Mass murders do not fit in with the German law-and-order mentality; the Germans learned it from the Russians. Two years before the Nazis started loading Jews into cattle trains, Russian security forces did just that with Poles. Starting in the winter of 1940, close to 400,000 people were relocated from the Soviet-occupied regions of Poland. The Soviets gradually escalated mass violence, testing it meticulously. They tried work camps, which killed through cold and planned starvation; they also tried mass executions of loosely defined enemies of state, and ethnic relocation. Brought together, these three components paved the way to genocide.

Other relocations were repressive but not genocidal. It was only the Poles whom the Soviets herded into trains at -50° F, causing a massive death toll. Only the Poles were shot in large groups—more than 110,000 in total—based entirely on ethnicity.
What was wrong with Poles in Stalin’s eyes? The answer looms in the statistics. In the five months after the Soviet occupation of Poland, 93,000 people were arrested, including 23,000 Jews, 41,000 Poles, and 21,000 Ukrainians. Poles inflicted a personal affront on Bolshevik leadership by defeating Russian aggressors in the 1919-1921 war. West Ukrainians consistently opposed the hated Russian rule. But why was the percentage of arrested Jews the highest of all ethnic groups?

After visiting Moscow, German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop issued a communiqué, which Soviet newspapers published on September 20, 1939. “Soviet-German friendship is established forever. … Both countries wish for peace to prevail, and for England and France to stop their fruitless struggle against Germany. If, however, the inciters of war get an upper hand in those countries, then Germany and the USSR will know how to react.” In German parlance, “the inciters of war” were Jews.

Curiously, Nazi leaders, as we know now from their diaries and meetings, were convinced that Jews had pushed Britain and the United States into war with Germany. The Western court Jews fueled that sentiment by calling for boycotts against Germany; they wanted Germany to accommodate its Jews, though Zionists meant to use the occasion to push for Jewish emigration to Land of Israel.
Stalin apparently subscribed to the same world view—namely that an international Jewish cabal opposed communist expansion. The Russian tyrant was oddly concerned with world opinion, which was why he split Poland with Germany instead of conquering the entire country. Only a couple of weeks after the Germans ended the Polish state did the Soviets invade their part. The worldwide Jewish lobby was thus a considerable hindrance for Stalin. Jews were an obstacle to him on yet another issue: Stalin believed that a worldwide crisis and resulting communist revolution were near, and Jews—generally capitalists, not proletarians—were his actual enemies. In the time of the Great Depression, the communist paradise seemed eerily close, and its opponents didn’t deserve human treatment.

Stalin’s pre-war attitude toward Jews was exemplified by his purging of Soviet ministries and high-level government institutions of them, especially the Foreign Ministry in the spring of 1939. He rendered to the Nazis the German communist refugees who lived in the USSR and were overwhelmingly Jewish. Nazis equated German Jews with communists—their original arch-enemies—despite the fact that most local Jews leaned toward capitalist enterprise.

In a self-reinforcing spiral, Germans thought the Russian threat to them was fanned by Jewish Bolsheviks. And there was quite a threat: the Soviet army dwarfed the German one, exceeding it by several times in manpower, tanks, aircraft, and artillery. There was also the marked qualitative superiority of Russian weapons. From 1939 to 1941, Nazi leadership went full circle, from hoping to win in a coalition with Soviets to seeing them as a fatal threat.

Nazi army was very weak. The Versailles treaty had forced demilitarization on Germany, and an entire generation of troops lacked proper training. German industry, crippled by sanctions, produced mostly second-grade weaponry. Even a minor military campaign in Poland took the Germans four weeks. Germany lost the air war against Britain despite a great advantage in aircraft numbers. The African campaign was eventually lost. They prevailed against France by pure strategy rather than by brute military force. Germans well understood their weaknesses and didn’t even try conquering France, which remained formally independent and entered into a ceasefire agreement with Germany.

Even so, strained achievements were made possible by massive Soviet aid to the Nazis. Since about 1920, the Soviet Union had aided Germany in just about every way, from oil, grain, and metal shipments to hosting German military factories and training facilities in circumvention of the Versailles treaty. Soviet and German training and rearmament programs went concurrently. Soviet assistance was indispensable to Germany, which had been devastated by WWI and the Versailles treaty. Austria and occupied France had little to share with Germany, and the Swedes and the Swiss were selling for hard currency, which Germany lacked.

Stalin collaborated not just with Germany generally, but specifically with the Nazis. For years, he covered the loyal German communist party in dirt and derailed their struggle with the Nazis. Ideology aside, Stalin had no interest in losers.

The USSR was Germany’s major political partner. Their cooperation was consistent: the partitioning of Poland had been discussed since the early 1920s. During Germany’s war with Britain, the Soviets hosted the German fleet in Murmansk and provided oil, which eventually fueled German aircraft. The Soviet-German correlation was remarkable: Germany annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia while the USSR took Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Germany fought France to a ceasefire, as did the USSR against Finland. They divided Poland, and the Soviets materially aided Germany in its war with Britain.

The Soviet collusion in partitioning Poland was indispensable to the Germans. In 1939, Germany wouldn’t dare to invade the well-known Russian sphere of influence. Neither could Germany do it in 1941: the Barbarossa succeeded only because Russian and German troops were positioned just across from each other, so close that a few German bombers were able to conduct a large number of short missions. With Poland as a buffer, Germany could not hope for a devastating first strike against the Red Army. A German invasion of Poland would have triggered war with a fully mobilized and incredibly strong Soviet Army.

Germany’s war on the Soviet Union was an apocalyptic endeavor, which the Nazis undertook only to prevent a Russian first-strike. The Barbarossa plan was outright silly: it presumed an advance of 1,500 miles to Archangelsk in four months, often through hardly passable terrain. The Soviet campaign should have been won before the British one, despite the incomparable scope of operations. The planners should have realized that no amount of surprise could enable them to prevail over the much larger and stronger Red Army. German attempts to encircle them were carried out with a ridiculously small number of tanks, and their bombing campaigns were carried out by almost irrelevant numbers of aircraft. German staff understood all the limitations, but had no options, faced with mammoth Soviet forces positioned for invasion of the German sphere of influence. Their evaluation was correct, as Soviet documents show. Thus, in May 1941, the Soviet General Command circulated Considerations on the Plan for Strategic Deployment in Case of War with Germany and its Allies (Соображения по плану стратегического развертывания Вооруженных Сил СССР на случай войны Германией и ее союзниками), which was clearly offensive in nature. The concentration of the best Soviet tanks at the border, tips deeply inside German-controlled territory, on the eve of war, left no doubt about the communists’ intentions.

