HAIFA, Israel — Russia is often in the news, since it is not only at home, but also in many places around the globe. However, antisemitism in the Russian Federation has long been unheard of. To understand where it has disappeared to and what the prospects of its appearance are, we need to remember what happened to state antisemitism in the USSR.
In the Soviet literature, positive portrayals of characters with Jewish surnames were rare. Most often, Jews were simply not mentioned. The presence of Jews as a people was silenced, almost “classified,” “tabooed.” They were hidden and excluded from the enumeration of the peoples of the USSR. In 1949, with belligerent incantations and aggressive rhetoric, the previously hidden Jews ceased to be silenced and were nailed to the pillar of shame of capitalism, identified as “traitors” of the domestic culture. But something went wrong in the campaign, or perhaps the “norms” of finding internal enemies of foreign origin were exceeded. Three years later, after the liquidation of the doctors’ case, the so-called “poisoners,” there was a “thaw”: from open and direct accusations of Jews to covert restrictions on their employment and admission to universities.
In Russia, stability seems to be an immutable value. In periods of stability the Jewish question does not occupy the dominant nation. In times of crisis, when it is necessary to take out the soul on the perpetrators of misfortune, the Jews become fuel for inciting hatred. There is a lot of fuel in Russia today. Jewish “fuel” is not needed yet, there are alternative sources of energy. Attacks on Jews or the silencing of their existence continued until “perestroika” and the wave of mass emigration from the USSR. The Jews felt that there was an opportunity to escape from the black hole of “bright, progressive” socialism, marked by hopeless promises of future benefits for the Soviet people. For the first time in their Russian history, Jews found themselves in a privileged position: only they were allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union, while the rest of the peoples were locked within the confines of Soviet socialism.
In the early 1990s, Jews began to leave the Soviet Union in large numbers. The departure of Jews from the USSR in the early 1990s was accompanied by their coming out of hiding, the legitimization of their nationality and the lifting of some of the accusations and even blood libels. The number of Jews in the USSR drastically declined. In recent years, Jews in Russia have appeared in large numbers and even of good human quality as heroes of literature and cinema. They have appeared on the screens and on the pages of books and the press at a time when there are very few real Jews left in the country. The fewer Jews in life, the more Jews in art. The Jewish question in Russia is also losing relevance due to the steady decline in the Jewish population through emigration, assimilation, baptism and natural attrition. According to the forecast of the American Jewish Congress there will be 23,000 Jews in Russia by 2030. Sociologist Boris Mironov (2017) estimates that by 2030 the Jewish population in Russia will decrease to 60,000 people.
In the Russian Federation the Jewish question is dying out through the disappearance of the Jews. But it is possible that this is not yet a withering away, but a “silencing.” The Levada Center, a Russian independent, nongovernmental polling and sociological research organization, estimates that the risk of passive antisemitism turning into active antisemitism remains as a result of “a signal from institutions that are identified as belonging to the state.” According to Levada Center analysts, “Jews understand that antisemitism is in repressed forms because the policy of friendliness toward Jews and Israel is demonstratively pursued at the highest levels of government. If there is a turn toward antisemitism at the state level, it will immediately lead to its rise locally. […] State antisemitism paves the way for domestic antisemitism.”
The transfer of antipathies to the peoples of Western countries, to “persons of Caucasian nationality” and to Ukrainians changes the direction of hatred in the Russian Federation and distracts from the Jews. In Russia, migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia, on whom the hostility of the dominant nation is concentrated, play the former role of the Jews. Various phobias such as American-phobia (including the phobia towards the West), Caucasophobia, Islamophobia, Ukrainophobia, which are planted by special services to the state-controlled mass media, are intensively exploited, replicating and amplifying the hatred. Antisemitism in Russia is controlled and dosed to the level required by the authorities. Regulated and controlled antisemitism is as latent as Soviet antisemitism.
The gases of state antisemitism are sealed in cisterns stored in the storerooms of the authorities, which can be opened if necessary, and the poisonous fumes will spread. Dormant antisemitism may awaken depending on the policies of the authorities. However, having and using a large number of phobias against a number of peoples is a risky thing to do. Phobias are contagious, explosive, and can spiral out of control. Living in an infernal atmosphere threatens the explosion of the “infernal machine” that can result from the overuse of flammable hatred. A country whose air is saturated with the miasmas of misanthropy contains poisonous substances for its citizens. Whether Jews will suffer from the abundant and careless treatment of oceans of hatred of different peoples by the authorities is unknown. However, the Jews are well on their way to extinction in Russia. Later researchers will have much work to do in studying and analyzing the reasons for the cessation of the Jewish “population” in Russia. The slogan “Beat the Jews, Save Russia!” still emerges in “narrow circles.” But it seems that the salvation of Russia is moving into the area of beating other peoples.
