"We mustn't let the lure of trade blind us to Russia's failings"

During the cold war, Russian dissidents tended to be intellectuals: poets, artists, scientists. Mikhail Khodorkovsky does not fit that pattern. He is one of a post-Soviet generation of businessmen who acquired lucrative shareholdings in state enterprises in exchange for supporting the former president, Boris Yeltsin. Most Russians consider that deal a colossal theft of public assets. The beneficiaries became known as the oligarchs.

Now Mr Khodorkovsky is in jail, convicted of fraud in 2005 and facing new charges that would see him imprisoned for another 20 years. His fate reveals a lot about the direction Russia has taken in the decade since Vladimir Putin took power.

Mr Putin offered the country's media and energy barons a deal. They could keep some of their wealth if they renounced any ambitions to meddle in politics. Most acquiesced; Mr Khodorkovsky did not, seeking to fund liberal trends in an increasingly authoritarian, nationalist climate. That is why he lost his freedom.

Opines The Observer from London today in an absurd and craven editorial ( We mustn't let the lure of trade blind us to Russia's failings September 19 2010 ).

Khodorkovsky lost his freedom because he was a crook and because Putin decided to make an example of him. If The Observer was to be logical, it would demand that more oligarchs should be in prison and not only Khodorhovsky. Misha Glenny in McMafia:Seriously Organised Crime has zero sympathy for one of the worst robber barons,

"Under Putin, the Kremlin has clipped the wings of several of the most powerful oligarchs. From exile in the West or from inside prison, oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky warn that the new President is the reincarnation of Stalin. But he isn't.

He has fashioned a novel system that brings together aspects of capitalism and Soviet socialism-market authoritarianism. The oligarchs desperate attempts to portray Putin as a new Stalin seek to conceal the primary responsibility they bear for the mess in which they and Russia find themselves"

Glenny ( page 83 )

The reaction in Britain to Khodorkovsky's imprisonment reeks of sententious and pious moralising in due proportion to an unwillingness to admit that the reason it supports the former Yukos oil boss and to oppose Putin lies in it being displeased at having its geopolitical interests curtailed.

Even on its own supposedly moral grounds, the standard line from London's media and finance elites hardly holds up. Few hold up China, with the largest numbers of executions per year in the world and the death penalty for corruption, to the opprobrium Putin is for jailing Khodorkovsky, despite the fact that he was guilty of great crimes,

As Business News Europe reported on September 6th, 2010:

The trouble with this whole story is that even if the forces of law unfairly picked on Khodorkovsky, he is "guilty as charged" says Peter Clateman, a lawyer for Renaissance Capital in Moscow who has been following the case closely. To be fair most observers have criticised the first trial, but no one pretends that Khodorkovsky’s trial had much to do with the letter of the law or was about “guilt” or “innocence.”

All the oligarchs were blatantly stealing everything they could in those days, so the issue isn't whether the law was use to lock up Khodorkovsky and expropriate his company, it's why all the other oligarchs weren't arrested and locked up too.

Khodorkovsky may be a victim, or better to say loser, of the political showdown with the Kremlin, but he is also certainly not the martyr the international press and leader writers in most of the international press make him out to be. Indeed, he started his corporate life as the very worst corporate governance abuser, which in Russia circa the mid-1990s is saying a lot.

But since then, Khodorkovsky has been careful to manufacture an image by spending millions of dollars on the best law firms, lobbyists and PR that money can buy – with so much success that no one remembers the "old Khodorkovsky" when he had a moustache, wore shabby suits and big black, TV-frame glasses and would dilute your stake to zip the moment you invested into one of his companies. "

The propaganda power and legal team Khodorkovsky has been able to assemble to insinuate that he is some kind of "dissident" or political prisoner-without actually using such a word-ignores the fact that he was a corrupt oligarch who deserves to be in prison. The "political prisoner" tag is applied because other oligarchs were not charged.

Edward Lucas has been critical of those who maintain that anti-Putin propagandists as himself are portraying Khodorkovsky as a dissident. Even if the word is not used, the image is with the fallen oligarch now meant to elicit sympathy through pictures of him sitting in bare cells with a simple wooden table and a packet of L & M cigarettes on the table.

But Khodorkovsky was one of the largest robber barons and the defence coming from those like Edward Lucas and from his lawyer Robert Amsterdam, as well as uncritical and simplistic "liberal interventionists", and has ample access to the Western media as it wishes to give this crook a platform because he benefitted Western business and banking interests.

The prating about the "rule of law" now from Khodorkovsky ihnores the extent to which he was never even a businessman. As Aris put it,

Oligarchs are not businessmen, they are opportunists. They got so rich so fast because they saw – only a few months before everyone else – how the collapse of the Soviet Union could be turned to their advantage as long as they acted quickly and ruthlessly.

According to bne sources, the actual idea for the makeover was not Khodorkovsky's; a group of bankers from Brunswick (which later sold out to UBS in 1997) went to see Khodorkovsky and explained that the most he could ever get out of Yukos was the $2bn annual revenue. But if he could turn his image round, then he could make far more from the share appreciation; at the start of 1999, Yukos' shares were trading at a price/earnings multiple of 1.3x, way below its Russian peers that were trading at multiples of 6.8x.