Only the near-total lack of tactical and strategic command in the Red Army, the near-absence of qualified commanders, and wholesale hatred of communists and Jews allowed the Germans their early victories. It wasn’t that the Wehrmacht won, but that the Red Army disintegrated when the totalitarian pressure on it was temporarily removed during the first months of disorganized fighting.

Back to Jews. Germans had no plans whatsoever for extermination before 1942. They killed the mentally ill but not the Jews, who would ostensibly be the target much more acceptable to German public opinion. Not even the Jewish mental patients were killed initially, nor even the masses of German Jewish communists. Germans cooperated with Zionists on resettling their Jews elsewhere. Zionist education—agricultural and thinly disguised military training—was conducted with the explicit approval of Nazi authorities. The Germans even went so far as to allow Jewish emigrants to take out large amounts of scarce foreign exchange. Unfortunately, American Jewish organizations stonewalled the German efforts, preferring Jews to stay in the Diaspora. In order to bug Germany with the Jewish problem, the United States and Britain rejected resettling of refugees just anywhere in the world—including the Jewish homeland allotted to us even by the League of Nations. The much-touted German plan of resettling its Jews on Madagascar was not a sneer, but a serious attempt to find any place accessible to Germany and amenable to it. As someone who wants Israel free of Arabs, I have no problem with Germans trying to expel their Jews without significant loss of life.

The Germans switched to extermination for three reasons. The first reason was that the Allies had blocked all the options for relocation of the Jews. Jewish refugees could get no visas. When they managed to cross the border illegally, Switzerland turned them back to the Nazis. Britain pressed the governments of Bulgaria and Romania to tighten their lax border policies, which allowed Jews to escape. Britain also pressed Turkey to allow no safe haven to Jews, lest they move afterwards “illegally” to the Land of Israel.

Two, the Nazis wanted revenge: Jews, they thought, were instrumental in Soviet and American aggression against Germany. The reasoning was wrong but not silly: seeing the intense opposition of international Jewry to pogroms and other signals that Jews were not welcome in Germany, the Nazis decided that war was the next logical step after the Jews tried to boycott them.

Three, an apocalyptic mindset descended on Nazi leaders when they embarked on war with the Soviet Union against the better judgment of the German military. They started thinking in terms of their final obligation to change the world by destroying Jews.

Many nations were instrumental in the Holocaust: just about every European nation, America, and some Arabs. But the Soviets made the Holocaust possible. Notoriously full of Jews, the communist establishment prepared a mortal blow for Germany: with the 1939 non-belligerence pact Stalin lured Germany into attacking Britain, to further weaken the aggressor. With massive rearmament he hinted to the Germans of his own aggressive intent, forcing them to amass troops near the Soviet border. The Germans understood Stalin’s trap: he wanted to crush much of their army with a single strike. Such treachery called for revenge, and in the German mind Jews should be targeted.

The Soviets showed Germany that mass ethnic extermination works and is tolerated by international community. Soviet work camps were less deadly than German camps for Jews, but still more deadly for Jews than for gentiles. Soviet camps were no less deadly than German camps for gentiles: thus, 400,000 of 1.8 million Germans taken prisoner after the war died. German forced labor camps were modeled on Soviet ones; no other country practiced them at the time.

The Soviet Union openly started ethnic repression against Jews in 1940. But months before, the Russians had divided Poland with Germany so that Jewish towns fell to the Nazi regime, whose pattern of anti-Semitic repression was well-established by then. When some Polish Jews managed to flee the Nazis, the Russians interned them in Central Asia; ironically, most internees survived in that area, free of German occupation, which gave birth to a persistent canard that Soviet Jews sat out the war in safety.

Stalin allowed a considerable number of Jews to survive, but those were largely the families of ranking communists. About a million such Jews, mostly from Eastern Ukraine and Russia, fled before the advancing German troops. After the war, they changed the face of East European Jewry: it was transformed into a mass of hardcore communists.

Soviet policy explicitly aided the Nazi extermination efforts. Though information on mass murders became available from the first day of the war, it was deliberately suppressed. Given the variety of information sources and Soviet media, it took an order from the highest level to quash all the information on Jewish massacres. Even in the occupied territories, Soviet propaganda remained present through radio broadcasts, leaflets, and rumors—but the Jews were left unaware of their fate, and didn’t flee. This is not an issue of a state’s responsibility to its citizens: perhaps the trains were lacking, but Jews could still be told to flee on foot, and many might have escaped. The logistics bottleneck is over-touted: the retreating Soviets evacuated millions of communist activists’ family members, and the space could have been found for Jews. In many instances, Soviet authorities dissuaded and prohibited Jews from fleeing. The Red Army cordons turned away scores of Jewish refugees, notably from Latvia.

The Soviet establishment facilitated the Holocaust by passing to Germans the housing data on Jews. Most Soviet offices destroyed their documents before Germans took the cities: burning all papers was a standard practice. But housing and registration documents were left to Germans intact in every town, and allowed them to identify Jews, many of whom were assimilated and could not be identified in any other way.

Soviet propagandists made a great effort to counter the German propaganda. Soviet broadcasts dispelled every other German allegation, but were consistently silent on a single one: that Jews provoked the war. The population hated Jews and Jewish Bolsheviks anyway (half a million Russians served in the German army), and took the Soviet silence for tacit confirmation of German anti-Semitic propaganda. Common Soviet people collaborated with Germans in identifying the Jews.
The Holocaust enterprise was directed by Germans but manned by Slavs. Death squads and camps employed tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Croats—but also many Russians.

