Free Putin's Wars by Marcel H. Van Herpen

“Union of the Russian People” one could read that
     “the Russian people, as the gatherer of Russian lands and the creator of the great
     might of the state, enjoys a preferential position in national life and in national
     administration.” [40] One of the demands was that the number of Jewish deputies to the State Duma be
     restricted to three: “Such limitation is necessary because of the disruptive, anti-state
     activity of the united Jewish masses, their unceasing hatred of everything Russian,
     and the unscrupulousness which they so openly demonstrated during the revolutionary
     movement [of 1905].” [41] It was added that “Jews could, of course, not be members of the Union.” [42] In September 1903 Znamya (The Banner), which would later become the official paper of the Union, was the first
     to publish in nine articles the complete text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , a pamphlet about a Jewish plot to dominate the world that had been forged around
     1900 by the head of the tsarist secret police in Paris at the suggestion of Pobedonostsev. [43] In October 1906 the Union founded the Black Hundreds ( chornye sotnye ), a terror organization with an armed wing, the Yellow Shirts —a predecessor and probably even a model for Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s Braunhemde (brownshirts). The movement mushroomed. At the height of its influence, in the years
     1906–07, it had three thousand branches, [44] which is astonishing in a country with a quasi-non-existent civil society. In effect
     it was not so much a sign of a developing civil society as of an emerging un civil society, because the movement played an important role in the wave of pogroms
     that ravaged Russia in this period and in which thousands of Jews were killed. According
     to Walter Laqueur there were up to seven hundred pogroms. However, these were not only perpetrated by the Black Hundred movement,
     but equally by the tsarist authorities. “Various parliamentary inquiry committees
     found that the local authorities were frequently involved; in some places where the
     Black Hundred did not exist . . . the pogrom was carried out by the police single-handed.
     . . . It was virtually impossible to establish to what extent pogroms were spontaneous
     and to what degree they were carefully planned and organized.” [45]
    Hatred against minorities went hand in hand with hatred against foreigners and West
     Europeans. This xenophobic hatred was often presented as a reaction to a real or imagined disrespect on the part of the Europeans. Already in 1841 Stepan Shevyrev, a conservative Slavophile,
     wrote: “The West . . . expresses to us at every opportunity its aversion, which resembles
     almost a kind of hatred, and which is offensive to every Russian who enters his country.” [46] Another writer, Nikolay Danilevsky, a Russian Pan Slavist who gave Russian nationalism
     its biological basis, wrote in a famous article, Rossiya i Evropa (Russia and Europe), that “Europe does not recognize us as its equal. . . . Everything
     that is pure Russian and Slav, seems to him to be despicable. . . . Europe considers
     . . . the Russians and the Slavs as not only a strange, but also an inimical element.” [47] The Pan Slavist’s xenophobic hatred of foreigners was justified by a—largely constructed—hatred
     that foreigners were believed to feel against the Russian people. Hatred of the West
     was, therefore, considered a justified reaction, a sound defense, and a confirmation
     of one’s own right to exist. If you are surrounded by enemies, is not the only sound
     reaction that of hating your enemies and preparing for war? According to Hannah Arendt
     the nationalism of the Pan Slavists was “a tribal nationalism [that] always insists
     that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that
     a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its
     people to be unique,