Khodorkovsky seized on the idea and threw himself into the task of cleaning out his own Aegean stable. It is a testament to the shortness of investors' memories that he was so spectacularly successful. Within three years, Yukos was the doyen of good corporate governance in Russia and Khodorkovsky was the 16th richest man in the world. Harvard Business School wrote a paper on the "Khodokovsky effect," which saw this good corporate governance spread to other Russian companies as the country's oligarchs looked on amazed.

The reason is that Putin basically did choose to make an example of Khodorkhovsky for his fraud and tax evasion was for the reason that he could-Khodorkovsky is not a man who really believes in "fair practice" and his Yukos business used contract killings to advance its interests-is part of gaining state control over Russian resources.

Naturally, Britain opposes that as its oil interests have been adversely affected in places like Sakhalin Island where previous contracts with BP have not been honoured. Though that could be portrayed as not "fair play", Putin's state has the opinion that it has the right to control resources for the national interest.

For those railing against such nationalism as a primitive remnant of the past in Europe, it worth remembering that Scottish nationalists have fumed consistently about how Scottish Noth Sea Oil was spirited away by mostly English interests and that had Scotland been independent in the 1970s, it would now be as rich as Norway or Switzerland.

Putin's sovereign democracy has it that Russia's resources should be used for the Russian national interest and so, following the looting of the Russian economy during the Yeltsin years by the oligarchs and Western business interests, the "dictatorship of law" should be applied. A strong state would be the precondition for the evolution of civil society in Russia.

Hence continual prating from the West on the Khodorkovsky case has only bolstered Putin's credentials as he can point to the external threat from those who really would like to see a return to a Russia where the preferred oligarchs can be esconced in power once more. Not only is Western support for Khodorkovsky unethical it is also deeply stupid and unrealistic.

Hypocritical editorials from The Observer only go further to confirm that "liberal interventionism" and the anti-Russian diatribes of Edward Lucas and those like David Miliband are an ideological rationalisation of British interests at the expense of Russian power and security.

However repressive Putin's regime in Moscow appears, it is important to realise that by historical standards it is a vast improvement and living standards have risen compared to what they like during the 1990s when few in the West piped up about Yeltsin's brutal coup d'etat of 1993.

Even under the Tsars in the Patriotic War against Napoleon in 1812 or the Great Patriotic War on 1941-45, Russian people rallied to defend a repressive regime instead of anything imposed on them from abroad. With a regime that is not repressive by historical standards, most Russians will not be lectured to by those supporting Khodorkovsky.

That does not mean that the abuses and undoubted corruption should be ignored. But that realistically, those who maintain hypocritical double standards about Russia have any moral high ground upon which to lecture it and, moreover, that as part of British diplomacy it is utterly counter productive.

Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR: The Concept of "Moral Equivalence".

It is often believed that you can draw a strong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin and assert that there was a double genocide perpetuated by both Hitler and Stalin. Even if their ideology was different there is it is believed a clear moral equivalence in the fact both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR.

Yet the term "moral equivalence" has its problems when applied to claiming that the Communist and Fascist and Nazi totalitarian regimes were essentially the same or equivalent in murdering people on such a colossal scale.

However, it is better to see the twin totalitarianisms as morally comparable in many aspects of their functioning but very different when it came to the scale and ambitions of their mutually antagonistic ideologies.

Soviet Communism was democidal and not genocidal as was the Nazi regime which aimed to exterminate Jews in their entirety. Both regimes aimed to remove any potential check on their power and treated "enemies of the people" in similar ways.

Yet the Nazi regime was intentionally genocidal in a way that Stalin's USSR was not, as the USSR did not aim intentionally to extermine entire races simply because of their race, though Stalin did in effect transport hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Poles and Tatars to their deaths.

Morally the scale of the killing is comparable but not "equivalent" in the sense of being "roughly the same" since it is impossible to equate the number of deaths meted out by both regimes according to some moral criteria. This is the key problem with the notion of "moral equivalence".

The numbers killed were not equivalent as Stalin killed more people of all races than Hitler: he was non-discriminatory in that sense. Both regimes intended to murder as many people as it was thought to gain an empire but the Nazi extermination of the Jews went beyond what was merely "necessary".

Stalin had a certain paranoid logic for wanting to crush centres of nationalist opposition to the Red Empire whereas Hitler was always alert to exploiting that in his Drang Nach Osten, as he did in Ukraine and the Baltics when some nationalist colluded in the killing of Jews without direct supervision.

The techniques of both totalitarian regimes: nihilism, mass concentration camp systems etc were morally comparable. The danger of "moral equivalence" is that it can easily slide by default into the idea that supporting the Waffen SS and German war effort, as in Lithuania, was a "lesser evil".

Moreover, as malign as Soviet totalitarianism was even in the 1980s it is propaganda to assert that they were "equivalent" to the Nazi regime which lasted all of twelve years. It means that those asserting anti-Russian nationalism are not judged by the same criteria as Putin is in Russia.

Most empires have as their rationale the control of scarce and strategic raw materials. Killing or consenting to kill people who get in the way or control those resources for purposes of pure greed is a normal feature of human life. Ideologies are there to rationalise these rapacious impulses.

