This claim, funnily enough, comes not from some nutty Russian nationalist but the Jerusalem Post, citing a Russian Jew commenting in the wake of Russian oppositionist Boris Nemtsov’s murder.
The murder hit Russia’s sizable Jewish intelligentsia particularly hard because “nearly all the leaders of the liberal opposition are either fully Jewish or have Jewish background,” said Michael Edelstein, a lecturer at Moscow State University and a writer for the Jewish monthly magazine L’chaim. “His murder is the low point in a process that started about two years ago which has left the Jewish intelligentsia and its milieu feeling more uneasy than ever before in post-communist Russia.”
The reason this came to my attention was because it was trumpeted by American identitarian Kevin MacDonald, writing at the Occidental Observer. I can understand why he would be interested in highlighting this as it would tie in quite neatly with the main body of his work, which advances the thesis that Jews have consciously worked to undermine European ethnic solidarity as part of a group evolutionary strategy of Zionism for me, cosmopolitanism for thee.
Sidestepping that particular debate – in short, I am extremely skeptical, at least insofar as there is any kind of largescale organization behind it – this statement is clearly false as it pertains to the Russian (nonsystemic) opposition.
The real figure is not more than 25% at the very most, and probably more like 15% (perhaps slightly higher amongst prominent liberal journalists, but still nowhere near a majority). A reliable list of the most prominent oppositioners in Russia could be obtained from the answers to a poll asking participants of the December 24th, 2012 Meeting for Fair Elections which of the speakers they trusted most. They are listed below in order of their approval rating amongst the Russian opposition protesters (naturally they are completely unrepresentative of the country at large), together with their Semitic status derived from my observations of Russian politics, my jewdar, and some quick Wikipedia-ing. The “Internet” at large is unreliable; you even find crazy Neo-Nazis claiming that Putin himself is Jewish.
Approval (%) | Jew? | |
Leonid Parfenov | 41 | No |
Alexey Navalny | 36 | No |
Boris Akunin | 35 | ½-Jew |
Yury Shevchuk | 33 | No |
Grigory Yavlinsky | 27 | No |
Vladimir Ryzhkov | 18 | No |
Mikhail Prokhorov | 15 | ¼-Jew |
Evgenia Chirikova | 14 | No |
Alexey Kudrin | 13 | No |
Boris Nemtsov | 13 | ½-Jew |
Gennady Gudkov | 11 | No |
Ilya Yashin | 11 | No |
Sergey Mironov | 8 | No |
Sergey Udaltsov | 8 | No |
Mikhail Kasyanov | 7 | No |
Sergey Mitrokhin | 7 | No |
Ilya Ponomarev | 4 | No |
That’s a total of one and one-quarter Jews out of 16 opposition leaders, or not more than 8%. In fairness, the list leaves out two more very prominent oppositioners, the oligarch-in-exile Mikhail Khodorkovsky and former world chess champion turned street agitator Gary Kasparov, both of them half-Jewish through the father’s line, which would make for two and one-quarter Jews out of 18 opposition leaders. (If you go down that route, then surely Vladimir Milov and some other ethnic Russian oppositioners absent at that particular protest would have to be added too, but I will refrain from doing that just to demonstrate that even under very generous assumptions Jews constitute nowhere near a majority). That would bring the Jewish share of opposition leaders up to 13%. Counting Jews based upon maternal identity yields three Jews: Akunin, Nemtsov, and perhaps Prokhorov, whose maternal grandmother was Jewish. That’s still less than 17%. By far the most prominent Russian oppositionist today, the self-appointed crusader against corruption Alexey Navalny, is not Jewish; he is in fact half-Ukrainian, while Grigory Yavlinsky is fully so. Does this mean Russia’s opposition movement is led by a Jewish-Ukrainian cabal?
Now 15% is still a high number relative to the Jewish population share of less than 1%. But Jewish Exceptionalism of this sort is observed virtually everywhere (including the US, as prolifically documented by writers like Amy Chua and Steve Sailer) and throughout all domains of political, economic, and intellectual life. Bear in mind that in the politically neutral zone that is the Russian economy – neutral in comparison with opposition street politics, at any rate – Jews constitute 21% of Russia’s billionaires. These overrepresentations in economics and opposition politics are all readily explaineble by the relative cognitive preponderance at the far right (har) of the bell curve conferred by virtue of the 110-115 mean Ashkenazi IQ.
