The
Role of Politics in Contemporary Anti-Semitism.
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. September 15, 1999
"That Jews control a disproportionately large share of the Russian
economy and Russian media certainly has some basis in fact. Between
50 and 80 percent of the Russian economy is said to be in Jewish hands,
with the influence of the five Jews among the eight individuals commonly
referred to as 'oligarchs' particularly conspicuous. (An oligarch is
understood to be a member of a small group that exercises control in
a government. The five oligarchs of Jewish descent are Boris Berezovsky,
Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
and Alexander Smolensky. The other oligarchs are Vagit Alekperov,
Vladimir Potanin, and Rem Vyakhirev.) Perhaps the most famous (and simultaneously
the most infamous) of the oligarchs is Boris Berezovsky. In common with
most of the other Jewish oligarchs, Berezovsky controls industries in
three critical areas: the extraction and sale of a major natural resource,
such as oil, as a source of great wealth; a large bank (useful in influencing
industry and transferring assets abroad); and several major media outlets
(useful for exerting influence and attacking rivals). He also controls
a significant share of the Aeroflot airline and the Moscow automobile
industry."
Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America.
New York Review of Books, November 16, 2000 [book review, posted
at Center for Defense Information/Johnson's Russia List]
"Whatever the American laws, a successful campaign against Russian
mobsters will require the cooperation of other governments, particularly
those of Russia and Israel, the two countries that are now the principal
residences of most Russian crime bosses ...'Of all the nations where
the Russian mob has established a presence, none has been more deeply
compromised than the State of Israel,' [Robert] Friedman
writes, adding that the Russian mafia has 'become a grave threat to
the stability of Israel.' Although this may be a bit hyperbolic, the
Russian mafia does have a strong, safe base in Israel -- a story that
American and Israeli journalists have largely overlooked. One FBI report
observes, for example, that most members of Mogilevich's criminal organization
have Israeli passports. And Jonathan Winer told Friedman (when Winer
was still the State Department's crime expert), 'There
is not a major Russian organized crime figure whom we are tracking who
does not also carry an Israeli passport.'"
'Jews
Are Fighting and the Whole Country Has To Watch' Jews in Power or Jewish
Power? The Captains of Russia's Post-Communist Economy Invited Uneasy
Questions,
[Jewish] Forward, September 13, 2002
[Review of: The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in
the New Russia, by David E. Hoffman],
"Sometime during the autumn of 1996, a small group of the most
powerful men in Russia gathered in a villa on Moscow's Sparrow Hills
district and worried aloud about antisemitism. They were Russia's famous
'oligarchs,' men who, in the aftermath of communism's fall, ran banks,
oil companies, television stations and, increasingly, the country, and
they had reason to worry: Most of them were Jews. 'In earlier years,
when the moguls gathered to talk or make deals, when they dined in the
villa on Sparrow Hills, or when they entered the Kremlin to warn Yeltsin,
they were largely hidden from public view,' writes former Washington
Post Moscow correspondent David E. Hoffman in his recent
book, 'The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia.' But in the
autumn of 1996, it was no longer possible to conceal their ambition
and their presence in the highest councils of the state. They worried,
among themselves, about a backlash. The threat of an antisemitic uprising
never materialized. The oligarchs, and Jews in general, are frequent
targets of the nationalist press, and extremist firebrands still occasionally
call out their names in public, but the Russian street has yet to take
up calls for their blood ... If the book has a flaw, however, it is
in not answering one of the central questions it raises: Why is it,
and what does it mean, that so many of these men - men who ruthlessly
acquired and manipulated Russia's resources and, for a time, its government
- are Jewish? Of the six main characters in the
book, four are Jews: Boris Berezovsky, now exiled and
wanted at home for corruption, who at one point owned everything from
auto-makers and airlines to banks and a TV network and earned the moniker
'Godfather of the Kremlin'; Vladimir Gusinsky, banker turned
media-magnate whose quarrels with President Vladimir Putin sent him
into exile; Alexander Smolensky, perhaps Russia's most notorious
banker, the collapse of whose bank in 1998 wiped out thousands of people's
savings, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, leader of Russia's second-biggest
oil company, who survived political scandals and the collapse of his
own bank. The other two - Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and reformist-politician-turned-energy-czar
Anatoly Chubais - are not Jewish, though that hasn't stopped nationalists
from making accusations about Jewish heritage. (The
book's index, meanwhile, contains at least another 25 prominent Russian
Jews, including tycoons Roman Abramovich, Pyotr Aven
and Mikhail Friedman and politicians Yegor Gaidar, Boris
Nemtsov, Yury Skuratov and Bella Zlatkis.) They were,
by and large, men who learned early how to manipulate the system. Gusinsky
bought copper wire on the black market to make the bracelets that
funded his first fortune. Berezovsky did a brisk shuttle trade
in German cars and Italian computers. Khodorkovsky used connections
in the Communist Youth League to finagle lucrative software contracts
... . But by 1996, some of the oligarchs were beginning to worry. Nationalist
politicians on the left and right were decrying what they called the
theft of Russia's industry and the 'oligarch Yids' who engineered it
... Between them, Berezovsky and Gusinsky controlled the
country's two biggest television stations, the leading news radio station
and several of the largest newspapers and magazines. The fact was that
the media in Russia was controlled by Jews; antisemites didn't really
care which Jews in particular. Even mainstream politicians such as former
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin didn't really like the idea; when
Berezovsky and Gusinsky were embroiled in one of their
public quarrels, broadcast for all to see on their respective television
stations, Chernomyrdin said, 'Two Jews are fighting and the whole country
has to watch." For anyone familiar with Russian history, the road from
scandal to pogrom would have seemed perilously short. Awareness of that
history led the oligarchs in contradictory directions. On that fall
evening in Sparrow Hills, the attendees - Berezovsky, Friedman,
Gusinsky, Khodorkovsky and Smolensky - collectively
decided that masking their Jewish identities would be the best option.
A non-Jewish oligarch, Vladimir Potanin, was chosen to be their public
liaison to government. Berezovsky was soon seen wearing a cross
and attending Russian Orthodox churches. Still, no matter how hard they
tried to distance themselves from Judaism, until very recently a glance
at their passports would have given them away [i.e., Israeli passports].
And yet less than a year earlier Friedman had joined Gusinsky
and a handful of other prominent Jewish businessman in organizing
the Russian Jewish Congress. Outwardly, the congress's aim was that
of any Jewish group anywhere - to support synagogues, schools and other
religious and cultural activities. But, according to Boris Usherenko,
a Russian actor turned Jewish activist and journalist who documents
his stint as the first executive secretary of the Russian Jewish Congress
in his self-published book, 'My Jewish Fate,' fear of antisemitism also
played a part. At one of the congress's early planning sessions in late
1995, Usherenko writes, the founders' purposes were bluntly,
if awkwardly, put. 'Fiery speeches were made. [Chief Rabbi Adolf
Shayevich] inspiringly contrasted the depressing past with the shining
future. [Gusinsky] expressed his nostalgia for the old rusty
pipe he used as a boy to beat antisemites. I remember [one attendee's]
fierce defense of his ideal - Jews with machine guns.' It was not, however,
the first time Jews were attacked for being at the vanguard of a tumultuous
revolution. Before and after 1917, nationalists pointed to the heavy
Jewish presence in the Bolshevik leadership, from Trotsky on
down. Even today, Lenin's guttural 'r' - the key element of what Russians
refer to as 'the Jewish accent' - is a running joke among Russian satirists;
at least one of Lenin's grandparents was Jewish, which, as the satirists
point out, would have made him eligible for aliya [immigration to
Israel]."
More information on the "Russian mafia"
here and here.
Russia's
Oil Czar Looks West,
Bloomberg Markets Magazine, July 2002
[Article about Jewish Russian mogul Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
in pdf form]
"With 3.5 billion barrels of oil reserves, Priobskoye is a
black gold mine for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chief executive and
main shareholder of AO Yukos Oil Co., Russia's second- largest oil producer
... Khodorkovsky is one of the so-called oligarchs who took control
of state assets after the collapse of the Soviet Union and oversaw some
of Russia’s worst violations of shareholder rights. Amid the country's
financial crisis in 1998 and 1999, Khodorkovsky transferred stakes
in Yukos subsidiaries to off-shore tax havens like the Isle of Man and
Cyprus."
Open Russia
Foundation,
[At least three of the posted four Board Members of this organization
are members of international Jewry: Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky,
Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, and Lord Jacob Rothschild
THE MEN WHO REALLY RULE RUSSIA,
New Statesman, 08/28/98
"Boris Yeltsin's quixotic decision this week to bring back the
prime minister he so ignominiously dismissed just five months ago makes
him look like a modern-day tsar. But Kremlin omnipotence is a myth and
its governments a constitutional facade -- the outgoing one has been
aptly described as 'a virtual government'. The truth about Russia is
that it is ruled, not by Yeltsin or any of his ministers, but by a handful
of men with almost no formal political role: the half-dozen businessmen
who call themselves 'the oligarchs' ... Their elder statesman is Boris
Berezovsky, a mysterious mathematician-turned-car-salesman-turned-financier,
who is the only one to occupy a state post, albeit a rather minor one.
Three others head conglomerates with businesses ranging from banking
to oil: Vladimir Potanin [of the 'oligarchs' here noted, only Potanin
isn't Jewish], head of the Interros group, Mikhail Khodorkovsky
of the Rosprom empire, and Mikhail Friedman of the Alfa group.
