Russia, the country that launched the largest land war in Europe since World War II, invading a country with a democratically elected Jewish president in the name of “denazification,” is bringing back old-fashioned Jew-hunting pogroms.

I’ll bet few of us have ever heard of Makhachkala, Russia, and would have been perfectly happy to never hear about it. It’s the capital of Dagestan, on the southernmost tip of Russia, bordering Azerbaijan and the independent democratic country of Georgia we used to call “Soviet Georgia.” Dagestan is Russia’s most ethnically diverse state, but it’s heavily Muslim, and when you combine toxic Russian antisemitism with toxic Muslim antisemitism, well, besides feeling like you’re standing between two scorpions, you have a foaming and combustible mix of hatreds ready to manifest in violence at any moment. Because it’s not just the hateful nutjobs storming the airport over rumors that Israeli refugees had arrived; it’s the lack of any government action to prevent this, and the lethargic, foot-dragging efforts to stop the airport rage festival once it started.

[Worth noting, too, that many pogroms had exactly this nature during Russia’s previous imperial era too. Those were not always “official” acts by the army or police. The local population got whipped up into an anti-Semitic frenzy and Russia’s officials looked the other way while Jews got killed, raped, and pillaged. That didn’t just happen in majority-Muslim areas either, but also in western Russia. — Ed]