HARVARD UNIVERSITY ANTICS: 55 YEARS OF SUPERSTITIO, AND COUNTING

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‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’-Kohelet, son of David, king in Jerusalem, made this point 3,000 years ago. Want a prime example of words that ‘aged well’? These are Kohelet’s words. Arguably, they did not age at all…. And if another example is needed, it exists in the form of the autobiographical account of Richard Pipes, a historian of Russia whose illustrious career started and developed in Harvard, then continued in the framework of the CIA, and then concluded in Harvard. Being an advisor to the American administration on all-things-Soviet during the period of the Cold War, Pipes became a very public persona. His reputation of a ‘conservative intellectual’ is a responsibility of the ‘liberal press’. The label of a ‘conservative intellectual’ has a function akin to a warning ‘contains nuts’ on food products: consume with care, remembering your sensitivities, just in case, you know…There...
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ANECDOTALLY SPEAKING: the Russian street and Israel-Gaza war

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The following text is a translation of the post published by the resident of St Petersburg, a theatre critic and a journalist, Elena Volgust, who decided to walk the streets of St Petersburg with an Israeli flag. *************BEGINNING*************** “I followed the route Moscow boulevard -Kuznetzovskaya-Brother’s Strugatskiye square-bus-trolleybus-Zagorodny boulevard-Vladimirskiy boulevard- corner of Nevsky and Liteiny-trolleybus-bus. All the way -I travelled silently. I did not talk to anyone and did not ask anything. All that time I simply held a flag in my hand, vertically. Reactions: A boy on a bicycle shouted : ”Jews!” A woman in a mask: “An activist..ugh” Two aged men: “Well done” Four people smiled at me on the street, size people smiled-on public transport Many looked intently but did not express any view One significant conversation happened, with a woman who initiated it, at a bus stop near Vitebskaya station. She approved of the flag, said that watches news day and night and all sorts of clever commentary, worries about Israelis, wishes them victory. Another woman,...
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Putin, Gaza and the siege of Leningrad

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For all those who are interested in the evolving position of Russia regarding the most recent developments in the 2023 Gaza war, below is an (almost) literal translation of positions publicly expressed by Putin on this matter. The link to the original video is here. The formulations employed show a degree of continuity with the late Soviet policy in essentials but not in detail. Israel and Zionism are not presented as a settler-colonialist enterprise, for example,  but as a side with legitimate and justifiable claims. The commitment is a very ‘general-purpose’ rather unspecific one to the creation of the independent Palestinian state. There is a degree of grievance towards the one-sided American mediation and abandonment of the ‘Quartet’ effort.  In particular, the comparison of the ‘siege of Gaza’ to the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War is not meant to draw ‘Israel-Nazis’ parallel but to hint at the devastating, for civilians, consequences of such a measure. All, or almost...
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Friday sermon at the Moscow Memorial Mosque, by Imam Shamil Alyautdinov, 13 October 2023

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First, why to talk about it? Why to consider and listen to something as (deceptively) esoteric as a Friday sermon to Muslims in Moscow? Well, the historical conflict that is coming to a crescendo as I am keypunching, is between Israel and some surrounding Arab populations but it echoes across the world. Islamic communities across the globe, albeit many not all, seem to align with or at least produces voices of support for Palestinians. Muslims in Russia are a genuine ‘black whole’. If Russia is not well understood and known to the average and above-average Westerner, then Russian Muslims ten times so. Yet, it is an important community. It is big, as I am going to show in a minute. It is also situated in the midst of the country that is itself at war. And it lives and thinks and operates from the larger Russian society, with its peculiar collectivism, a degree of reverence towards leadership figures and a...
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Russian antisemitism and Jewish immigration

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‘Has antisemitism been increasing in Russia?’, ‘Is that the reason that immigration of Russian Jews has been so high lately?’ – these are the most frequently asked questions that I received since the publication of the report ‘Jewish migration today: what it may mean for Europe’. The report has shown that, since the outbreak of war between Russian and Ukraine in February 2022, immigration of Jews and their family members from Russia and Ukraine rose to the levels last seen at the end of the 1990s, almost quarter of a century ago. If these levels keep for the next 5-10 years, Jewish community of Russia would be less than a half of its current size while Jewish community of Ukraine would almost disappear. Immigration of Jews from France have been high in the early 21st century but really at an incomparably lower level compared to the new Russian and Ukrainian realities. It almost feels like immigration of Jews from Ukraine does...
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JEWS IN THE 2021 CENSUS OF ENGLAND AND WALES: THE ACTUAL NUMBER, THE ACTUAL DEVELOPMENTS