Jews who claim that the Russian opposition is led by their coethnics aren’t “letting the mask slip” or anything of that sort, they are merely indulging in some ethnic narcissism–as does anyone who buys into such claims without at least first examining the evidence.
Mr. Karlin!
Unfortunately I could not find your patronymic to address you with appropriate respect,
which respect of your work is sincerely hold by me.
Anyhow, it would be nice to learn your opinion about numerous comments by Anatoly Evgenievich Nesmiyan, a.k.a. blogger El-Murid, http://el-murid.livejournal.com/ .
El-Murid claims that large part of anti-government forces in Russia
works under the influences, if not for money, of Western organizations, e.g. Soros’ fund etc.
But unsupported assertions are so much fun!
Welcome back.
I admit that I’ve always assumed that Yavlinsky is Jewish. His face and surname aren’t incompatible with that, he’s liberal, and I’ve never looked up the details in the Wikipedia. You know a thousand times more about Russian politics than I do, so you’re probably right in saying that he’s not Jewish.
Mr. Karlin,
any opinion about El-Murid blogger’s (a.k.a. A.E. Nesmiyan’s) statements that important part of Russian opposition works for Western interests?
Yavlinsky was born in Lviv but I’m not sure about his ethnicity. He is the son of “carpetbaggers” who came to Lviv from the USSR in 1939. His father was a Soviet officer and his mother a chemist. Mother’s maiden name was Naumov and she was evacuated to Tashkent during the war, suggesting she may have been Jewish. A lot of ethnic Russians left Lviv after the USSR fell apart and I suspect Yavlinsky was one of those, although his brother remains n the city.
Michael Edelstein specifically claims it is the “liberal opposition” that is mostly Jewish. I don’t know much about Russian politics, but you listed Alexey Navalny as the 2nd most popular Russian opposition leader and his Wikipedia articles says he is a nationalist, so I’m not sure he really counts as the “liberal” opposition. The Occidental Observer has previously published articles about the persecution of nationalist opponents of Putin, and surely Kevin MacDonald doesn’t expect to see many Jews represented amongst that sector of anti-Putin activism.
I feel this article is really very muddle-headed. For me, the core conceptual problem that the author has is based on an excessive concentration — well, obsession perhaps — with bloodlines, specifically here the notion that “Jewish power” would have to be based on a bloodline. And this causes him to bark up the wrong tree basically.
So, okay, he looks at a number of prominent Russian opposition figures and sees that very many are not of Jewish descent and then concludes that the people who characterize this “Atlanticist fifth column” as being primarily a Jewish phenomenon have got it wrong. Hmm…
Well, Mr. Karlin, political science is not really primarily about bloodlines. Or, rather, it’s a nuanced issue. Yes, there is a Judaeo-Zionist power configuration in America, for example. Yes, Jewish ethnics play a huge role in that power configuration. Yes, Zionism is primordially a product of Jewish ethnic politics. BUT… you can be a zionist and a creature of that Judaeo-Zionist power configuration without actually being a Jewish ethnic. And conversely, you can be a Jewish ethnic without having anything to do with the aforementioned power configuration.
What makes somebody a creature of that Ziocon block is that their entire career is tied up with that power structure, the Israel lobby, the neocon think tanks, etcetera. Thus, you have prominent non-Jewish neocon Zionists such as McCain or John Bolton who are obviously neocon zionists. And you have prominent anti-Zionists such as Norman Finkelstein or Steve Lendman, who are themselves of Jewish origin.
So if you pointed at Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney and a bunch of others and said that all these people aren’t Jews so therefore the neoconservative movement is not primordially a Jewish intellectual movement, you would reveal — as the author here does reveal, sorry to say — that, at some level, you just don’t get it.
As for the author’s comment that you see high concentrations of Jews in certain fields because of higher mean Jewish IQ, well, this again relates to the author’s obsessions. In fact, a combination of common sense and casual observation tells us a few things. First of all, some common sense: even with a somewhat higher mean Jewish IQ, if Jews are only 1 or 2 percent of the population, there are vastly more highly talented non-Jews than highly talented Jews in absolute numbers. So, when you see that the U.S. commentariat, like almost all the commentators or analysts in the New York Times or Washington Post are Jewish ethnics, this cannot be explained by high mean Jewish IQ. Not exclusively, or primarily, anyway.
