Starmer and Corbyn’s Putinist friend
Yesterday’s election in Slovakia has been reported in the mainstream press (and even by some H&D readers who should know better) as a victory for the ‘populist right’, or even for ‘nationalists’.
In fact the election winner (and given the fissiparous nature of Slovak politics it’s important to point out that he ‘won’ with less than 23% of the vote and will need to find coalition partners) was the ex-communist Robert Fico, whose social democratic party Smer remains a member of all the usual international alliances of mainstream leftwing parties.
The only reason why some on the vacuous “dissident right” have welcomed Fico’s victory, is that this Slovak leftist is a de facto supporter of the Kremlin’s anti-Ukrainian, anti-European aggression.
Fico has insisted that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a war started “by Ukrainian nazis and fascists”. And predictably this Stalinist rhetoric has been echoed by the Kremlin’s useful idiots, including some so-called ‘nationalists’.
Ironically, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is a longstanding partner of Fico’s party in three international socialist alliances – the Party of European Socialists, Progressive Alliance, and Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. The Slovak party is also part of an even more leftwing organisation, the Socialist International, where Starmer’s Labour now only has “observer” status.
In 2006 Smer was suspended from the Party of European Socialists because Fico accepted a ‘far right’ party into his coalition government, but this suspension ended in 2008 and Fico now seems to be accepted by the likes of Starmer and Germany’s social democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a good socialist comrade!
During the coming days and weeks, Smer will look for coalition allies. The Slovak nationalist party SMS might again be one of them, but with 5.6% (10 MPs) it has less than half the support it enjoyed when it joined one of Fico’s previous coalitions in 2006.
The real kingmakers this time will be another leftwing party, Hlas, with 14.7% and 27 MPs. We shouldn’t expect much in the way of political principle in these negotiations, still less should we expect anything resembling racial nationalism, whether or not SMS ministers join the payroll.
What we can sadly continue to expect is that the ignorant and deluded ‘dissident right’ will continue to disgrace themselves by applauding Putinist victories, even when these victories are for parties of the socialist / social democratic left.
Death of an embarrassment
We are unlikely ever to find out for certain who was responsible for the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin on 23rd August after their plane crashed in unexplained circumstances.
Many observers will quite reasonably point to the long history of Kremlin dictators assassinating their rivals. The KGB and its predecessors and successors have frequently tracked down ‘traitors’ even in foreign countries, let alone those such as Prigozhin and Utkin who had the temerity to continue to challenge the Kremlin’s authority within Russia.
Yet even today we don’t know for sure whether (for example) the KGB murdered Walter Krivitsky in the Bellevue Hotel, Washington, in February 1941, or whether he killed himself in the despair and isolation of exile.
Even in death, Prigozhin and Utkin continue to be an embarrassment to the European cultural and political traditions whose symbolism they and their Wagner Group abused.
It seems unlikely that Prigozhin had the slightest interest in or knowledge of Wagner, beyond a vague idea that he was Adolf Hitler’s favourite composer, and that the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from Die Walküre was used to accompany scenes of American helicopter gunships slaughtering Vietnamese civilians in the Hollywood film Apocalypse Now.
Neither did he or Utkin demonstrate any appreciation of national socialist ideas, nor of Adolf Hitler’s true political legacy.
What Prigozhin, Utkin and their fellow ‘Wagner Group’ thugs liked was the Hollywood image of ‘nazi brutality’. They revelled in slaughter and profited from selling their murderous services to sundry African dictators. In so doing, they acted as arm’s length instruments of their Kremlin sponsor Vladimir Putin, who of course naturally took his cut from their numerous criminal enterprises.
This cosy partnership fell apart for only one reason. The Wagner Group was in the forefront of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, given special license to scour Russia’s prisons for rapists and murderers who could be unleashed on Ukrainian civilians. As is so often the case with mercenary forces, their reward was to come largely from looting their victims, in what was expected to be a swift conquest.
Ukrainian resistance prevented that scenario, and left Prigozhin’s forces under fire and under paid.
The consequence was that Prigozhin and Utkin turned on their Kremlin master, and even after the swift evaporation of their attempted ‘coup’, Putin was left looking enfeebled. If he believed that killing Prigozhin and Utkin would be a form of political Viagra, Putin is sure to be disappointed.
For European nationalists, the embarrassment of the Wagner Group’s ‘nazi’ iconography continues. Not only are we faced by endless news bulletins describing the dead mercenaries as ‘neo-nazis’, but we also have the living embarrassment of some of their associates, such as another supposed ‘neo-nazi’ gang allied to the Kremlin, Rusich and its co-leader Yan Petrovsky.
