‘Has antisemitism been increasing in Russia?’, ‘Is that the reason that immigration of Russian Jews has been so high lately?’ – these are the most frequently asked questions that I received since the publication of the report ‘Jewish migration today: what it may mean for Europe’. The report has shown that, since the outbreak of war between Russian and Ukraine in February 2022, immigration of Jews and their family members from Russia and Ukraine rose to the levels last seen at the end of the 1990s, almost quarter of a century ago. If these levels keep for the next 5-10 years, Jewish community of Russia would be less than a half of its current size while Jewish community of Ukraine would almost disappear. Immigration of Jews from France have been high in the early 21st century but really at an incomparably lower level compared to the new Russian and Ukrainian realities.
It almost feels like immigration of Jews from Ukraine does not require an explanation. There is a war and people tend to escape war if they can. There may be more to it, but this intuitive explanation is not wrong in fundamentals. The situation with Russia is different. There is no war inside Russia. Why are Jews leaving then? In this case, rise in antisemitism as an explanation would have made a good story, it almost feels like. It would cohere with the Jewish historical memory, certainly. Except this explanation does not seem to work.
The pre-revolutionary, still-monarchic, Russia of the early 20th century was antisemitic. Today, polls of public opinion all over the world measure antisemitism by asking people about their opinion of Jews. A recent consolidation of the results of the polls conducted by the Pew Research Center around 2010 suggests that about 5%-10% of people in the USA, Canada, Western and Northern Europe, 10%-30% in Eastern and Southern Europe (e.g. Italy, Spain, Russia and Ukraine) and 70%-100% in Muslim countries openly declare that their views of Jews are unfavourable. So, today Russia (and Ukraine) fit into the Southern European model; neither is conspicuous in its measure of popular antisemitism. But that is today, of course. Such measurements were not taken in the past, in Russia or anywhere. The contemporary quantitative measures of the level of antisemitism, such as the proportion of population harbouring negative view of Jews as reflected in public opinion polls, are a recent invention. And so, there is no way to measure how much antisemitism Russia had then and how exactly it compared to other countries in Europe and to today’s realities.
It is sufficient to say that the Russian Empire imposed political disabilities on Jews: Jews could not live anywhere they chose, their participation in higher education was subject to limitations, to give just two examples. Jews of the Russian Empire experienced periodic outbursts of violence in the form of pogroms. During the Soviet times, traditional antisemitism, along other forms of racism and ethnically targeted hatred, was strongly condemned yet antizionism flourished. It would be fair to say that traditional antisemitism, rooted partly in Christianity (or what was left of it in the highly secular and/or atheistic Soviet culture) and partly in xenophobia, led clandestine existence. The data show that in 1991, at the very end of the Soviet era, about one quarter of Russians held an unfavourable opinion of Jews. Antizionism, in contrast, was a highly visible tool of the Soviet foreign policy, imaginatively ‘married’ by the Communist ideologists to other themes, such as anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. What happened to this legacy?
Antizionism is buried at the same cemetery as the Soviet Union and the communist ideology. It never won the hearts of the Soviet citizens anyhow. In the post-Soviet period, the leadership of the Communist party, toyed with antizionist rhetoric on occasion but was not too consistent with it. Popularity of the Communist party with the voters had gone down very considerably since the mid-1990s. Today, Russian public opinion is more positive towards Israel than much of the West. In fairness, the same is true of many different former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. Surveys conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, for example, testify that about 5%-15% of the general population in Russian and Ukraine have an unfavourable view of Israel while in the United Kingdom and Spain 25%-35% do. What is the essence of the Russian antisemitism today? Because there is such a thing. Not a single country or society is free of antisemitism, Russia is no exception, and it is extremely important that we develop a correct understanding of each case.
One thing is sure: Christianity cannot play a significant role in Russian antisemitism today. This is simply because the Russian society today is one of the most secular societies on the face of Earth. The data coming from the large-scale surveys of European religiosity by Pew Research Center are rather unambiguous in this respect: religious faith and church attendance in Russia today are very low, and comparable to those in Northern Europe. This should not come as a surprise. The Soviet rule lasted for about three quarters of the century, a long time covering three demographic generations, and all that time it led a sustained anti-religious campaign. Serious return of religious faith and practice never took place in Russia even after the Soviet regime had gone. People are out of habit and out of knowledge. The ideas of religious conflict between Christianity and Judaism, Christianity as replacement of Judaism, Jewish role in crucifixion, in short, the classic set underlying Christians anti-Jewish sentiment when and where it exists, are simply insufficiently familiar. So, it is not that Orthodox Christianity dropped these themes entirely, it is that the Christianity in itself does not occupy a centre stage in the Russian mind today.
