Vladimir Putin’s steely nationalist rule has raised fears in the West of a return to Soviet-style dictatorship in Russia. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that the country is still in a period of ideological transition, with a new national idea gradually emerging from the Marxism-Leninism of old. Among the more noteworthy aspects of this new “Russian idea” is the explanation it provides for the upheavals of the 20th century and the country’s perceived current decline. Unfortunately, as is often the case with such overarching narratives, Jews play a disproportionately significant role.

Home to a prominent anti-Semitic tradition under the tsars, and again under the Communist regime that replaced them, Russia has long been seized by the “Jewish question.” During the Soviet Union’s first two decades, many among its key leaders were themselves Jewish—and Marx himself, of course, was of Jewish origin—but within the party apparatus, though less strong at the top than in the middle and lower echelons, there was a great deal of animosity toward Jews.

Today, thanks in part to still-lingering consciousness of the Holocaust, open anti-Semitism is démodé. It is unthinkable, for example, to regret publicly that Hitler killed too few Jews, or to deny that he killed any at all. But underlying anti-Jewish sentiments persist and have found alternate means of expression, notably through the simple replacement of “Jews” and “Judaism” with “Zionists” and “Zionism.” Yesterday’s accusations of bloodthirstiness, perfidy, and licentiousness have, for the most part, given way to revisionist accounts of the satanic “Zionist” influence on Russia’s historical path.

The content of these works ranges from the relatively sane to the utterly bizarre and lunatic. Their quantity, however, has lately reached an all-time high, even as the number of actual Jews living in Russia is at a historic low. (Émigré Jewish speakers of Russian in greater New York may now equal or outnumber Jews currently living in Russia itself.) What explains this recent surge?

One partial answer lies in the enduring Russian fascination with para- and metapolitics, especially conspiracy theories, the appetite for which has never been met by any homegrown tradition of detective fiction; there is no Russian Sherlock Holmes or Jules Maigret, for instance. Another answer lies in the more or less complicit attitude of Russia’s current political and intellectual elites, some of whom support the anti-Semitic campaign and would even see it intensified (though others caution against overdoing it). But really to understand the phenomenon’s sources and aims, one has to delve into its inner logic. That anti-Semitic paranoia should flourish under today’s circumstances speaks volumes about the contemporary Russian mindset, and demands attention.

To survey the vast recent output of “anti-Zionist” propaganda by Moscow publishing houses would be a heroic undertaking. Fortunately, given how repetitive such works have become, focusing briefly on just one work by one author will do the job before we move on to more formidable figures.

Vladimir Bolshakov is the author of Blue Star against Red Star: How the Zionists Became the Gravediggers of Communism (2014). This is the final installment of a trilogy, the first two volumes of which, With the Talmud and the Red Star and Khazaria and Hitler, were published in 2013. The latter titles alone are weird: the Talmud was never seen together with the Bolshevik red star, and what possible connection could link the medieval kingdom of Khazaria, which briefly adopted Judaism, and Adolf Hitler who in all probability never heard of it?

The trilogy’s third volume only deepens the mystery. Its back cover announces that, in the early 1970s, international Zionism, operating through the offices of Golda Meir—then Israel’s prime minister but originally, Bolshakov claims, an ally of Communism—launched a subversive campaign against the Soviet Union and eventually became its “gravedigger.” These are indeed sensational allegations, and one wonders how such remarkable facts and world-shaking events could have escaped notice by contemporaries and historians alike. Why on earth would Golda—around the time of the Yom Kippur war and at a time of terrible danger to the young state of Israel—have taken the reckless and politically suicidal step of declaring war on a superpower?

In support of such disclosures, Bolshakov cites “Iron Felix” Dzherzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, as Soviet intelligence was called in the regime’s early days, to the effect that on certain issues Zionists and Communists could perhaps find common ground. He does not reveal when or where Dzherzhinsky said this, let alone that Dzherzhinsky was never in a position to influence basic issues in Soviet or Communist policy; in his day, the political police and espionage apparatus were not remotely so powerful as they later became. Nor is Bolshakov himself, who once labored at the lower levels of the Soviet propaganda apparatus, and virtually all of whose “quotations” are of a similar cast, in a position to tell us how important decisions were made in the Kremlin.

