Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007
From: Vladimir Shlapentokh <shlapent@msu.edu>
Subject: Putin as a Flexible Politician: He Imitates Stalin, But Not His Anti-Semitism
Leaders who can be considered bearers of an ideology are, as a rule, less flexible in their domestic and foreign policy than those who are highly pragmatic, anti-dogmatic and completely absorbed in pursuing their personal interests and ready to pay any ideological price to hold on to power and its material benefits. Soviet history provides us with both types of leaders. As representatives of the first type, Lenin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev were champions of the Communist idea in one form or another, while Brezhnev could be seen as a leader for whom the might of the Soviet empire was the prevalent value. The first group tried, as much as possible, to implement their shared values in their policies. None of them neglected the importance of personal power, but none of them were ready to use any means to keep it or exploit it for personal material enrichment.
Stalin and particularly Putin epitomized the second type of leader who was ready to sacrifice the country's short and long-term interests to maintain his power. Yeltsin, to some degree, also belongs to the second group, even if his desire to look like a democratic leader influenced some of his actions. Of course, Stalin and Putin used ideologies extensively for propagandistic purposes and for the legitimization of their personal power. However, given the fact that they were concerned only about personal power, these two leaders were extremely flexible and open to the idea of changing the country's ideological course in any direction. Stalin proved this several times during his career. He cannot be labeled as a leader with Communist ideology, even if some of the elements of Marxism influenced his thinking, such as the high role of conflict and material interests in social life.
He easily departed from Lenin's belief in the world revolution and international class solidarity and moved toward the idea that the might of the Red Army was the means for Russia's security and expansion in the world. Dismissing social equality as the basis of his social policy, he made the party apparatchiks into the materially privileged class in society. In fact, he created a class-based society (Milovan Jilas, a disappointed Communist and a former aid to Tito, the Yugoslavian leader, published one of his first books on this topic in 1957). Some observers assert that Stalin, despite his Georgian origin and heavy accent, was a Russian nationalist. His policy better supported this label than the label of a true Communist. He indeed promoted aggressive Russian nationalism. However, when he felt some threat from young party leaders in Leningrad in 1949-1950, he accused them of Russian nationalism and executed 200 of them.
Putin is as flexible as Stalin. It is impossible to classify his ideology. Nobody thinks that Putin is a democrat, since he destroyed the fledgling Russian democracy. He reduced the State Duma into almost the same sham parliament as the Soviet Supreme Council, while the leading pro-governmental party /United Russia/ became similar to the Soviet Communist Party. In both cases, membership in the party was a necessary condition for careers. Also in both cases, no other political movement could challenge its supremacy in the country. In addition, Putin's control over the media, TV in particular, became almost as strong as the state's command of the media in Soviet times. He also restored Stalin's propaganda from the 1930s about the country being surrounded by foreign enemies that wish to destroy the country, as well as lurid slogans about internal enemies serving their egotistical interests and those of the West. The idea of internal and foreign enemies was the core of Putin's speech before an audience of his supporters on November 20, 2007 in connection with the upcoming parliamentary election; the speech was amazingly similar, given its focus on enemies, to Stalin's speeches between 1937 and 1939.
With his creation of the chekists* *(current and former members of the political police), who now rank among the country's richest people, and his support for those oligarchs who are loyal to the Kremlin, nobody can name Putin a Communist or even a leader with sympathies for socialist ideals. However, he also cannot be treated as a genuine Russian nationalist. It is true that he directly and indirectly supports nationalist extremists and does almost nothing to oust them from the political arena. As we can judge from his behavior, he considers Russian nationalism a powerful ideological instrument that helps him maintain his power. At the same time, several facts cast doubt on his real concern about the country's long-term national interests. Due to the skyrocketing price of oil, Putin was able to raise the standard of living in the country in the last years. Using authoritarian methods, he established a sort of political stability in society, even if it remains precarious. At the same time, he did almost nothing to fight corruption, which plagued all sectors of Russian society, and curtailed the efficiency of the state apparatus, particularly the judicial system and the police. Of no less significance is his conspicuous indifference toward the modernization of the economy, his acquiescence to the miserable state of Russian science and the erosion of intellectual and professional capital. These factors guarantee that technological retardation will grow in Russia, as suggested by economists on the right, such as Evgeni Yasin, and on the left, such as Sergei Glaziev. Making the presidential election campaign into a sort of detective story, keeping the nation in suspense about his choice of an heir and supporting, like Stalin, the cult of his personality as the only person in Russia who can run the country, Putin is not benefiting the country's long-term interests and stability. Moreover, national interests are not promoted by Putin's personal aggressive policy toward Ukraine and Georgia and several other neighboring countries.