Last month Petrovsky, who sadly (unlike Prigozhin) does have real connections to the fringe of European nationalism, was arrested while passing through Helsinki airport. He co-founded Rusich with a sadist and football hooligan from St Petersburg, Alexey Milchakov, and they have polluted various corners of the internet with a combination of crude, fake ‘neo-nazism’ and advocacy of anti-European genocide in Ukraine.
But like the Wagner Group, Petrovsky and Milchakov turned against Putin. Rusich is now complaining loudly that the Kremlin has done nothing to help Petrovsky after his arrest.
These gangsters (large and small) are fighting each other as their plan to loot Ukraine falls apart.
For Western European nationalists the broader lesson is clear. We must firmly dissociate ourselves from sadistic thugs and mindless scum who discredit our cause, not only in Russia but throughout the White world.
Putinist oligarch arrested in London
Mikhail Fridman – one of London’s leading Russian oligarchs – was arrested at one of his two London homes on Thursday by officers from the National Crime Agency’s Combatting Kleptocracy Cell. British press reports have avoided naming Fridman.
According to an NCA statement, Fridman – a close ally of Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin – was arrested “on suspicion of offences including money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the Home Office and conspiracy to commit perjury”. A 35-year-old man was arrested in the vicinity after being observed leaving Fridman’s home with a bag containing a large amount of cash.
Later on Thursday, the former boyfriend of Fridman’s current partner was arrested at his home in Pimlico, “for offences including money laundering and conspiracy to defraud”.
The NCA’s Director-General Graeme Biggar said: “The NCA’s Combatting Kleptocracy Cell, only established this year, is having significant success investigating potential criminal activity by oligarchs, the professional service providers that support and enable them and those linked to the Russian regime.
“We will continue to use all the powers and tactics available to us to disrupt this threat.”
Mikhail Fridman was born in Lviv but now holds joint Russian and Israeli citizenship. He began to build his Alfa business empire in his early 20s, in partnership with two fellow Jews – German Khan and Petr Aven – and is best known for his co-ownership of the controversial Alfa Bank and associated companies.
Since 2017 Fridman and his partners have been involved in several legal actions against the former MI6 officer Chris Steele, whose dossier alleged that they had corrupt dealings with Putin and Donald Trump.
Fridman co-founded the Russian Jewish Congress and has been a major donor to Zionist causes including the European Jewish Fund and ‘Holocaust’ education projects. His Genesis Philanthropy Group sponsors an annual prize for “Jewish contributions to humanity”.
Fridman’s two London homes are 25 Cavendish Close, St John’s Wood (close to Lord’s cricket ground), and Athlone House, a mansion in Highgate, North London, that was used as an RAF Intelligence base during the Second World War. For many years pre-war it was owned by Sir Robert Waley Cohen, one of the leaders of the Anglo-Jewish community.
In 2018 Fridman addressed a Chabad “Living Torah” event in London’s exclusive Belgravia district, where he described the Torah as the “backbone” of key concepts pioneered by Judaism, including “the precedence of good over evil and the power to choose between them using free will’. No doubt following his arrest he will be given plenty of time to explain these concepts to the Combatting Kleptocracy Cell of London’s National Crime Agency.
17th June 1953 – still relevant to us in 2022
This is a translation of a perceptive article posted online yesterday by the fast-growing German nationalist group Der III. Weg (‘The Third Way’ – no connection to the 1980s / 1990s UK organisation of the same name). Photos added by H&D: any errors in translation are our responsibility.
Almost 70 years have passed since people in central Germany rose up against the Bolshevisation of their homeland by Moscow’s GDR puppets and fought desperately against oncoming Soviet tanks, which finally violently crushed the uprising. 34 demonstrators lost their lives in the anti-Soviet uprising (Volksaufstand) that day. Subsequently, more insurgents died as a result of death sentences by Soviet court-martials or as a result of the conditions in the communist prisons.
On June 17th 1953, Germans had gathered in East Berlin, Halle, Magdeburg, Leipzig and Dresden with the Deutschlandlied on their lips and, in addition to social improvements, also demanded national goals such as the dismissal of the GDR government, which was dependent on Moscow, the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the Reunification of Germany. This uprising against the corrupt Soviet system, together with the “Prague Spring” of 1968, symbolises the resistance of the oppressed peoples in the Eastern Bloc countries against the Muscovite tyranny, against which the nations of Europe fought heroically in the years 1941-45, before they finally had to kneel before Moscow thanks to the alliance of Churchill and Roosevelt with Stalin.