The Soviets were careful not to obstruct the Holocaust. In their tens of thousands of bombing raids through Poland into Germany, Russian aircraft commonly overflew the death camps—but not a single bomb was ever dropped on them. The Russians bombed targets just miles away from the death camps, but not the camps themselves. Soviet partisan guerrillas waged a full-scale war on Germans in Byelorussia, sabotaging railroads and installations – but there was no concerted effort to stop the ongoing massacres, arm the ghetto inhabitants, or even inform them of the danger.

The Russians reconfirmed their policy toward Jews in 1953, when the entire country lauded the anti-Semitic rhetoric of its leadership. The intended relocation of Jews to Siberia, stopped by Stalin’s death, was unlike any other ethnic relocation, except the Poles’. Jews were herded specifically for death: pressed into cattle cars as during the Nazi massacres, transported to the coldest place in Siberia, where the only housing waiting for them was the shacks made of roofing felt, which allowed them no chance to survive the winter.

After the war, the Soviets covered German massacres of Jews while trumpeting and inflating other atrocities. The word “Jewish” was excised from reports and commemorations: rather, vague “Soviet citizens” were murdered. That policy cannot be explained by the state’s pandering to popular anti-Semitism; the state was unconcerned with popular feelings, and experience suggests that anti-Semites are not at all uncomfortable with Jews being mentioned in Holocaust accounts. The government suppressed the Jewish massacres for the same reason it suppressed many other wartime accounts, such as the massive collaboration with Nazis: shameful events that implicated the communist regime were stricken from the annals. The regime did not want questions about its own complacency and explicit aid to the murderers.

The Soviet Union didn’t actually save Jews. The Germans killed just everyone whom they could find, almost 100 percent of the Jews in the German-occupied Soviet territory. No statistically significant additional numbers of Jews would have been killed if the war had lasted for another few years. The Soviet Union nurtured the Nazi regime, provoked the war, and—regardless of the eventual victory—is responsible for Holocaust.

Russian support for the Palestinians will come largely in the military sphere. In Lavrov’s diplomatic-speak, Russia supports Abbas’ “security measures.” The only Fatah security measures we see in Israel are related to terrorist attacks: scores of Fatah policemen are vacationing in Israeli jails for terror activity. Not a single Palestinian terrorist was intercepted by Fatah policemen. The few terrorists comfortably jailed in Palestine were arrested by IDF and released to Fatah.

The Russian pledge to Palestine has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. Russians never delivered food or other humanitarian supplies to Palestinian refugee camps, but looked for “security cooperation” with the Palestinians. In plain English, Russians seek a military foothold on Israel’s borders. To that end, they pledged ten MIG-29 jets to Lebanon’s Hezbollah government free, and they are building a mammoth navy base in the Syrian port of Tartus. The navy base will host S-300 and later S-400 anti-aircraft defense, which would protect most of Syria against Israeli reprisals. Under the Russian ABM umbrella, Syria can develop its nuclear weapons without fearing Israeli preemption.

Russia’s Middle East policy also includes TOR-1M and S-300 deliveries to Iran and a joint nuclear program with Egypt.

Russian expansion comes despite that country’s economic troubles. The Russian economy relies on oil, gas, and other natural resources almost as much as Saudi Arabia. Oil and gas revenues account for about 60 percent of the Russian budget (both directly and through taxes on businesses which thrive on high oil prices). During the years of windfall oil profits, the Russian government built currency reserves, but they dwindled quickly as oil prices fell.

Instead of minding its own business and building a modern economy, the Putin-Medvedev government grew increasingly hostile. Domestically, the regime amended the high treason law: the new formulation of the law easily includes all dissidents. The tax administration hunts down crisis-stricken businesses: the reduced tax revenues are blamed on evasion rather than on the economic downturn. In the “near abroad,” Russia continues military incursions into Georgia and has introduced a gas blockade of Ukraine. The Russian monopoly Gazprom refused to transport Asian gas to Ukraine, and slapped it with gas prices substantially higher than those offered to West European customers.

Russia cannot bring rich or advanced countries on its side. They are either not interested in Russian overtures or prefer relations with the West, if only for economic reasons. Russians have nothing to offer Saudi Arabia or the Emirates, but courts the world’s outlaws, such as Iran or Venezuela.

The Old Europe also falls victim to Russian bullying: France and Germany, the EU cheerleaders, depend on Russia for gas supplies, as do most other European countries. The staunchly anti-American EU embraces Russia, if not for any other reason than to slap the United States. In its latest meeting at FM level, NATO discussed Georgia: not how to defend it from Russia, but how to get over it and re-establish ties with Russia.

US-Russian nuclear cooperation, arms reduction, and anti-missile treaties have been practically abandoned. Russia threatened to stop dismantling its nuclear warheads and selling the uranium to America, though the deal has gone on smoothly for fifteen years. Putin resumed militarily useless but highly provocative flights of Russian nuclear-armed strategic bombers around Europe.

Russia’s increasingly strong relations with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the PLO are best viewed in the context of its worldwide strategy. Lacking funds to buy clients with aid, and having too little economic clout to obtain friends with trade advantages, Russia has resorted to the old Soviet tactic of stirring trouble. That policy amounts to racketeering: if the Russian role is not acknowledged, regional troubles ensue. Propping up miscreants like Iran or the PLO is much cheaper than staging conflicts and immensely cheaper than any civilized way of spreading one’s influence.

Unless Russia breaks down again into post-democratic anarchy, it is out to create major troubles for the world.

In terms of alliances, the American one is empty. Our earthly protector gives Egypt and Palestine more aid than us, supplies Arabs more weapons than us, and pushes us around diplomatically. Russia is better: it never pushed a client to suicidal peace with its enemies. Russia, if aligned with Israel, would be interested in our expansion rather than shrinking us into eight-mile-wide borders. Being a normal rather than professedly moral state, Russia would want its client to win rather than capitulate to defeated enemies. Russia would love to lure the proverbial American client and in a brink of an eye establish control over the Middle East.