Vladimir Gussinsky has a bank, too, but his strength is his vast
media kingdom. Aleksandr Smolensky, the weakest of the gang,
controls the huge but struggling SBSAgro retail bank. With the exception
of Berezovsky, who seems to relish the limelight, all these men
insist that they are humble businessmen, with diverging interests and
no direct purchase on the Kremlin. This has a grain of truth: the oligarchs
are not always united (indeed, their quarrels have gone so far as to
include allegations that two of them once tried to have one another
assassinated) and their influence over the government waxes and wanes.
But even with these qualifications, it is striking to what extent Russia's
oligarchs have grouped themselves into a capitalist cabal beyond the
wildest imaginings of the most fevered Soviet propagandist. In times
of crisis, like the current financial meltdown, the oligarchs are ever
at the state's elbow. Late in the night on Sunday 16 August, as cabinet
ministers put the frantic final touches on the devaluation and default
they would announce the next day, the oligarchs flocked back from their
Mediterranean holiday homes to keep vigil in the White House, the seat
of the Russian government. A few days later, as I waited all afternoon
for an interview that never happened, I watched the oligarchs, en masse,
troop from a meeting with one deputy prime minister, to a meeting with
another, to a meeting with the prime minister himself. Collectively,
they have been conferring almost daily with the Central Bank chairman.
And while the financial turmoil has highlighted differences of opinion
and of economic interest among the oligarchs, they seem to have taken
a conscious decision to present the world with a common front ... This
week three of the most powerful corporate empires -- Interros, Rosprom
and Most -- announced they would consolidate their troubled banking
arms into a single bank, to be owned and controlled equally by each
member of the troika. Certainly, the oligarchs carry all the visible
symbols of their quasi-ministerial status. Their sleek Mercedes and
Land Cruisers all sport the blue flashing lights and special licence
plates that the state issues to its highest officials, granting immunity
from the traffic laws and traffic jams which hem in lesser Muscovites.
Russia's corporate politburo had its economic genesis in 1995, with
the loans-for-shares privatisation scheme, a bizarre programme that
transferred control of some of Russia's choicest companies to a handful
of corporate insiders at knockdown prices. But it took the 1996 presidential
elections to elevate these barons into the nation's kingmakers. Less
than six months before the ballot, Yeltsin's campaign was being run
by feuding and corrupt Kremlin courtiers, and a communist victory seemed
assured. But then, after a late-night meeting in an Alpine restaurant
during the "businessmen's summit" -- the World Economic Forum conference
in Davos, Switzerland -- the oligarchs stepped in. They masterminded
and bankrolled Yeltsin's political comeback; they seconded their smartest
executives to work flailhme on the elections; and they transformed their
television stations into presidential propaganda machines. Their weekly
meetings which included a rollcall detailing who had spent what on the
president's behalf became the guiding force of Yeltsin's reelection
drive. By the time Yeltsin had beaten the odds and triumphed over his
communist opponent, the oligarchs had been born ... By choosing to surrender
the electoral process to the oligarchs in 1996, the Kremlin created
their political power."
[The Jewish Lobby's social engineering to veil popular recognition of
what is happening in Russia:]
ADL,
Russian Law Enforcement Exchange Information,
Anti-Defamation League,
November 13, 2002
"The Anti-Defamation League has established a partnership
with Russian militia officers, government officials, educators and non-profit
leaders through 'Climate of Trust' (COT), a program aimed at fighting
intolerance in the former Soviet Union through hate and bias crime training.
In August of this year, ADL leaders and educators met with a Russian
delegation during a weeklong visit to San Francisco. The in-depth training
included visits to police stations, government buildings, courts, and
non-profit agencies, where trainers from the San Francisco Police Department,
as well as the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and ADL, spoke
to participants about United States law and the structure of our justice
system. Following that presentation, ADL shared its expertise and materials
on combating hate groups and extremists, and trainers from the A WORLD
OF DIFFERENCE ™ Institute demonstrated the need to educate children
about bias and encourage adults to look at their own prejudice. In turn,
the Russian delegation shared its efforts to combat and respond to acts
of xenophobia and intolerance ... COT is organized by the Bay Area Council
for Jewish Rescue and Renewal, BACJRR, and operates in cooperation with
the United States Department of State and the Russian Federation government.
Partners in this program include the Anti-Defamation League, The San
Francisco Police Department, the San Francisco District attorney's office,
as well as a San Francisco Superior Court Judge and an Administrative
Law Judge from the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing.
As a result of COT, new programs adapted from the hate crimes and tolerance
curriculum were established in a number of Russian police academies
and schools."
"World
On Fire" by Amy Chua. A new book argues that when Third World countries
embrace democracy and free markets too quickly, ethnic hatred and even
genocide can result, by Michelle Goldberg, Salon.com,
Jan. 13, 2003
"The case Amy Chua makes in 'World On Fire: How Exporting Free
Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability' is
so clear and persuasive it almost seems as if it had been obvious all
along. Yet her argument, that rapid switches to majoritarian rule and
free-market democracy in many Third World countries benefit certain
ethnic groups over others and lead to vicious sectarian strife, is quite
new, if occasionally overstated ... 'World On Fire' is about a phenomenon
Chua calls 'market-dominant minorities,'
groups like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews
in Russia, whites in Zimbabwe and Indians in East Africa and
Fiji. Market-dominant minorities control hugely disproportionate percentages
of their countries' resources ... Jews make up
a similarly tiny proportion of Russia's population, but of the seven
'oligarchs' who control virtually all of the country's business, six
are Jewish ... It's enormously touchy to talk about the economic
element of communal violence, especially regarding Jews, since rhetoric
about one ethnic group exploiting another is so often a precursor to
atrocity. But that's exactly why Chua's book feels so urgent. No matter
how politically incorrect it is to talk about, her book makes clear
that minority market domination is a reality in much of the world, one
that's tied up in many ways with smoldering group hatreds and explosions
of mass slaughter, and one that's made worse by Western policies. Chua,
a professor at Yale Law School, is a careful, precise writer, and she
makes it very clear that she's not blaming prosperous ethnic groups
for violence directed against them, or blaming capitalism alone for
fomenting genocide ... 'The point, rather, is this,' she writes. 'In
the numerous countries around the world that have pervasive poverty
and a market-dominant minority, democracy and markets -- at least in
the form in which they are currently being promoted -- can proceed only
in deep tension with each other. In such conditions, the combined pursuit
of free markets and democratization has repeatedly catalyzed ethnic
conflict in highly predictable ways. This has been the sobering lesson
of globalization in the last twenty years' ... The reasons for Jewish
economic success are more mysterious -- especially in Russia, where
they've been repeatedly subjected to vicious pogroms -- and 'World On
Fire' does little to illuminate them. Chua is less interested in how
minority groups come to dominate than what happens when they do. She
argues that when economic liberalization and democracy are rapidly introduced
to countries with market-dominant minorities, the two forces necessarily
come into conflict. 'Markets concentrate enormous wealth in the hands
of an 'outsider' minority, fomenting ethnic envy and hatred among often
chronically poor majorities,' she writes. 'Introducing democracy in
these circumstances does not transform voters into open-minded cocitizens
in a national community. Rather, the competition for votes fosters the
emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority and foment
active ethnonationalist movements demanding that the country's wealth
and identity be reclaimed by the 'true owners of the nation.'"
Mark
Rich Helped KGB Create Hidden Government,
Newsmax, Saturday, March 31, 2001
"Mark Rich, the most-wanted fugitive pardoned by former
President Clinton, was a key figure in the Communist Party and the KGB's
creation of an underground government that survived the break-up of
the Soviet Union and still rules Russia today behind the scenes. As
previously reported by NewsMax.com., in 1983, the year Rich
fled the U.S. to avoid prosecution, he took advantage of the grain embargo
imposed on the USSR by the United States because of their war in Afghanistan.
Rich ignored the embargo and imported grain into the Soviet Union,
winning friends in the Soviet hierarchy with whom he would ally himself
when the Communist government collapsed. According to NewsMax.com
sources, from then on Rich was guided in his business dealings
'by the Communist Party and KGB senior figures. Everybody in that carousel,
commie and KGB got personal benefits ... commissions in Western accounts.'
Thanks to the influence he gained from sharing his profits with Party
and KGB officials, Rich was drawn into the inner reaches of the
hierarchy that ruled the Soviet union and was included in the creation
of the sinister, behind-the-scenes government that was designed to outlive
the deliberate dismantling of the Soviet Union. According to Dr. Joseph
D. Douglas, an expert in national security matters and a former official
of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Defense
Department, Rich played an important part in the deception that allowed
the old Communist apparatus to maintain its grip on Russia and the rest
of the old Soviet Union after the so-called collapse of communist rule.
In an interview with the current New American magazine, Dr. Douglas,
an expert on international organized crime and its role in long-term
Soviet/Russian strategy, made the startling revelation that "No revolution
took place in Russia or the other Soviet "republics" that would account
for the sudden dismantling of the Soviet state. Nothing forced the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU] to relinquish its monopoly on power.
In fact, what the CPSU did was diversify its holdings, rather than dispense
with its monopoly.' Douglas said that Communist Party bosses surreptitiously
'either created new parties, or took over the leadership of existing
ones.' He said that years before the 'end' of the Soviet Union the CPSU
and the KGB 'set up all of the structures of what they call the 'invisible
party economy.' This was already going on in the early 1980s, even before
Gorbachev came along with his 'reforms.'' Because of the hidden superstructure
Rich and his KGB colleagues created, members of the Communist
nomenklatura had put themselves in a position to become the masters
of the new, "privatized" economy."