Imposing an authoritarian regime on the country, Putin, at the same time, is still free from any ideological dogma. He is flexible in his domestic and foreign policy, which perplexes both his supporters and enemies, who continue to ask themselves, "Who is Putin?", even after eight years of his rule. In a brief amount of time, he moved from pursuing rather cordial relations with the United States to an arrogant hostility toward this country. He also moved from the idea of a state alliance with Belorussia to a policy inspired by the hatred of Lukashenko.
Using their monopoly on media, education and art, as well as people's fear of the authorities, both leaders were able to persuade their subjects that Russia would perish without their leadership. The mass mourning after Stalin's death on March 5, 1953 was accompanied by widespread panic over the possible collapse of the country. In fact, Putin and his political machine were able to achieve almost the same result. The Kremlin inculcated in the public mind the idea that, without Putin at the helm, Russia will face instability and hostility from the external world. In October 2007, according to Levada's polling firm, almost two thirds of the Russians wanted, despite the rules of the constitution, Putin to remain the president for three or even four terms (20 percent preferred that he stay in office indefinitely).
Though he respects Stalin as the great leader of the empire, Putin, however, does not imitate Stalin in all ways. He does not want to repeat Stalin's mass terror (targeted murders by Putin's secret police are quite enough to scare the public). One stark piece of evidence of Putin's flexibility is his policy toward Jews.
If Putin were a dogmatic leader, he would have included anti-Semitism in his public ideology. Anti-Semitism was introduced in the ideology of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. The restrictions placed on Jewsa sort of "anti-affirmative action policy"soon became universal. Following a short respite in the aftermath of the revolution in the 1920s, Russia returned to the traditional anti-Semitic policy of the tsars (particularly the policy of the last two, Alexander the Third and Nikolas the Second).
The Soviet anti-Semitic policy of the 1940s-1980s made it difficult and sometimes impossible for Jews to enter the best colleges, get positions in the party apparatus, the army or managerial jobs of a high level in the economy. Today, 50 to 60 years later, mathematicians, as seen from various professional publications (for instance, George G. Szpiro's 2007 article in the prestigious journal, /Notices of the American Mathematical Society/) have started analyzing how Jewish boys and girls were rejected from Moscow University and how examiners prepared two sets of problems: one set for "them," the so called killer questions, and one for the rest of the students.
In media, novels and movies, Jews were almost never shown in a positive light. A Jewish name could only appear in a negative context. Alexander Askol'dov's movie /Komissar /(1967), which praised the humanism of a Jewish family during the civil war, was shelved and never shown in the Soviet Union, while the director was excluded from the party and ousted from the movie industry. Miron Chernenko, in a recent book /Red Star, Yellow Star/ (2006), showed that Jewish characters were almost never shown in Soviet movies. An article published in a leading party newspaper by a Jewish author represented an extraordinary event. One example was the article by Evsei Liberaman (a Kharkov economist) on economic reform published in /Pravda/ in 1962 (it was published only with the permission of Khrushchev). Even writers of Jewish origin tried to keep their distance from their own people and mentioned them only in a critical way, as did Naum Korzhavin in his almost anti-Semitic play, "It Happened in the 1920s," staged in the 1970s in one of Moscow's leading theaters, the Stanislavsky Theater.
The open propaganda against Jews jarred with Lenin's heritage and internationalism. For this reason, the Soviet authorities replaced the term Jews with "Zionists." Since Zionism was a "legitimate" enemy of socialism, it became possible to carry out an anti-Semitic campaign under the guise of the fight against it. The hatred of Jews was so high that the Soviet propaganda tended to describe Zionism as a greater evil than the United States, suggesting that American imperialism was merely a tool used by the Jews to conquer the world. The anti-Zionist campaigns were carried out until the last days of the USSR. The typical trick used by the Soviet authorities at that time was to humiliate prominent Jews by forcing them to denounce Zionism. Under pressure from the Kremlin, famous actors of Jewish origin, Arkadi Raikin and Maia Plisetskaia, participated in a shameful TV show in 1970 as the "convinced" critics of Zionism. The Soviet state anti-Semitism was particularly heinous, because it was rather an exception to a sort of tolerance cultivated in the Soviet Union toward other minorities. Only Germans, given the heritage of the war, shared to some degree the position of the Jews as the pariahs in the Soviet Empire. The USSR tried to combine the dominance of the Russians with positive attitudes toward all ethnic groups.