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The reported situation At 9.30 AM on the 29 November 2021, the latest results of the 2021 Census of England and Wales describing the religious and ethnic composition of the nation made it into the public domain. The Office for National Statistics (the ONS) told that in 2021 the Census of England and Wales registered 271,327 people who self-identified as Jews in response to the religion question. To be precise, these are people who ticked the ‘Jewish’ box in response to a question ‘What is your religion?’. A decade earlier, in 2011, there were 265,073 such people. That means an addition of 6,000, or growth of 2.4%, in a decade. For comparison, the population of England and Wales as a whole grew by about 6.3% during this period. Just how credible is it? This picture is rather incredible. Anyone with sound knowledge of the recent demographic realities of British Jews would say so.  Konstantin Stanislavsky, a notable Russian theatre producer and actors’ trainer,...
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Cambridge versus Oxford Jews

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Nights are still getting longer and weather is getting colder. Which is exactly why the Office for National Statistics in England and Wales chose to release the 2021 Census data on religion and ethnicity. To keep us on fire with excitement. Census data are exciting (said nobody ever), but bear with me. You can do all sorts with the Census data. Cambridge versus Oxford Jewish race, for example. Have you not always wondered which one, Cambridge or Oxford, has more Jews? So here is the end of that mystery. It is Oxford. Oxford has slightly (very slightly!) more Jews than Cambridge. Just above 2,000 people in the City of Oxford and the surrounding districts of Oxfordshire ticked the ‘Jewish’ box in the 2021 Census (2,117). Just under 2,000 people identified as Jews by religion in the City of Cambridge and the surrounding districts of Cambridgeshire (1,978). Just under 1,000 Jews in each place identified as Jews by ethnicity, but-from the experience of...
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HOW TO UNDERSTAND RUSSIA, AND HOW NOT TO

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Autocracy it isHaving gone through a period of radical political transformation and economic crises Russia is back as a world player. It re-emerged gradually, but its recent direct involvement in Syria, its sightings within the context of the American election and finally its 2014-2022 ‘Ukrainian campaign’ brought it back to the Westerners’ attention. Russia, in the eyes of an average Westerner, is an exotic and somewhat incomprehensible place. Russian bears, Russian dolls, Russian oligarchs, Russian brides, Russian vodka, Russian baths. A soft form of ‘Orientalism’, if you ask me. ‘Natasha from Russia’ will tell you everything you need to know about that… A lot has been written on Russia by serious scholars since the collapse of communism and the access to the archival materials that followed. However, the area of Russian studies in the Western academia never stagnated. Robert Conquest, Robert Service, Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes published maybe 50 books on the Soviet period of Russian history, all before 1990. There...
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DO SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA WORK? A REPORT FROM THE NATURAL EXPERIMENT AND LESSONS FOR ISRAEL AND ISRAEL’S DETRACTORS

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Do Western sanctions against Russia work? Such was the question asked by the ‘Economist’ recently. Those sanctions, yes, ‘like none the world has seen’. Well, how does one know that something works, in principle?  In scientific fields, it is rather rigidly understood: something ‘works’ when it achieves the hoped result, and the result is confirmed by comparing the ‘before-policy’ situation to ‘after-policy situation’, and possible alternative explanations that could have generated the result are ruled out definitively. The comparison, in scientific fields, should be based on numerical indicators, not feelings. Presumably, Western sanctions were imposed to end the war against Ukraine. And, presumably, the causal mechanism, if it was ever specified by those who conceived the sanctions, would look something like this: sanctions will be imposed, prices would go up, hopefully scarcity would develop too, Russian population will suffer, it will then turn against Putin and depose him. That will end the war. Has it happened and, if not, how close...
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POLITINFORMATION/Политинформация

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Politinformation…is something that every product of the Soviet educational system would remember. Half an hour, once per week, on Wednesday. A teacher would address briefly this or that issue of international politics in front of the class, at a level appropriate for a particular age group. Which issue? All sorts. Olympic games, apartheid in South Africa, a visit of Indira Ghandi, nuclear disarmament, miners' strike. From grade 4 (age 10) politinformation was something that one of the (more literate and confident) children in class was tasked for. If this role was allocated to you, you would have to look at the newspaper in the evening, choose a suitable piece of information and be ready to present it to the class in the morning. The teacher would then facilitate discussion. I was a booky kid and was tasked with politinformation year after year. My future biographers would be tempted to say, I hope: “his path in life was charted early enough”..... I...
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