Turning to the nearby new capitalist nation
of Russia, in 1997 the Washington Post noted that
"In
last year's presidential campaign, two of the most powerful media
tycoons, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky,
played a key role
in
reelecting President Boris Yeltsin, demonstrating the might of
television
in the young democracy." [HOFFMAN, p. 12]
The Wall Street Journal noted that
Gusinsky (also spelled Goussinsky) "is sometimes billed as the richest
man in Russia." [WALL ST, 4-13-95]
For his part, Berezovsky was listed by Forbes in 1997 as
one of the "ten top" billionaires in the world. Both Gusinsky
and Berezovsky (originally Abramovitch) are Jewish. Gusinsky is also the
president of the Russian Jewish Congress and his circle of international
Jewish connections includes the aforementioned Ronald Lauder and Edgar
Bronfman of the World Jewish Congress. A source told the Jewish Week
that Gusinsky founded the Russian Jewish Congress so his "physical
well-being will no longer be just [his] personal concern; it will be of
international [Jewish] interest,” i.e., whatever he does, he can tap into
the powerful international Jewish defense mother lode against "anti-Semitism."
[COHLER-ESSES, p. 13] The Jerusalem Post notes that in Israel "media
reports [were] hinting" that Gusinsky "had ties to the Russian
mafia." [COHEN, A.] Gusinsky built his business empire from his
Most Bank; the Chairman of the Board of
the Most Bank is Boris Hait
who is also one of the vice-presidents of the Russian Jewish Congress.
Other vice-presidents of the Jewish organization include Mikhail Friedman,
Chairman of the board of the Alpha
Bank, and Vitali Malkin, President of the Rossiiiski
Kredit Bank.
Gusinsky's media empire includes NTV television -- the largest commercial
television station in Russia with an audience of 120 million. It also
broadcasts to Israel, and "recently [December 1997] unveiled plans
to expand its Russian-language broadcasts to Western Europe and other
parts of the Middle East." [KRICHEVSKY, p. 10]
(Even in the New York area, the Russian-language Russian Television Network is run by a rabbi, president Mark Golub.
Alexander Polovets, the editor and publisher of Panorama, "the
most influential Russian-language newspaper in the United States,"
is also Jewish. [TUGEND, 10-22-99]). Gusinsky also controls the Echo of Moscow radio station; a weekly magazine called Itogi (published in partnership with Newsweek/The Washington Post); the newspaper
Segodnya; and NTV-Plus, a pay-per-view satellite network.
In 1997, the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Alexei II, charging blasphemy,
declared that "God would punish those responsible" for screening
Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ on Mr. Gubinsky's
television channel. The program had been postponed twice "because
of Orthodox Christian fury." [MEEK, p. 1] With mind-boggling chutzpah, NTV had originally planned to show the
film "in April, on Russian Easter." [KRICHEVSKY, Jewish-Owned,
p. 9] Meanwhile, "at Gusinksi's
influence," noted the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 1998, "a
synagogue and Holocaust museum are now being built at the World War II
Memorial site in Moscow." [MILNER]
In 2001, the deputy head of the Russian
Jewish Congress, Mikhail Miralashvili was arrested in Russia and charged
with kidnapping. "Mr. Mirilashvili," noted London's Independent,
"who holds joint Israeli and Russian citizenship, was due to leave
Russia this week with the Israeli President, Moshe Katzav, who is on a
state visit. Mr. Mirlashvili is a director of the St. Petersburg
company Russian Video, which was bought by Media-Most, controlled by Mr.
Gusinsky, in 1997. Mr. Gusinsky was later accused of defrauding the
state by buying the company for $10 million -- well below its real value."
[COCKBURN, P., 1-25-01]
In July 1997, the Jewish Week reported
that
"the
Russian Jewish Congress, a powerful new group headed by one of
Russia's
most prominent and controversial millionaires, has signed a
landmark
agreement with American Jewry's top umbrella organization
[the Conference of Presidents of Major American
Jewish Organizations],
pledging joint cooperation and consultation
... The National Conference
on
Soviet Jewry, another U.S. umbrella group that encompasses many
of
the same Jewish organizational members as the Presidents
Conference,
was also a signatory.... Some, including a top Russian
Jewish
Congress official, says it marks a milestone in the emergence of
the
Russian group as an influential diaspora player on the international
stage ... In a separate initiative, the Russian
Jewish Congress signed an
agreement at about the same time with the World
Jewish Congress..."
[COHLER-ESSES, Lawyer, p. 9]
(A note about the Conference of Presidents
of Major American Jewish Organizations: It represents, notes Jewish journalist
Wolf Blitzer, "more than thirty of the most important national Jewish
organizations; it has come to be viewed as the authoritative voice of
the mainstream Jewish leadership ... Because the Presidents' Conference,
like AIPAC [the leading American Jewish Israel lobbying organization],
can almost always be found in support of the official Israeli position,
U.S. officials in all recent administrations have to view it as a de facto
arm of the Israeli government." [BLITZER, p. 141-142])
Gusinsky also met with a number of Jewish
American Congressmen, including Carl Lewin, Frank Lautenberg, Joseph Lieberman,
and Arlen Specter. "The Middle East and 'rising anti-Semitism' were
among the topics discussed," noted Don Bonker ("a former Congressman
who handles public relations for Goussinsky in Washington"). [COHLER-ESSES,
US RUSSIAN, p. 1] The Jewish
Week further noted that "according to a Jewish official who spoke
on the condition of anonymity, Goussinsky's efforts to meet with top State
Department officials were rebuffed due to what one State official ; as
his 'checkered past.'" [COHLER-ESSES, US-RUSSIAN, p. 1] In 2000,
Gusinsky, who, like other Rusisan Jewish media moguls, has dual Russian-Israeli
citizenship, fled Russia after accusations of fraud. In October, related
to the Gusinsky criminal investigation, Russian police raided the central
Moscow synagogue, searching "practically everything," but particularly
looking for "in what way was the Jewish community ... laundering
money it was receiving from its sponsors." Alexander Osovtsov, Executive
Vice President of the Russian Jewish Congress, complained: "What
gives special cynicism to it is the fact that the action was undertaken
on the single day when the leaders of the Congress and the Jewish community
were absent from Moscow because they were on a one-day visit of peace
and solidarity to Israel." [INTERFAX RUSSIAN NEWS, 10-20-00]
Boris Berezovsky's riches began with Logovaz, a car dealership. He has since
rapidly gained control of the Russian Public Television network, known
as ORT; the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta; the weekly magazine Ogonyok; Transero, a Russian
airline; and 80% of Russia's seventh largest oil company, which merged
in 1998 with another Jewish-owned oil firm (together called Yuksi), to
create "the world's largest oil company in terms of reserves."
[MCMAHON, p. 3] "Berezovsky," says the Wall Street Journal,
"has a reputation for labyrinthine political and business intrigues
and has in the past exercised influence over Russian companies, including
the national airline Aeroflot,
without taking over formal ownership." [HIGGINS, p. 2]
"Like many of the people in Russia
who became rich very fast," notes the New York Times,
"Mr. Berezovsky has been the subject of numerous press reports that
suggest he relied on organized crime to build his business empire."
[STANLEY, p. A3] Berezovsky, notes
the Washington Post, "is part of a tight circle of financiers
and business moguls who, by his own estimate, control half of Russia's
economy ... [HOFFMAN, Russia]. ... They all attained wealth in
the violent, corruption-ridden, high-stakes competition that followed
the collapse of the Soviet Union five years ago.... The scramble for wealth
and power was carried out with brutal means, often including car bombs
and assassinations.... Russian tycoons are not public heroes. Popular
resentments run deep over the vast sell-off of state property, which made
many of them rich and left millions of Russians in poverty." [HOFFMAN,
p. A26] Berezovsky, notes the
(Jewish) Forward, is one of the "robber barons accused of
milking Russians dry." [BLUSTAIN, p. 1]
In 1999 Berezovsky gained control of Moscow's
popular TV-6 television station.
That same year he claimed control of "Russia's premiere daily newspaper,
Kommersant," and fired its editor, Raf Shakirov, who said
that "his ouster [is] an attempt to curb often critical coverage
of the tycoon's business and political activities." [HIGGINS, p.
2]
In December 1996, Forbes magazine
published a scathing article about Berezovsky (making sure such reports
will be few and far between, the multi-billionaire responded by punishing
the magazine with a suit for libel, as did the other Jewish tycoon giant,
Vladmir Gusinsky, against the Wall Street Journal for an unflattering
report about him). [WALL ST JRNL,
4-13-95] The Forbes article, entitled "The Godfather of the
Kremlin," was printed with no byline for fear of violent retribution
to its authors. "Berezovsky," noted the magazine's editor, James
Michaels, "stands tall as one of the most powerful men in Russia.
Behind him lies a trail of corpses, uncollected debts and competitors
terrified for their lives." [MICHEALS, p. 10]
The anonymously written article in Forbes
notes that
"Assassination
is a tool of business competition. Scores of business
leaders
and media personalities have been killed ... Berezovsky controls
Russia's
biggest national TV network. His control was solidified shortly
after
the first chairman of the network was assassinated gangland style.
Berezovsky
was immediately fingered by the police as a key suspect,
but the murder remains unsolved two years later
... Such is the Russian
business
environment today that the men at the top have use for the
shadowy
army of killers and thugs who work further down in the scale
of
corruption, running prostitute and protection rackets." [FORBES,
p.
91,
92]
In 1995 Vladislav Listiev, one of Russia's
most popular television talk show hosts, was named head of the Russian
Public Television network (ORT).
One of his major efforts was to rid the station of the corrupt, monopolistic
advertising empire of a man named Sergei Lisovsky. The Forbes article
suggests that Berezovsky was involved in Listiev's eventual assassination,
and when Berezovsky ended up with a controlling interest in ORT (36%), he retained Livosky as the only agent for the company's
advertising.