Since Jews still live in Russia, it makes sense to understand the prospects for controlled anti-Semitism in that country in connection with the attack by Russian troops on “Nazi” Ukraine, led by a Jewish president. The Jewish leader of Ukraine is disrupting Russian plans to take over his country. This resistance is costly to Russia because of the enormous losses to its army and economy. Such a blow to Russia’s imperialist plans provoked a non-diplomatic reaction from that country’s chief diplomat. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov established the equivalence of Zelensky to Hitler, in whose veins he also found Jewish blood. In general, he determined that Jewish blood stood in the way of the Russian Empire’s victory over Ukraine.
The extent to which this private, popular antisemitism of the new “Black Hundreds” (“Black Hundreds” were Russian nationalist organizations that carried out Jewish pogroms in the early 20th century) is capturing the consciousness of the masses in Russia remains to be determined through research. One thing is clear: the sharp decline in the number of Jews in Russia in the era of globalization is not reducing anti-Semitism, as the Jews disappearing from Russia are being replaced by Jews from Israel, the United States, Ukrainian President Zelensky, and Ukrainian oligarchs of Jewish origin. Here is a recent example in which we can detect the first signs of Russia’s newest antisemitism, based on the oldest book of classic Russian judeophobia, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
On April 17, 2022, an article titled “Who started the war between Russia and Ukraine?” appeared on the Russian social network m.vk.com, signed by the name Anna Akulova. Here are excerpts from that article, the full text of which can be found at the link:
https://m.vk.com/@adonaris-kto-razvyazal-voinu-mezhdu-rossei-i-ukrainoi
(“VKontakte,” internationally known as VK, is a Russian social network headquartered in St. Petersburg. The site is available in 86 languages, and is especially popular with Russian-speaking users. The total monthly audience of “VKontakte” in all countries is 97 million users).
So:
Anna Akulova. “Who started the war between Russia and Ukraine? Who is hiding under the mask of the Russian-Ukrainian war?”
“The U.S. has a government that is essentially supposed to represent and protect America’s interests. But it looks more like the Knesset cabinet. It is a Jewish administration. The president of Ukraine is a Jew. And the Jews have started a revolution there. They overthrew the legitimately elected government and took control. […] Ukraine is run by Jews who serve Israel. And the same people run America, they are the Jewish “elite”. […] If you look at the Biden administration, it consists only of Jews. So was the Trump administration. Yet Jews make up only 2 percent of the population in the United States and only 0.3 percent in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the main so-called “bosses”-the Jewish oligarchs of Ukraine, the billionaires-are in complete control of all the finances of this country. The Jewish government has completely banned all other political parties whose policies do not conform to the Jewish president. […] Russia itself is not the initiator of this war. This war was started by a group of Jewish oligarchs who seized power in Ukraine in 2014. And as soon as they did, they immediately started demonizing Russians and pressuring the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. And the point is that, in fact, Ukrainians and Russians are one people. You can’t even tell them apart by their DNA. […] The Jews will never be part of the Ukrainian or Russian people, and will always represent only the interests of the Jews and Israel. The war in eastern Ukraine was unleashed and directly sponsored and managed by Jewish oligarchs with the support of NATO and America. […] Russia is subject to sanctions from all sides, and the Russian people will suffer from this too. […] And all of this is being run by a group that is less than two percent of the population and is the absolute superpower of the American Security Council. […] It is time for all of us to realize that the war that began in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, actually began in 2014. Who started it? Jews who hate both Russia and Ukraine.”
The nationalists of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires blamed the Jews for the outbreak of World War I and for the defeat of their countries. When a great calamity arises, it is easy and natural to find the Jews responsible. How the struggling Ukraine, led by a “Jewish Nazi,” will change the policy of Russian controlled antisemitism, the near future will show. Whether the genie of traditional Russian antisemitism will emerge from the bottle, from the state repository of phobias, remains to be seen.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and the Technion in Haifa (Doctor of Science, 1984). He immigrated to Israel in 1979. He is a Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. He is the author of eight books and about 500 articles in print and online, and has been published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.