Mr. Zalmayev later acknowledged in a deposition that he had been paid $100,000 but had not disclosed that he was working at the behest of Mr. Vavilov when he approached groups including the American Jewish Committee and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Both ultimately signed anti-Egiazaryan letters to the State Department and the Homeland Security secretary.
Mr. Zalmayev’s strategy largely relied on painting Mr. Egiazaryan as anti-Semitic because of his connection to the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, headed by an ultranationalist. By March 2011, Mr. Zalmayev had persuaded The Jewish Journal, a widely read newspaper in California, to publish an opinion article he wrote.
“Jewish groups in America and Russia have repeatedly condemned the L.D.P.R. and its leader as anti-Semitic,” the article said, adding, “The U.S. government must likewise put anti-Semites worldwide on notice: You are not welcome in this country.”
…Mr. Egiazaryan mounted his own public relations campaign, denying the charges of anti-Semitism and saying he had fled Russia after death threats against him and his family.
One interesting revelation of the New York Times series doxing the foreign looters buying up the penthouses in the new towers just south of Central Park (one source for my Taki’s column on Wednesday about the New York and Los Angeles real estate booms for rich immigrants) is that the only people making strong efforts to keep unsavory foreign oligarchs out of America are other unsavory foreign oligarchs bearing grudges from the Old Country over who carved out the largest slice of pie for himself…
One of Vavilov hobbies has been waging a public relations war to persuade the U.S. government to not allow a rival oligarch to settle in Beverly Hills. The resulting lawsuits revealed some interesting facts about the economics of think tanks and op-eds.
Steve Sailer writes Jan. 12, 2014:
In the 1990s, a small coterie of economists at Harvard and MIT, such as Jeffrey Sachs, Larry Summers, Andrei Shleifer, Jonathan Hay, and Stanley Fischer, played a crucial role in recent history by advising the government of Russia to rapidly privatize its economy. Much of the wealth of Russia wound up being stolen by a tiny number of oligarchs.
The President has nominated Dr. Fischer, who recently resigned after eight years as head of the Israeli government’s central bank, to be vice chairman of America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve. This might be a good time to reflect upon the successes and failures of Dr. Fischer’s recommendations in contributing to the Rape of Russia.
Fischer was not the public face of the experts from Cambridge, but he appears to have been a respected insider, as he remains today. His nomination to the Fed has been greeted with outpourings of praise from global financial insiders and very little skepticism from the less privileged.
As far as I know, nobody has ever accused Fischer of attempting to unethically profit off of the disaster he helped create in Russia, as the Federal government fined Shleifer and Harvard for doing.
Still, Fischer was there at the creation. He had numerous chances to speak out publicly about what was going horribly wrong in a Russia that looked to him and his friends for advice.