BUT… also, casual observation tells us that the prominent Jews one sees in these fields are actually not that intelligent. This is subjective, I know, but would you really say that a prominent Jew like Wolf Blitzer on CNN or Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, are all that intelligent? I watch people like that on the TV or read their columns and these people are not Einsteins. Now, okay, such individuals are sufficiently intelligent to carry out their jobs, but the real reason they are where they are is their ideological reliability from the point of view of a certain power structure. Again, this is not purely a product of their ethnic origin, but their ethnic origin does play a role in the overall equation.
Now, I am less familiar with Russian politics than American politics, I admit. However, my intuitive gut sense of things is that the commentators that say that this Atlanticist fifth column within Russia is very largely a Jewish phenomenon are probably right. In any case, the kind of argument that this article makes, based on my considerations above, would not persuade me otherwise.
Sorry for the excessive length of the above comment. This is a nuanced issue and seems to require some lengthy development, as there are a lot of conceptual traps and pitfalls here.
Mr. Karlin, the original claim wasn’t that the entire Russian opposition is Jewish, but that the entire liberal Russian opposition is Jewish. That is an important difference. As far as I know, there is a kind of an ethnic nationalist, neo-Nazi opposition in Russia, and it does not strike me as particularly surprising to me that Jews wouldn’t be involved in that movement. The main opposition party in Russia is, I think, the Communist Party, and despite the leading role that the Jews played in the Bolshevik revolution, still, it isn’t particularly surprising that Jews wouldn’t be involved in the modern day Russian Communist Party either.
Thank you for this brilliant response to the author. I am certainly an admirer of Mr Karlin’s writings but this particular piece did need answering, and you have done it well.
Listen, you are not counted ‘jewish’ by orthodox law unless it is through your mother. No ‘ifs’, no ‘buts’. I know for everyone else, including liberal jews, any parent is enough, but if you are going to be strict about it and not anyone related in jewish, even a grandparent (the rules relaxed by Israel to aid immigration until fairly recently). So, it is far, far less than 8%, not that anyone who has an axe to grind with (or should that be ‘on’ if you are talking about the Oxinazi Observer) the jews actually gives a shit. What this smacks of is trying to tar Russia with the ‘anti-semitic’ brush that american media has tried to do several times over the proceeding two decades, and so far failed, thank god.
Thanks for popping MacDonald’s bullshit balloon. I don’t mind people who flat out dislike Jews; what really irks me is when it’s masked by unintelligible pseudoscience. “Group selection”… LOL! Not a single reputable evolutionary biologist believes this is even technically feasible.
Time to bring out Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon… Anatoly, are you familar with either these two writers? Atzmon in particular pushes the “cognitive elite” thesis quite hard, he’s practically made the “Ashkenazi cultural elite” the centre of all his political commentary.
15-25 % is still an awful lot considering that only 0.1% of the Russian population is Jewish. This means Jews are overrepresented in the Russian opposition by a factor of 150-250!
Who’s fault is it that Jews have ability, while most Russians are ineffectual peasants? Jews are overrepresented in meaningful positions on the other side as well.
Keep in mind that the Ashkenazi IQ bonus is to a subset of intellectual skills. IIRC their ‘verbal IQ’ average is in the 130s, well into the gifted range.
“Listen, you are not counted ‘jewish’ by orthodox law unless it is through your mother.”
In terms of a political analysis, i.e. analyzing a political power configuration, the above is more or less irrelevant. Certainly, from a religious point of view, somebody who does not believe in God or the Torah is not a Jew, so somebody like George Soros, who is openly atheist, is not a Jew. But, in terms of this kind of conversation, that is obviously nonsense.
And the fact remains that there are prominent non-Jews, whose careers are very bound up in what is basically a Judaeo-Zionist power structure. Somebody like John Bolton, say, if the Republicans are out of power, he likely has some stint at some neocon think tank. Yes, a “think” tank. They pay John Bolton to sit around there and think! Wow, what a concept! Pay Bolton to sit around and think! Who would do that? Why?
Okay, so John Bolton gets paid to sit there and think and he thinks and he thinks and the result of all that thinking he was paid to do is that he thinks that it would be a good idea to bomb Iran. Or to give some even more advanced weapons to Israel…
Or take Tony Blair. The principal fundraiser for this guy was a British Zionist Jew, Lord Levy, a major eminence grise of British politics. Then, after Tony Blair leaves office, he becomes very rich very fast. For example, he serves on the board of a Wall Street investment bank, J.P. Morgan, if memory serves. Now, what exactly does Tony Blair know about investment banking?