The anti-Semitic state policy was accepted by the majority of Russians, as well as by many non-Russians in Soviet times. Some non-Russians who did not like the role of the Russians as "the senior brother" took revenge by joining them and discriminating against the Jews in their republics. Some Russians accepted anti-Semitism as justifiable, or as an unpleasant element of the Soviet landscape that should be tolerated by Jews, while many others pretended not to see it. Very few joined the fight against anti-Semitism. Even today many Russian liberals claim that they did not see any state anti-Semitism in the Soviet times. The most ardent anti-Stalinists, such as Irina Pavlova in her book /The mechanism of power and the building of Stalinist socialism/ (2001), totally avoided the subject or denied Stalin's anti-Semitism, as in the case of Egor Gaidar in his recent book, /The fall of the empire: The lessons for contemporary Russia/ (2006).
However, even more important than the state's policy toward Jews was the transformation of anti-Semitism into a strong emotional component in the ideology created for the masses and party elite. The involvement of an individual in an ideology is high only if he or she shows allegiance to its elements in private conversations, in the family or in communications with friends. As we know from various sources of information, such as memoirs, movies and novels, people's private conversations at home or parties almost totally ignored Soviet dogmas, such as the leading role of the working class or the importance of social equality.
Of course, anti-Americanism was a very important element of the Soviet ideology, but it did not play an important role in the emotional life of the political elite in the 1960s-1980s. (It was later, under Putin, when the hatred of America became an essential element in the minds of the Russian elite). Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, represented a different case. It was indeed a part of the emotional life of the Soviet ruling class. In private communications, most apparatchiks talked with enthusiasm about Zionist plots, about the hidden Jews in the bureaucracy, or about the treacherous behavior of Jewish intellectuals. As a matter of fact, the hatred of Jews and Zionism cemented the ideology of the party and state apparatchiks. Anyone who did not support their views on Jews became an outcast with no chance for promotion. Leonid Zorin, in his novel /Sober Man /(2001), was among the authors who were able to depict the deeply anti-Semitic climate in the party apparatus, as was also the case in Alexander Proshkin's movie "See Paris and Die" (1992).
The traditional anti-Semitism, honed by Stalin over many years, was seen by his successors, who dared to make reforms, as a fundamental fact about the Russian psyche, which they had to avoid for the sake of liberalizing society. In his four volume memoir, /Time, People, Power/ (1999), which he dictated after his dismissal as the party leader, Khrushchev talked a lot about Stalin's anti-Semitism. However, he did not risk even indirectly mentioning Stalin's anti-Semitic policy in his public reports to the party congresses in 1956 and 1961, when he harshly denounced his former boss.
The same was true about Gorbachev. From the beginning of Glasnost to the end of his rule, he was almost never critical of his predecessor's state policy toward Jews. In February 1986, Gorbachev, in an interview with the French Communist newspaper /L'Humanité (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Humanit%C3%A9)/ categorically denied the existence of state anti-Semitism, declaring that "this question became part of the true psychological war against the USSR." The life of Jews in the Soviet Union in Gorbachev's Russia improved significantly (for instance, emigration became much easier), but the General Secretary continued to keep his distance from any involvement in the "Jewish question" and did not recruit Jews to any significant position in his administration, continuing the old party tradition.
As a builder of democracy and a proclaimed ally of the West, Boris Yeltsin eliminated, considering his cadre policy, even the slightest suspicion that, as a former party regional secretary, he was an anti-Semite. He involved many Jews in his government and administration, but avoided any public demonstration of his break with the old party line, preferring to show, as the known Moscow journalist Leonid Radzikhovsky observed, that "he is completely indifferent to any national issue."
When Putin came to power and declared his loyalty to the Soviet empire and traditions, it was only natural to expect a gradual restoration of state anti-Semitism. The rise in anti-Semitism in Western Europe only encouraged Putin to do this. Putin's background strengthened the pessimistic expectations about the revival of a state anti-Semitic policy. Since the late 1930s, the KGB was a bastion of hatred of the Jews.