Incredibly, in 1996 Berezovsky vast wealth
and power afforded him the opportunity to become a member of the Kremlin
Security Council, a position that meant access to some of the Russian
government's most sensitive national secrets. He was soon embroiled in
a scandal over his national allegiance when the liberal newspaper Izvestia
publicized the fact that Berezovsky had secured Israeli citizenship in
1994. Berezovsky threatened to sue the newspaper, charging anti-Semitism.
[SHALAPENTOKH, p. 19] (Meanwhile, the ruthless baron publicly declares
he is a convert to Christianity). [KRICHEVSKY, L., 5-23-99]
A year later Fortune magazine ran
an article entitled "Russia's Robber Barons," profiling ten
of the most important Russian business tycoons who have catapulted to
economic dominance in Russia with the collapse of communism; these included
Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Boris Hait, Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Vinogradov,
Vladimir Potanin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Alexander Smolensky, and Pyotr
Aven.
Along with Gusinsky and Berezovsky, not
only are Hait and Friedman Jewish, they are, as noted earlier, vice-presidents
under Gusinsky in the Russian Jewish Congress. Khodorovsky, the President
of Bank Menatep (and, curiously, the former
Deputy Secretary of the Moscow Branch of the Communist Party youth branch)
is also Jewish. (Khodorovsky's ability to make ideological U-turns on
a dime somewhat echoes the latent wheeling and dealing of Leonid Roitman,
whose "meteoric rise to power was fueled by the chaos of post-pestroika
Russia." In his earlier years, under the communist regime, says the
Jerusalem Post, Roitman set up "an organization called Hatehiya,
which taught summer camps for Jewish youth. In a brilliant move, he registered
Hatehiya as part of Komosol, the Communist Youth movement, and it rapidly
became 'one of the largest and strongest organizations in Russia.'"
[HECHT, p. 12]]
Continuing the Fortune list, Pyotr
Aren, of the Alpha financial
group, is also Jewish. Smolensky,
president of Stolichny Bank
and Vinogradov, head of Inkombank,
are also -- according to a B'nai B'rith publication -- "believed
to be Jews." [BERNSTEIN, RUSSIA'S, p. 12]
(Many Jews in Eastern Europe publicly hide this fact of their identity).
Of this group of economic dominators, that leaves only Potanin who is
not Jewish (in a country where today less than half of 1% of the Russian
population is Jewish [BERNSTEIN, p. 12]), but he has had American Jewish
billionaire George Soros as a major backer in some of his deals, including
the takeover of Russia's Svyazinvest telecommunications giant. (Soros has "invested around
$2.5 billion in Russia, more than anyone or any institution." [BROWNING,
p. F2]
"Soros's extraordinary role,"
noted the (London) Guardian in 1994, "not only as the world's
most successful investor but now possibly, fantastically, as the single
most powerful foreign influence in the whole of the former Soviet empire,
attracts more suspicion than curiosity." [LEWIS, M., p. 14] "I
have been a prime target for the current version of anti-Semitic conspiracy
theory," notes Soros himself, "If there was ever a man who fit
the stereotype of the Judeo-plutocratic Bolshevik Zionist world conspirator,
it is me. And that is, in fact, how I am increasingly depicted in Eastern
Europe and also to some extent in Western Europe, but not so much in America."
[SOROS, p. 239])
The above ten Russians, notes the Fortune
piece, "dominate the country's trade in arms and precious metals,
as well as its production of copper, nickel, and a quarter of its oil.
They control the No. 1 and No. 3 television networks, the Visa bankcard
network, a big chunk of the pulp and paper industry, and an increasing
portion of the food processing industry ... Princeton professor Stephen
Cohen, writing in the Nation, dubbed [most of today's Russian business
elite] a 'semi-criminalized oligarchy' that has made ordinary Russians
'suffer unduly and unjustly.'" [MELLOW, p. 120]
Berezovsky has publicly bragged that he, Gusinsky, Khodorovsky,
Aren, Friedman, Smolensky, and Potanin control half of Russia's wealth.
[BERSTEIN, p. 12]
As Jewish scholar Betsy Gidwitz noted in
1999:
"That Jews control a disproportionately large share of the Russian economy
and Russian media certainly has some basis in fact. Between 50 and 80
percent of the Russian economy is said to be in Jewish hands, with the
influence of the five Jews among the eight individuals commonly referred
to as "oligarchs" particularly conspicuous. (An oligarch is understood
to be a member of a small group that exercises control in a government.
The five oligarchs of Jewish descent are Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman,
Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and
Alexander Smolensky. The other oligarchs are Vagit Alekperov, Vladimir
Potanin, and Rem Vyakhirev.) Perhaps the most famous (and simultaneously
the most infamous) of the oligarchs is Boris Berezovsky. In common with
most of the other Jewish oligarchs, Berezovsky controls industries in
three critical areas: the extraction and
sale of a major natural resource, such as oil, as a source of great wealth;
a large bank (useful in influencing industry and transferring assets abroad);
and several major media outlets (useful for exerting influence and attacking
rivals). He alsocontrols a significant share of the Aeroflot airline and
the Moscow automobile industry." [GIDWITZ, B., 9-15-99]
A 1999 Wall Street Journal editorial
notes that disturbing situation in today's Russia:
"Russia's
oligarchs -- many of them apparatchiks from the communist
days
-- have stripped the country's best assets and transferred their
winnings
to off-shore companies they control ... For every dollar
a
Russian has laundered abroad there had to be a counterparty at
the other end. London, Geneva, and New York
are preferred
destinations,
as well as off-shore havens such as Cyprus and
New
Jersey. Estimates of $10 billion capital flight from Russia
each
year are probably conservative." [W S J, 8-30-99, p. 8]
By 1998, the foreign minister of Russia
was Yevgeni Primakov. His real last name -- Finkelstein -- was dropped
when he worked for the KGB. Also that year, Sergio Kiriyenko became the
prime minister of Russia. He too is Jewish. [SAFIRE, p. 6]
Primatov later succeeded him as Prime Minister. "Two of the
main political leaders in Parliament," adds the Times of London,
"Grigori Yavlinsky, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, and
Vladimir Zhirnovsky, the head of the ultra-nationalist LDPR, also have
Jewish parents." [BEESTON] A
Los Angeles Times reporter notes that "at least half of the
powerful 'oligarchs' who control a significant percentage of the [Russian]
economy are Jewish. The reviled architect of Yeltsin's failed reform policies,
Antaloy Chubais, [later head of the national electrical power monopoly],
is rumored to be Jewish, along with Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, ousted
Deputy Minister Boris Nemtsov and Yeltsin's wife, Naina." [REYNOLDS,
p. 7A] The Jewish Telegraph Agency noted that "Chubais is
not ... open about his Jewish roots." [KRICHEVSKY, L., 5-23-99]
Alexander Livshitz also served a spell as Russia's finance minister
in the 1990s. [KRICHEVSKY, L., 5-23-99]
In 1999, the Jewish Exponent noted
that
"all but one of the eight leading [Russian]
bankers are Jewish," and
four of them -- Goussinsky, Boris Hait, Mikhail
Friedman, and Vitaly
Malkin
-- occupy the top positions at the RJC [Russian Jewish
Congress]
... In addition to these business titans, often referred to
here
in the [Russian] media and on the street as the 'oligarchs,'
many
of the leading political figures in Russia are also Jewish
or
partly Jewish. These include fomer prime Minster Sergei Kiriyenko
and
top Kremlin aides Yegor Gaidar and Boris Nemtsov. Grigori
Yavlinsky,
the leader of the Yabloko, the largest democratic party in the
Duma
today, has one Jewish parent ... In the new Russia, the most
important
fields ... to which Jews [have] gravitated [are] banking,
trade,
the media, and show business." [RUBY, W., p. 37]
In late 1998, Viktor Ilyukin, the head
of the Russian Parliament's Security Affairs Committee, said this about
the Yeltsin government: "The large-scale genocide [i.e., Russian
social and economic collapse] wouldn't have been possible if Yeltsin's
inner circle had consisted of the main ethnicity groups, and not exclusively
of one group, the Jews." [NEW YORK TIMES, Communist, p. 12] That same year, Nikolai Kandratenko, the governor of a southern
Russian province, called the government of the area's largest city "a
Zionist nest" exemplifying a "Judeo-Masonic mafia." [KRICHEVSKY,
L., Russian, p. 7]
Meanwhile, also in the same year, the Jerusalem
Post noted a more commonly enforced stereotypes about the situation
of Jews in Russia:
"[A
Christian woman in Dallas] heard about some young Jews in the
former Soviet Union getting help via a soup
kitchen. She decided to
become
the adoptive grandmother, sending in a monthly contribution for
their
welfare." [COHEN, A., p. 11]
As Jewish scholar Michael Paul Sacks noted
in 1998 about the almost secretive nature of the economic situation of
Jews in modern Russia:
"Published census data on Jews [in Russia] have been very scarce,
but this [from the 1989 Russian census] and other sources leave no doubt
that in comparision with other groups Soviet Jews were very distinctive
in terms of their urban concentration and their educational and professional
achievement ... With the recent release of new data from the 1989 census,
a more precise understanding of the opportunities available to Jews
in 'Soviet' Russia is now possible. These data show the number of men
and women by major ethnic groups (including Jews) in 257 job categories.
Surprisingly, this new information is not referred to even in the most
recent Russian scholarship on Jews, and it received no mention in western
sources ... Jews showed a very early path of upward mobility in the modernizing
sectors of the labor force ... [SACKS, 1998, p. 247] ... Occupations that
that were largest for Jews were primarily top-level positions and
all were white collar: physicians, scientists, chief-managerial personnel,
artists and producers, literary and press personnel. The [job] categories
that were largest only for Russians were entirely manual labor and
other low-skills; tractor drivers, cleaners, weighers, nursemaids, lathe
operators, tailors and seamstresses, carpenters and dairy work."