Exactly…
In the above-mentioned cases (and we could go through far more) neither of the two men has, as far as I know, any claim to Jewish ancestry, matrilineal or not, and neither of them professes any belief in the Jewish religion. Ergo, anybody who talks about Jewish power, or a Judaeo-Zionist power configuration in these cases must be talking nonsense, right?
Uhh, no, wrong. Very wrong….
One thing a lot of people miss is that there are two groups of Jews, neither of whom is going to be particularly good friends of the Unz crowd.
You have liberal Jews, like Noam Chomsky and, to a lesser extent, most of these guys. They’re lukewarm on Israel in many cases. Some are even involved in the BDS movement.
Then you have the hardcore Zionists, like Sheldon Adelson and the guys who give AIPAC all its money.
So the people trying to get the US into dumb wars on behalf of Israel are often not the same people trying to, say, push for gay rights in Russia or whatever.
My opinion is that there’s a power elite, and Jews are a big part of it, which is why Israel gets so much money and influence. But it’s not so much a Jewish conspiracy as the oldest story in the world: the rich and the powerful getting their way. There are a lot of Jewish rich and powerful, due to both network effects (ethnic nepotism) and the IQ stuff Karlin mentions (plenty of other groups are clannish, more so even–Jewish intermarriage is 50%!– but they don’t have 115 mean IQs) which is why you see what you see.
And no, I don’t think it’s OK, we should be holding their feet to the fire. There will always be rich and powerful: it is the way society works. But we still have enough freedom to fight them.
The most important thing for white gentiles complaining about Jewish power is that non-Jewish whites are not ethnocentric, and to a large extent that’s because culture has been disproportionately influenced by Jews and so we arrived at this absurd world where it’s OK for Jews to be ethnocentric, but not OK for gentile whites.
Another thing to note is that many in your first crowd (the liberal Jews) are fiercely pro-Israel, like Chuck Schumer, or for example in my native Hungary Mátyás Eörsi. But it’s true that some people among liberal Jews are lukewarm about Israel and occasionally are outright anti-Israel, too.
To be honest, I wouldn’t care so much for the wars for Israel if they weren’t on top of many other things that are also pushed by Jews. I don’t think I’d worry about Jewish influence if all they did was pushing for wars on behalf of Israel. Not that these wars aren’t highly destructive and largely pointless (at least for white gentiles, but possibly also for Israel), but in themselves they would be balanced out by Jewish cultural, scientific etc. achievement.
“Exceptionalism.” They’re not pursuing ethnic goals. They’re not practicing hypocrisy. They’re not adhering to and enforcing double standards. It’s just common garden exceptionalism. Right. Well, I guess you did say you were sidestepping the debate. Still, you could perhaps spare an occasional thought for some of the unfortunates on the receiving end of all that exceptionalism.
One of MacDonald’s correspondents pointed out that the Putin clique also contains a number of Jews. Russia is no different than the USA in this regard, with Jews working both sides of the street (e,g. the notorious Neocons in the GOP).
even with a somewhat higher mean Jewish IQ, if Jews are only 1 or 2 percent of the population, there are vastly more highly talented non-Jews than highly talented Jews in absolute numbers. So, when you see that the U.S. commentariat, like almost all the commentators or analysts in the New York Times or Washington Post are Jewish ethnics, this cannot be explained by high mean Jewish IQ. Not exclusively, or primarily, anyway.
It follows from the properties of the normal distribution that at very, very high IQ levels, it’s possible for the the number of (ashkenazi) jews and the number of non-jews performing at that level to be pretty close. Using usa whites and usa jews, a rough (very rough) calc in R shows that at the IQ160 level, you get (white/jew) = 2.5 approximately. At those stratospheric levels of IQ we’d expect to see 1/3rd jews more or less on merit.
By the same properties of the normal distribution, if we’re talking about an IQ range of, say, (110 to 125), pure intellectual ability predicts a (white/jew) = 20 approximately. In the media field, the jews are punching way above their intellectual weigh, assuming that the IQs of jewish media people are distributed the same way as the IQs of non-jewish media white people.