Putin had grounds to believe that a demonstration of negative attitudes toward Jews could enhance his position in the country. Indeed, the anti-Semitic feelings in the country in the early 2000s, as illustrated by the data from the most prestigious public opinion firms, including the Levada-zentr and the Fund of Public Opinion, were running high, even if they were weaker than anti-Chechen or anti-Azerbaijan sentiments. Roughly 8 to 10 percent of the population can be regarded as avowed anti-Semites; 13 percent endorsed a proposal to ban all Jewish organizations in the country; 18 percent thought that it would be useful to limit the number of Jews living in the country; and 34 percent did not condemn anti-Semites. Another 44 percent thought that the influence of Jews "in the spheres of politics, business, law firms, education and show business should be restrained."
There are strong xenophobic and anti-Semitic elements in the Orthodox Church, a new and very important Kremlin ally. Even indirect support from Putin for these feelings would contribute to the Kremlin's relationship with the church. What is more, many nationalist movements in the country, which Putin sees as a sort of hidden constituency that could be important to him in a critical situation, are deeply anti-Semitic and actively spread anti-Semitic literature. On several occasions, the State Duma became a springboard for various anti-Semitic initiatives, such as a letter by 19 deputies who demanded, in 2005, that the prosecutor general investigate and ban Jewish organizations in the country. Several known authors have shown, with different levels of intensity, their displeasure toward Russian Jews. One example is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's two-volume book, /200 Years Together/ (2006).
In order to instigate anti-Semitism in the country, Stalin resorted to various fabrications, such as the invention of "the doctors' plot" in the last years of his life. Today, if Putin wanted to foment anti-Semitic propaganda, he could easily do it without inventing facts. It would be enough for the Kremlin to create a TV series about the origins of the wealth of numerous Jewish oligarchs, who are very visible in the Russian economy. Such a series could show, without any distortion of the truth, how this wealth, as well as the wealth of ethnic Russian oligarchs, was accumulated by criminal methods in the 1990s. The real facts about the high life of the Jewish moguls, about their villas on the Côte d'Azur* *and about their accounts in foreign banks would be more than enough to convince millions of Russians that the new evidence corroborates their feelings toward Jews.
Putin, however, did the opposite of what almost everybody expected. Putin showed his respect for all ethnic groups in Russia, particularly Muslims who make up to 20 percent of the population. He appointed many Germans to high positions in the country and rectified the injustice done to them during the Soviet period. Most surprising was Putin's positive attitude toward Jews. In 2005, Putin began a harsh anti-American campaign. Meanwhile, there was a popular view in Russia that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism always go together. For this reason, almost all analysts did not pay attention to Putin's "Jewish anomaly." None of the authors (inside or outside Russia) who have recently written about Putin drew attention to this remarkable fact.
If to take into account all of Putin's publications, meetings and speeches since 2000, he said more positive words about the Jews than all the Russian leaders before him, with Lenin as the only exception. In his memoir, /On behalf of himself/ (2001), Putin did something that no other Russian leader did. With a high degree of warmth, he described a Jewish family that lived with his family in the same communal apartment in Leningrad. He talked about his Jewish wrestling coach Anatolii Rakhlin as a person who "probably played the crucial role in my life." The coach had attracted him to serious sports and drew him away from a dangerous life on the streets. Putin showed special sympathy toward his high school teacher, who has the typical Jewish name, Vera Gurevich. Among other things, he publicly invited her to his birthday party. As suggested in /Komsomol'skaia Pravda /in October/ /2007, Putin bought a new apartment in Tel Aviv for his old school teacher Mina Yuditskaia.
During his stay in the Kremlin, Putin met with rabbis several times. In his last meeting with Russia's chief rabbi in June 2007, he promised to donate one month's salary for the construction of a Jewish museum of tolerance. Putin meets regularly with representatives from Russian Jewish Communities and various Western Jewish organizations. In October 2007, he met with a representative of the European Jewish Congress, attended many Jewish religious celebrations (for instance, Hanukkah in 2001) and regularly sent congratulations to the Russian Jews in connection with Rosh Ha-Shanah, the Jewish New Year and Hanukkah. Speaking in Krakow on January 27, 2005, in connection with the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Putin urged other nations to consider the lessons learned from the Holocaust and warned against anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia worldwide. What is more, he also noted the existence of anti-Semitism in Russia, a statement that none of the Soviet leaders after Lenin dared to make.