On a small scale, Lithuanians were happy to collude in murdering their Jewish neighbours if they could rationalise it according to the Jewish Bolshevik threat and thus ease their poverty at once by grabbing a flat or clothes they would have otherwise had to work for for many years.

The same trend occurred in Poland in World War Two, as documented in Jan T Gross' Neighbours, about the massacre of Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne in 1941, and Fear, which deals with anti-semitism not only during the war but also even after Auschwitz.

Thecollective dis-ease even in 2010 at the knowledge that previous generations did this and that the installation of Soviet Republics did nothing to diminish the coveting of Jewish assets is one reason why this double genocide myth is there to cosset people from the truth.

There is nothing unusual in this. Israel has encouraged similar rapaciousness in Palestinian lands by referral to some "existential threat" and justified it with narratives of victimhood.

Coveting land and assets is normal behaviour and entirely human, though still repellent. Humans are just like this when they believe greed can be rationalised in a way that soothes the claims of the conscience because of the threat "they" pose to "us".

One reason liberal humanists such as Havel have refused to take on the double genocide myth is most likely because of a residual ethnocentric distaste for Russia, resentment that such "barbarians" control resources more civilised Central Europeans have a human right to.

That is, notto be held captive by Russian control of pipelines and bullied as Georgia was in 2008, a claim made by Western politicians and worthies just three years after the same people such as Havel supported the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 to grab its oil.

When liberals claim the Soviet Union was "morally equivalent" to Nazi Germany, they wish to portray Stalin's dictatorship as a Greater Russian phenomenon mingled with the nihilism of Communist ideology and not that it was an universalist Enlightenment project .

The barbarism of Stalin was created by Lenin's nihilistic revolution after 1917 and contempt for legal norms but it was in accordance with many aspects of the European Enlightenment and a distinct break with Old Russia in positing wholesale extermination as a necessary part of Progress.

A number of objections are usually made when criticising the double genocide concept,

Objection 1

..whilst far right nationalists do use the concept
of a moral equivalency between Hitler and Stalin as a tool for minimising the pure evil of Hitler and the Holocaust, many others have no such agenda. Nor have
we been misled. Some of us simply see the two as being roughly equivalent in evil and horror.

Objection 2

Morality is as much about effects as it is about intention. I doubt that those people dying in gulags in Siberia were thinking, "Well I'm going to die here, but at least it's not down to my ethnicity". People are people are people.

What people experienced in the Gulag is comparable to that of being in a Nazi concentration camp.

But that still does not mean they were equivalent, not least if a person was a Jew in Sobibor or Maidenek which where explicitly extermination camps on the frontline as the Wehrmacht advanced into Soviet territory quickly followed by Einsatzgruppen.

Ironically, it was precisely Auschwitz, the site set up as the totemic symbol of the Nazi concentration camp, that was not in fact purely an extermination centre but also a work camp for "politicals" and Poles, though it was often effectively a death camp too, just as were the Gulags.

True, at the time, it must be remembered, inmates were unlikely to have been thinking of whether life in a Nazi camp or Gulag was worse or better, though they must have thought what it was they had done that was wrong in many, if not most, cases.

Quite simply they had little or no knowledge to make the comparison.

The point, however, is this: the notion of "moral equivalence" is difficult to apply to death on such a scale if effects are mentioned and unrelated to intentions. For if this was the case, then British Imperialism can be seen as "morally equivalent" to Hitler's Third Reich or Stalin's Empire

It is, in my opinion, simply better to state that the USSR in its Stalinist period and Nazism were morally comparable in many aspects of their functioning but not "equivalent". The "equivalence" charge does make it possible by default not design to argue as far right Lithuanians do.

For if a small nation as Lithuania is faced with an "either-or" choice, then it can be argued that collaboration with the Waffen SS was a "lesser evil" as both Nazism and the Soviet Union were morally equivalent but, from a Lithuanian perspective, the Soviet Union more of a threat to "them".

Paradoxically, the charge of "moral equivalence" can be used to argue that if one just has to choose one side, it is natural to choose the one that was less of a threat in circumstances where survival overrode any normal moral considerations.

Yet, in fact, Stalin did not slate the entire Lithuanian nation to extermination as Hitler had the Jews. So by siding with the Nazis, Lithuanian nationalists made a choice that the Nazis were 'less immoral' than the Stalinists.

Willing collaboration with nationalist groups who killed Jews was not necessitated. It was still a choice.

The evidence is that in conditions where civilisation has broken down, some members of subject peoples as the Lithuanians were under the Nazis occupation after 1941 can often behave with equal evil and brutality as the occupiers.

To claim Lithuanians were thus subjected to genocide can be used to obfuscate the role of Lithuanians in the Holocaust.

Objection 3.

So in your eyes, the idea of a double-genocide is out-and-out "myth" ... because it was in fact Nazi genocide, and Baltic "democide".

Well isn't that distinction rather technical. And again you seem to be saying that killing thousands of people because of a devotion to a nationalistic or racial ideology (genocide) could never be compared to killing a 'possibly' similar number of people through political decision-making by a different creed.

It is clear that genocide and democide are comparable in actual effect but not "equivalent" as Lithuanians were not slated for wholesale extermination as the Jews across all of Eastern Europe were and thus the word "genocide" is thus wrong for obvious terminological reasons which can thus be interpreted by some to make emotive appeals.