Until recently, awareness of the Muscovite threat seemed to be shared only among the older generations among us. Too far away in the past was the time when the oppressive Stalinist regime in central Germany shot down rebellious workers who wanted a united German fatherland. The idea that Moscow could again reach out to Europe to seize parts of it and impose its system on them, as the Soviet predecessor system of today’s Russian Federation practiced against all western neighbouring states and on itself since the beginning of its existence, was too unreal. Though with the help of the Allies from 1945, it was even able to subdue the entire eastern half of Europe.
In the years that followed, Russia joined the ranks of the “democratic states” in the world. From then on, the USA and its allies were considered the only imperialists in the world who, with their wars of aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and the continued presence of American military bases in Europe even after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, rightly earned the status of occupiers and warmongers . That changed when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine on February 24th 2022 under the pretext of “denazifying” Ukraine, but actually wanting to reincorporate it into the Russian Empire. What had been hidden for years before was now openly apparent. The restoration of the old imperialist Soviet Union is a declared goal of the Kremlin’s policy under Putin.
What happened almost 70 years ago in the cities of Central Germany, we are experiencing again just 2000 km to the east, in cities like Kherson and Melitopol, where the civilian population is making life as difficult as possible for the Russian occupiers, blocking the progress of military vehicles and gathering for mass protests on the streets under waving national flags, even at the risk of being gunned down by Putin’s troops. In Kherson, however, the Russian occupiers are planning to install another separatist bandit republic under the leadership of puppets loyal to Moscow – in the spirit of Ulbricht, Pieck and Grotewohl at the time of the early GDR – after the removal and arrest of local Ukrainian politicians.
And the so-called “victory flag” of the Russians has not changed compared to then. The red flag with hammer and sickle is now waving in central squares in Russian-held cities where the national symbols of Ukraine have been removed. The Bolshevik monster was never dead, just slumbering for the past 30 years. Europe’s struggle for freedom against the old enemy did not come to an end after the fall of the Soviet Union, but is now experiencing a resurrection. Reason enough to commemorate June 17th 1953 and its freedom fighters more consciously than ever this year, because our people still have a long way to go before they have paid the last bloody toll in the fight against Bolshevism and Muscovite imperialism.
Ethics and Oligarchs in Tel Aviv
One of Israel’s leading academics has admitted lobbying in defence of sanctioned oligarch Roman Abramovich, saying: “When someone offers you $50m, you sign their letter.”
The tycoon was already controversial for reported links to organised crime as well as his role as Putin’s international financial fixer, but had been welcomed as a big donor to Israeli institutions as well as to international campaigns against ‘racism’ and ‘anti-semitism’.
Just two days before the invasion of Ukraine, Abramovich and the Israeli ‘holocaust’ memorial Yad Vashem announced a “strategic partnership” in which the oligarch would donate tens of millions of dollars. He had acquired Israeli citizenship in 2018.
Perhaps it was unsurprising therefore that soon after the invasion Yad Vashem’s chairman Danny Dayan was among signatories to a letter from influential Israelis to the US Ambassador in Jerusalem, calling on the American authorities to refrain from sanctioning Abramovich.
These distinguished Jews, including Israel’s Chief Rabbi, wrote:
“We are examples of institutions that have benefited from Roman Abramovich, and have long-standing ties with him. We implore you warmly to consider Roman Abramovich’s position and importance to the community and to Israel. We warn that any action against him will not only be unfair, but will also negatively impact the Jewish world and Israel.”
After the appeal failed and Western governments proceeded with sanctions, a few of these institutions belatedly distanced themselves from the disgraced oligarch. Yad Vashem suspended their receipt of his largesse, but has not handed back his earlier gifts.
One of the senior Israelis who co-wrote the letter and remains unabashed is Professor Ariel Porat, president of Tel Aviv University, which had received $50 million from Abramovich.
Last week in a secret meeting with senior academics, Porat – one of Israel’s leading legal scholars – defended the university’s links with Abramovich. He admitted: “Unfortunately there is a legal impediment to taking money from [Abramovich]. After the war is over, I imagine the sanctions will be lifted.”
And he told his colleagues: “When someone offers you $50m, you sign their letter.”
