Yes, indeed it is. Both Chris and I are talking about anti-Semitism in eastern Europe and Russia, and about how influential it is. I think Chris's point was that there were people who hold those views, but that other antagonisms such as the conflict with Chechnya were more important to the state. I think I agree with him. I come across casual anti-Semitism talking to Poles and Russians I meet in this country, and have seen it in East Europe - just the same as I have come across it talking to north African and West Indian immigrants in Britain.
Sebastian, though, heaps up a number of examples in an eighty year dash through the history of eastern Europe and Russia, that appear to show that anti-Semitism is endemic. This, it seems to me, is a cherry-picking approach to history that tend to flatten the historical specifity of different periods (maybe cherries is the wrong metapor). There are different things going on at different periods. Yes, there was a decidedly anti-Semitic edge to Stalin's appeal to Great Russian Chauvinism in the Second World War and immediately after, during the Slansky trial (Ilya Ehrenburg refers to it in his memoirs).
And the backward-looking Russian chauvinist movements like Pamyat are pretty marginal today. Making them emblematic of what Russia is really like would be like saying that Gordon Brown was just the front man for the British National Party.
BUT THE OTHER side of the argument, the one that both Sebastian and Andie are resistant to, is that when considering the deplorable aspects of 'backward Slavic Culture' it is as well to be aware of the fact that you are participating in a long history of anti-slav racial stereotyping.
Just as if you make an issue out of Jewish merchants, or hysterical Arabs, or lazy blacks or mean Scotsmen you should know that these are stereo-types. It does not mean that at various points in your life you are not going to meet a mean Scotsman. It is just that the mean Scotsman you meet is not a fair sample of all his race.
So all your historical examples of east European anti-Semitism seem to add up to a pattern of behaviour because you have missed out the counter examples. As Abram Leon explains, while West Europeans were persecuting Jews throughout the middle ages, they lived in peace with their neighbours in East Europe. Or that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia rallied the Russian people behind a party with many Jewish leaders (as did the 1919 revolution in Hungary). Or that Poland's inter-war leader Pilsudski (reactionary in so many ways) was decidedly opposed to anti Semitism. Or that Jews continued to play a role in Soviet life right through till 1989. None of this says that there is not anti-Semitism in east Europe, as there is in west Europe, only that it is by no means endemic, or the decisive event.