To justify his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has reconstructed the oldest and deadliest conspiracy theory. Only one essential component is missing.

Putin revealed the existence of a secret society with extraordinary powers that is threatening Holy Mother Russia and the rest of humanity. In a speech in the Kremlin on 30 September, he described “the dictatorship of the Western elites [that] is directed against all societies”.

It pulls the strings of Russia’s enemies, and stokes war to advance its dreams of global domination, he continued. It manipulates the so-called Ukrainian leaders, who are mere puppets controlled by their “real masters in the West”.

This conspiracy is not an ordinary cabal. It is a supernatural enterprise driven by unspeakable malice.

It wants nothing less than a “radical denial of moral norms, religion and family. Indeed, the suppression of freedom itself has taken on the features of a religion: outright Satanism”.

And who are these devil-worshippers behind the attack on the values of marriage, Orthodox Christianity and Russia’s very right to exist?
Well, you know, surely, they must be because they always have been, they’re the…

Except they’re not. Putinism is now an insanely revanchist cult of grievance and violence. It has let loose the dogs of war. But antisemitism is the one dog that has not barked, and its absence demands an explanation.

Christopher Hitchens once said that, if it had not been for the Bolshevik revolution, we would use a Russian rather than Italian word to describe fascism. Many readers of the JC will know why. Like me, they will have ancestors who fled Tsar Alexander III’s anti-Jewish laws or the mass-murder of Jews in the pogroms at the turn of the 20th century.

The Russian extreme right of the early 1900s bears the foul distinction of inventing the Nazi conspiracy theory when they forged and propagated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903.

It took more than the Bolshevik revolution to eliminate the oldest hatred in Russia. Stalin and the post-1945 European communists reinvented it in their campaigns against “foreign”, “cosmopolitan” and “Zionist” elements that led to a renewed persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. A late blooming of this Soviet-grown fleur du mal helped inspire the hatreds of the far left in our own dear Labour Party.

Yet the Putinist regime has not demonised Russian Jews. It has used antisemitic-type laws to ban the promotion and normalisation of homosexuality against Russia’s LGBT+ population. And it has promoted antisemitic-style conspiracy theories against them as “Satanic” threats to “moral norms, religion, and family”.

Jews are not escaping unscathed. Moscow’s chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, went into exile last July after the authorities put pressure on him to support the invasion of Ukraine. But Goldschmidt and other anti-war Jewish figures left Russia as individuals following their conscience, rather than as refugees from a modern pogrom.

The Russian economy is tanking. The state-controlled media is screaming out blood-soaked fantasies. The regime is feeding victimhood as a means of distracting attention from its catastrophic political errors.

And yet Putin is not resorting to blood libels against the traditional scapegoat of Russian autocracy in both its Tsarist and communist guises.

Realpolitik at its most cynical provides a part of the explanation. A common interest in containing Iran and Hezbollah in Syria has locked Russia and Israel together.

Their de facto alliance explains Israel’s shameful refusal to supply military aid to Ukraine and its (Jewish) leader. From Putin’s point of view, meanwhile, angering Israel’s leaders by persecuting Russian Jews would be a dumb move even by his dumb standards.

It was noticeable how fast Putin shut up his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov after he outraged Israeli leaders by saying in May that he could call Zelensky a Nazi because Hitler “had Jewish blood”.

Yet I wonder how long the restraint can last. Putin is militarising society for the sake of a war that will enfeeble Russia for years to come. The level of hatred necessary to prosecute it is equal to the level of national self-delusion.

Dr Ian Garner, the author of the forthcoming Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth, describes a deranged popular culture where all who oppose Russian imperialism are simultaneously traitors, Nazis, gays, liberals and democrats.

For now, the ultra-right does not automatically include Jewish people in the enemies list, because its ideology does not automatically equate Jews with the hated “West”.
But Garner points out that both Russian state media and the public are projecting traditionally antisemitic images and tropes onto the Ukrainian population.

They depict Ukrainians as pigs to be slaughtered, as dirty, diseased, and as an epidemic to be eradicated from the healthy Russian body politic. “These are all images that might be drawn from Nazi-era propaganda,” Garner says.

With a major land war in Europe continuing indefinitely, it is impossible to rule out Putin imitating the tsars and the communists and painting Russia’s Jews as the bearers of dangerous Western values. It’s what Russian dictatorships have always done, and nothing about Putin suggests that he is morally superior to his gruesome predecessors.