Put simply, a genocide of Lithuanians would have meant that all Lithuanians were destined to be eradicated by Stalin. This was not so. The national "bourgeois" elite was removed and deported along with thousands of others who had committed no crime other than to get in the way of Stalin's annexation.

Those Lithuanians who died in the Gulag or in the torture chambers of the NKVD were killed by a totalitarian regime prepared to eliminate any person of any race who opposed Soviet i.e Stalin's power and so it best for that reason termed democide.

This is why it is not "equivalent", though the effects were just as horrendous in many cases where Jews died no less than those placed in Gulags, though those in Stalin's camps did have some hope that they would eventually survive whilst all Jews by being Jews were going to be exterminated as a matter of policy.

By terming Stalin's action democide and not genocide the victimhood narrative whereby the crimes of Lithuanian far right nationalist collaborators with the Nazis are rationalised can be avoided and confronted.

That can be done without drawing attention away from the enormity of the crimes committed by Stalin's USSR.

"Double Genocide" and Lithuania

It is often thought that the history of the Second World War and of the twin horrors of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism has never really been laid to rest in Eastern Europe where the legacy of that experience can still resurface to cause controversy even in 2010.

With regards Lithuania, Jonathan Freedland has written in The Guardian, on the absence of any significant memorials in Kaunas to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust that it has much to do with the myth of the "double genocide" perpetuated by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes equally.

.....there are no special road signs directing visitors to make the short drive to the Ninth Fort, the place where the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators dug deep, vast pits – into which they shot almost 10,000 Jews, including 4,273 children, on a single day in October 1941, the so-called Great Action.

....the Ninth Fort includes not only a massive, Soviet-era socialist-realist memorial to the dead buried in those pits, but a newer exhibition hall, covering the oppression of the Soviet years.

.......I cannot go along with the "double genocide", especially not now that I've seen how it plays out in practice rather than in theory. For one thing, the equation of Nazi and communist crimes rarely entails an honest account of the former. The plaque at the Ninth Fort, for instance, identifies the killers only as "Nazis and their assistants".

It does not spell out that those assistants were Lithuanian volunteers, enthusiastically murdering their fellow Lithuanians. In my travels, visiting a whole clutch of sites, I did not encounter one that gave a direct, explicit account of this bald, harsh truth: that Lithuania's Jews were victims of one of the highest killing rates in Nazi Europe, more than 90%, chiefly because the local population smoothed the Germans' path. Indeed, they began killing Jews on June 22 1941, before Hitler's men had even arrived.

All of that is true. In Kaunas, the German soldiers did not need to do anything other than watch the locals beating Jews to death in the streets. As Niall Ferguson put it in The War of the World, "Between half and two thirds of the Jews were killed not by Germans but by other Lithuanians".

The reason for this was the myth of Judeo-Communism, something present in Lithuania before the Soviet invasion of 1940 following the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 between Stalin and Hitler which had partitioned Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres, but given greater impetus after it was occupied.

Above-Lithuanian Jews in Kaunas being put to work in 1941

That Sovietisation was brutal and inhuman was obvious enough as Lithuania's national leaders and numerous civilians were sent off to the Gulag. Yet the conflation of Jewishness with Communism was something the Nazis were able to exploit to get nationalistic Lithuanians to kill off Jews for them when they invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

The "double genocide" version of Baltic history depicted in the Museum of Genocide Victims, off Vilnius's central Gedimino Boulevard is an update of the myth of equivalence between Nazism and Communism when the two are not "morally equivalent" but merely comparable in the scale of the suffering and killing.

The danger of "equivalence" has been that it used to let off those who fought in Waffen SS units against Stalin as being thereby of a lesser evil and forced to do so by circumstances and so not as fundamentally evil in intensity and duration as the Communist experiment as far as most Lithuanians are concerned.

The destruction of Lithuanian Jewry is portrayed as something wholly separate from what befell the rest of the nation. Freedland points out,

If you wish to remember Lithuania's 200,000 slain Jews, you have to wander far from the main drag, up a side street, to the tiny Green House – which is anyway closed for renovation and whose director, under pressure from state officials, is fighting for her job.

It's the same story with a 2008 change in the law that, in the name of equivalence, banned not just Nazi symbols but Soviet ones too. As if that were not bad enough – banning a veteran of the anti-Hitler resistance from parading his medals – in May, a Lithuanian court held that the swastika was not a Nazi symbol after all, but part of "Baltic culture" and therefore could be displayed in public.

Naturally, as Freedland points out what this fails to emphasise is that Lithuanian Jews were Lithuanian citizens and not a nation within another nation and nor did many even act as though they were anything other. The problem was that Jews were disproportionately represented in the professions and were the most successful capitalists.

As Micheal Burleigh points out in The Third Reich A New History, it was, in fact, the very capitalist success of Jews that had marked them out in 1940 as a target for the Soviet regime's policy of expropriation,

"The Soviet occupation of Lithuania in June 1940 affected Jews disproportionately, while paradoxically intensifying the feeling among Lithuanian nationalists that Jews were uniquely responsible for it.Jews owned 57% of plant and 83% of businesses nationalised by the Soviet socialists".