Russia cannot give us as much aid as America in nominal dollar terms, but can match it in purchasing-power-parity terms because Russian weapons cost three to ten times less than comparable American systems; Russian weapons are not perfect, but they are good enough against Arabs. More importantly, Russian military support would be unwavering: the Soviet Union has been arming Egypt for years—and for free—before the US started meager deliveries to Israel at high prices. During the Yom Kippur war, Russia launched an airlift to Egypt on day one and brought nuclear missiles to its client’s defense, while the US Administration procrastinated until Israel decided the war with what weapons were available.

Israel the American client invokes no fear because everyone knows that Americans are slow to react. It’s totally different with Russia, which has no money to bribe its enemies and therefore chooses to fight, sabotage, or otherwise uproot them. Russia arouses a kind of raw-power respect among Arabs, and they would not dream of attacking Israel if we were a Russian associate. Palestinian and Lebanese terrorists, Syria, and Iran would suddenly become nice to Israel. It is not nice to join thugs, but if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The Maccabees were more practical: they had no qualms about switching from the progressive Syro-Grecians to the relatively barbarous Roman thugs.

True, Russians are anti-Semitic, but so were the Romans and so are the Americans. It was a joint Anglo-American-Russian decision to refuse to ransom a million Jews from Germany. All the Allies refused to announce the ongoing Holocaust during their radio broadcasts into the occupied territories so that Jews might know and flee. America, Europe, and Russia condemned the Israeli attack on Osiraq. Jews have no friends, but our allies should better be mad.

And in one respect, Lavrov is right: who is that young Jewish British fellow to lecture him? Like France’s, Britain’s superpower status only exists in its hallucinations, and after it outlawed opium, the hallucinations became rather weak. Western Europe is swarmed with Muslim immigrants, drowned in liberalism and laborism, lacks meaningful armies, and depends on Russian oil and gas. Who is it indeed to lecture Russia?

It doesn’t matter that the Russian economy is on a par with the Saudi one, based entirely on natural resources. Poor barbarians have conquered the advanced Rome.

It matters little that Russian military expenditure is 2 percent of US expenditures in nominal dollar terms, and new equipment purchases are hardly noticeable. The credibility of the Russian military threat is based on its nuclear weapons, which Russia is presumably ready to use.

It is not critical that Russia’s allies are poor. They compensate for poverty with roughness, and for the shortage of weapons with the high likelihood that they would use them.

For the effeminate Western world, Russia’s unwavering determination is a deadly approach. NATO may expand whatever it likes, but Venezuela makes a better ally for Russia than all the Eastern Europen countries combined make for America. Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Ukraine would think a million times before antagonizing Russia, but Venezuela admitted Russian nuclear-capable bombers and fleet and expelled the US ambassador on a whim. With such allies as Venezuela, Syria, and Iran, Russia prevails in any diplomatic confrontation with the West simply because, unlike them, the West is afraid of confrontations.

Still more importantly, Russia can succeed in courting China. With a country ruled by a handful of communist bureaucrats, you never know whether China would opt pragmatically for open markets with the West, or for international supremacy in conjunction with Russia.

The Russian KGB/FSB elite learned the lesson of the arms race, and now uses this tool against America. Russia’s minor moves prompt massive American expenses, such as billions of dollars in aid to Georgia and Ukraine. Russia acquires allies cheaply, merely with diplomatic support to rogue regimes and profitable arms sales to them. America buys allies with aid, but paid vassals are contemptuous of the master who is weak enough to offer them money. America often antagonizes friendly countries by moralizing; Russia supports its allies with no moral qualms. In one example, America subverted its close friend South Africa because of the perfectly legal apartheid (the blacks were allocated their own country, Bantustans); it is unthinkable that Russia would subvert a friendly regime over racial issues.

Russia spends frugally on its military. It mostly relies on the PR effect from very small events: patrolling Europe with nuclear-armed bombers, selling weapons to rogue regimes, and developing wonder-arms which would never come to mass production. America’s shows are super-expensive, like the Iraqi and Afghanistan affairs. Russia, even though on diplomatic offensive, maintains a budget surplus while America runs a deficit.

The lack of clear political objectives costs America dearly. Why impose sanctions on Iran instead of cooperating profitably with the oil-rich nation? Iranian nukes are Israel’s problem, not America’s. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost America hundreds of billions of dollars and led to budget deficits—for no good. Billions of dollars of US aid to Egypt and Palestine are a complete waste. Morality in foreign policy is a breach of trust toward one’s own population: the government is elected to maximize the interests of its voters rather than pursue the moral objectives of faraway peoples.

The most important thing to understand about the KGB/FSB establishment is its conservatism. New doctrines are foreign to the Russian security elite. They re-assembled the country from the economic shambles of the Yeltsin era, nationalized much of the oil revenues, control the balance, but have no positive economic program. Likewise, they ended the post-Soviet era feudalism, centralized political power, but have no idea what to do next. Like any nation, Russians are most interested in affluence, then freedom. Both of those objectives align them with the West, but ruin Russia’s traditional political and economic framework. The establishment is not only concerned about its own vanishing role, but also the apparent inability of the Russian economy to rebuild itself quickly into a market system with reasonably fair income distribution.

It took America two hundred years to achieve that end. The Russian situation is worse. America had the huge advantage of relative lawlessness. Extreme corruption was almost as common in nineteenth-century America as in today’s Russia, but vigilantes from slandering reporters to citizens’ committees to lynch mobs succeeded in making corruption both unpopular and outright dangerous. Russia, a strong police state even under Yeltsin, curbs citizen activism, and in doing so opens the way to corruption. The Russian economy is thus more likely to follow in the way of Nigeria than the United States.

Russia’s security establishment has no firm policy yet, but tests the Western response to hardline measures. So far, the response has been pretty encouraging: the West is unwilling to fight the next Cold War. As mammoth oil and gas revenues trickle down the Russian society, the population is economically satisfied and longs for political goals. The only such goal on the agenda is a strong Russian semi-empire. An empire needs a good enemy, preferably a not-too-dangerous one, and Russia engages the West. The KGB/FSB establishment won’t attack the United States; peripheral conflicts suffice. So Russia returns to the old Soviet policy of kindling as many fires on the globe as possible on the cheap. The opposition to sanctions on Iran, weapons supplies to Syria, diplomatic contacts with Hamas and Hezbollah, encouraging Venezuela, and wooing China into separate agreements with Russia serve the goal of troubling the West. A troublemaker automatically becomes a VIP.