[SACKS, M., 1998, p. 257]
A 1995 study in Russia found that
84% of employed Jews had "professional or managerial positions."
Another 4% were "owners of firms or entrepreneurs." [SACKS,
M., 1998, p. 265]
With the likes of Gusinsky, Berezovsky,
and other powerful Jewish business tycoons wielding extraordinary influence
and blatantly buying (and allegedly even killing) their broad way into
the Russian media, business, and government, (as well as centrally placed
Jews in the Russian government like Finance Minister Alexander Livshits
and First Deputy Minister in Charge of Economic Reform, Boris Nemtsov),
the Christian Science Monitor noted in 1997 that
"A
loose coalition of nationalistic communists and out-and-out
[Russian]
nationalists has begun to characterize President Boris
Yeltsin's
regime as 'Jewish.' It is the Jewishness of Mr. Yeltsin's
regime, its essential foreignness to Russia,
that [in this view] explains
the plummeting economy, the brazen corruption
and enrichment of the
few ... and Russia's subservient position to
the West."
[SHLAPENTOKH, p. 19; WALL ST, 4-13-95, p. A14;
HOFFMAN,
D.,
1-10-97, p. A1; STANLEY, 6-14-97, p. A3]
Still another angle on Jewish economic dominance
at the upper tiers of capitalist Russia was a 1998 article in the Israeli
daily, Haaretz, which noted
"The
most successful venture capitalists in the world in 1996 and 1997
operated
out of Moscow and was started by an Israeli. The Hermitage
1 and
Hermitage 2 funds specialize
in investments in Russia and other
countries
of the former Soviet Union, although they invest throughout
the
world. They were set up in 1995 by Israeli businessman Benny
Steinmatz
and the Safra brothers [and are] managed by American Bill
Broder
... Hermitage is considered the most senior player on the
Moscow
Stock Exchange, and it is the second-largest of the fund
managers active in Russia, with some $600 million
to invest." [LIPSON]
Then there is Boris Jordan, also Jewish,
from New York's Long Island, eventual head -- after Vladimir Gusinsky
fled to Israel to escape criminal prosecution -- of Russian television
station NTV,
"who almost single-handedly established the Russian stock market,
who in one year earned half the global profits for his employers at Credit
Suisse First Boston, who walked away from a reported $4 million bonus
because it was insultingly small and instead founded Russia's first full-service
investment bank, which he optimistically called Renaissance Capital.
Brash, bright and above all ambitious, Jordan more than
any other individual put Russia on the financial map in the 90's. 'Czar
Boris,' as he was dubbed by admiring business reporters, held court high
atop Moscow's most expensive new skyscraper, while Renaissance's
800 pinstriped bankers and brokers handled billions of dollars from blue-chip
investors like George Soros and the Harvard endowment. The darling of
Davos, the Swiss summit for the well heeled and influential, Jordan was,
in his own words, on top of the world." [BRZENSKI,
M., 7-22-01, p. 40]
Yet another Jewish Russian money mogul is
Roman Abramovich. The Warsaw Voice (headed by Jewish publisher
and editor Andrzej Jonas) noted in 1999 that he is "the CEO of the
powerful Sibneft oil group. A popular joke in Moscow
says that one must count one's fingers after shaking hands with Abramovich,
who has for years been associated with Berezovsky's financial group."
[ZYGULSKI, p. 8] Oil magnate Leonid Nevzlin became head of the Russian
Jewish Congress in 2001. He and the aforementioned Mihail Khodorkowvsky
"formed one of the first successful private banks in Russia in 1989.
The two then went into the oil business together, and now run the YUKOS
firm -- Khodorkovsky is in charge, and Nevzlin is his deputy." The
secular Jewish Nevzlin, like so many, has returned to his Jewish roots.
"For all my life," he says, "I have never felt any substantial
anti-Semitism, and was rather indifferent to the Jewish community. Then
something clicked, and I thought, Well, I'm over 40, I have made a successful
career, I have made a fortune. But what will I tell my children when I
am 70." [GORODETSKY, L., 5-23-01]
Then there is Mikhail Mirilashvili (a.ka.,
Misha Kutaisskey), who "is one of the biggest shareholders of the
local branch of LUK oil. He
is also president of Channel 11
and president and deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of
the Russian chapter of the World Jewish Congress." A brother, Konstantin,
is the "co-owner of Gosting
Dvor, [St. Petersburg's] major shopping center." [KORALYEV, VLADIMIR,
10-11-2000] Then there is Anatoly Karachinsky, "head of Information
Business Systems, Russia's largest IT group." Karachinsky, also Jewish,
"is regarded in Russia as the country's answer to Bill Gates -- and
who is about to become the country's first high-technology dollar millionaire."
Karachinsky "set up NewspaperDirect, a system that allows
newspapers from anywhere in the world to be printed on a desktop."
[FINANCIAL TIMES, 10-2-00]
Then there is New York-based Stuart Subotnick,
also Jewish, who is the CEO and president of Metromedia International
Group. (In 1999, Subotnick was ranked by Forbes magazine among
the richest 400 Americans). This company's specialty is cable, telephone,
and digital media -- largely in Eastern Europe. Holdings include complete
-- or major -- shares in Russia's PLD Telekom, Kosmos TV ("one
of Russia's largest wireless cable operators"), 50% of Comstar
("a large Moscow digital communications carrier"), Romsat
("one of the largest cable operators in Romania"), 70% of "a
leading Bucharest-based ISP (Internet Service Provider) called FX Internet.
Metromedia even has holdings in places like Belarus and Kazakhstan.
In Russia it also owns "several TV and radio stations in St. Petersburg
and Nizhii Novgorod." [CAPITAL MARKET RUSSIA, 5-20-99; AFX EUROPEAN
FOCUS, 1-12-01; CABLE EUROPE, 7-4-00; TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES MARKET,
6-26-00]
Howard Jacobson rode with a taxi driver
in recent years in New York City. The driver was a fellow Jew, a recent
immigrant from Russia. "He speaks Yiddish," noted Jacobson in
1993,
"His
family kept it alive so that they could talk among themselves and
not be understood. 'A secret language,' he explains. The secret language of the Jews. A light kept
burning underground all during those years of atheism. I'd be touched
if I wasn't alarmed. For where people speak a secret language, how
can suspicion and fear of them not multiply?" [JACOBSON,
H., 1993/1995, p. 80-81]
"Our people are not blind," proclaimed
the head of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, in 1998, "They
cannot fail to see that the spread of Zionism in the government is one
of the reasons for the current catastrophe in the country, the mass impoverishment
and the process of extinction of its people." [ENSEL, M., p. 3]
The blustering of an anti-Semitic fanatic?
In the same year, a Jewish Russian immigrant in New York of considerable
renown, novelist Edward Topol (whose work was once banned in Russia),
stirred controversy and deep concern in the world Jewish community because
of a published letter he wrote to a Russian weekly newspaper. In it Topol
called prominent Jewish Russian bankers "puppeteers" who manipulated
Russian politics and its economy. The puppeteers, he concluded, has "a
very long Jewish last name -- Berezovsko-Goussinsko-Smolensko-Khodrokovsko,
etc. ... How come all or almost all the money in this country ended up
in Jewish hands?" Topol also called the economic crisis in Russia
today a "Jewish tragedy." "Mr. Topol's main premise,"
noted the (Jewish) Forward, "is that for the first time in
a millennium, Jews have gained real political power and financial control
over Russia and can pretty much decide whether to 'cast the country into
a chaos of wars and poverty or raise it from the mud.'" [KRICHEVSKY,
Emigre's, p. 5; KAZAKINA, p. 5]
In 1997 the (Jewish) Forward reported
that "with the [Russian] economy in shambles, opposition parties
held nationwide strikes at the end of last month. [Even] Jews are grumbling
that too many Jews stand close to the reigns of power and too many Jewish
names fill the headlines." [BLUSTAIN, R, p. 1]
"All the Jews, I don't understand their motivation, to show
they are rich ... [to say] 'I am an owner and you are a slave,'"
complained Alexander Lieberman, the Jewish director of the Union Council's
Russian-American Bureau of Human Rights. "If I were a single Russian
and I saw and heard only Jews in the government ... [I would think] 'we
are all without money because the Jews have all the Russian money.'"
[BLUSTAIN, p. 1] "People
have quite bitter memories of Jews in the [communist] revolution,"
noted Michael Chlenov, the president of the Jewish Va'ad of Russia.
In this regard, transnationally, in 1996,
Boris Berezovsky hosted a party in honor of the earlier mentioned Ronald
Lauder (American Jewish owner of a number of TV stations in Europe), attended
by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and United States Ambassador Thomas
Pickering. Speaking to a reporter, Lauder (already ensnarled in partnership
media dealings in the Ukraine with Russian mafia-clouded Vadim Rabinovich)
publicly distanced himself from Berezovsky, saying, "The invitations
went out in President Yeltsin's name." [FORBES, p. 91]
(excerpt from When Victims Rule. A
Critique of Jewish Preeminence in America, chapter 24,
pt. 2 )
[The trans-world Jewish collusion. More evidence of the Jewish/Zionist
sweep of American foreign policy. Jewish/Zionist Pentagon bigwig Richard
Perle interferes in Russian politics in the name of the Jewish Russian
owners of Yukos Oil; Mikhail Khodorkovsky (Russia's richest man) is Jewish]
THE WORLD: Russian Firm's Woes Raise Fears for Big Business. The outcome
of a battle between an energy giant and criminal prosecutors could affect
the development of the nation's free market,
By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times, July 23,
2003
"When key Washington policy advisor Richard Perle sat down
this week for a meeting with leading Russian political analysts, he had
an unsolicited word of advice: Lay off Yukos Oil Co., the Russian energy
giant locked in a showdown with criminal prosecutors. Many believe that
the outcome of that battle could determine the future of big business
and foreign investment in this nation's still-fledgling free-market economy.
