grudinin’s favor and possibly dented his numbers. Nonetheless, with 7% of voters polled declaring their intention to vote for the Communist Party candidate, he remains second to Putin and just ahead of the anti-Communist, nationalist party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky (LDPR).

Nonetheless, the ruling party is clearly not taking any chances and will be unrelenting in its attacks. The Sunday, 18 February edition of the widely viewed News of the Week program on Rossiya-1 dwelled for about 10 minutes on the Communists.  Presenter Dmitry Kiselyov used questionable poll figures on voting intentions of Party members to argue that the decision to back the non-Party Grudinin opened the Communists to an internal division, with less than half its members prepared to vote for him.  Kiselyov predicted the party’s demise and called upon its leader Gennady Zyuganov to reverse his decision and withdraw his support, this is the name of solicitude for Russia’s still new and fragile democracy.

​This particular report by Kiselyov seems to have little if any factual basis.  The notion that Grudinin’s candidacy splits the Left runs counter to the process that led to his selection in the first place. That process bears mention here since it seems not to have been picked up by Western media.  

In fact, many of the Left political movements, entailing more than a hundred organizations led by the Left Front and the Communist Party, collectively held primaries in which Grudinin won in a second-stage run-off.  It was on this basis of his being a unity candidate of the Left that Gennady Zyuganov put Grudinin’s name forward within his own party and then assumed the position of his campaign manager.

In the face of the various attacks from the Russian state news programs and in personal interviews on air from ill-disposed hosts, Grudinin has shown himself to be cool-headed and genial.  In his 37-minute long January interview with Vladimir Solovyov on Rossiya-1, Grudinin managed to withstand harsh questioning and to get out his political program and beliefs, even forcing the presenter to acknowledge some common perspectives on the country’s ills and to smile at some of his repartee.

Grudinin calls for continuity in the country’s foreign policy, to the point where he says he would keep in office Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Instead, the changes he seeks are in domestic policy. To ensure the social benefits mentioned above, he would introduce a progressive income tax, freeing the poor from tax but imposing a substantial levy on the wealthy. Moreover, he would require repatriation of oligarchs’ wealth from abroad and ensure there would be no further private export of capital offshore. Finally, he would channel all profits from the country’s oil and gas industry into the state coffers, while acting strictly through the law and independent courts. Heady stuff!

Coming in third in the mid-February polls with 5% electoral support, Vladimir Zhirinovsky is the candidate who has been receiving the most television air time now for months as a nearly daily guest on both principal talk shows produced by Rossiya-1, Sixty Minutes and Evening with Vladimir Soloviev. On these shows he is allowed by the indulgent presenters to dominate discussion, delivering a stream of outrageous comments on Russia’s past, on relations with the United States and more that have great entertainment value even if they are far removed from day to day politics. Thus, even in the “debate” between Zhirinovsky and Grudinin which the popular talk show Sixty Minutes hosted a couple of weeks ago, and which has gathered more than 4 million “hits” on youtube, the LDPR leader was allowed to hog the microphone and Grudinin was doubly under pressure from the few questions pitched to him by the moderator.

​Apart from his insistence on taking a strong stand against American provocations in Syria, in the Ukraine, in its sanctions list, Zhirinovsky’s platform focuses on domestic concerns like all other candidates. He decries unemployment levels, low living standards, unaffordable housing, for-pay medical care and education. However, while calling for social welfare that is not dissimilar to the Communist Party’s program, Zhirinovsky denounces the Soviet past for running a dysfunctional economy and for misguided internationalism at the expense of the welfare of the Russian people. Says Zhirinovsky, the United States uses its foreign policy to bring in wealth, while the Soviet Union, and to a lesser degree Russia today only loses wealth on foreign adventures.

Zhirinovsky’s main target in his campaign is not the ruling United Russia party but the Communists. In his television appearances he is a pit bull against Grudinin.  For his support to Putin in the last Duma elections, Zhirinovsky’s party was rewarded with the chairmanship of the Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee.  One may assume that if his run against Grudinin works, Zhirinovsky and/or his party will get additional political spoils, perhaps at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself.