Theoretically, it is easy to stop Russia. Its clients must be made to understand that collaboration doesn’t pay. Syria welcomes the Russian fleet? Freeze its dollar accounts. Venezuela hosts Russian strategic bombers? Stop buying oil from there. Russian troops enter Georgia? Supply Georgians with TOW anti-tank missiles. Russians mess in Ukrainian politics (just like the Americans)? Support independence movements in Russia. Russia strikes an alliance with Germany? Stir up anti-Russian sentiment in Germany, such as recollections of the wholesale rape of its women in WWII and the annexation of Konigsberg. Zero tolerance to Russian expansion in any sphere, any issue would not only be efficient on its own, but will also signal to the KGB establishment the impossibility of launching Cold-War-lite. It is critical to check any Russian advances on the spot, not allowing its government any PR benefits whatsoever. Such politics requires an ingenious and strong leader, and is entirely unrealistic.

Other than that, there is really nothing to be done to curtail the Russian diplomatic expansion. Western Europe cannot refuse Russian and Iranian oil and gas. America cannot defend obscure Georgia with its own troops. Germany and France, resentful of the United States for helping them out during the Cold War, cheerfully align themselves with Russia. This trend is less pronounced under Sarkozy, but would resurface under a less pro-American president. The world is returning to its normal bipolarity of Russia-Germany-France versus Britain-America. Given the huge number of Muslim immigrants in Britain, even it could defect to the Russian camp.

Russian expansion is its own worst enemy. One cannot keep peddling expectations forever. Russian people will get used to anti-American, anti-Georgian, anti-Ukrainian, anti-everyone hysteria. Russian government-controlled media have resorted to an easy way of rallying public opinion: they heavily employ the familiar Soviet propaganda molds, down to outright curses and expletives toward hostile foreign leaders. There is a problem with that mold: Russians know about the eventual bankruptcy of Soviet propaganda. Eventually they will become cynical about the imperial propaganda. At that point, the Russian government will need a victorious war; depending on the availability and outcome of such a war, Russian society can turn further inwards or break out of its KGB-imposed policies.

A downturn in oil prices can provide major impetus for political changes in Russia. Without the oil and gas revenues, Russian military, government, and welfare expenditures are insupportable. Russia thus has a tremendous interest in fanning the Iranian conflict and instability in the Middle East generally—that’s besides a sheer pleasure of subverting American policies there. Faced with economic hardships, Russians would behave unpredictably: follow the reformers who promise them the Western-style affluence, brace for US aid, or—if all hope is lost—support the hardliners who promise them at least equality in their poverty.

But so far, welcome back to the Cold War.

The very fact of Georgian similarity and common Christian heritage made Georgia’s secession an affront to Russia. The subsequent alignment with America ensured the military confrontation. Divorce is bad enough, but the ex moving in with your enemy is too much.

Russia thus began subverting Georgian independence with the textbook colonial policy: settlement. The way of settling Georgia was ingenious: Russia issued massive numbers of passports to Osetians and Abkhazians, residents of two Georgian provinces. Russian passports offered them work opportunities and general mobility, and in a decade cemented the sense of belonging to Russia. Never mind that ethnic Russians are contemptuous of the Asiatic Osetians and Abkhazians.

Osetia and Abkhazia were not homogeneous, but included many ethnic Georgian villages. The issue of Georgian sovereignty there is moot: for the last two hundred years, the country itself lacked sovereignty and belonged to Russia. Georgians previously appealed to the precedent of Crimea: The Russian government recognized the Soviet act of ceding the peninsula to Ukraine; they claimed similar rights to Osetia and Abkhazia, which the Soviets incorporated into Georgia. Now that many Russian politicians frown upon the Crimea arrangement, that dubious precedent doesn’t hold.

In the current crisis, it is hard to believe that the Russians could react so swiftly; there are considerable rumors to the effect that the invasion had been planned for months. Both Russian troops and Osetian hospitals were unusually well-prepared. Osetia, the Russian client, started shelling Georgia—or so the latter claims—to which hot-headed Georgians, reassured by years of Israeli training, responded with invasion. Russia intervened, quickly routed the lackluster Georgian troops, took a day more to overrun its special forces, and all but occupied the American protectorate.

The conflict’s scope was minuscule: the Georgians had less than 200 killed, Russian troops less than 100. Osetian losses were somewhere in between those figures. Russian media hugely inflated Osetian losses, but judging by the mere hundreds of wounded who registered in local hospitals, the body count probably did not greatly exceed two hundred, largely the militia.

There are a few lessons. First, Russian clashes with Ukraine should not come as a surprise. Two, Medvedev follows in Putin’s footsteps: Putin started his reign with the Chechen war, Medvedev with the Georgian one. An empire such as Russia’s has to be constantly on the alert, always fighting someone lest its citizens pause to question the government’s policies.

The world had no problem with Russia and Georgia killing civilians, the only demands were for ending the publicized affair. Likewise, Israel can do anything to Arabs, as long as she limits her operations to a few days. That should be enough for the transfer.

The world has no problem with the secession of Georgian provinces or probable Russian annexation of them; the only thing on the agenda is the continued occupation of Georgia. Anything which is too long, and unacceptable to Western consciences, allows the media to jump in. Anything goes until the world knows—or rather is forced to admit that it knows. Even so, continued Russian presence in Georgia would not arouse the West. No one likes to make a helpless person of himself; once the US and EU politicians realized that they cannot change Russian policy, they would ignore it rather than reiterate their diplomatic failure. In the Israeli case, the civilized world accepted the Golan annexation presented as fait accompli.

There is also a lesson about friends. America provoked Georgia into acting against Russia, but didn’t supply it with meaningful arms to repel the invaders. The US Administration would protest Russia’s drastic moves but not the continuous carping at Georgia. American guarantees are worthless, especially the implicit ones. Russia has a better record of standing up for its clients, and its weapons are cheaper; Israelis should think about that.