"It's possible already to say that real damage is being done to the prospects
for future Russian economic growth and development by what appears to
be an arbitrary, capricious and vindictive campaign against a private
company," warned Perle, adding that "it will get very bad" if the
Kremlin decides to move decisively against Yukos. For nearly three weeks,
Moscow has been politically shaken by the face-off between prosecutors
and Russia's richest man, 40-year-old Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose
Yukos empire has been threatened by the arrest of a key shareholder, searches
at company offices and announcements that prosecutors are examining company
officials for suspected crimes from tax evasion to murder. The fact that
U.S. interests are quietly weighing in on Khodorkovsky's behalf
- Perle emphasized that he was not speaking on behalf of the government,
but U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow clearly was when he said the affair
"raises a number of questions for us" - is testament to Khodorkovsky's
role as a powerful advocate for Western interests in a country still deeply
troubled over issues such as U.S. policy in Iraq and the future of free-market
capitalism within its own borders. The outcome of the Yukos crisis is
crucial for Russia, not only because it will signal whether free-enterprise
advocates in the Kremlin will hold out against an apparent assault from
the state bureaucracy's old guard but also because the dogfight has already
proved costly. Yukos, which is expected to become the world's fourth-largest
oil company after a planned merger with Russian company Sibneft, has lost
$10 billion in market capitalization over the last two weeks, or about
a quarter of its value. Its slide pulled down the stock market, which
has lost more than $20 billion ... It is not known to what extent [Russian
Prime Minister] Putin may have been involved in approving the July 2 arrest
of Platon Lebedev, 43, a billionaire and a key member of Khodorkovsky's
financial empire, on embezzlement charges stemming from the privatization
of a fertilizer plant nearly a decade ago. Some analysts believe that
Putin simply wants to warn Khodorkovsky and the other oligarchs
to stay out of politics and is not seeking to reverse liberal economic
reforms. Not only has Khodorkovsky given millions of dollars to
two liberal parties that might block Kremlin policy in parliament, but
he also urged Russia not to oppose the U.S. in the war on Iraq."
[Another apolegetic for Jewish wealth and power and Russia. These
many Jewish billionaires are just "fronts," you see, for the
real bad guys. As always, even the fabulously wealthy Jews -- most with
ties to the Jewish "Russian" mafia -- who have shaped post-commuist
Russia are depicted as victims,]
The
Jews and The Bicycle Riders,
by Dr. Gary K. Busch,
Pravda (Russia), July 26, 2003
"My grandmother, from Kovno, had a standard response to weighty matters
of social and political policy. She would say ?I suspect it's all the
fault of the Jews and the bicycle riders.' When people would ask 'Why
the bicycle riders?' she would reply 'Why the Jews?' In the current discussion
about the deteriorating fate of the 'oligarchs' in Russia the unspoken
question is not about the bicycle riders. The question, to put it as a
Russian euphemism, is a line five question. This refers to line five of
the internal passport which deals with nationality; e.g. 'Jew'. There
are a number of very good reasons why it is the Jewish oligarchs that
are feeling the cool breeze from St. Petersburg and Moscow. First it was
Gusinsky and Berezovsky and now the pressure is spreading to
Khodorkovsky, and Abramovitch. The answer, in short, is
the real powers behind the process of capital accumulation, the KGB and
the 'Old Guard', no longer think they need to use them as an acceptable
front. The elevation of Putin and many of those who have accompanied him
have convinced them that there is no longer any need to mask who really
has power, both economic and political, in Russia. There are many in Russia,
let alone abroad, who may not understand why so many of today's oligarchs
are Jews. This is to use the Russian line five classification of Jew which
has nothing to do with faith or observance but is an inherited ethnic
and nationality distinction. These Jews are oligarchs because they were
chosen to be oligarchs and set up in business by the Chekists and the
boys from the Aquarium for this purpose. I can only extrapolate from my
own experiences in Russia in the early 1990's, helping to set up the trade
in non-ferrous metals with the West ... The KGB and its allies, under
Silayev and Kryuchkov, set up a system in which loyal and trusted members
of the Komsomol system and friendly businessmen could form their own banks
v Russian banks. Men like Khodorkovsky, Aven, Fridman
and others were chosen and set up in the money business. They used
the banks to channel the returning Mafia money into long-term businesses.
With few exceptions, those chosen for this were all Jews. When Western
pioneers like Marc Rich, David Reuben, Gerry Lennard
or Jerry Cligman agreed to work within this system by creating
the -tolling business, they were given a kick start of roubles to help
pay for the initial costs of the tolling system, They, too, were mainly
Jews, albeit foreign Jews. Between these two groups there was another
layer of 'facilitators'; people who knew the parallel system. They set
up the deals. They traded the hard earned cash from aluminium into cigarettes
and vodka which could be brought back into Russia and sold for cash, providing
liquidity to the system. These facilitators were among the first private
businessmen in Russia. They had ties to the very independent private sector
who had access to the raw materials and the internal organizations which
could deliver on the agreements made; the Izmailova (the late Anton Malevksy),
Soltsnevo, Long Pond groups to name but a few. The facilitators included
the Chernoy brothers (Mischa and Lev), Sam Kislin,
and the 'institutionals' Gregory Luchansky, Semyon Mogilevich
(Lyubarsky and Long Pond) or Vadim Rabinovich in the Ukraine.
Most of these, too, were Jews. Without these men the Russification of
Russia couldn-t have taken place. They provided the only working system
in Russia."
Jewish
capital is good for Russia, Jewish politics less so,
By Eliahu Salpeter, Haaretz (Israel),
August 17, 2003
"Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the wealthiest man in Russia, is under
investigation. It's Anti-Semitism again, say Jewish sources It is doubtful
whether there are many Jews in the world the value of whose assets reach
$5 billion. Certainly, there is no other Jew who can afford to lose a
billion dollars and still be the richest man in Russia. Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
39, looks in photographs (depending on the angle) like a young Shas politico
or like a successful Wall Street investment consultant. According to Fortune
magazine, Khodorkovsky controls 16 percent of the shares in the
company Yukos and owns more than half of them personally. Yukos is said
to be worth $15-20 billion, and with the completion of the deal to acquire
the Sibneft, which was signed about three months ago, it will become the
third-largest oil company in the world, and the largest in Russia. The
troubles started for Yukos (and Khodorkovsky) at the beginning
of July, when the police arrested his aide and chief ally, Platon Lebedev,
and accused him of fraud, forgery and tax violations and also interrogated
(but did not arrest) Khodorkovsky himself. About two weeks ago,
the General Prosecutor's Office announced that it had also opened an investigation
of five murders or attempted murders of officials and businessmen at odds
with the company. In Moscow, it's said, the police are investigating Khodorkovsky's
aides but are aiming at him; the authorization for the investigation was
given by President Vladimir Putin. The burning question in Moscow is what
lies behind the investigation? Maybe the Kremlin is embarking on a new
hunt of the "oligarchs," the very wealthy Russians who made their fortunes
during the Nineties' privatization ... The Jews in Russia are, of course,
concerned about whether there are anti-Semitic elements in the affair.
Of the dozen or so Russian billionaires who made their fortunes during
the past decade, seven were Jewish. Three of them have already been deposed
from heading their companies and pushed out of Russia as well - Aleksandr
Smolensky, the crash of whose bank in 1998 led to the worst financial
crash in the post-Communist era; Boris Berezovsky, "the Kremlin
godfather," whose demonstrative conversion to Christianity proved to be
of no avail; and Vladimir Gusinsky, who was not helped by his demonstrative
Jewishness as chairman of the Jewish Congress in Russia. Four remain:
Khodorkovsky, bankers Pyotr Aven and Mikhai Fridman
and the current media star of the oligarchs, Roman Abramovich -
among other things, the main owner of Sibneft - who is considered the
richest man in Russia after Khodorkovsky. ... Aleksandr Osovtsov,
former vice president of the Jewish Congress in Russia says the anti-Semitism
in the affair is clear. The same team from the Prosecutor General's Office
that in its day forced Gusinsky to leave Russia is active now and
by chance or not, Gusinsky was one of the financial supporters
of the Jewish Congress and Khodorkovsky is also among its supporters.
Chelsea's new owner In recent weeks international attention has been accorded
to the seventh of the Jewish oligarchs, Roman Abramovich, who purchased
the English soccer team Chelsea for about $200 million ... The patronage
of Berezovsky (who at the time still enjoyed the support of the
Kremlin) helped him acquire, for the paltry sum of about $100 million,
dozens of local oil companies and to build from them the huge Sibneft
company. In 2002, the profits of Sibneft came to $1.1 billio ... The Khodorkovsky
affair gives rise to a more realistic question: Is there a likelihood
that influential Jews in Moscow, oligarchs and politicians, will be able
in the foreseeable future to help Israel in the Kremlin? Their relative
weight is no less than the weight of Jews in the upper reaches of the
American economy."
St.
Petersburg Jews jolted by stiff sentence for local leader,
By Lev Krichevsky, Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
August 21, 2003
"The stiff prison sentence handed down to Russian businessman and
Jewish leader Mikhail Mirilashvili is sending shock waves through
Russia’s second-largest Jewish community. On Aug. 1, the Leningrad District
Military Court in St. Petersburg sentenced the local business magnate
and Jewish philanthropist to 12 years in a high-security prison. Mirilashvili,
43, has spent the last 30 months in jail on charges of creating a criminal
gang, kidnapping and attempted murder. The verdict, handed down the same
day as the sentencing, cleared the businessman of the attempted murder
charge but found him guilty of trespassing, kidnapping and detaining persons
against their will ... Mirilashvili has served as president of the [Russian
Jewish Congress] RJC’s St. Petersburg branch since the group’s founding
in 1996. He retained his post after he was imprisoned in January of 2001.