No Russian leader after 1945, including Gorbachev and Yeltsin, even remotely or indirectly mentioned the Holocaust. Such a reference was forbidden in Soviet media. Putin was also the first Russian leader who expressed his regret that many Jews left Russia and hoped that some of them would return to the country. In 2002, Putin, in conversations with Rabbi Berel Lazar, said that Russia views the Jewish émigré communities abroad as a future resource of "great economic potential," and at the same time the government is ready to "address Jewish communities' concerns and help them." He sent a special message to the Congress of the Russian-Speaking Jews (2002). Putin was also the first Russian leader who visited Israel. Putin's close confidant, the famous film director Nikita Mikhalkov, made a movie in 2007 called "12" (a remake of the American movie "12 Angry Men"), which denounces anti-Semitism and other ethnic prejudices in Russia. The screening of such a film would be absolutely impossible not only between the 1940s and the 1980s, but even in Yeltsin's time. According to /Moskovskii Komsomolets, /in November 2007, Putin invited journalists and gave a public showing of this movie in his residence. He reportedly expressed his high satisfaction with the piece.
On November 30, 1936, when Stalin was already in the process of making Russian chauvinism a pillar of his ideology and making his first hidden moves toward an anti-Semitic state policy (one of the first anti-Semitic documents was circulated at the Central Committee in 1938, according to the book /State Anti-Semitism in the USSR, 1938-1953,/ 2005), he published a letter in /Pravda/ to a Jewish organization in the United States, in which he strongly condemned anti-Semitism as "the most dangerous remnant of cannibalism" (in fact, it was written in 1931).
However, contrary to Stalin's hypocrisy, in no way can Putin's numerous positive statements about Jews be treated as propaganda. Anti-Semitism in Russia today is lower than it has been in the last seven decades. Jews in Russia are much less inclined to hide their ethnic origin or their interest in Jewish culture and religion. According to data cited in Rosalina Ryvkina's comprehensive book, /How Jews Live in Russia/ (2005), the proportion of Jews who talked about their involvement in Jewish culture (considered a taboo in Soviet times) increased by three times in 2004 in comparison with 1995. In the same period, the number of Jews who declared themselves as believers in Judaism increased by 50 percent, while the number of regular visitors to synagogue increased by 11 times and the number of members of Jewish organizations increased by almost 5 times. The number of Jews who suffered from anti-Semitism declined from 75 percent to 55 percent.
Of course, the dwindling population of Jews in Russia (in 2002 the population was only 42 percent of what it was in 1989) continues to feel some hostility. According to data cited in Ryvkina's book, 55 percent of Russian Jews think that discrimination against Jews still exists when they apply to colleges or look for jobs; 68 percent are still afraid of possible "pogroms" and are terrified by the dissemination of anti-Semitic literature, acts of violence against Jews and the vandalism in Jewish cemeteries. In 2004, 83 percent of the Jews thought that the attitudes of the Russian people toward them was the same as it was ten years before; 96 percent recognize anti-Semitism as an organic trait of society. One of the most brazen attacks occurred in January 2006, when a knife-wielding assailant, who reportedly yelled "I will kill the Jews," attacked the Chabad Bronnaya Synagogue in downtown Moscow and wounded at least eight worshippers. Russian Jews are also despondent about the fact that the justice system is very slow to prosecute cases of violence against them.
However, with all these extremely negative developments, since the 1930s the Kremlin and the state have not treated Jews as well as they treat them today. In fact, state anti-Semitism (as opposed to popular anti-Semitism) has almost completely disappeared from the Russian political scene. Jews or so called half Jews hold a large number of high positions in the state apparatus, including the government and leading state corporations. The appointment of Mikhail Fradkov as prime minister in 2004 was only one of many of Putin's appointments that totally ignored the ethnic background of the candidate. No less indicative was the appointment in 2007 of two managers with Jewish backgrounds, Leonid Melamed and Semen Vainshtok, as the heads of two big state corporations, both with multi-billion dollar budgets. One of the corporations dealt with nanotechnology, while the other was building the facilities for the Olympic Games in 2014 in Sochi.