Russia again embarked on the path of military confrontation with everyone else. Increased training and allocations to the Russian army, patrols by strategic nuclear-armed bombers, and new ballistic missile defenses and weapons upgrades show that the KGB/FSB regime wants its subjects to be patriotic—that is, anti-someone. The Russian military machine cannot rebound: previously, it relied on almost free labor and supplies, but cannot pay competitive salaries to scientists and purchase supplies at market prices. Even though Europe subsidizes its nemesis by buying Russian oil and gas at sky-high prices, that money is not enough to finance a modern army; the Russian military budget is below 2 percent of the American one in nominal dollars, 10-20 percent in purchasing-parity terms.

Russia, therefore, has returned to its beloved and inexpensive policy of making troubles for everyone in order to get respect. Georgia, Central Asia, and Ukraine suffer Russian meddling (not that they lack for American meddling). Angola, Algiers, Venezuela, Korea, Iran, Syria, Egypt, China, and India enjoy Russian weapons, so their neighbors suffer. The only way to stop Russia is Kennan’s way: firm opposition to every Russian move, arms sales to Chechnya, more support to opposition parties, ABM systems in Eastern Europe, a diplomatic vacuum around Russia, and isolating its clients so that they understand that dealing with Russia is unprofitable. Any attempts at appeasing Putin’s regime are counterproductive. Like Hezbollah, he takes the absence of a blow for encouragement.

After the Cold War, the international consensus for containment of Russia has faded. There is no need for it. Just as US-alone sanctions against Iran would be harsher than the consensual but ineffective UN sanctions, so the US-alone containment of Russia would work better than the watered-down US-EU opposition. It is unrealistic to expect the EU, addicted to Russian and Iranian oil and gas, to oppose either.

The next time you see a liberal, laugh at him. The Wild West world of power politics is alive and bad.

Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs invariably participate in those countries’ elections; large business there is inseparable from politics. The costs and difficulties involved in Russian and Ukrainian politics dwarf those of Israel. It is not unusual for a Ukrainian oligarch to spend $10-30 million for his own tiny party in parliamentary elections; contributions to large parties, especially in Russia, run much higher. Parliamentary seats are sold at $4-10 million apiece. In comparison, the power in Israel comes on the cheap. Russian oligarchs see Israel as a political investment opportunity. For them, it is not only or even primarily a matter of profiting from politics, but mostly a way to realize their dreams of power. They come so close to power in Russia and Ukraine, but are always vulnerable to anti-Semitic rulers. In Israel, the oligarchs can finally dominate.

Israeli politics is very provincial. Even a no-one called Netanyahu rose to power by hiring American campaign managers and investing relatively little in advertising. Peace Now became prominent by using forty-year-old tricks of political campaigning. Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs possess vastly more sophisticated experience in managing political campaigns and imagine they can influence Israeli politics efficiently.

The oligarchs are far smarter than average Israeli politicians; it’s hard to find a person sillier than an average MK. But it takes luck rather than genius to become an oligarch in Russia, and the magnates often overestimate their political power. The oligarchs are hapless in politics, consistently losing their political investment on the advice of cheating campaign managers.
Thus we see Michael Cherny and Vadim Rabinovich’s investments in Lieberman going sour; after short-term success, Lieberman the phony predictably loses his support base. Cherny and Rabinovich bet on militant Russian identity in Israel, but once that idea failed to bring Lieberman’s electorate substantial improvement, they weren’t able to redefine his platform. With Likud making inroads into Lieberman’s Russian audience, and ad hoc parties such as the Pensioners’ taking their share of Russian voters, Lieberman’s project is doomed. Lieberman will retain some supporters—those bent on taking him for a messiah—but their number will guarantee him only an insignificant position in the Knesset. It is possible that Lieberman can heat up his voters with demagoguery once again, but his trend is downward. Lieberman’s case is the first Israeli instance of a phenomenon that is widespread in the Ukraine: parties which depend on lone oligarchs are doomed. The oligarchs cannot allow their parties to be strongly anti-government, and so the parties lose their opposition identity, becoming mild and unattractive for voters. Lieberman’s oligarchic sponsors do not rationally depend on the Israeli government, as they make money elsewhere, but so far they habitually avoid alienating the ruling establishment.

Or consider a Jew with an odious last name, Gaydamak (gaydamaks are the worst anti-Semitic strain of Cossacks). He partners with KGB/FSB in many businesses, from Soviet foreign debts to weapons sales, but now he has miraculously transformed into an Israeli philanthropist. Gaydamak was always frank about his social and eventually political ambitions in Israel. After the years of being derogatorily called “Arkasha” by his KGB overseers, Gaydamak wants to become a political boss. His entourage of Israeli advisors is laughable, though; they play the king rather than trying to make him. In the Israeli political vacuum, Gaydamak’s bizarre political party may win asmany as fourteen seats, but will hardly enter the Knesset in subsequent elections. Messianically minded Jews have elected a number of such single-session parties, and almost none of them has ever staged a comeback. Gaydamak’s sensible social slogans target voters across the political spectrum, thus making him dangerous to every politician. Upon entering the Knesset, Gaydamak would likely be ostracized by his fellow politicians. He can make a decent political figure: not prone to petty corruption and not very left.
Like other very rich Jews, Gaydamak cannot be rightist or Jewish: such a stance would offend his Gentile friends and business partners. Olmert likewise describes Bush, whose peace process is killing the Jewish state, as very friendly; Jewish values and interests are an uncivil obstacle to the friendly chatting of ex-Jews with fellow Gentiles. It is impolite to stubbornly insist on Abraham’s right to Hebron and Jacob’s right to Schem when a powerful, friendly Gentile wants to help you out of that mess with the Arabs that his predecessors set up. It is ludicrous to speak of Jewish choseness, the truth of Judaism, and the religious right to the land at business meetings and debauched parties. Gaydamak, accordingly, spends money to alleviate the harm done by defeatism rather than helps to achieve the victory; he helps Sderot refugees rather than outpost settlers.