* * * *
The opening on 18 March of the Russian airwaves to promotional video clips, both free and paid for by the candidates, added an important new dimension by which their objectives and electoral prospects can be measured.  Since no one in Russia or in the West seems to have made use of these new metrics, I will take the plunge in what follows.

First, the latest television spots for Ksenia Sobchak are head and shoulders above all other Russian electoral advertising. Both in terms of concept and in terms of execution, they bear the fingerprints of top international corporate public relations talent. Sobchak has been re-packaged and her entire message is concentrated in two words that are positive, attractive and impactful:  “за молодость и смелость” – “for youth and daring.”  This contrasts with her previously negative appeal of “none of the above” and matches the flair of Vladimir Putin’s own campaign slogan “a strong President for a strong country.”

​Sobchak’s coiffure, her dress, her entire image has been reconfigured to combine seriousness of purpose with womanly as opposed to girlish appeal.  If she can stay to script on the campaign trail, the new Sobchak may be expected to multiply several fold the votes she draws on election day. This assumes she is not undone by alternative videos posted on youtube by her enemies, contrasting the new idol of the creative classes in Moscow with her recent past as a narcissistic Reality Show star. In any case, Sobchak’s results will not threaten Vladimir Putin, but may set in place a credible foundation for further development of her political year in coming years.

Second in sophistication to Sobchak are the latest videos posted by the Yabloko candidate Grigory Yavlinsky. The perpetual candidate of this Liberal party born in the 1990s that has enjoyed support among urban intellectuals in the two capitals, Moscow and St Petersburg, Yavlinsky has waged a low-key campaign and raised assorted issues like animal welfare in his talks on the campaign trail. One new video clip repeats insistently the theme that Russians as a people have been inventive and at the cutting edge of technology for at least a couple of centuries but have been let down by their state and political culture. Meanwhile his latest video can easily be confused for a message from the Central Election Commission urging the population not to stay at home, not to watch the political process with folded arms but to go and vote on election day. Only in the last couple of seconds is the candidate himself identified.  The clear purpose of this advert is to discredit Alexei Navalny and his call for a boycott.

Yavlinsky knows his chances of succeeding to the presidency based on his fraction of a percent of popular support are nil, and this video suggests he has decided to use his opportunity as a candidate with air time to discredit the non-systemic and authoritarian Navalny. This is a variant of Zhirinovsky’s attacks on Grudinin: candidates devouring one another while leaving the enormously popular Putin untouched.

Apart from Sobchak and Yavlinsky, the remaining challengers to Putin and United Russia have posted promotional videos which are primitive in both concept and execution, none more so that the videos of LDPR candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In contrast to the relaxed and confidential tone of Sobchak and Yavlinsky, Zhirinovsky is intense and aggressive. He denounces poverty, unemployment and social injustice while making empty, unsupported promises of a bright future if he is elected. It is a safe bet that Zhirinovsky took no counsel from PR professionals and relied solely on his own instincts.

The Communist Party videos on behalf of Pavel Grudinin are also lacking in sophistication and emotional appeal. They do the candidate no favors.  It is hard to say whether Grudinin’s greater air time on talk shows and the like due to his leads in polls against the rest of the non-Putin field and his own relaxed and attractive personality can compensate for the official media attacks and the disservice of mediocre advertising support from the Communist Party. Notwithstanding these deficiencies, it is entirely possible that Grudinin’s ballot count on 18 March will be substantially higher than the polls now suggest. Not enough to force a run-off against Putin, but sufficient to revise expectations in the Party’s favor during the next Duma elections.

​Those in the West who have viewed the Russian presidential election of 2018 with disdain because of the near certainty that Vladimir Putin will win are missing the point.  In the candidacies of Sobchak and Grudinin, in particular, we see the jostling for power in the next legislative elections of 2021 between what are new generation Right and Left forces directed against the centrist ruling United Russia party. All of this will greatly affect the post-Putin succession process which will set in by 2022 given the “lame duck” phenomenon as the President’s men make their own moves to secure their future without him.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2018

G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide.

"Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the country's parliament, speaking about Russia's success in the defense sector, relations with the US and NATO, social and economic development of the country, as well as Moscow's plans concerning the technological advance in big data, AI and cryptocurrency."

https://sputniknews.com/russia/201803011062103713-putin-address-federal-assembly/​

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

Orlov is one of our favorite essayists on Russia and all sorts of other things. He moved to the US as a child, and lives in the Boston area.

He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile [1], along with James Howard Kunstler, another regular contributor to RI (archive). [2] These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up.

He is best known for his 2011 book comparing Soviet and American collapse [3] (he thinks America's will be worse). He is a prolific author on a wide array of subjects, and you can see his work by searching him on Amazon.

1 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/26/the-dystopians
2 https://russia-insider.com/en/james-howard-kunstler
3 https://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Collapse-Experience-American-Prospects/dp/0865716854

​He has a large following on the web, and on Patreon, and we urge you to support him there [4], as Russia Insider does.

His current project is organizing the production of affordable house boats [5] for living on. He lives on a boat himself.

If you haven't discovered his work yet, please take a look at his archive of articles on RI [6]. They are a real treasure, full of invaluable insight into both the US and Russia and how they are related.

4 - https://www.patreon.com/orlov
5 - http://quidnon.blogspot.com 
6 - https://russia-insider.com/en/dmitry_orlov

​In trying to disentangle the current fraught state of relations between the US and Russia, one group that deserves a higher level of scrutiny is American Jews.

​This is the single largest population group that the two countries have in common: of the some 5 or 6 million Jews currently living in the US (numbers vary depending on how one measures “Jewishness”) around a million immigrated to the US from the Former Soviet Union, either directly or after a sojourn in Israel. The US government readily accepted all of them, granting them refugee status; thus, they entered American society with a politicized, distinctly anti-Russian identity, and their anti-Russian attitudes have had an effect on the opinions of many non-Russian Jews and other Americans.

​Russian Jews are by far the most educated group ever to immigrate to the US. They integrated very well into American society and many of them, and their children, were able to launch professional careers. Their firsthand experience of life in Russia has allowed them to position themselves as the subject matter experts on all things Russian and, to a considerable extent, has allowed this relatively small group to negatively affect the attitudes of the other 322 million Americans toward the 144 million Russians within the Russian Federation as well the 30 or so million Russians residing outside it.

It is an unfortunate accident of history that a group of around a million has, more or less inadvertently, soured relations between half a billion people.

​There are a lot of tricky bits and pieces to this story. Part of it is the Cold War legacy, which generated a great deal of institutional inertia within the US, which in turn causes the US to continue to treat Russia as the enemy. Part of it is the strangely disproportionate influence of Israeli Jews specifically, and of Jews in general, on US politics. Yet another piece of the puzzle has to do with the benefits that accrued to the Russian Jews in the US who talked up their having been victimized by the Soviet government or by Russian antisemitism. A final, particularly tricky aspect has to do with the nature of Jewish identity and how it has historically clashed, and continues to clash, with what it means to be a Russian Jew.

I will talk about each of these in turn, but first I want to disclose what it is that makes me qualified to write on this subject. I was born and grew up in Russia in the 60s and 70s, then emigrated as part of a wave of mainly Jewish emigration, entered the US as a refugee and was naturalized five years later. A fictional Israeli relative or two were featured in our application for the exit visa, although we had no intention of ever going to Israel.

​I have lots of Jewish relatives, but not enough to make me a Jew. We are all Russian Orthodox Christian, and have been for anywhere between 3 and 40 generations (depending on genealogical branch). At home we have never spoken anything but Russian. We went back to Russia at the earliest opportunity—in 1989, as soon as émigrés started being granted visas—and have been going back and forth ever since. All of this makes me an expert on this very subject.

