Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a news conference. Photo: Reuters/Sergei Bobylyov

As Russia retreats further into the ultranationalist politics that have underpinned its invasion of Ukraine, the country’s centuries-long tradition of antisemitic agitation has been reactivated, according to a Russian Jewish historian, who is openly wondering whether those Jews who remain there may once again face deadly persecution.

“Two years ago, I would have said no, but I think that today, the worst forecasts carry greater weight,” the Russian Jewish historian Ksenia Krimer told The Algemeiner in a telephone interview this week, from her offices in Germany. “It’s not yet on the scale of [Stalin’s repression during] the 1930s, but they have emptied the prisons and the penal colonies [to enable convicted criminals to fight for the Russian army or one of its paramilitaries], so now there is plenty of room in those places. I really don’t see what’s stopping them.”

The origins of the current wave of antisemitism in Russia are rooted in the early days of the war, when up to one million people fled the country, among them thousands of Jews, many of whom headed to Israel, said Krimer, a historian and fellow at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany.

Since the start of the invasion, “between 700,000 and one million people left the country,” Krimer said. “A substantial proportion came from Jewish backgrounds, because Israel launched an emergency aliyah program for Jews from both Russia and Ukraine.” According to the Israeli authorities, nearly 33,000 Russian Jews emigrated to Israel in 2022, a 400 percent increase on the previous year.

Those who departed Russia as the invasion got underway quickly found themselves demonized by politicians and the state media. As Krimer points out, Putin set the tone with a March 16, 2022 speech in which he railed against the emigrants as “traitors” and a “fifth column” who were ripe for manipulation by western countries. “Russians will be able to tell the difference between the patriots and the scum,” Putin fulminated. The “scum,” he continued, would “be quickly spat out, as you would a tiny fly that lands in your mouth.”

Krimer’s Story Amidst a Changing Russia

The rhythm of Krimer’s own life and career has been heavily determined by events in her homeland. Born in Moscow into what she describes as a “fairly assimilated Jewish family,” she started attending synagogue in the relatively liberal environment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. “That translated into my academic pursuits,” she said. She entered the doctoral program in Jewish Studies at the Central European University in Budapest, studying “with professors who suffered from persecution during the Soviet days,” she recalled. Post doctoral fellowships followed, including stints at both the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem.

Krimer is stoical about the prospects of returning to Russia. “I don’t think I’m going back to Moscow ever again. A lot of what I write, for example about the atrocities and war crimes committed by Russian soldiers, is now criminalized,” she said. In any case, she added, it had been “nauseating, seeing the support for the invasion. That was a push factor for me.”

Krimer reflected that prior to the invasion, many Russian liberals — both Jews and non-Jews — comforted themselves by saying that whatever his other flaws, “at least Putin is not antisemitic.” That claim rested on ever more shaky grounds these days, she asserted.

“We have to look at milieu of ideas that Putin floats in,” Krimer argued. “There are people around him infected with antisemitic ideas, as well as anti-western and anti-Polish prejudice. He cannot remain immune.”

Jewish “Chosenness”: Signs of Antisemitism Predate The War in Ukraine

Distorted notions concerning Jewish “chosenness” alongside tired accusations of Jewish “dual loyalty,” the supposedly Jewish predilection for avoiding military service and the Stalinist caricature of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans” with dangerously liberal tendencies have all surfaced around the issue of emigration.   All this has been boosted by a political climate which emphasizes that Russia is locked in a zero-sum game with its western adversaries, a situation reminiscent of the vilification of Soviet Jewish “refuseniks” during the Cold War.

In the decade prior to the invasion, a few hints of what was to come emerged, Krimer said. She cited one notorious example from 2013 involving Leonid Gozman, a Jewish commentator who compared the brutality of the Soviet secret services with the Nazi authorities in one of his columns. In response, Ulyana Skobeida, a writer for the pro-government Komsomolskaya Pravda, opined that it was a shame that the Nazis hadn’t produced more “lampshades” from “the ancestors of today’s liberal intelligentsia” — a not so subtle euphemism for “Jews” as well as a demeaning reference to the Nazi atrocities.