“It follows from the properties of the normal distribution that at very, very high IQ levels…”(blah blah…)
I’m pretty sure that all of this analysis mostly amounts to barking up the wrong tree. The prominent Jews you have in the U.S. commentariat are not there as a result of some kind of IQ meritocracy. Watch ten or twenty minutes of Wolf Blitzer on CNN and tell me with a straight face that this guy is some kind of genius. Read some NYT opinion columns by the likes of Tom Friedman. There is a hilarious Matt Taibbi takedown where he lampoons just how poor Tom Friedman’s writing is. A risible, mediocre hack…
Now, the whole issue of getting into some mythology about how magically clever the clever Jews are. Well…. this, like other ethnic stereotypes, has some truth to it, but you can also go overboard on it. But look, consider somebody like Norman Finkelstein. The guy could be a poster child for high Ashkenazi Jewish IQ. Particularly verbal IQ. Like, watch any of the segments on youtube where he gets the chance to debate these zionist muppets. (You can almost feel sorry for the zionists. Well, almost… :-)) So does Norman have a column in the New York Times? No. Of course not. It is Jewish ethnics who are comparative dullards like Tom Friedman or Roger Cohen who have columns in the New York Times. Why? (See, now you’re really thinking….:-))
See, guys, this is a power structure. The prominent people in the power structure are clever enough, but far more important is their ideological reliability. In fact, it’s just as well to have a mediocrity like Tom Friedman or Wolf Blitzer because surely they know, at some level, that without that power structure they are nothing. But, yes, the ethnic origin of such people is a factor in all of this. I would suppose that, in the Mafia, if you’re an Italian ethnic, particularly one from certain founding Sicilian families, this plays a role, but it’s not absolute either.
Also, the power structure in question will use dirty tricks to “destroy their own”. Look what happened to Eliot Spitzer, for example. Spitzer, another Ashkenazi Jewish cognitive elite guy, was governor of NY and they destroyed him with a sex scandal and replaced him ultimately with a non-Jew, Cuomo. So the non-Jew can be more ideologically reliable from their point of view than the Jew.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn…. similar story. Elite French Jew, at the time the likely next president of France…. very similar setup in a New York hotel.
This is not primarily a bloodline at this point. It is a power structure. Moreover, all those congress critters and so forth understand this. That’s why they fall over themselves giving standing ovations to Netanyahu and making sure to show up at AIPAC and say how much they love Israel. They must express their fealty to that power structure. In fact, the non-Jews probably have to do so all the more because, other things equal, yes, the people who belong to the bloodline are considered more ideologically reliable by default. But, if not, they can get the Eliot Spitzer treatment or the DSK treatment or some other treatment…
When comparing media representation, you’re drawing from a pool mainly in NYC and Washington, where the percentage of Jews living is an order of magnitude higher. Adjust your calculations and see what happens.
Also, “media skill” is a subset of “IQ” or “G” or whatever; subsets of intelligence will also vary by population and I suspect Jews would score astronomically in this measure.
Uh, just offhand, I think there’s a fallacy in your argument. You are ignoring the problem that in NYC and DC, the non-Jews living there are also more verbal, higher IQ types than the U.S. population as a whole.
At the risk if sounding like a ‘crazy Neo Nazi’ can I suggest you publish a similar table showing the principal funders if these freedom-fighting opposition figures?
re:
I’m too dumb & lazy to look for it, but a few days ago someone responded to my declamation of Italian superiority with the claim that “DNA shows that Ashkenazi Jews are 50% Roman.” or something like that — once again, we Italians are a lazy lot (when we’re not creating financial systems, establishing universities, developing the political science that US founders used as models, designing fabulous clothes and art, and flipping pizza)) so I may have the wording a bit off kilter.
The point is — Ashkenazi Jews learned banking from Florentines — the Medici, to be specific. That is, they learned how to become “rich” from Italians. “The IQ stuff” is, by the assertion of at least one Jewish person, at least 50% is Roman (which makes sense since most Jews were in either the Persian/Parthian or Roman empire as it prevailed for over 800 years, and when their rebellion was crushed in 70 AD, many Jerusalemite Jews fled to southern Italy, where it is reasonable to expect that they intermarried. Of course, Southern Italians have heavy Greek & Turkish influences ….).
It’s also worth noting that the commenter who claimed “50% Roman DNA” ascribed that characteristic to Ashkenazi Jews, not all Jews. Mizrahi Jews, for example, do not demonstrate the same “high IQ.” It’s reasonable to speculate that Mizrahi Jews did not have the same access to European (French, Italian, German, Russian) universities.
As well, and extremely importantly, simply note the intense emphasis on Jewish bloodlines & DNA. Sounds a lot like the racism that NSDAP was accused of, don’t it?