Lev Levaev comes very close to being the fifth column. His major income source, trade in Russian diamonds, wholly depends on Putin’s whims; Levaev, therefore, has to dance carefully to Putin’s tune. And so Levaev sponsors the alien Russian culture in Israel; instead of integrating the Russian Jews into the Israeli milieu, they are kept distinct. Levaev also fosters political ties between Israel and anti-Semitic Russia; his role is especially dangerous because of his contacts in the highest political echelons of Israel. Levaev cooperates with Putin, and—for example, on Angola diamonds—with Mossad’s ex-chief Danny Yatom. It is plausible that he acts as a link between them, essentially abetting high treason. Levaev, like other oligarchs, is leftist: an aggressive, religiously charged Jewish state is not good for his business. Superficially, Levaev supports Chabad charities, but his own shopping malls work on Shabbat. The Jewish schools Levaev sponsors in Russia and Ukraine are thinly disguised assimilationist shops which teach formalized religion, which is hateful to the children, instead of the real Judaism and Jewish values. Levaev is a typical religious atheist who separates God from business. Like Vyacheslav Kantor and so many others, Levaev chose a respectable position as Putin’s court Jew instead of simply being a person true to Judaism.

The latest Russian Jewish oligarch who has established a connection with Israel is Roman Abramovich. He survived Putin’s purges of Jewish oligarchs, and exhibits absolute loyalty to the Russian regime; and a shred of loyalty to anti-Semitic Russia amounts to treason against Israel. Abramovich is far richer than any other Israeli oligarch and, considering his extravagant spending habits, can reach almost any political goal, if only temporarily. There is no doubt that Abramovich would be as left and pro-Russian as the other oligarchs. He has a history of social mega-projects in Chukotka, a far Siberian region where he serves as absentee governor. Abramovich is therefore likely to follow in Gaydamak’s steps, starting with huge cocktail parties and ending with pompous welfare projects. Given Abramovich’s track record of keeping a low political profile in Russia, he is unlikely to exhibit political ambitions in Israel.

Putin’s tremendous influence on Russian Jewish oligarchs presents a problem. Putin is very different from previous Russian leaders: he is not a nomenclature bureaucrat who carefully charts his course, but a petty KGB officer turned corrupt businessman turned politician turned tsar. Putin is, in a sense, rootless; he lacks political fundamentals. His thinking is that of the proverbial “new Russian” businessman, entirely lacking strategic dimension. The nearest Western analogy is of a spoiled and not particularly bright child who suddenly became a large company’s CEO. Putin is unpredictable; he makes moves based on curiosity and desire to show his power. Now the Putin-controlled Jewish magnates can establish control over Israel. They can spend much more on elections than any Israeli party, and invest more in the electoral-oriented welfare than any charity. In all likelihood, the MAPAI-built security apparatus of Israel will grind the oligarchs. And we shouldn’t pity them.

In terms of professionalism, Russia has lost the two generations which graduated from mid-1980s until now. The quality of education greatly deteriorated in the last twenty years, with the brightest students and many professors leaving universities for entrepreneurship. Russia’s universities offer very poor education now, and there is no possibility of changing that situation any time soon; there are too few good teachers to educate a new generation of professors. The diversity and complexity of modern knowledge has made it very fragile. There could never be enough good teachers to staff mass education, but Russia has lost the great educational potential it painstakingly developed over the previous century.

In a highly symbolic move, Olmert’s government agreed to transfer a major piece of real estate in Jerusalem, the Russian Courtyard, to Russia’s government. It is not even an issue of legal rights: the Russians have none, as the property was purchased by a long-defunct tsarist charity. Israel had previously dispossessed scores of Arab villagers who had far stronger rights to the land than the Slavs. The faithless Israeli government fearfully avoids demolishing the many Christian Orthodox churches that dot Jerusalem’s landscape, though it isn’t clear how those churches are different from Hitler’s monuments. It was Christians rather than Muslims, Hindus, or Martians who exterminated the Jews for centuries. The churches in Jerusalem are a political symbol of the institutional oppression of Jews. Nazis held power for years, but the Orthodox Church conducted anti-Semitic propaganda and organized massacres for centuries. The Russian and Ukrainian pogrom mobs, with Orthodox crosses in hand, annihilated Jews. Besides the political issue, there’s an explicit commandment to refrain from selling Jewish land to idolaters. And are the Orthodox Christians not idolaters? They revere weeping icons! That’s right, some of the most revered Christian icons “weep” occasionally, and are worshiped for that very behavior. Let’s not presume the ancient Greeks to be so stupid as to believe that their statues are really enlivened; ancient idolaters worshiped their images as a symbol of divinity—just like the Orthodox Christians worship their icons, which feature their deity (a good Jew, actually). Worse, the Orthodox Christian churches in Jerusalem picture what they believe to be God. However one interprets the prohibition of graven images, it doubtless covers false images of God.

Tolerating the Nazi-like, idolatrous Orthodox Christian churches in Jerusalem is, moreover, worthless. The Russians refuse to return hundreds of thousands of Jewish properties they confiscated after the Nazis massacred their owners, or to restore to Jews thousands of synagogues confiscated by the communists. Russians eagerly appropriate real estate, such as the Russian Courtyard, but supply anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to our Muslim enemies, work with Iran on its nuclear program, and have resumed a massive Navy presence in Syria.

Jews don’t gain anything by brazenly violating the commandments.

Putin the outgoing leader aroused sympathy among Russians. They remembered his achievements, such as curtailing the rampaging theft of state property, and valued his decency in leaving the presidential office within the constitutionally set time-frame. The Putin who betrayed their hopes for a law-abiding leader would be much less popular.

More Russians will vote for Putin in the presidential elections than have voted for his party. But among the third of the population who voted for the party, many were intimidated into doing so, others succumbed to massive propaganda whose influence is fleeting, and still others saw Putin’s party as the only credible political force opposed to Russia’s despised liberals. Only perhaps a quarter of Russians strongly back Putin. That’s far short of the support required to maintain benevolent authoritarianism.

