Boris Spiegel

Boris Spiegel (born 18 February 1953 in Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) (Russian: Бори́с Исаа́кович Шпи́гель) is a Russian politician and businessman. Haaretz describes him as an oligarch who is "closely tied to the Kremlin." From 2003 to 2013, he represented Penza Oblast in the Russian Federation Council; in December 2011, he was appointed the First Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Legislation, Legal and Judicial Affairs and Civil Society Development. In 2010, he founded World Without Nazism, an organisation with close ties to the Russian government, formed to affirm the Russian version of history, particularly in relation to the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states and the Holodomor. This followed the establishment of the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests the previous year. The organization is described in the Annual Review of the Estonian Security Police as a propaganda organization aimed at promoting "a Soviet-era approach to World War II." It cooperates closely with the Finnish Anti-Fascist Committee. He is also chairman of the organization World Congress of Russian Jewry (WCRJ), an organisation that according to The Jewish Chronicle "works on behalf of the Kremlin" despite its nominal independence. During the 2008 South Ossetia War, acting as president of WCRJ, he accused Georgia of committing genocide, which attracted criticism from Israeli voices. The Jewish Chronicle writes that Spiegel "is firmly in the pro-Putin camp. His subservience was clearly on show […] during the fighting in the Caucasus when he joined the Kremlin's propaganda campaign calling for the establishment of a tribunal that would investigate Georgia's 'war crimes' and 'genocide.'" Spiegel has accused the countries that were formerly part of the Communist Bloc (except Russia and Belarus) of "rapid nazification". He also criticizes the "Western European democracies" for their alleged...