Arthur Ruppin, who produced zionist Hebrew culture in Palestine, was an award-winning eugenicist. He applied eugenic theory to the selection of the “appropriate human material” for the creation of “the new Jew” who was to populate the sociopathic zionist squatter entity. Ruppin was born and educated in Germany; his preference was for German Jews; he — as well as Vladimir Jaobtinsky– was dismayed by the “unhygienic” nature of Eastern European Jews; one group of such E. European Jews that made aliyeh was sent back home because they were unsuitable to Ruppin’s plans for “the new Jew.”
Louis Brandeis, an ardent zionist, decreed ~Feb. 14, 1933 that “all Jews must leave Germany. . . . I urge that no Jew remain in Germany.” That decree was pretty much carried out: relatively few German Jews lost their lives in WWII; the great majority of Jewish lives counted as lost were East European — the least favorite of the “sociopathic zionist squatter entity.” Quite a coincidence.
It’s also intriguing that Jews, who boast of having been around for 6000 years +- (the rest of us have ancestry going back only a few years –I for one have no parents or grandparents; I sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus er something) and yet their population is so small. The German people were decimated in WWII and are experiencing the demographic threat that is to be expected of such a calamity, but even they have surpassed the Jewish people in reproduction. One would have expected the Jewish people to number about 40 million by now, but they don’t. One only speculates that a great deal of selection goes on in which Jewish fetus develops to birth.
Russia is not obeying orders over Iran, which Israel has marked for destruction. So Russia gets the treatment that everyone fears. And they are right to fear it.
Putin put a stop to their holy looting as well.
In their fevered brains, he’s Haman, and the goyim must destroy him.
Jews have been lending money and banking for a lot longer than 500 years. There were bankers in Babylon with Jewish names, and ancient Roman complaints exist about being dangerously indebted to Jews.
They lie about their numbers; they are hyperbolic with Jewish body counts while they underreport their actual population to fly more easily beneath the radar and to help out the myth of being an exceptional superminority.
That they are always on the verge of dwindling into nothing or being pogrommed to extinction is another of their brainsick ethnofetishes that they’ve indulged in since forever.
When you get right down to it, practically none of the folks in the US claiming to be “Jews” are really Jewish either. And exactly zero percent of those can prove doodly squat about being an heir of Abraham.
But does that stop any of them? You tell me.
Their money still talks, and practically the entire Congress of the US listens.
Say, how many Chiefs does it take to run a tribe?
The author here speaks as though it is certain that unless a particular faction maintains a numerical majority, that there’s no way that they can call the shots.
That’s funny. It wasn’t quite the situation that existed between the Sunni minority and the Shiite majority in Iraq before US meddling at the behest of Israeli occupied Capital Hill.
So, Hitler was a single man. Yet certain people maintain to this day that he was evil incarnate and responsible for 9/10ths of what’s wrong with the earth today. The same argument might be applied to a Trotsky or a Marx.
But who’s counting?
Oh no, they are leading with their strength, for saying someone’s main opponents are Jews is tantamount to an allegation of anti Semitism. It’s thinly veiled. Israel and its lobby are going to shatter Iran into bits (like Iraq). Israel wants all Arabs to be fighting one another like in Iraq, and Syria. Putin did Israel a favour by stymying the US airstrikes on Assad, thereby keeping the Syrian civil war going, but Putin is not going along with an attack on Iran, so he is getting the treatment. It will wear him down slowly but surely.
Anatoly Karlin is simply lying and hiding many names of prominent Jews who actively oppose and work against Russian interests and here is the proof:
http://tchaykovsky.ru/blog_a/pyataya.htm
Yavlinsky is a Jew. Check his wikipedia, his nationality is listed as Russian Jew, although he is officially Orthodox by religion.
My understanding is that a large percentage of Russians with Jewish heritage are quiet about their ancestry to the point of being crypto-Jews. There is still a significant anti-semitic strain among ethnic Russians and many of the Turkic minorities.
I meant to link to @Glossy with my above comment.
“…one and one-quarter Jews out of 16…”
A deeper analysis of one hundred Russian opposition leaders, counting the quarter Jews, and octave Jews, 1/16th and 1/32nd Jews, may have added up to 8 full Jews. Although 8 Jews dont even make a minyan (the minimum quorum for Jewish prayer), their conspiratorial potential is phantastic.
I mean a phantasy.
Really interesting, apparently here there is other Leonid Parfenov…. and this one is a Jew!!! … Parfenov is a Jewish last name in Russia, according to this website.
http://www.jewage.org/wiki/en/Profile:P0791117225