Moreover, the continued failure to stress the shared suffering of Lithuanian Jew and Gentile alike under the Soviet occupation of 1940 exactly 70 years later in 2010 is striking considering the fact that 12,000 of the total of 60,000 Lithuanians deported East to the Gulag were Jewish and 15.2 % of all of them were actually members of the Lithuanian Communist Party.

That the Lithuanian double genocide model has not been challenged by most politicians in the West is through the desire to exploit nationalistic sentiments of those like Saakashvili in Georgia if it ties in with the geopolitical aims of expanding the US sphere on influence eastwards.

Matt Seaton comments,

The pernicious nonsense of the 'double genocide' thesis is far from merely a Lithuanian problem. Its founding document is the 2008 Prague Declaration includes, to their shame, such luminaries of the Velvet Revolution as Vaclav Havel and Jan Urban.

For those who lived and suffered under Stalinist dictatorship, a certain loss of perspective is forgivable; but these former dissidents are making themselves the 'useful idiots' of contemporary Baltic, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Polish and Czech ultranationalists – whose political forebears were as resolutely antisemitic as they were anti-Bolshevik.

The 'double genocide' thesis also entirely glosses over the fact that the Nazi project in the east was both to exterminate the Jewish population and ethnically cleanse the Slavs too: Lebensraum for the Volksdeutsche and all that.

Stalin used famine in the Ukraine as a political tool; and the elimination of the kulaks was an ideologically-motivated genocide. With cynical and criminal deliberation, both cost many millions of lives. But neither can or should be equated to the horrifying ambition of the Third Reich's racial purity project in the east.

The problem with Matt Seaton's view is that he still uses the word "genocide" for Stalin's class war against the richer peasants. It effectively killed millions but was a democidal policy. Genocide means the intention to remove and destroy a particular race. Stalin wanted to kill people of all races to advance Soviet power and centralisation.

Also the 2008 Prague Declaration that Seaton mentions can only be understood in this context of current geopolitical concerns. Yet the hypocritical reference to the double genocide myth only being something beholden to far right nationalists is itself a myth: liberal interventionists, of which there are many writing for the Guardian, accept it when expedient.

In reality there was no "double genocide". There was a democide on the part of the Soviet Union under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin between 1917 and 1953 under which the Lithuanians suffered as much as other national groups caught between Hitler's Germany and the "Red Empire".

As Mark Almond has writtten,

Stalin’s regime was undoubtedly cruel, but compared with the complete deportations of the Crimean Tatars or Chechens for instance, the scale of deportation in the Baltic States was surprisingly modest. It cannot be compared to the pretty near complete extermination of local Jews by the Nazis. Yet the myth of a “deported nation” still is widely peddled in the West. In fact, Stalin found many willing collaborators in the Baltic States and local Balts held high office throughout the period of Soviet occupation.

The far right nationalist myth is a use of history for political propaganda and to advance hatred and fear of Putin's "neo-Stalinist" Russia in order to promote an anti-Russian alliance of states, NATO and complete fealty to US policies, including the neoliberal policies that created so much poverty.

When faced with a downturn in living standards and the cost of spending money on NATO accession, politicians like President Valdas Adamkus before 2003, the last leader in Europe to have fought in World War Two on the German side, had to use nationalism as a divertion from "real" issues.

The double genocide myth thus offers a rationalisation for suffering, that all the privations Lithuanians have suffered since independence in 1991 is the malign legacy of Communism no less than Nazism and that of these Communism was just as bad because, unlike Hitler, Stalin destroyed Lithuanian freedom in 1940.

The other assumption is that the collaborators with Hitler were not "collaborators" but "freedom fighters", the very words are used consistently in museums and commemorations to those who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union in neighbouring Latvia and Estonia no less than Lithuania.

Occupation Museums routinely airbrush out of history or euphemise the scale of the collaboration with Hitler as it only lasted four years compared to the Soviet or "Russian" occupation that lasted half a century. As Nazi occupation only saw Jews murdered and not Lithuanians, it seemed relatively tolerable for the many.

Hence the rewriting of a heroic victim narrative in Lithuania that displaces guilt on to Russia, in spite of the fact the Soviet Union was not merely an extension of Great Russian nationalism. The Vilnius Genocide Museum thus not only refers to the Soviet "genocide" but also lists the names of certain 'freedom fighters'.

According to John Czaplika,

'some of these heroes of the Lithuanian resistance against the Soviets [who] may have been at the same time Nazi collaborators who cooperated or took active part in the eradication of the Jewish communities in Lithuania'.

Naturally the double genocide myth is accepted by those who promote anti-Russian racism in the West as part of a New Cold War, such as the neoliberal ideologue Edward Lucas who recommends the website La Russophobe which includes continual references to "Russian barbarians".

Now Lucas is considered a "liberal" by many but the reality is that in the Great Game for resources anything goes if it promotes the West's pipeline interests against Russia and so evidence of the racism of those in Lithuania and Georgia is routinely overlooked or called "problematic".

The real nub of this is not so much that the double genocide myth will lead to a new anti-semitism but that it represents a rewriting of history, ramps up tensions with Russia ( with appalling consequences as in Georgia's attack on Russia in 2008 ) and reveals how people will pervert history to advance geopolitical ambitions.