Still, his account is valuable in conveying the mood within the Soviet elite in the decades after the death of Stalin in 1953. He is deeply convinced that the Zionists—of whom, he says, there were a great many in Moscow—played a sinister role throughout this period and even into the post-Soviet age in the 1990s and afterward. Consider Vladimir Zhirinovsky, now the head of Russia’s third-largest political party and one who enjoys the reputation of being staunchly and reliably anti-Zionist. Zhirinovsky’s mother was Russian; but, asked on one occasion about the nationality of his father Wolf, he replied, suspiciously, only that Zhirinovsky père had been a lawyer from Lviv (Lvov). Bolshakov assures us that the son is not to be trusted.

Bolshakov also tries to lay to rest any impression that Jews ever faced discrimination behind the Iron Curtain. Far from it, he claims: they were—and remain—all-powerful. In fact, so pervasive has their influence been that anyone critical of it has found himself subject to persecution. Conscientious journalists who warned against Jewish conspiracies were exiled to faraway countries like Australia and New Zealand. True, Bolshakov admits, a few Russian patriots were sometimes able to publish books and articles exposing the Jewish cabal, and lower-echelon “anti-Zionists” were occasionally protected by those higher up in the hierarchy, including editors of leading newspapers like Pravda and some in the party propaganda machine. But on the whole, he insists, anti-Zionists had to be extremely cautious not to exceed certain limits lest they face professional discrimination or banishment to the Gulag.

Bolshakov bitterly accuses many highly placed party leaders of dereliction in their duty to guard Russia against the Zionist threat. In his account, even those not directly in the thrall of the Zionists are depicted as turning a blind eye to the danger; one such was Leonid Brezhnev, the hardline General Secretary of the Communist party who led the USSR from 1964 to 1982—but who allegedly (according to Bolshakov) had a Jewish wife. We also hear frequently about the iniquities of the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev (General Secretary 1985-1991), along with those of his adviser and evil genius Alexander Yakovlev. As for today, although Bolshakov and those who think like him would not dare attack Vladimir Putin for such sins, they show no similar forbearance when it comes to other members of the ruling group.

If Bolshakov’s paranoid anti-Semitism can be described as merely a symptom of the new Russian idea, the roots of the phenomenon go back farther and deeper—and its branches now extend to the highest echelons of Moscow’s current post-Communist elite. Perhaps the most interesting and influential star in the firmament is Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), who in the new ideology of the Putin regime may be thought of as the equivalent of Marx and Lenin rolled into one.

The son of a Russian father and a German mother, Ilyin was born in Moscow, studied philosophy and theology, and in 1922 was expelled following Lenin’s orders on board the famous “philosophers’ ship” of suspect intellectuals. Settling first in Germany, he welcomed the advent of Nazism, regarding it as a counterforce to liberalism and Jewish influence. He even worked for a certain period in the Nazi propaganda ministry under Joseph Goebbels; although losing his job in the wake of a personal intrigue among Russian émigrés, he continued to believe sincerely in Hitler as a bulwark to the spread of Communist infiltration in Europe. Warning constantly of the Jews’ control of the media in the Weimar republic, and of their overwhelmingly harmful influence, he was hardly troubled by their subsequent fate under the Nazis. Nor did he grasp the other consequences of the radical cause he supported, including the murder in its name of millions of “subhuman” Russians.

Even after the war, Ilyin regarded fascism as a positive force, criticizing it only for being insufficiently religious in inspiration, a fault that in his view eventually caused its downfall. Indeed, he had preferred Mussolini to Hitler because of the former’s more positive attitude to the church, and, on the same grounds, Franco and Salazar to other dictators. (If Russian religious thinkers, for their part, tended to doubt the depth and sincerity of Ilyin’s religious attachments, it was because they found in his works more of German philosophy than of orthodox belief and dogma.)

Having lost his job in Germany, Ilyin moved to Switzerland with the help of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. He remained a fascist sympathizer until his death in 1954, though, when it came to Russia, he favored monarchy over fascist dictatorship.