A lot has already been written on the topic of American Cold War inertia, so I will sum it up in just a few of sentences. The US is being held hostage by a bloated, ineffectual and generally incompetent military bureaucracy whose only area of overwhelming superiority is in extorting exorbitant sums of money for its projects, many of which are failures. In order for this extortion to work, one must be able to argue that there is an enemy to defend the country against.

During the Cold War the enemy was, most conveniently, the USSR. After the USSR collapsed, there was a period of vacillation, during which “Russian mafia” got a lot of attention, just to keep the image of the enemy fresh. But a felicitous new opportunity presented itself after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (which, many claim, were contrived for just this purpose) to present international terrorism as the new enemy. This ruse has by now outlived its usefulness because the terrorists are now doing better than ever, and so it is time to shut up about terrorism and to go back to Plan A: cultivating russophobia (with China now thrown in for good measure).

It is true that Russia, having recovered from the devastation of the Soviet collapse, is a bit more formidable as an enemy than it was in the “Russian mafia” days, but russophobia is still key, and it requires a steady stream of negative news stories and commentary on Russia. It is here Russian Jews, some living in the US, some traveling back and forth between the US and Russia, are happy to oblige, since they are, arguably, America’s subject matter experts on all things Russian.

The strangely disproportionate influence of Israeli Jews, and of Jews in general, on American politics is also a hot topic of discussion, and so here I will once again summarize briefly. First the obvious: Israel is not part of the United States; it is a separate sovereign nation and a UN member. And yet American politicians can pledge allegiance to Israel without being arrested and tried for treason. Lots of US-Israeli dual citizens circulate through both US and Israeli institutions, and nobody ever bothers to ask which one of them is spying on whose behalf. Within the US, Israel, and Jews generally, receive special treatment: anyone who dares to criticize Israel is more or less automatically accused of antisemitism and ostracized. Also, it has been made illegal to boycott Israeli products or companies, which some people want to do in support of the Palestinian cause. Some analysts go as far as to say that Israel has colonized the US, much as Britain had colonized India, with a few thousand British controlling the entire subcontinent to their own advantage.

​Israel is the recipient of many billions of dollars in US military aid, making it an integral part of the American military-industrial extortion racket. This means that Jews and/or Israelis in the US (the distinction between American Jews and Israelis is not a particularly useful one, since it’s easy for an American Jew to get an Israeli passport) have to talk up the “Russian threat” in order to belly up to the trough alongside the US military, and so they do.

But within Israel the situation is a bit different. About a third of the Jewish population of Israel is made up of Russian Jews. Many of them are actual citizens of the Russian Federation; most of the rest can claim Russian citizenship as a birthright. Lots of of them go back and forth between Russia and Israel, to work, for medical treatments, to visit relatives, on vacations, etc. A steady stream of Israelis is going back to Russia, mainly because Russia is in some ways more prosperous than Israel, where opportunities for social advancement are growing increasingly limited. Relations between Russia and Israel are very friendly and cooperative. When the Israeli defense minister flies to Moscow for talks, he doesn’t take a translator along because he is, in fact, Russian.

Right now relations between the US and Russia are in a dismal state. At the same time, relations between Russia and Israel are the warmest that they have ever been. “Russia and Israel can take pride in our high level of partnership, fruitful cooperation and far-reaching business contacts,” said Vladimir Putin while taking Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to the Bolshoi Ballet. In spite of all of the complexities of the Middle East—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Syria, Iran’s growing influence, Turkey’s traditional treachery, strange goings on in Saudi Arabia—the Russian-Israeli relationship is just ticking along.

If you wanted to get just a tiny bit conspiratorial, you could perhaps imagine that Israel is Russia’s Trojan horse in the US. What is its purpose? To keep the US squandering borrowed money on military junk and misadventures, of course, until it’s all gone! To push the US toward the same cliff over which the USSR went back in 1990, obviously! But let us not get side-tracked into conspiracy theory and simply say that the asymmetry between US-Russian, US-Israeli and Israeli-Russian relations is extremely significant and begs for an explanation. It’s a three-legged stool that rocks—a geometric conundrum.