Along with trafficking in suspect ideas, Jews are also presented as exercising a sinister, unaccountable power. Krimer quoted another instance prior to the invasion, this time from 2016, when Maria Zakharova — now the spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry — declared on a TV chat show that to understand why former US President Donald Trump won the election that year, “you have to talk to the Jews, naturally.” Adopting a faux Brooklyn accent, she added: “They told me: ‘Marochka (a Russian diminutive for Maria), you understand, of course, we’ll donate to [Democratic Party candidate Hillary] Clinton. But we’ll donate twice as much to the Republicans.’ That was it! The matter was settled, for me personally.”

The host of that show, Kremlin loyalist Vladimir Solovyov, has continued to push antisemitic themes in his output, Krimer said. In one episode following the March 2022 massacre of hundreds of civilians by Russian forces in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, Solovyov — who acknowledges his Jewish origins and has even accused Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” of trying to assassinate him –nevertheless ranted against journalists and pundits with Jewish names. among them the American writer Anne Applebaum,  as agents of “Russophobia” who had failed to show genuine gratitude to the Russian liberators of Nazi concentration camps in the closing stages of World War II. Krimer observed that similar accusations were fired in the direction of the popular Russian singer, Alla Pugacheva, by Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the Kremlin’s broadcast mouthpiece, RT. After Pugacheva’s move to Israel with her Jewish husband, Maxim Galkin, Simonyan and her co-thinkers accused the couple of “biting the hand that feeds them.”

Russia’s Invasion and Antisemitic Outbursts

As the invasion proceeded, so did the antisemitic outbursts continue, Krimer said. A soldier’s manual published in Oct. 2022 with the approval of the Russian Ministry of Defense attempted to justify the invasion to those tasked with carrying it out, claiming that “all power [in Ukraine] is concentrated in the hands of citizens of Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom. They orchestrated the genocide of the native inhabitants…Today, all of us, Russian Orthodox and Muslims, Buddhists and shamanists, are fighting against Ukrainian nationalism and the global Satanism that supports it.”

Krimer observed that the justification provided in the manual reflected a 2019 article by Sergei Glaziev, Putin’s former economic advisor, who stated that US support for the democratic government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — who is proudly Jewish — was a sign that the US Administration was “working in cahoots with far-right forces in Israel to implement a mass transfer of Israeli Jews” to Ukraine. According to Glaziev’s conspiracy theory, many Israelis, weary of the conflicts in the Middle East, are eager to be resettled “in the south-east of Ukraine, in territories which, according to Glaziev, have been ‘cleansed’ of ethnic Russians by the Kyiv government.” Israel responded with a condemnation of Glaziev for being “conspiratorial” and “antisemitic.”

Krimer also highlighted the case of Evgenia Berkovich, a prominent Russian Jewish poet and theater director, and her colleague, the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, who were arrested on May 4 and then imprisoned on charges of “justifying terrorism” with their new play, “Finist, the Brave Falcon.” The play tells the stories of Russian women who decided to marry radical Islamists and move to Syria, and is based on real events. Supporters of Berkovich believe that the decision to arrest her was heavily influenced by her activism opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Broad Social Trend

The impact of such statements on large swathes the Russian public is painfully clear, Krimer said. On the social media platform Telegram, several channels branded with a “Z” — the symbol of the Russian invasion — denounce Jews as aliens unworthy of trust, mocking the idea that Jews are “chosen” as well. “There is is this very powerful trope that Jewish ‘chosenness’ is a thorn in the side of the Russians, so they mock it in derogatory terms,” she said. Such notions are particularly visible in the writings of Zakhar Prilepin, a 48-year-old military blogger and ultranationalist politician. Indeed, as Krimer pointed out, Prilepin established his credentials as early as 2012, when he published a piece titled “An Open Letter to Comrade Stalin” offering a stalwart defense of the record of the late Soviet leader, who orchestrated a sustained campaign of antisemitic repression during his final years in office, towards the Jews under his rule.

The rhetoric among politicians and media influencers is echoed in Russian society more broadly, Krimer said. “It’s not just the public pronouncements, there is the sense that [antisemitism] is back on a vulgar, everyday level,” she said. “A friend of mine of who lives in Austria went to visit her mother in St. Petersburg last September. Her mother is a former academic who lives in a house with other retired academics. My friend returned horrified at the conversations she had heard, her mother and her friends speaking in low voices about how most of the people who have left are Jewish, how they exploit the situation, and this is far from being the only occasion where you hear something like this.”