Oil revenues gave Russia a respite from the death agony that started in the late nineteenth century. The communist experiment in Russia was not about progress. It was a desperate effort by nostalgic intelligentsia to turn the clock back, to return Russia to communalism. The October 1917 revolution was actually a restoration of communalism, despotism, and militancy. The communist rule was reactionary; it sought to reverse the liberal economic policies of the 1870s-1910s. Tsar Alexander released the Russian serfs, and the communists turned the peasants back into serfs. Collective farms were similar to feudal servitude. The masses of arbitrarily convicted Russian people who built the major Soviet channels and dams would look familiar to feudal industrialists like the Demidovs, who operated their vast factories with serf labor. Russia has heavily employed forced labor, both serfs and convicts, from time immemorial. Communists returned to the fundamental Russian policy of keeping the state rich by pauperizing the population. Even by the late Soviet estimates, only 29 percent of the GDP was disbursed to the people. Even of that portion, the state expropriated the major part through latent inflation and forced savings. The figure was still less during the Stalinist years. The communist state, like tsarist Russia before it, depended on the almost free labor of a society of serfs.

In order to reverse the clock of history, the Russian government needed to keep its subjects in dark. That isolation failed in the late nineteenth century, when Russian intelligentsia started traveling a lot to Europe and encountered the wonderful freedom. The communists immediately closed Russian society. The second shock came in 1956, when Khrushchev invited scores of young foreigners for a sport competition in Moscow. The show of their unimaginable freedom and affluence broke the Russian hubris. Communists could no longer sell their lies about the achievements of the Russian proletariat; now the Russians knew how much better the life in the West was. With the isolation broken, the Russian clock moved quickly forward. The Soviet regime was dead in 1956.
And here is the answer to why Putin cannot re-create Russia into the threatening monster: he cannot close the society. Government propaganda can make some Russians skeptical of the Western achievements they see on the Internet and satellite TV, but “you cannot fool everyone forever.” The abundance of information in modern society makes it impossible to close Russian society, and short of closing, nothing will return it to communalism.

Then there is the economy. The Russian economy is miserable. Oil revenues, concentrated in the state’s purse, look significant; but no developed country can finance its ambitions by selling raw materials only. Russian oil revenues are negligible compared to the GDP of developed countries such as the United States or Great Britain. Even in the best-case scenario, it takes centuries to build a modern economy, and the Russian case is far from the best. America has drawn the most enterprising people from around the world. England is the cradle of modern liberalism and entrepreneurship. Russia retains its communal mentality, which precludes economic endeavors and is inefficient on a large scale. The Russian people produced many geniuses, but no brilliant managers or CEOs like Ford. The Russian state can only thrive by robbing its subjects, whether entrepreneurs or workers. But in an open society, subjects won’t submit to robbery—and the Russian government, therefore, cannot attain the prosperity of the communist times.

Russia’s efforts at flexing its muscles are lame. Putin is quintessentially a minor KGB functionary, one of those officers implanted as agents of influence into various government bodies shortly before the USSR collapsed. He has been corrupt at least since his years as an export-licensing official in St. Petersburg. Before becoming president, Putin was subservient to his superiors—men like Yeltsin and Berezovsky. Putin tries to present himself as a tsar, but has managed only to project the image of a petty KGB official who licked his way from dregs to riches. The stability of Putin’s regime is superficial. A billion dollars pumped into the opposition would buy massive protests in Moscow and Petersburg, publicized over the international media. Totalitarian governments are notoriously fragile; Putin’s Russia, like Gorbachev’s Russia or tsarist Russia, would succumb to a coup which need not even extend beyond the two capitals. Russian provinces wouldn’t notice changes in Moscow.

Putin’s plot to establish himself as prime minister under an amenable president after his own presidential term ends is doomed. Russians are not likely to elect a no-one even if Putin endorses him. Russians want leaders with charismatic potential, not the dull figures Putin promotes for the nominal presidency. A dull presidential candidate won’t win Russian elections if they are conducted with the least transparency—assuming, of course, that the opposition fields a popular candidate rather than some liberal marginal. Even if Putin succeeds in installing a weak president, such a weakling would soon become strong and arrogant, a center of gravity for Putin’s opponents. Putin himself was weak at first. A new president won’t tolerate an all-powerful Prime Minister Putin.

The Russian military threat is exaggerated. The Soviets built a huge army, just like they built a huge economy, on nearly free labor. For decades, military research offered the best conditions to the brilliant minds of Russia. Not anymore. The Russian military cannot compete with private employers for the best minds. Creative people resist discipline, particularly the discipline of government or military jobs. The Russian military doesn’t pay competitive salaries, provides an unattractive work environment, and offers no fame, such as might be gained by writing research papers. Russian military R&D facilities are staffed by people of respectable age, and very few young people are joining. As the Internet and migration extend employment opportunities to young scientists in faraway regions of Russia, they too abandon their military jobs. The Russian military R&D budget is lower than Israel’s, and the procurement of new military systems is comparable between the two countries. Putin’s Russia is attempting Soviet imperial policy but lacks the financial capabilities. Russia can no longer buy the allegiance of barbarous regimes with massive aid. In the absence of the communist threat, Russian political weight worldwide has dwindled. Russia only thrives now on its past glories. Locked in our minuscule state, Israelis are snobbishly respectful of Russia, but no deference is due. Russian weapons sales to Israel’s enemies are irritating, but in the end the truly ingenuous Russian-made weapons never work as advertised; the samples are great, but the production quality is abysmal.

The Russian Empire, whether tsarist or communist, is over. Huge totalitarian societies never survive affluence. Just like in China, economic development will cause a Dark Age and internal breakdown in Russia. It’s a matter of guesswork how long the KGB will manage to hold the crumbling Russia together, but surely not for long. Russia won’t lose much territory in the breakdown; an independent Siberia is an unlikely prospect. The Russian state would probably become a chaotic conglomerate with quasi-independent regions and huge inequality among the developed cities, resource-rich areas, and the utterly impoverished 95 percent of the country. Russian nukes will go on the black market, and the world must be prepared to buy them off from dealers.
The dying body of Russian communalism need not be feared. Containment is the proper policy against contagious diseases and ideologies.