Anti-Semitism on rise in Russian leaders’ rhetoric

Speaking at a St. Petersburg forum about his “Jewish friends,” Vladimir Putin claimed they told him that Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky is “not a Jew, but a disgrace to the Jewish people.”

Putin’s attempt to humiliate the Ukrainian president by emphasizing his ethnic origin means that despite the propaganda narrative about Russia fighting against Nazism and appropriation of World War 2 victory, the Kremlin is promoting blatant anti-Semitism, trying to make ordinary Russians believe that it’s the Jews who are to blame for any political and social issues arising in the country. Putin’s career in the KGB has deeply influenced his attitude towards the Jews, who have fallen victim to the Soviet ideological machine that trampled upon any sort of dissent. In its official policy today, Moscow traditionally relies on conspiracy models, in which anti-Semitism serves as a solid point to constantly fuel conspiracy theories of the Western threat.

In the late 1980s, the restriction of Jewish emigration from the USSR and the anti-Semitic features of Soviet anti-Israel propaganda turned the “Jewish world” into Moscow’s fierce critics. The experience of Vladimir Putin and Nikolai Patrushev’s days in the KGB had a decisive influence on the Kremlin’s current stance towards the Jews. Although Putin’s been wary of any open confrontation with Israel, his anti-Semitic views persist.

On May 24, 1945, Stalin proclaimed an infamous toast “to the Russian people”, which marked the launch of another wave of Russian chauvinism, accompanied by anti-Semitism. On Moscow’s command authorities in Soviet Ukraine were preventing the Jews from regaining their homes seized by the Nazis during war, as well as hampering their employment attempts. That routine anti-Semitism, which sometimes even reached the level of violent pogroms, was never prosecuted. In the fall of 1946, the Soviet government also set a course for severe restrictions of Judaism worship, bans on Jewish customs and traditions, including such random things as baking matzo, as well as Jewish funeral services. By 1988, more than 300,000 Jews had fled the USSR.

According to Romania’s senior intelligence official, Ion Mihai Pacepa, who fled to the United States, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov recommended inciting Nazi-style enmity toward Jews in Arab countries by spreading a narrative that the United States and Israel are both run by imperialist governments, whose policies are under the full control of ridiculously wealthy Jews. Thus, despite criticizing Nazism along the ideological lines, the Kremlin has also traditionally taken a radical anti-Semitic stance to achieve some geopolitical goals. The war on Ukraine has shown how the Kremlin is fine-tuning a wide range of tools once widely used against the Jews to now employ them against Ukrainians in the captured territories. Torture, mass executions, burning of books, and deportation are all among them. Since 2014, Moscow’s propaganda has been actively guiding the Russians to despise Ukrainians as an inferior nation – the tactic largely borrowed from the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic drive.

Traditionally, the Kremlin has tried to avoid the Holocaust agenda, instead claiming it was the Russians who suffered from the Nazi regime the most.

Since tsarist times, anti-Semitism has been central in the domestic political discourse to mobilizing Russian nationalists and stimulating radicalism for political purposes. This is strikingly similar to Hitler’s successful bid on anti-Semitism in his ascent to power.

In July 2022, Russia’s prominent propaganda pundit Vladimir Solovyov listed on the air of national television the names of Jews whom he accused of “lack of patriotism,” in yet another demonstration of Kremlin increasingly exploiting anti-Semitism as a tool to manipulate the masses. While employing anti-Semitic rhetoric targeting the Ukrainian leadership, Putin plays the card of Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism in the very paradigm of aggression against Ukraine in the same way that Hitler used anti-Semitism to mobilize the German nation for the conquest of Europe. Since anti-Semitic sentiment in Russia is much stronger than the negative attitude towards Ukrainians as a nation, the Kremlin is trying to draw parallel lines with the “Jewish issue” and Russia’s goals in its war against Ukraine. Hence his attempts to put an equation sign between the government in Kyiv and the big “J” as a red cloth for the Russian public. In the current foreign policy context, the Kremlin’s anti-Semitism is a way to win the hearts and minds in Tehran, where the elite has long sought to annihilate Israel and is now hoping for Russia’s help in this matter through the military-technical cooperation boost.