A relatively obvious reason for Israel cozying up to Russia is this: it is a US protectorate, but the US is becoming increasingly erratic, unreliable, militarily enfeebled and prone to catastrophic failure. Israel needs a new patron, and since Israel is a significant part of the mighty Russian diaspora (a third of Israelis are in fact Russians) reaching out to Russia is an obvious step. From their own perspective, the Russians sense that the the Israeli project may be temporary and may last only as long as American support for it.

Once it is over, Russians living in Israel would flood back into Russia. Such repatriation, if it becomes unavoidable, would need very tight coordination between Russian and Israeli authorities. Russia can probably absorb this influx without problems; after all, in recent years over a million Ukrainians, fleeing economic devastation and war at home, have successfully resettled in Russia. But the Russians may want to put Israel on life support instead, for the sake of preserving some semblance of regional stability.

The piece of the puzzle that has to do with the benefits that accrued to the Russian Jews in the US who talked up their having been victimized by the Soviet government or by Russian antisemitism is riddled with contradictions as well. Take on board the fact that Russian-speaking Jews are by far the most educated group ever to immigrate to the US. Also, Russia is one of the least antisemitic countries, with Jews well represented in every profession and at all levels of government, with Judaism flourishing and respected, and with no social problems specifically or disproportionately affecting Jews.

The reason Russian Jews were well-educated and ready to start prosperous careers more or less the moment they landed in the US was that they were extremely well-educated and prosperous before they left Russia. Much oppressed under the pre-revolutionary regime, Jews were instrumental during the Russian Revolution of 1917, and they and their children reaped tremendous benefits from their involvement in it during the subsequent decades. In fact, Jews did so well in the USSR that they crowded out Russians from many top jobs: although they made up just 1.5% of the population, by the 1950s over half of all directors at the many institutes, research centers and laboratories of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were Jewish. Jews made up a third of the Soviet Writers’ Union; a quarter of all university lecturers; and so on.

Members of my own family followed this trajectory. My grandfather grew up in a shtetl, spoke Yiddish with his mother, moved to St. Petersburg after the revolution, joined the Communist Party and eventually became a professor of Russian literature with a grand apartment on a city square and a country mansion. both stuffed with art and priceless antiques, a live-in housekeeper and nanny and a private limousine with a chauffeur. Jews like my grandfather dislodged the old aristocracy and became la crème de la crème of Soviet society.

Here is a fascinating bit of trivia: recognizing that Jews are a nation without a territory and wishing to fix this problem, the USSR became the only country in the world to freely offer Jews their own homeland—the Jewish Autonomous Region, strategically located on the Chinese border. Most of its Jewish residents have by now emigrated to Israel, leaving behind public buildings with plaques in two languages: Russian and Yiddish.

In time there started a bit of a backlash from all the Russians that the Jews had been squeezing out of the universities and the professions. Some of the tricks that were employed to fend off the relentless onslaught of their well-tutored children were, shall we say, less than kosher; for instance, a Jewish relative of mine wasn’t admitted to Moscow State University by being given a known unsolved problem to solve on the math entrance exam and—horror of horrors!—ended up becoming an architect instead. Many Jews saw in this backlash a sign of incipient antisemitism, and some of them decided that the pastures would be greener on the other side of the ocean.

From this it should be obvious why upon their arrival in the US Russian Jews would paint the USSR and Russia with a broad brush loaded with dark colors: oppression, antisemitism, pogroms, plus the general backwardness, drunkenness and awfulness. Had they resisted the urge to play the victim, their narrative might, by default, become something like this: “We wrecked Russia, rearranged it to our advantage, made out like bandits, pretty much bankrupted the place… and so now we are over here in the US, together with our prized possessions, elderly relatives and pets, claiming to be refugees, and are ready to do it again.” That just doesn’t sound sufficiently refugee-like, now, does it? Add to this the fact that there is considerable money to be made in the US by lambasting Russia, and the urge to lambaste becomes irresistible.