One of Porat’s critics pointed out: “No one is disputing the necessity of donations — but not at all costs and at any condition. It is embarrassing that an academic institution is willing to sell its prestige and social standing for money.”
Embarrassing, but in the case of Tel Aviv University and Roman Abramovich not surprising.
The oligarch who hedges his bets
Today Spanish police seized a £70m ‘superyacht’ belonging to one of Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarch cronies.
Tango is registered in the British Virgin Islands – one of the favourite havens for shady international tycoons – and belongs to Viktor Vekselberg, son of a Ukrainian Jew and a Russian. Since 1990 Vekselberg has been head of the Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate with interests in aluminium, oil and other sectors. He has been subject to international sanctions due to his close Kremlin ties.
According to several investigators, Vekselberg’s most interesting international role has been as the man who does the dirty work for Sir Len Blavatnik, his business partner, co-founder of the Renova Group and closest friend since their schooldays.
While Vekselberg has been sanctioned, Blavatnik has earned a teflon reputation which might be connected to his remarkable talent for backing opposite political sides and remaining close to power.
Blavatnik has at various times backed pro- and anti-Netanyahu factions in Israel; Tony Blair in the UK; Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the USA. In 2015 a group of international scholars condemned Oxford University for accepting Blavatnik’s money to fund the ‘Blavatnik School of Government’.
Blavatnik however insists that he has distanced himself from Putin, and the likes of Tony Blair and his ‘charitable foundations’ have continued to work closely with the Blavatnik School of Government. Meanwhile Blavatnik has continued to be one of the world’s leading sponsors of ‘Holocaust’ education, including a recent international conference to celebrate “the nearly 1.5 million Jewish men and women who fought in World War II against Adolf Hitler and the Axis powers.” H&D will soon be analysing some of the interesting omissions from this ‘history’!
Perhaps the ambiguities of Blavatnik’s own position will never be fully resolved, but as the Kremlin’s brutality continues in Ukraine, the likes of Tony Blair are feeling increasingly nervous about their ties to Putin’s oligarchs. Whatever their politics, Western politicians (including some so-called ‘nationalists’) have been happy to stick their snouts in the Kremlin trough.
Abramovich disgraced – a nation mourns
Vladimir Putin’s favourite oligarch – Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich – is now in disgrace. He faces a range of sanctions by the British government and today was disqualified by the Premier League as a Chelsea director. The billionaire Abramovich is no longer regarded as a fit and proper person to be involved in the running of a football club. His assets at the club and elsewhere in the UK have been frozen.
One of the most recent causes to benefit from Abramovich’s largesse was Yad Vashem, the most prestigious international museum of ‘the Holocaust’. On February 22nd – just two days before his close friend and ally Vladimir Putin began his brutal invasion of Ukraine – Abramovich and Yad Vashem announced a “strategic partnership” in which the tycoon would donate tens of millions of dollars.
The Abramovich donations, it was said, would be “significantly enriching Yad Vashem’s world-renowned International Institute for Holocaust Research … at the center of ground-breaking research initiatives in the field of Holocaust studies, which serves as the basis for both commemorative and educational activities related to the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators before, during and after the Holocaust. This new strategic partnership will expand and bolster Yad Vashem’s research activities, at a time when Holocaust distortion, denial and politicization are rising alarmingly worldwide. The partnership will provide support over a period of five years, to further expand and develop the Institute’s activities on a global scale.”
At first Yad Vashem was lobbying governments not to sanction Abramovich. But less than three weeks later, the deal is off, in the face of real atrocities committed across Ukraine by the generous donor’s closest political ally.
Abramovich is not the only big donor to Israeli causes who is now under international sanctions, though it remains to be seen whether these wily operators will be able to evade the world’s financial regulators in time-honoured fashion.
Some of his closest associates include Eugene Shvidler, partner in many Abramovich businesses and once a fellow director at Chelsea FC. A private jet linked to Shvidler was impounded at a UK airport earlier this week.
Another is David Davidovich, Abramovich’s righthand man in his earliest days in business, who made more than $1 billion from his sale of Russian oil interests. Davidovich also owns Russia’s second largest meat and meat-processing business. He gives his nationality as “Israeli”.
Abramovich is not the first unusual ‘businessman’ to be a major donor and facilitator of Zionist operations.
During the Jewish terrorist war against Britain from 1945-48, prominent figures in the US Mafia helped smuggle weapons to Palestine from New York docks. These included the notorious killers Mayer Lansky, Albert Anastasia and Joe Adonis whose daily business was known as “Murder Incorporated”.
