RUSSIA - Sergei Kiriyenko & The Jewish Elite

The PM from March 23 to Aug. 23, 1998, Kiriyenko was born on July 26, 1962 in the Black Sea town of Sukhumi, now in independent Georgia's disputed Abkhazia. Soon after his family moved to Gorky which was later named Nizhny Novgorod, a closed industrial town in central Russia. He was an active member of the Komsomol, the Communist movement, and graduated with a degree in management. When Russia adopted a free market system in the early 1990s, he rose quickly to become chief executive of Garantiya commercial bank and later took the presidency of Norsi Oil, a big refining company. He forged close links with the governor of Nizhny Novgorod, Boris Nemtsov. Less than two months after Nemtsov was made 1st deputy PM in Moscow in March 1997, he brought Kiriyenko

to the capital to become 1st deputy minister of energy to replace Victor Ott. Nemtsov was the energy minister. In November 1997, as Nemtsov was too busy as deputy PM, Kiriyenko was made energy minister. After becoming PM in late March 1998 Kiriyenkomade Sergei Generalov, the 34-year-old deputy CEO of Bank Menatep and Yukos, energy minister and retained Nemtsov as 1st deputy PM. After Chernomyrdin was made PM on Aug. 23, Kiriyenko and Nemtsov said they would not serve in his government.

After becoming PM, Kiriyenko said in a TV interview: "I am an interesting mix. My mother is Russian, my father was a Jew, my surname is Ukrainian and I was born in Abkhasia". The Jewish Encyclopedia of Russia lists Anatoly Chubais, architect of the IMF's July 1998 bailout, as a Jew; and so is his arch-rival Boris Berezovsky. Members of the Jewish elite include Yevgeni Primakov, foreign minister for years. Primakov is the Ukrainian word for "stepson", but his real name was Finkelstein which he had to change when he became a KGB agent and a Pravda correspondent in the Arab World. Other prominent Jews or half-Jewish are Livshits (see profile), reformer and Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky, ultra-nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Boris Nemtsov, Menatep/Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and media/banking mogul Vladimir Gussinsky who leads Russia's Jewish Congress. The presence of more Jews in high places than at any time under the tsars or since the 1917 Bolchevik revolution is something Russians have been depicting as sinister.