Putin's Blunder

Few in Russia believe President Vladimir Putin's assertion that the spectacular arrest of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky last weekend is simply the result of an aboveboard criminal investigation.

On the contrary, almost everyone believes it's a blatantly political act, meant to punish Mr. Khodorkovsky - the president of YukosSibneft, the world's fourth-largest oil producer - for daring to dabble in politics.

At least Mr. Putin is consistent. He began his term by going after two of the most politically active oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky. Both, like Khodorkovsky, supported the liberal political opposition, owned media outlets, and were Jewish. Both are now in exile.

Putin then cut a deal with the remaining oligarchs: They'd stay out of politics and he'd leave them alone. But Khodorkovsky increasingly violated that understanding.

Whether the oil tycoon is guilty of the tax-evasion, fraud, and theft charges against him is almost beside the point. The arrest confirmed the deepest worry of many investors that Putin is not really committed to democracy or a market economy - the Russian stock market plunged 10 percent the day after the arrest.

The affair spotlights infighting within the Putin administration between ex-KGB officers - many of them nationalistic, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic - and the liberal, pro-Western Yeltsin loyalists Putin inherited from his predecessor. With parliamentary elections coming this December and presidential balloting next March, the hard-liners appear to have the upper hand. Putin will lose few votes for moving against the oligarchs, whom average Russians widely despise.

But Putin is risking much. While he has stabilized and improved Russia's economy, the foreign investors it so desperately needs will not put their money in a country where leaders continue to selectively prosecute business people on political grounds.

Khodorkovsky's arrest also threatens Russia's relationship with the West. Already in the United States, for example, there are calls for Congress to refrain from repealing the 1970s-vintage Jackson-Vanik law, which requires Russia get an annual waiver for normal trade relations in return for allowing freedom of emigration.

President Bush and other Western leaders friendly with Putin must make it clear to the Russian president that instead of leading his country into the modern world and prosperity, actions such as this arrest can take it back to poverty and isolation.

Personally I think that condemning the Russian prosecutor may be a bit premature; at least give him a chance to present the evidence first.

Also, my suspicions are triggered when the Christian Science Monitor, of all publications, cries glycerine tears for Khodorkovsky.

I found the following quite amusing.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gideonlichfield/message/23

(Gideon Lichfield is a journalist writing for The Economist.)

EXCERPT:

[...]Russia, though it seems to
be cosying up to Arab countries, is actually getting about as close
to Israel as you can get without being America.

This is no great surprise, but I also worry a bit that it might be
used as ammunition by those who like promoting Jewish conspiracy
theories. As a Jew I hate to admit it, but if you want to go around
spreading the word that the Jews run the world, Russia is the perfect
place to start. You can still get little books from wizened old
ladies in the street detailing the Jewish stranglehold over Russia.
Never mind all the Jewish scientists and artists - you get them
everywhere - or the Jews in government and the media, who keep a
fairly low profile. Back in the mid-90s when Russian business was
ruled by a coven of seven oligarchs, six of them were of Jewish
origin and the seventh served them as a kind of political shabbes
goy: whenever they felt that a Jew couldn't ask the authorities for
something, they'd get him to mediate. One of them, now the richest
man in Russia and one of the 30 richest men in the world, Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, is Jewish. And Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the emblem of
Russian ultra-nationalism, the mad-dog racist who accused the Jews of
provoking the Holocaust and selling Russian children and transplant
organs, admitted in 2001 that he had a Jewish father (though his
grasp of biology is a little shaky: he wanted to know why he should
be stigmatised just because of the "one drop of Jewish blood" his
father left in his mother). So it's not enough for us to run the
country, we have to run the anti-Semites as well?

Likewise, the Jewish community itself is also a more extreme version
of what it would be elsewhere. When I went to the synagogue on Jewish
New Year, everything was mixed together - the Hasidim were doing
their round-the-hall dances and yodelling like Swiss farmers while
the secular Jewish businessmen tied up loose ends on their mobile
phones in the middle of the service. Not so long ago there was a
power struggle for the post of Chief Rabbi of Russia, which by all
accounts was as vicious as a typical Russian business takeover and
was won by an Italian-born New York Hasid. One of my friends here was
told a story by an American diplomat who had to organise George W.
Bush's visit to the Choral Synagogue in St Petersburg. It was a great
event, and all the rabbis of Northwestern Russia were invited.
Unfortunately half of them were at loggerheads with the other half
and each threatened not to come if so-and-so did; the diplomat was
driven nearly insane trying to arrange the seating to keep deadly
rivals apart.

I asked the president of the Russian-Jewish Congress, the
unfortunately-named (for English-speakers) Evgeny Satanovsky, why the
Jews have done so well. His answer was basically evolution: the
constant struggle to succeed against Soviet discrimination made them
the winners once the barriers began to lift. That gives you an idea
of how intense Soviet discrimination must have been.

But what makes it even more remarkable is that this crowd of super-
evolved power-mongers had to be formed out of the relatively small
number of Jews who didn't leave Russia as soon as they had the
chance. The Russian diaspora is about five million strong, and a good
part of it is Jewish. There is a common belief here that Jews have a
kind of innate radar for disaster. I met a Chechen who told me that
the first sign that Chechnya was heading for ruin, well before the
war started, was when the Jews started leaving. Satanovsky said that
the RJC set up an online forum for Russian-speaking Jews abroad. They
got contacted by people from 82 countries.

And let's not even talk about the Russian Jews in Israel. When I went
there over the holidays, my flight was five hours late. I spent the
day in the airport talking to an old gent, and after a while he asked
to use my mobile phone to call his relatives in Tel Aviv. His
conversation, all in Russian, went something like this:

[Voice answers the phone]: Hello?
Gent: Hello, can I speak to Misha?
Voice: He's gone out. Who is it?
Gent: It's his brother. Can you tell him the flight is late? We'll be
landing about...
Voice: What? What flight?
Gent: The flight from Moscow.
Voice: You've got the wrong number.

That, then, is the Russian Jewish Conspiracy. Not only do the Russian
Jews run Russia; they run Israel too. After all, what's the sense in
having a Jewish conspiracy if you're not prepared to do it properly?

Shabbat Shalom!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.