Matt Seaton is thus hardly correct when he argues,

My point is that only the right really has interest in promoting the double genocide thesis. It's not a neutral historical debating point; it's purpose is to enlarge the significance of Soviet occupation and oppression not only at the expense of the memory of the Holocaust, but in order to rehabilitate a nationalist tradition that was (as Jonathan Freedland rightly observes) often actively involved in Nazi collaboration with the Holocaust.

In fact, the double genocide thesis is routinely allowed to pass by those 'Democratic Geopoliticians' who advocate Liberal Interventionism, even if like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik it really boils down to a universal crusade against "totalitarianism" and they don't refer explicitly to "double genocide".

In practice, what both far right nationalists and European Liberal Interventionists have in common is that they both uncritically accept US foreign policy no matter what and pride themselves in supporting the USA from Afghanistan to Iraq. To that extent they support far right authoritarians such as Saakashvili in Georgia, as has New Labour's Denis MacShane.

The usefulness of Baltic nationalist victim narratives is that they can uncritically ratchet up blind hatred for Russia in this "New Europe". This then makes it a necessity for why the elites are clients of US power and patronage. Once a satellite, always a satellite, as the French like to remark.

Havel was a useful idiot in supporting the Iraq War, as Tony Judt argued, but he is not foolish enough to not know about Baltic nationalism: his consistent support for neoconservative foreign policy is based on fear and dislike for Russia, a hangover from the Cold War but given a new lease of life with the revival of Russian nationalism under Putin.

In the Power of the Powerless he referred to the "blind serf mentality" of the Russians, an understandable feeling given the brutality of the Soviet Union's crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 but hardly relevant in the post-Cold War era unless Putin's regime in Russia is regarded crudely as an exercise in"neo-Stalinism".

The key omission when looking at the far right Baltic nationalism is that 1) It's a form of divertion to scapegoat "the Russians" as being coterminous with "the Soviets" and 2) To big up nationalistic sentiments in order get people behind NATO and to support it's eastward expansion to control oil and gas.

After all, the 2008 Prague Declaration was accepted by leading authorities on the Holocaust such as Emanuelis Zingeris who was instrumental in fighting for the cause of Lithuanian independence and in creating the Vilnius Gaon Jewish State Museum of which he then acted as a director.

Particulary ironical then is the fact that Lithuanian political figures such as Vytautas Landsbergis in January 2005 advocated the banning of Communist insignia if the Nazi swastika was banned. Yet liberals continually advocate the cause of The Other Russia against Putin which has the Natzbol ( National Bolshevik ) Eduard Limonov as a key player.

So fervent was Landsbergis' dislike and contempt for Russia, and thus the Soviet Union, that he found a willing ally in the European Parliament-Alessandra Mussolini who opined, "To implement the proposal of the Members of the European Parliament regarding Communist symbols is our moral duty".

Yet the Russian Fascist Limonov seems to have gone one stage further as part of The Other Russia in combining both the Nazi creed and its insignia with the Bolshevik ones, a kind of new "Third Way" which sits uneasily with the presence of those regarded by Havel as model dissidents like Alexeyeva.

This shows the scale of the Orwellian doublethink: totalitarianism and its symbols are railed against in Central Europe and the Baltics and yet liberals support coalitions in Moscow that include those who explicitly support Fascism, a point never mentioned by Guardian writing "democracy promoters".

......................................................................................................................................................................

A Response to Criticism that the Double Genocide thesis in relation to the Idea of Morally Equivalence between the Totalitarian Regimes.

....far right nationalists do use the concept of a moral equivalency between Hitler and Stalin as a tool for minimising the pure evil of Hitler and the Holocaust, many others have no such agenda. Nor have we been misled. Some of us simply see the two as being roughly equivalent in evil and horror.

The point is surely to what end is the double genocide myth put and conveniently it is pretty much the same as the idea of equivalent totalitarian systems: uncritical support for US hegemony and promoting "Democratic Geopolitics".

The idea that only the far right collude in the illusion that there were two genocides is wrong. Terminology matters. The issue is no longer really about Jews, as there are sadly so few left in the Baltic Republics. It is about uniting people against Russia which is why Israel is a staunch ally of Baltic republics and Georgia.

Cutting through the rhetoric of victim politics to the real interests being advanced is essential. The historical record is important, of course, but equally true is the use of logic to work out why such nations as Lithuania are using the double genocide myth.

To promote the Soviet Union=Big Russia Myth is an attempt to try to divert attention away from the failures of the post-Communist transition which immiserated so many people through shock therapy, something seldom mentioned as the coda to the victory over the Soviet Union in the media.

It is possible to bear two things in mind: that the demise of Communism was one of history's Good Things and yet that the IMF and the US dominated institutions of the Wahington Consensus subsequently used that moral impetus to justify imposing a terrible neoliberal economic model that was once again an "experiment on a people".

That the crude monetarism with the same prescriptive elements meted out as historical inevitability by the "Marriott Men" caused appalling poverty is seldom mentioned in the West. It is often downplayed by erstwhile liberals and The Guardian has not carried a substantial report of the economic hardships in countries such as Lithuania.