The final, particularly tricky aspect to this story has to do with the nature of Jewish identity and how it has historically clashed, and continues to clash, with what it means to be Russian. Jewish identity is rather strange and different, and to elucidate this point it is easier to compare Jews not to some garden variety group like the Irish or the Italians but to another similarly non-garden-variety group: the Gypsies. I have been acquainted with some Gypsies, and I have also researched them extensively for a case study on cultural collapse (and resistance thereto) in my book The Five Stages of Collapse.

The word “gypsy” is a corruption of “Egyptian,” which the Gypsies definitely are not, having come out of Northern India at some point in time well over a thousand years ago. (Incidentally, it is the Jews, according to their biblical mythology, who came out of Egypt via a magic hole in the Red Sea, so perhaps it is the Jews who should be called “Gypsies.”) What the Gypsies in fact are, and what they call themselves, is Roma, and their language is Romani.

The Roma share a great number of similarities with the Jews. Both are diaspora nations without a territory (excepting the rather small internationally recognized Israeli bits of Palestine); instead, they colonize various countries, migrating from country to country over time. Both Jews and Roma are traditionally xenophobic: the Jewish word for “non-Jewish” is “goy” (plural “goyim”). In Romani, it is “gadjo” (plural “gadje”). Both Jews and Roma have specific, and rather curious, taboos and purification rituals as ways of resisting contamination or corruption spread by outsiders, most of which is symbolic rather than physical.

And both were victims of the Holocaust: a quarter of Europe’s Roma population was wiped out in that event, but with a difference: while the Jews received restitution for the Nazi atrocities, the Roma did not. Only in 1979 did the West German Bundestag acknowledge the fact that Nazi persecution of Roma was racist, making them eligible to receive compensation, but by then most of the victims had already died.

Both Roma and Jewish identities are to some extent secret. The Roma usually disguise themselves by taking on local-sounding names; in Anglo countries they go by generic-sounding English names like Bob Jones or Cathy Smith; in private, they call each other exotic, Roma-sounding names like Ruslan or Zemfira. And then each Roma has a secret name known only to that person and that person’s mother.

At various times Jews have likewise found it advantageous to obscure their identities behind local-sounding names. My other grandfather is a case in point. He was born in Zhitomir, in the Ukraine. When, around the time of the Russian Revolution, his parents and sisters decamped for Brooklyn, leaving him behind, he saw it fit to change his name to the very generically Russian Alexander Orlov and led everyone to believe that he was an orphaned Russian. He lived a good long life, first in Kiev, then in Leningrad, under an assumed identity, but some time after he retired he suddenly shocked his children with the news that he was in fact Jewish, that his name was not Alexander but Abraham, and that he is moving to Israel where it’s warmer and sunnier.

He eventually met up with one of his sisters, but the other was by then shunned by the whole family, having become a Jehova’s Witness. Not that the remaining sister or her family were the least bit religious; at one time, they attempted a Passover ritual, for our benefit, I suppose, and it was such a travesty that it made me cry. (I was young and impressionable back then; now I would probably just laugh.)

Both Roma and Jewish identities are matrilineal: one cannot be a Roma, or a Jew, unless one’s mother is a Roma, or a Jew, respectively. This works to their advantage within the societies they colonize, which are all patrilineal. The rate of intermarriage is much greater in the case of Jews; the Roma do not seem to intermarry all that much because of their very negative attitude toward the “gadje.” The considerable extent of Jewish intermarriage is obvious from their appearance: the Roma often look quite North Indian, while European (Ashkenazi) Jews look European rather than like the Arabs and other Middle Eastern tribes. They are not exactly a race or an ethnic group; half of the X (female) chromosomes may be of a Jewish origin, but the Y (male) chromosomes may have been, more often than not, borrowed from some other group. Since the Y chromosome is an evolutionary hotbed, such genetic borrowing confers a considerable advantage as far as inclusive fitness.