Putin's fight against Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky cannot be ascribed to their Jewish origin, because he entertains close relations with several oligarchs of the same ethnic background, including Roman Abramovich, Mikhail Friedman and many others. Jews under Putin continue to play a very visible role in media and arts. Putin has regularly awarded state prizes and medals to many culture figures with Jewish backgrounds. Recently, the 70^th birthday of Iosif Kobzona, a known Jewish singer in Russia, was celebrated in the Kremlin and on TV with high prominence.
Of course, considering his loyalty toward Jews and his sensitivity toward their tragic past, Putin still does not rise to the level of a Western leader. Unlike Western leaders, he did not openly stand up against the two greatest anti-Semites of our timethe *Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and the Iranian President Mahmud *Ahmadinejad <http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Ahmadinejad%B4s_Mahmud_983368377.aspx>*. In *October 2003, Putin attended the meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, during which Mahathir Mohamad talked about the Jews who ruled the world. As Putin's semiofficial biographer Andrei Kolesnikov wrote in his book /Putin Saw Me/ (2005), the Russian president said nothing about this rude anti-Semitic tirade, even though he had the opportunity to do so, because he talked at the conference following the Malaysian leader. While chatting with the Russian journalists who attended the conference, Putin did mention that some speeches at the conference were "extremist." What is more, Putin never made critical comments about the appeal of the current president of Iran to obliterate Israel.
In no way should Putin's attitudes toward Jews allow one to forget that, during his eight years in power, he accomplished an anti-liberal perestroika, which effectively turned Russia into an authoritarian society with nothing more than a democratic façade. While praising ethnic tolerance, Putin has also done the opposite on several occasions. In 2006, he initiated a shameful campaign against Georgians, which included the police identifying Georgian children and expelling them from schools. In September and October 2006, during a campaign against immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus, he demanded that only "native people," supposedly ethnic Russians, were permitted to sell their products at the markets.* *This chauvinistic term was used by Stalin's bureaucracy and is now being used by Russian extremists who support the slogan "Russia for Russians."
However, in spite of Putin's record as a destroyer of Russian democracy and as supporter of several heinous regimes in the world, his refusal to incorporate anti-Semitism in his domestic and foreign policy reveals his inordinate flexibility as a politician. We can only speculate about Putin's motivation on this issue. It is possible that, besides personal motives, Putin's refusal to pledge his loyalty to rabid nationalism is linked to the special character of his authoritarianism and its deep internal contradictions.
Yearning for Stalin's model of governance, Putin and his friends are, at the same time, deeply devoted to the institution of private property, as well to their personal wealth, which they accumulated by controlling the state machine. Their wealth and desire for personal security forced them to condemn the terror of the 1930s, as Putin did for the first time in his public speech in October 2007 in connection with the 70^th anniversary of the peak of the terror in 1937. At the same time, he did not directly implicate Stalin in the mass terror.
The duality of Putin's social position also explains the eclectic character of his foreign policy, which combines deep hostility toward the West with a willingness to maintain a bridge with the United States and the European Union. His positive attitude toward Jews represents another part of his dualism. By keeping up the image of a civilized ruler, Putin enhances his connection with the West and keeps many opportunities open for his future career. Certainly, by distancing himself from the anti-Semitic and xenophobic feelings in the country, Putin hopes to gain more from stabilizing his power than from choosing Stalin's anti-Semitic policy of the 1940s.
At the same time, the Jewish card could be played if the danger to Putin's elites from Russian nationalists increased. In this case, the Kremlin, without any compunction, could deprive its opponents of their powerful weapon, anti-Semitism, and resort to moving the regime even closer to that of Stalin. Putin's speech at the Forum of Supporters in Moscow on November 21, 2007 was full of hatred not only for foreigners, but also for his own compatriots whom he identified as his opponents; he characterized them as "jackals." This speech, which showed an evident escalation in Putin's hostility toward his opponents, is a bad omen not only to the liberals, but also to non-Russians, even if it was free from any ethnic slurs.
The memory of state anti-Semitism is quite fresh in the minds of Russian Jews and many of them are psychologically prepared for a tragic course of events. It is evident that Putin will resort to state anti-Semitism only under very pressing circumstances. In any case, the West is dealing with a very flexible and pragmatic Russian leader. Given his obsession with maintaining political power in the country, he is open to various options in domestic and foreign policy.