Other important allies of the Zionist terror gangs included Sam Kay, a leading Jewish gangster in Miami; Bugsy Siegel, pioneer of Mafia interests in the Las Vegas casino and entertainment business; and Mickey Cohen, then the leading mafioso in California.
Putin’s London oligarchs: the dishonouring of Britain’s ‘elite’
This morning’s Sunday Times front page reports that MI5 and MI6 – Britain’s security and intelligence services – objected to the peerage awarded 18 months ago to Evgeny Lebedev, Russian owner of London’s Evening Standard.
Lebedev owes his fortune to his father Alexander, a prominent oligarch and former KGB officer who was in charge of the KGB’s station in London at the end of the Soviet era in the late 1980s, the period when a young Vladimir Putin was number two in the equivalent station in Dresden. As is often the case in the complex politics of post-Soviet Russia, Alexander Lebedev was briefly an enemy of Putin’s but then changed sides and became what one former MI6 officer has called “a craven supporter” of the Kremlin godfather.
Lebedev junior has been a good friend of Prime Minister Boris Johnson for more than a decade, ever since his strong support for Johnson first term as Mayor of London and his re-election campaign in 2012.
According to this morning’s Sunday Times, Johnson exerted pressure on MI5 and MI6 to withdraw their objections to Lebedev’s peerage, and they duly did so. His elevation was announced in July 2020 and he officially took his seat as Lord Lebedev in November that year.
The blatant sale of honours (up to and including knighthoods and peerages) has been an intermittent feature of British political life since the early 1920s, when Prime Minister David Lloyd George marketed such baubles to political donors via a shady coterie of corrupt businessmen including Maundy Gregory, a theatrical producer and newspaper owner who used his network of homosexual associates to obtain blackmail opportunities for British intelligence.
These schemes became so notoriously disgraceful that a special law was brought in to criminalise such behaviour: the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. Maundy Gregory himself is the only person to have been convicted under this law – he was jailed for two months in 1933. Gregory’s death remains mysterious. He was reportedly captured by German forces after the French surrender in 1940, and possibly died in an internment camp the following year, but there has never been any official confirmation.
For forty years after Lloyd George there were few if any scandals surrounding honours, until the arrival of Britain’s most pro-Zionist Prime Minister, Labour’s Harold Wilson and his notorious political secretary Marcia Williams (herself ennobled as Lady Falkender).
Wilson and Falkender lavished honours upon corrupt Jewish businessmen who had either donated money to the Labour Party or provided them with personal favours. Many of the beneficiaries had ties to Israel’s intelligence service Mossad, and at least two of those elevated to the Lords – Joseph Kagan and Rudy Sternberg – were suspected of links to the KGB or other Soviet bloc services.
Heritage and Destiny has carried out extensive investigations into the Wilson-Falkender ties to Israeli interests, as readers will learn in a forthcoming book by our assistant editor.
In one important respect, Johnson’s government is even worse than Wilson’s, whose most notorious apparent sales of honours followed his still-mysterious resignation in 1976 – known as the “Lavender List” because Lady Falkender supposedly compiled it on her personal notepaper.
Despite their corruption, Wilson and Falkender did give in to pressure from the honours scrutiny committee and removed three names. One of those removed was the boxing promoter Jarvis Astaire, who was one of many Jews with shady connections who had donated to Wilson’s party coffers and had been suggested for a knighthood. A later pro-Zionist Labour Prime Minister – Tony Blair – eventually gave Astaire a slightly lesser honour, an OBE, in 2003.
Blair’s own government was for some time embroiled in allegations surrounding the sale of honours, involving several prominent Zionist lobbyists close to Labour’s then-leader.
Another name that Wilson agreed to remove was Illtyd Harrington, deputy leader of the Greater London Council, whom he had suggested for a peerage. In Harrington’s case there were probably two problems: first he was openly homosexual (which in those days was considered more scandalous than it would be today), and secondly his father had been an active communist who fought with the communist-controlled International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and would certainly have had an MI5 file.
Lord Lebedev is also widely assumed to be a homosexual, but in today’s world MI5 and MI6 objections would not have been related to his private life, unless they were concerned that his famously lavish parties had been used to promote Vladimir Putin’s interests.
When Lebedev’s ex-KGB father first purchased the London Evening Standard in 2009, then Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson turned down requests for the British government to intervene. Mandelson is a close associate of another Putin oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.