Thus, in mixed marriages, Jewish women function a bit like cuckoo birds, which lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, forcing other birds to rear cuckoo chicks alongside theirs. The “shiketz” (a “goy” husband) may think that his children add to the numbers of his own tribe, but is sadly mistaken. Jewish women can help colonize societies by marrying local men and having them bring up Jews (in secret if necessary) at their own expense. This salient detail wasn’t lost on everyone; in particular the Cossacks, who patrolled the margins of the Russian Empire and were fond of bride-snatching Persian, Turkish and Caucasian women, then baptizing and Russianizing them, would have nothing to do with Jewish women. On the other hand, until quite recently bringing home a “shiksa” (a “goy” female) was very much disapproved of in Jewish families, because children from such a union could not be counted as Jews.

If Jews are not a race or an ethnic group, are they are religion? Notably, there is no freedom of religion among Jews: according to most Jews, one cannot be a Moslem Jew or a Christian Jew and still be a Jew. But over half of the Jews in both the US and Israel are atheist, and there are far more Atheists among American Jews than among the general population. One ritual—bris (circumcision) is generally required as a condition for social inclusion, but it does not carry much religious significance in a society that (somewhat inexplicably) tries to circumcise all of the male infants regardless of their parents’ religion.

If Jews are neither a race/ethnicity nor a religion, then what are they? By process of elimination, they are the same as the Roma: a nomadic caste. Many of the elements that signal caste membership are the same: the xenophobia inherent in terms such as “goy”/“gadjo”; the insistence on matrilineality even within generally patrilineal societies; the tendency to cultivate a secret identity; and the tendency to move on and colonize new countries as conditions warrant.

Jews can function as a nomadic caste in the US, which is full of transience and of clannish, cultish, class-based social divisions, of segregation by race, income and religion and of many other castelike social distinctions. They could function as a caste in pre-revolutionary Russia as well—admitted and tolerated but kept apart because they would not praise the Holy Trinity and venerate the Holy Cross in a country where Orthodox Christianity was a precondition for full citizenship. But post-revolutionary Russia is not so conducive to preserving the Jewish caste.

First, a Russian has the right to pick the nationality of either parent (the Russian Federation is made up of 160 nationalities, each with its own language), the default one—Russian—or to not declare one at all. Religious or secular laws that interfere with this freedom of choice infringe on this right. Second, a Russian has the right to practice any religion, independent of the choice of nationality. Thus, religious or other laws that tie one’s religion to one’s nationality infringe on this right. Third, it is generally accepted that the Russian identity suffuses all the others. There is a linguistic distinction between “Rossiysky” (pertaining to the country) and “Russky” (pertaining to the nationality) but in practice they are used interchangeably. Thus, a Russian Jew is a Russian first (linguistically, culturally, socially, possibly religiously) and a Jew second. Being Jewish is like holding a rose between your teeth: an interesting, idiosyncratic fashion accessory.

If you think that these are small details, you should see the hysterical, xenophobic reactions I can provoke more or less at will in almost any group of Jews simply by saying that I am Jewish by dint of having two Jewish grandfathers. Sure, my mother is Russian, but I am a Russian Jew, and in Russia nationality can pass from father to son, and usually does. Oh, and by the way I am a Christian, so Jewish laws don’t apply to me.

The cognitive dissonance of being brought face to face with the fact that Jews are a caste must be most painful to its members. So, fine, I am not a Jew; nor do I have a rose in my teeth. In fact, it is disingenuous of me to flippantly provoke Jews by saying that I might be Jewish, because I don’t feel even the tiniest bit Jewish and I am perfectly at peace with just being Russian.

The point of all this is that for all of the above-stated reasons you should never, ever again listen to what American Jews have to say about Russia. All they have to deliver in that department is damaged, tainted goods. It is absolutely essential for the safety and security of the entire planet that the US and Russia maintain good, cooperative, professional, friendly relations based on up-to-date facts rather than falsehoods, bigotry, innuendos or outdated tales of woe. It is incredibly self-destructive to use the lies being spread about Russia as an excuse to continue feeding the US/Israeli military monster.

If Americans are in need of a perfectly good example of how to have good relations with Russia, here it is: it’s called Israel.