It was in such a situation that in the 1990s, politicians resorted to the easy option of blaming Russia for everything and conflating Russia with the Soviet Union in order to co-opt support for Euro-Atlanticism. The same nationalism was promoted under Yushchenko in Ukraine after 2004.

Using history as nationalist propaganda is only vilified when Putin does it: when pro-Western politicians groomed in Washington do it, it is routinely ignored or downplayed. This was quite clearly the case with the racist demagogue Saakashvili who was termed "hotblooded"or "reckless" for attacking Russia in August 2008.

In Lithuania, agriculture collapsed leaving ghost villages not reported by Luke Harding who has, however, gleefully reported on dying villages in Russia, the alcoholism rates, the prematurely dying men and disappearance of the young-as if that was only Putin's fault and had not happened in the Baltic states.

Meanwhile the EU continually protected its agriculture as both Western nations and the US asset stripped the economies. In such a situation where people need somebody to blame even those liberals like Vytautas Landsbergis started piping up about Russian reparations.

Nationalism became the trump card across what was known as "Eastern Europe". Liberals seldom refer to the economy and shock therapy as the driving force of this resentments because of the simplistic triumphalist narrative of 1989-1990 and because they can't bring themselves to admit what went wrong.

Power to the Powerful in Russia is Bad.

The confusion over Russia in a Guardian editorial today ( Power to the Powerful ) reflects a profound ignorance of Russian history and an utter lack of realism as well as bad faith, repellent double standards.

With regards this summer's destructive forest fires and the failure to provide a proper fire service, the Guardian cites the official who,

....said it was up to each owner to have their own fire bucket. Why should the state help those who could not, or would not, help themselves? The narod are mugs.

This is actually very much what some Russian liberals think of the Russian narod or the plebs in neighbouring Ukraine where on the election of Yanukovych in elections earlier this year Yulia Latynina opined in a Moscow Times article that "Letting Poor People Vote is Dangerous".

When Hurricane Katrina hit the USA, Western liberals did not suggest that regime change should be imposed or that EU nations should preach to the USA about its democratic deficits. Nor that the failure of the neoliberal economic model to guarantee security to its citizens was a major failure and that the EU should call for the funding of civil society activists to challenge the monied oligarchies that control the US.

This is not to say that deficiencies in "the West" mean that continued failures in Russia as regards should be simply excused because "we" are in no position to criticise. Yet a wider perspective is needed beyond the crude impulse to exploit humanitarian catastrophes to make one dimensional political swipes at Putin.

For a start by any standards Britain has become less of a participatory democracy in recent years and more of a "virtual" one that is staged and choreographed in a way that converges with the Russian model of a democracy mixed with authoritarianism. It is just that Britain's ailing civil society can provide real opposition to the oligarchy there.

In Russia there has not existed such a tradition that grew up in Britain over many centuries and the idea of "civil society" in the West is declining as states become more intent on circumventing it and ceding power to unaccountable transnational organisations such as the IMF and large corporations and media.

Indeed Britain has provided succour to the exiled Russian oligarchs that New Labour or New Conservative politicians have reflexively supported, despite their criminality, and have never condemned as explicitly as they have Putin who has never been forgiven for disproving the idea that Russia needed neoliberalism.

The crude belief that economic liberalism leads inexorably to political liberalism is rehashed in the Guardian and shows a curious economic determinism of the sort that certain Marxists would have approved of when it states,

God forbid that economic liberalisation should lead to political change, the creation of real political parties, a functioning civil society, and institutions independent of the governing elite. There is no exact equivalent in English of Putin's "soft autocracy", and that may be telling in itself. Even benign despotism implies a will to improve the lives of ordinary people.

There might be no exact equivalent in English for "soft autocracy" but to blame Russian for linguistic difficulties in articulating what Guardian "liberals" think is more a problem for them. Putin's hybrid of autocracy and democracy is intent on creating a powerful state that can create the conditions for Russian capitalism.

The very nature of Russia requires a degree of centralisation and the creation of a functioning state. Oppositionists in The Other Russia hold Putin to account for his authoritarianism and yet never state what they would do instead to curtail oligarch power and root out corruption.

The reason is that many Russian "liberals" still support the notion that the global "transition" from Communism to Liberalism was never completed and ignore the traumatic impact of shock therapy and the millions of Russians who died, as documented by an important Lancet study.

There was little concern for the Russia narod back in the 1990s when only the tradition of peasant cultivation and plots saved them from an actual famine and greater levels of death and starvation. This fact is airbrushed out of nearly everything that Guardian liberals such as Luke Harding write on Russia.

That corruption persists and the spoils of office still fall to FSB operatives is hardly a good thing but the experience of the 1990s and the realities of Russian politics bear out the fact that the "democratic" opposition is still financed by those wanting power and wealth they had under Yeltsin in the 1990s.

Putin's task has been first to consolidate the Russian state an impose what he calls "the dictatorship of law". It's a vision that Michael Stuermer argues, in Putin and the Rise of Russia, suggests owes much to Hegel's notion of a machtstaat and that is held to be needed in order to avoid the chaos and anarchy created by the policies of the IMF.