Now that the Sunday Times has made these allegations, and given that ordinary Britons will inevitably pay a heavy price in their shopping and utility bills for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, it is surely imperative for the Johnson Government to publish all relevant documents about the Lebedev peerage and be completely open about the Prime Minister’s friendship with the Standard owner and fellow oligarchs.
And to show that this is a matter that transcends party politics, we are sure that the Labour Party will support the formal request that H&D is now making under the Freedom of Information Act for similar release of all relevant files concerning the Wilson government and its donors. One such file is catalogued as PREM 19/589/1 – due to be released to us at the National Archives in January this year but withheld, “closed while access is under review” for unexplained reasons.
A formal request for release of this and other documents will be submitted at the start of office hours tomorrow.
We shall of course inform H&D readers of any progress in this long overdue forensic examination of the British state’s decline into dishonour.
Putin, Yeltsin, Falstaff: the brutal reality of transferring political and criminal power
The video above combines two clips illustrating the transfer of political power and its cold brutality. (Click square in bottom corner above to view full screen.)
First, in March 2000: Vladimir Putin climbs to power on the back of Boris Yeltsin’s corrupt camarilla and Putin’s own KGB/FSB circle. In amazing video footage at Yeltsin’s home, the corrupt old president is seen celebrating because he assumes his protégé will continue his influence and that of his crooked family and friends. Yet as we see, Putin will not even accept or return Yeltsin’s phone calls.
Putin goes on to work closely with some of the kleptocrats and gangsters from the Yeltsin circle and KGB, while purging others. And so it has continued for more than 20 years.
I’ve combined this clip with a famous scene from Shakespeare, as adapted by Orson Welles in one of my favourite films, Chimes at Midnight.
Here the old rogue Falstaff approaches his former partner-in-crime Prince Hal, who has just become King Henry V. But his former protégé (like Putin to Yeltsin) rebuffs him:
““I know thee not old man.
…Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.”
That’s their world of ‘high politics’, and it’s one reason why we shouldn’t wish to surrender our loyalties and ideological commitments in exchange for the baubles of ‘power’, whether in a 21st century Moscow dictatorship or a 15th century English monarchy.
Putin will doubtless soon experience the same treatment he once gave to Yeltsin: as his grip on power loosens, the new powerbrokers will again “turn away their former self”.
We might see the victory of the true Europe in our lifetimes or we might not. But unlike these ‘statesmen’, honour and loyalty will continue to be central to our lives.
Putin attacks ‘neo-Nazis’ and ‘Banderites’: who does he mean and what does this rhetoric reveal?
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly referred to the need to crush ‘neo-Nazis’ and ‘Banderites’ as the key motives for his invasion of Ukraine.
Neither Russian nor Western media have adequately explained what he means.
Stepan Bandera was a Ukrainian nationalist leader assassinated in 1959 by the KGB (for which Putin himself later worked for sixteen years).
But why should Putin in 2022 be so obsessed by this long-dead nationalist and his movement?
In a major archival investigation for H&D, our assistant editor Peter Rushton visits recently declassified archives – including one document still secret in Britain but which can be accessed indirectly via CIA files.
Today he uncovers the complex story of Stepan Bandera and Ukrainian nationalism; its connection to both Third Reich and British intelligence agencies; the bravery of Ukraine’s anti-communist partisans but also the problematic aspects of their legacy; the reasons for Putin’s ‘anti-nazi’ obsessions; and how all this can inform a rational and honourable policy for today’s European nationalists.
Click here to read Who was Stepan Bandera?
PS: Just in case readers thought Putin’s favourite billionaire oligarchs were all Jews, here’s a Muslim one. But with a Jewish wife.
In 1980 as a hard-working young lawyer in Brezhnev’s decaying Soviet Union, Alisher Usmanov was the victim of an unfortunate misunderstanding that earned him an eight-year jail sentence for fraud and theft. Twenty years later, when he had become a tycoon, he was able to get the whole business straightened out and his conviction was quashed.
And until this week there had been no looking back. British readers will know Mr Usmanov for his decade of investment in Arsenal Football Club, which at one time he seemed likely to take over, though he later sold his shares for more than £500 million.
Sadly, Mr Usmanov has fallen victim to another misunderstanding this week due to his innocent friendship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. His £437 million yacht has been seized by German authorities.
Especially after reading the heart-warming story of this honest Muslim billionaire’s marriage to a Jewess, we are sure readers will all be hoping that Mr and Mrs Usmanov get their yacht returned some time soon. Perhaps in time for Purim.