The 21st-century rediscovery of Ilyin by Putin and his friends was a momentous event. Putin took a personal hand in arranging the philosopher’s 2005 reburial in Russia, and has sent his works as Christmas presents—and mandatory reading—to all of Russia’s regional governors. As one of his ministers put it, “God gave Ilyin the gift of prophecy.” He is virtually the only thinker cited in Putin’s own speeches and articles, and the same goes for the public utterances of the regime’s other leading figures. He is regarded, in short, as the most farsighted Russian political theorist of modern times, particularly when it comes to his strongly voiced nationalism and unwillingness to acknowledge the presence in Russia of other nationalities and minorities and their rights. (Less attention is paid to Ilyin’s economic and social views, which broadly speaking were those of the “Solidarist” movement, a kind of Christian alternative to Communist-style collectivism, quite out of fashion in contemporary Russia.)

To be sure, the enthusiasm has by no means been universal, even on the right. To one political writer, for example, Ilyin is not just a suspect figure but an outright enemy. After all, had he been a true Russian patriot, the Bolsheviks would surely have not just exiled but killed him. And is it not indicative that, during his Berlin exile, meetings of the Russian émigré intellectuals took place in a building placed at their disposal by B’nai B’rith, the Jewish “Masonic” lodge? On this view, what is needed for the new Russia is not the wishy-washy and half-hearted anti-democratic ideology of someone like Ilyin, but something far more robust.

And this brings us back to Vladimir Bolshakov and Blue Star against Red Star. In the last third of that book, Bolshakov suddenly swerves to focus on masonstvo—the Masons. This in itself is no great surprise: as students of the subject know well, zhido-masonstvo, the alleged Jewish-Masonic conspiracy, has long been a main obsession of Russian anti-Semites. From here on in the “Zionists” in Blue Star against Red Star become amalgamated with or even subordinate to the Masons and their lodges: the true engineers, along with the people who were their tools, of all of the major and most of the minor political developments in modern history. In Russia, their nefarious activities are said to have included both revolutions of 1917: the non-Communist February one, marking the end of the Russian empire and the creation of the Russian republic, and the October one, marking the Bolshevik takeover.

But if Lenin was a Mason, along with Trotsky and the other members of the Communist leadership, in what way were the “Zionists” responsible for their crimes? The answer, it seems, is that for Bolshakov and his comrades, “Zionism” and the battle against it have always been the core issue, and all other political controversies—including the relative merits of Communism versus tsarist autocracy—are secondary. Indeed, educated Russians who continue to believe in the old party-line version of Communist and Soviet history are now in a minority, and even those who like Bolshakov himself pretend to be guardians of the Communist flame have adjusted themselves to the new line. They may still accept a small part of Marx’s teachings, and preeminently his virulent essay on the Jewish question, but they pointedly distance themselves from his Russophobia as well as from the internationalist thrust of his doctrine, not to mention his economic prescriptions. The new Russian idea, after all, is not socialist, and not even national-socialist, but state-capitalist.

All of this is bound to cause major attacks of dizziness. Bolshakov at one point fingers the late Meir Kahane as the principal cause of Communism’s demise, but a few pages later his villain is the playwright Arthur Miller, and just a few pages after that the Russian politician Gennady Burbulis, an associate of Boris Yeltsin in the first post-Communist government who is now best known as president of the association of Russian short-track speed-skaters. Can such a farrago of nonsense possibly gain credence among a significant number of people in positions of responsibility in a major country?

One would like to doubt it, but in fact there is no clear answer. Putin himself does not believe in “anti-Zionism” or in the Judeo-Masonic fantasy; even the nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, probably the most prominent contemporary peddler of more sophisticated conspiracy theories, has declared that those who disseminate primitive “anti-Zionist” idiocy are doing more harm than good. Yet Putin still professes to be guided by Ivan Ilyin.

And herein lies the significance of the Bolshakov trilogy: not that it is exceptionally extreme or foolish but, to the contrary, that it is representative, and that there is a flood of others just like it. There is still no generally agreed-upon party line in the new Russia; some of the power elite, including apparently the army general staff, seem to go well beyond Ilyin—who was no believer in conspiracy theories, and, as a Christian, would hardly share the Asian (or Eurasian) fantasies of some ambitious present-day Russians.

Just who will come out on top in the struggle for power under and after Putin, and what kind of new ideology will eventually prevail, is still anyone’s guess. But whatever the outcome, it would be a serious mistake to ignore the grimly prominent role played by anti-Semitism in this unfolding drama.