The group says that despite his imprisonment, Mirilashvili still
remains the largest local supporter of the Jewish community. Last year,
the RJC raised $350,000 in St. Petersburg, according to the group’s 2002
annual report. RJC president Yevgeny Satanovsky said most of the
money had been a donation from Mirilashvili. “Despite his imprisonment,
he remains one of the most affluent people in St. Petersburg,” Satanovsky
said. A native of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Mirilashvili
is said to have a wide range of business interests in St. Petersburg,
including casinos, real estate, retail, entertainment and hotel businesses.
The businessman, who has never been shy about his Jewish background, holds
Russian and Israeli citizenship and used to divide his time between St.
Petersburg and Tel Aviv. His 18-year-old son, Slava, recently
graduated from an English-language high school in Israel and will attend
Tufts University near Boston this fall ... A week before his sentencing,
Mirilashvili became embroiled in a public argument with another
powerful Russian Jew, exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky — who in the
mid-1990s unsuccessfully tried to take over a local television station
Mirilashvili ran. In an open letter published July 24 in the Moscow
newspaper Kommersant Daily, Berezovsky accused Mirilashvili
of being involved in an underhanded deal in the early 1990´s to privatize
a St. Petersburg-based alcohol producer ,,, He also denied accusations
by Berezovsky and others that he has ties to the criminal underworld.
In the same letter, Mirilashvili accused Berezovsky of changing
his religion to Orthodox Christianity after Berezovsky failed in
an alleged attempt to become a leader of the Russian Jewish community."
[Gusinksky is just one of the Jewish Russian "oligarchs"
who looted Russia. Boris Berezovsky is another Jewish media billionaire,
also with Israeli citizenship, who fled that country.]
Ex-Russia
Media Mogul Arrested in Greece,
By THEODORA TONGAS, Asbury Park Press (From
Associated Press) August 24, 2003
"A former Russian media mogul who clashed with the Kremlin and fled
under fraud accusations three years ago was in Greek custody after being
arrested at the Athens airport. Vladimir Gusinsky, whose former
empire included the independent NTV television station, was detained Thursday
after arriving from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he has lived since April 2001.
His name appeared on an Interpol wanted list for fraud in excess of $250
million, airport authorities said Saturday. Gusinsky, who became
one of Russia's best-known oligarchs after the fall of communism, is scheduled
to appear before a Greek prosecutor Monday. Russia initially sought Gusinsky
on charges of misrepresenting the assets of his company Media-Most
to obtain a $262 million loan from the government-controlled gas giant
Gazprom. It later added allegations of money laundering ... Gusinsky,
who holds Russian and Israeli passports, claims the charges against him
are politically motivated. He was arrested in December 2000 at his home
in Spain, but a Spanish court refused to extradite him, saying the grounds
for the case wouldn't amount to a crime in Spain. Gusinsky then moved
to Israel."
[More about the oppressed Jews of "antisemitic" Russia:]
ALONG
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILROAD. Thanks to prominent locals, city sees revival
in Jewish expression,
By Adam B. Ellick, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
"Simon Spector has thick, expressive eyebrows and a heavily
wrinkled forehead. But the 67-year-old’s portrait won’t be gracing the
cover of any fund-raising brochures depicting elderly, impoverished Russian
Jews slurping borsht at a soup kitchen. The dapperly dressed Spector
is the antithesis of a needy Russian Jew. He is a man in power, representative
of a disproportionately high number of prominent
local Jews who are revealing their ethnic roots and transforming
the face of Russian Jewry — though it’s not clear how willing they are
to use their clout in support of local Jewish life. Spector is
the deputy governor for the Sverdlovsk region, an influential area of
4.5 million in Russia’s Ural Mountains, where Europe and Asia meet. Yekaterinburg,
the regional center and Russia’s third largest city, is home to just 13,000
Jews, or 0.05 percent of the population. “There’s
a myth in Israel that Russian Jews cannot be powerful people. Israeli
doctors come here and cannot believe I’m Jewish,” says Spector, who heads
the local veterans hospital. “The governor tells me to go to Israel, recruit
30,000 Jews and bring them here, because we’re such good leaders.” Three
other Jews also serve as deputy governors, including the health and property
ministers. There are 10 Jewish cultural directors in the region, including
the head of the Yekaterinburg Philharmonic Orchestra and Russia’s Motion
Picture Union. Other prominent local Jews include the head coach of the
Russian chess team, the dean of the local university, Yekaterinburg’s
chief cardiologist, the region’s chief doctor, who oversees 33 hospitals,
and dozens of businessmen, including a bank president. Indeed, Yekaterinburg
can be seen as a microcosm of Russia, where five of 12 owners or majority
stockholders of the largest industrial or financial institutions are Jewish
— a considerable number for Russia, where Jews make up less than 2 percent
of the population ... Domnich and Yekaterinburg’s Hillel director
cannot cite any specific support, but the government gave the ambitious
Ashkenazi — a Chabad rabbi who enjoys close ties with the Kremlin — a
free, 45,000-square-foot plot of land in the city center to build a $1.6
million community center and synagogue. They currently are under construction
after four years of delays. What’s more, the separate Jewish day school
that Ashkenazi runs is tax- and rent-free. The new complex will be Russia’s
largest Jewish center outside of Moscow and will house two mikvahs, a
gym, a weight room, a pool, a medical center, a library, a computer lab,
a music studio and study rooms."
[The two richest Russians today, Roman Abramovich
and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are Jewish. So are the below mentioned
Russian billionaire fugitives Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir
Gusinsky. All looters of Russia. All "gangster capitalists."
All with dual citizenship: Russian and Israeli.]
Boyish
Billionaire Turns His Sights Outside Russia As Others Face Probes, Abramovich
Sells Assets,
By Peter Baker, Washington Post, September
5, 2003; Page A12
"One sits in prison, another just got out on bail, a third awaits
extradition hearings. But while many Russian tycoons face legal pressure
from their government, Roman Abramovich passes time in the director's
boxes at British stadiums, leaping to his feet in triumph, burying his
face in disappointment, relishing each kick by the London soccer team
he has just bought. Life as a British sports magnate seems to agree
with Abramovich, a boyish orphan-turned-billionaire with designer
stubble on his chin. Between soccer matches, he retires to his 450-acre
English country estate and considers which British schools his children
should attend while accountants back in Moscow unload more of his assets.
Abramovich, Russia's second-richest man and the quietest of the
men known as oligarchs who once seemed to run the country, appears to
be extricating himself from the tangled and untamed business-political
world in his home country, where many of his peers find themselves the
target of criminal investigations. With Russian parliamentary elections
scheduled for December and a presidential election next March, Abramovich
hopes to avoid the fate of other business leaders who play the role
of villain in many campaigns .. Now 36, he is worth $5.7 billion, according
to Forbes magazine, making him one of the world's 50 richest people.
President Vladimir Putin's government seems to be renewing a campaign
against the oligarchs as the elections draw nearer. Prosecutors this
summer opened eight investigations into the Yukos oil company and associates
of its chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the only Russian
with more money than Abramovich. Khodorkovsky's adviser
and fellow billionaire, Platon Lebedev, was arrested on fraud charges
and was ordered held until Oct. 30. Khodorkovsky was called in
for questioning. Abramovich's estranged partner, Boris Berezovsky,
who had fled Russia, faces an extradition hearing in Britain in October.
And another self-exiled tycoon, Vladimir Gusinsky, was detained
in Greece and released on bond pending a Russian extradition request.
For a time, rumors swirled that Abramovich was next, but nothing
has come of it. Abramovich eschews public talk of political maneuvering
and instead focuses with childlike delight on the joys of buying virtually
any soccer player he likes and soaking up the novelty of part-time life
in the West ... Abramovich recently said he would not seek a
second term as governor of Chukotka, a barren Arctic region across the
Bering Strait from Alaska and home to more reindeer than people. Abramovich
won the governorship in 2000 promising to transform the destitute wasteland
where winter lasts nine months. Since then, he has put $200 million
of his own money into reviving Chukotka ... "It's not going to be better
up here without him, that's for sure," Alexander Adelshtein,
a spokesman for the district government, said by telephone. "It's natural
to keep hoping to the end that he will change his mind." His recent
transactions are yielding a massive cash windfall, much of it kept abroad.
Last year Sibneft, which Abramovich and Berezovsky acquired
from the state for $250 million in 1995, paid $1 billion in dividends
to Abramovich and his remaining partners. Sibneft recently promised
another $1 billion dividend this year. The sale to Yukos will bring
in $3 billion more and his Russian Aluminum holdings are on the block
for yet another $3 billion ... Abramovich bought the storied
Chelsea soccer club in July, paying the equivalent of $94 million and
assuming debt of $141 million. Since then he has gone on a spending
spree, shelling out $150 million to secure some of the most talented
players in the country in pursuit of the team's first league championship
since 1955. Britain reacted to the purchase with a mixture of awe and
dread. A member of Parliament questioned whether Abramovich was
a "fit and proper person" to own a soccer club, given
his emergence from Russia's gangster capitalism ... He already
owns a Boeing Business Jet, the equivalent of a 737 airliner, and recently
bought a 355-foot yacht. He has a 100-acre estate outside Moscow, a
luxury apartment in St. Tropez and the estate in West Sussex south of
London, with stables for 100 horses, two polo pitches, a swimming pool,
tennis court, rifle ranges and go-kart track. He's selling a $7.9 million
London apartment so he can get a bigger place."