Before lecturing Russia on its deficiencies it is about high time many in the West admitted the culpability of policies that originated mostly in the USA-the Washington Consensus-in creating the mess that Putin is responding to and stopped naively buying into the messianic New Cold War guff spouted by neoliberal ideologues like Edward Lucas.

The problem, as evidenced by Russian nationalist responses, is that "Democratic Geopolitics" is seen as having those double standards inherent in the New Great Game for control of the pipeline matrix, of which Russia is still a central part in post-Soviet space, and is also evident in the Guardian's Milibandite propaganda trope here,

Russia itself is languishing. Its economy contracted by nearly 8% last year, its worst annual economic performance since 1994, and – despite being so dependent on the stuff – it is producing less oil now than the Soviet Union did in the 1970s.

Soviet oil accounted for 35% of global production in 1985. Oil from Russia accounts today for just 17% – a marked decline even after the partial loss of oil from the Caspian basin is factored in.

Russia's economy has shrunk twice in the last decade, and deindustrialisation is making itself felt in Russia's mono-cities – those reliant on a single industry. It is against this background that the billions of dollars thrown at baubles like Skolkovo and Sochi should be judged.

That oil production is declining is obvious enough globally, one reason that Miliband still supports the invasion of the oil grab that was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 just four years after North Sea Oil peaked back in 1999 and Blair and Bush saw Iraq as a panacea to guarantee Western hegemony.

The contraction of the Russian economy is serious but hardly on the scale of the previous decade i.e the 1990s, when shock therapy laid waste to whole swathes of Russian industry and that is conveniently omitted in the Guardian's shrill and one dimensional worldview, one consistently repeated in what can only be considered forthright propaganda.

The shrinking of the Russian economy back in 1998 was a result of the inappropriate nature of the IMF's neoliberal policies and one important reason why Putin was able to consolidate power after 1999 when NATO was extending its control over pipeline routes from the Black Sea through the Kosovo Conflict and Russia seen as weak and powerless.

The New Cold War mantra is hinted at by the way Russia's declining oil base is evidenced by contrasting it to the Soviet Union back in the 1970s, as if Russia under Putin was some seamless successor to the Soviet Union but a weaker version that Democratic Geopoliticians could still alter.

Yet the over dependency of the USA and UK, indeed the West as a whole, on oil lying in unstable lands riven with ethnic irredentism and conflicts is equally as evident. If Russia still did not control a large amount of oil and resources the West wants a stake in it would care less for Russia.

It could be argued that a mutually beneficial partnership between the West and Russia would be in the interests of both and can only be gained if Putin is removed in favour of a more "open" political system. Yet the evidence of the 1990s is hardly encouraging and political thinking in the West remains the same.

The Democratic Geopoliticians of The Other Russia are financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs who aim at "regime change", something that Putin can exploit to shore up popular support for Russian nationalism and which Other Russian ultra-nationalists such as Limanov's Natzbols are mobilised to challenge in the streets.

In such cynical conditions it is highly unlikely that pro-Western liberals are going to count for much in Russia as few of them have any regard for Russian interests beyond exploiting the deficiencies of Russia's record on freedom to advance their own designs to get their hands on Russia's resources.

Democracy was hardly encouraged when Yeltsin launched a coup d'etat against the Russian Parliament in 1993, invaded Chechnya and when the West had little or nothing to say about that, only becoming interested in human rights when Putin thumbed his nose at Western geopolitical interests.

Those ex-Soviet nation states that have joined the US geopolitical orbit, such as the Baltic Republics, have , moreover, suffered incredible poverty and de-industrialisation as a result of neoliberal "reforms" imposed by the IMF. The economy of Latvia declined by 15% after the 2008 crisis.

That is hardly a great advert for "joining the West" and both the EU and the US will just have to accept that Russia and a goodly number of Russians and Ukrainians are not going to be interested in sacrificing what meagre material benefits they have got since shock therapy was rejected.

Despite the folly of "the billions of dollars thrown at baubles like Skolkovo and Sochi" that "should be judged", the Russians can come back with the West's financial sectors profligate irresponsibility, massive debt fuelled consumerism in the UK and US, the billions squandered on Iraq.

Billions of pounds are squandered in London by the exiled oligarchs who robbed Russia in the 1990s, like Roman Abramovich snapping up Chelsea to make it his plaything. London alone generates most of the UK's income in a dysfunctional economy based on rentierism and money transactions alone.

The New Russian elite knows these weaknesses and it is hardly going to be lectured by those who colluded in the robbery of Russian assets in the 1990s to a tune of $300 billion.

Russia is simply not going to go along the road mapped out for it by the West, that Democratic Geopolitics often sacrifices democracy to coalitioning new oligarchic elites ( as in the Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" of 2004 ) . Russians will continue to prefer a strong leader who can keep those who want to sell out Russia's national interests to foreign ones.

The damage done in the 1990s will not be forgiven very quickly and events will move on further along the path towards large power blocks fighting to control oil and gas and trying to install elites to further these ends, something that will lead to a greater pathology of competing power interests that could become lethal.

With regards democracy, the perception of double standards on the part of the West and the fact that "liberals" in Russia seem more intent on pursuing their own interests in tandem with US help will be resented and, as a consequence, resisted. And that the West's mistakes ( and greed ) are to blame for that.