Russian
Jewry’s Point Man Feliks Frenkel is widely regarded as the chief liaison
between his community and the Jewish establishment,
by Walter Ruby, The Jewish Week,
September 19, 2003
"If any Russian Jew can claim to be an essential bridge between
the Russian-speaking community of New York and the world of American
Jewish philanthropy, Feliks Frenkel may be that person. Having
risen in less than 25 years from a penniless immigrant from Kiev
to a wealthy arbitrageur and considerable power within the world of
Jewish philanthropy, the engaging 48-year-old Frenkel is widely
seen as the Russian Jewish layperson who is best able to explain the
needs and the general gestalt of the Russian community to the top leaders
of UJA-Federation, and vice versa. Unlike other
Russian Jewish millionaires in New York who tend to live and
work in a largely Russian-speaking environment, Frenkel, who speaks
fluent, lightly accented English, divides his time between his office
in a thoroughly American corporate environment in Westchester County
and a condominium on the Upper East Side he shares with his wife, Marina,
and their two children. Yet Frenkel, who mainly socializes with fellow
Russian Jews and has undertaken his philanthropic work within a specifically
Russian Jewish context, says he sees his role as “not only bringing
the message and expertise of UJA-Federation to the Russian community,
but also bringing the soul of Russian Jewry to the mainstream community.”
... Frenkel says he has never had a problem relating to the lay leaders
of the American Jewish establishment, in part because
he is every bit as wealthy and powerful as they are ... Frenkel
says he imbibes his strong ethic of responsibility to the Jewish community
in his mother’s milk, noting that both of his parents considered it
their responsibility to help fellow Jews in need back in Kiev ... After
graduating in 1980, he submitted 100 resumes to Wall Street firms, including
Bear Stearns, where someone showed his resume to the firm’s legendary
CEO Alan “Ace” Greenberg. According to Frenkel, “Greenberg
looked at my resume and noticed that I had studied at the University
of Siberia. So he said, ‘I’ve hired people from all walks of life. I’ve
had geniuses and embezzlers, undergraduates and PhDs. But I have never
had anybody from the University of Siberia. Let’s give him the job.’
” Just over a year later, however, Frenkel left Bear Stearns and joined
the predecessor of OTA Limited Partnerships, a trading firm that specializes
in corporate takeovers, as a research analyst in risk arbitrage ...
Frenkel has always made it a point to live in Manhattan, which he calls
“a lemon from which my wife and I try to squeeze
as much juice as we can.”
[The
Jewish Telegraph Agency noted that "Chubais is not ... open
about his Jewish roots." [KRICHEVSKY, L., 5-23-99] You'll note
that the blueprint for economic destruction and looting of Russia seems
to have been a largely Jewish job. Chubais, Sachs, Lipton, Summers,
Soros, etc. etc. etc.]
The
Harvard Boys Do Russia,
by Janine R. Wedel, The Nation, May 14,
1998
"After seven years of economic "reform" financed by billions of
dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled
debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically.
The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the
free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run
for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated
hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia's
wealth. The architect of privatization was former First Deputy Prime
Minister Anatoly Chubais, a darling of the U.S. and Western financial
establishments. Chubais's drastic and corrupt stewardship made
him extremely unpopular. According to The New York Times, he
"may be the most despised man in Russia." Essential to the implementation
of Chubais's policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton
Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in
Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development. Using the
prestige of Harvard's name and connections in the Administration, H.I.I.D.
officials acquired virtual carte blanche over the U.S. economic aid
program to Russia, with minimal oversight by the government agencies
involved. With this access and their close alliance with Chubais
and his circle, they allegedly profited on the side. Yet
few Americans are aware of H.I.I.D.'s role in Russian privatization,
and its suspected misuse of taxpayers' funds. At the recent U.S.-Russian
Investment Symposium at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government,
Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, made what might have seemed to many
an impolite reference to his hosts. After castigating Chubais
and his monetarist policies, Luzhkov, according to a report of the event,
"singled out Harvard for the harm inflicted on the Russian economy by
its advisers, who encouraged Chubais's misguided approach to
privatization and monetarism." Luzhkov was referring to H.I.I.D. Chubais,
who was delegated vast powers over the economy by Boris Yeltsin, was
ousted in Yeltsin's March purge, but in May he was given an immensely
lucrative post as head of Unified Energy System, the country's electricity
monopoly. Some of the main actors with Harvard's Russia project have
yet to face a reckoning, but this may change if a current investigation
by the U.S. government results in prosecutions. The activities of H.I.I.D.
in Russia provide some cautionary lessons on abuse of trust by supposedly
disinterested foreign advisers, on U.S. arrogance and on the entire
policy of support for a single Russian group of so-called reformers.
The H.I.I.D. story is a familiar one in the ongoing saga of U.S. foreign
policy disasters created by those said to be our "best and brightest."
Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart,
Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists
participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin
reformers planned Russia's economic and political future. Sachs
teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin's first architect of economic
reform, to promote a plan of "shock therapy" to swiftly eliminate most
of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet
citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock--not least,
hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent--than therapy. One
result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the
substantial savings of Russians. By November 1992, Gaidar
was under attack for his failed policies and was soon pushed aside
... Print this article E-mail this article Write to the editors .I.I.D.
had supporters high in the Administration. One was Lawrence Summers,
himself a former Harvard economics professor, whom Clinton named Under
Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in 1993. Summers,
now Deputy Treasury Secretary, had longstanding ties to the principals
of Harvard's project in Russia and its later project in Ukraine. Summers
hired a Harvard Ph.D., David Lipton (who had been vice president
of Jeffrey D. Sachs and Associates, a consulting firm), to be
Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Eastern Europe and the Former
Soviet Union. After Summers was promoted to Deputy Secretary,
Lipton moved into Summers's old job, assuming "broad responsibility"
for all aspects of international economic policy development. Lipton
co-wrote numerous papers with Sachs and served with him on consulting
missions in Poland and Russia. "Jeff and David always
came [to Russia] together," said a Russian representative at the International
Monetary Fund. "They were like an inseparable couple." Sachs, who was
named director of H.I.I.D. in 1995, lobbied for and received U.S.A.I.D.
grants for the institute to work in Ukraine in 1996 and 1997 ... Andrei
Shleifer, a Russian-born émigré and already a tenured professor
of economics at Harvard in his early 30s, became director of H.I.I.D.'s
Russia project. Shleifer was also a protégé of Summers,
with whom he received at least one foundation grant ... Another Harvard
player was a former World Bank consultant named Jonathan Hay,
a Rhodes scholar who had attended Moscow's Pushkin Institute for Russian
Language. In 1991, while still at Harvard Law School, he had become
a senior legal adviser to the G.K.I., the Russian state's new privatization
committee; the following year he was made H.I.I.D.'s general director
in Moscow. The youthful Hay assumed vast powers over contractors,
policies and program specifics; he not only controlled access to the
Chubais circle but served as its mouthpiece ... With help from
his H.I.I.D. advisers and other Westerners, Chubais and his cronies
set up a network of aid-funded "private" organizations that enabled
them to bypass legitimate government agencies and circumvent the new
parliament of the Russian Federation, the Duma. Through this network,
two of Chubais's associates, Maxim Boycko (who co-wrote Privatizing
Russia with Shleifer) and Dmitry Vasiliev, oversaw almost a third of
a billion dollars in aid money and millions more in loans from international
financial institutions ... The device of setting up private organizations
backed by the power of the Yeltsin government and maintaining close
ties to H.I.I.D. was a way of insuring deniability. Shleifer,
Hay and other Harvard principals, all U.S. citizens, were "Russian"
when convenient. Hay, for example, served alternately and sometimes
simultaneously as aid contractor, manager of other contractors and representative
of the Russian government ... Against the backdrop of Russia's Klondike
capitalism, which they were helping create and Chubais and his team
were supposedly regulating, the H.I.I.D. advisers exploited their intimate
ties with Chubais and the government and were allegedly able to conduct
business activities for their own enrichment. According to sources close
to the U.S. government's investigation, Hay used his influence, as well
as U.S.A.I.D.-financed resources, to help his girlfriend, Elizabeth
Hebert, set up a mutual fund, Pallada Asset Management, in Russia ...
After Pallada was set up, Hebert, Hay, Shleifer and Vasiliev looked
for ways to continue their activities as aid funds dwindled. Using I.L.B.E.
resources and funding, they established a private consulting firm with
taxpayer money. One of the firm's first clients was Shleifer's
wife, Nancy Zimmerman, who operated a Boston-based hedge fund
that traded heavily in Russian bonds. According to Russian registration
documents, Zimmerman's company set up a Russian firm with Sergei
Shishkin, the I.L.B.E. chief, as general director. Corporate documents
on file in Moscow showed that the address and phone number of the company
and the I.L.B.E. were the same. Then there is the First Russian Specialized
Depository, which holds the records and assets of mutual fund investors.
This institution, funded by a World Bank loan, also worked to the benefit
of Hay, Vasiliev, Hebert and another associate, Julia Zagachin. According
to sources close to the U.S. government's investigation, Zagachin, an
American married to a Russian, was selected to run the depository even
though she lacked the required capital ... Anne Williamson, a journalist
who specializes in Soviet and Russian affairs, details these and other
conflicts of interest between H.I.I.D.'s advisers and their supposed
clients--the Russian people--in her forthcoming book, How America
Built the New Russian Oligarchy. For example, in 1995, in Chubais-organized
insider auctions of prime national properties, known as loans-for-shares,
the Harvard Management Company (H.M.C.), which invests the university's
endowment, and billionaire speculator George Soros were the only
foreign entities allowed to participate. H.M.C. and Soros |