Russian antisemitism today is secular in nature. To the extent that it exists, it is based on xenophobic sentiments, fear, envy and perception of Jews as a hostile, exploitative and corruptive group, highly cohesive and at cross-purposes with the Russian interests. All these dimensions of antisemitism are present in the West as well. When we compare their prevalence in Russia to Europe, Russian levels of negativity towards Jews are consistently higher than in Western and Northern Europe (e.g. UK) and very similar to the levels observed in Southern Europe (e.g. Spain). Surveys conducted by the Anti-Defamation League in Europe for over a decade now offered to respondents several classic antisemitic tropes and asked to which extent the respondents agreed with these tropes. In Russia and Spain 28% of respondents agreed with most of the antisemitism tropes offered, in contrast to 10% in the United Kingdom.
Most importantly, no change happened to the prevalence of these sentiments in Russia over the past decade. That much is clear. In particular, the ADL surveys registered no increase in any of the tested antisemitic sentiments in Russia between 2014 (the year of annexation of Crimea) and 2023 (a second year of the war between Russia and Ukraine). Analysis of the data returned by the surveys of antisemitic feelings in Russia by Pew Research Center, covering a longer period of 1991-2019, leads to a similar conclusion: negativity towards Jews had been stable in Russia, with some signs that it may have gone down in that time. Surveys of xenophobic and antisemitic feelings in Russia in 2010-2021, conducted by Levada Center, a research institute with a bold anti-establishment reputation, documented at the very least stability and possible decline in antisemitic and, more generally, xenophobic feelings in Russia. In sum, three different empirical sources signal ‘no change’ when it comes to the trajectory of Russian antisemitism in the 21st century.
Has antisemitism been increasing in certain pockets of the Russian society? It is possible, after all, that the situation may be stable in a society as a whole but some highly visible subgroups in it may still promote antisemitic ways of thinking? This question today is impossible to answer empirically. Details studies of the Russian political spectrum on the issue of antisemitism are needed for that, and the nationalistic movements are the ‘usual suspects’ when it comes to antisemitism and xenophobia. Mihail Sokolov, a Russian sociologist whose work has focused on the Russian far Right provided some insights into the state of mind of the nationalistic Right in Russia in a lecture given through a Russian educational channel Arzamas Academy (Sokolov, M. ‘Russian Nationalism: a sociologist’s perspective’). Sokolov’s work focused specifically on the party called ‘Russian National Unity’ (RNU), banned in 2000. The party, according to Sokolov, never attracted significant volume of popular support-about 3% of the Russian population at the height of it influence. Sokolov infiltrated the organisation as part of his fieldwork leading to an advanced degree in sociology, his particular interest was the extent to which the organisation was antisemitic. Through this work Sokolov had several valuable insights into the nature of contemporary Russian, i.e post-Soviet antisemitism, inside and outside the RNU.
In his own words: ‘Initially, I was interested to what extent these people are actually antisemitic. A typical answer of an RNU activist would be: it is not that they do not like Jews, it is that Jews do not like them, and present obstacles to them building a strong Russian state. If Jews are not critical (of the nationalists) then the nationalists have nothing against them. I think, they were sincere. My question was still: what exactly they think about Jews? Who are these ‘Jews’, in their understanding?’
‘After one such conversation, I had a Eureka moment. I said (to an RNU activist) that my grandfather’s name was Boris Efimovich. I knew already that this name and patronymic are strongly coded in their circles as non-Russian. So I said that and then I saw something changing in the face, in the eyes of that activist. But then-a little later- I noticed that a similar change took place when I said that I studied at the university. The question is: what is in common -in terms of the effect produced- between the fact that I am a student and my grandfather’s name?’
Sokolov continues: ‘At closer inspection I understood that their understanding of Jewishness was class-based. For them, Jews are people who occupy all available positions in the sphere of higher education and culture, and they are protective of these positions. Class envy was the foundation of the Soviet and early post-Soviet antisemitism. When [during the post-Soviet times] higher education, science and culture lost their former prestige, antisemitism died quietly. Nobody covets a PhD, or a position which a PhD would lead to.’
Antisemitism in Russia is not dead, as surveys testify, though some parts of it may be more dead than other. Still, Sokolov’s observation regarding the death of political antisemitism in contemporary Russia is most interesting. It may be an overstatement made to sharpen his point. Yet it is worth noting that despite the continued existence of the far Right political parties on Russia and notwithstanding the public activity of nationalistic thinkers, such as Aleksander Dugin, it is factually true that neither antisemitism nor xenophobia in general received official ‘sponsorship’ of the Russian regime, since the fall of the Soviet Union till this very day. Representation of the far Right in the State Duma too remained low in all these years. Further, popular appeal of nationalistic sentiments and philosophies and their impact on the ruling circles and Vladimir Putin in particular remains uncertain, as Marlen Laruelle, a leading scholar of contemporary Russian politics, points out. Laruelle’s very discerning analyses suggest that the most extreme, Nazi-like types of nationalistic expressions, are rejected by the Russian society.
Shifting sands of the post-Soviet Russian politics and society should be studied closely and in depth, with access to sources in Russian language, and integrated into the contemporary research on antisemitism. That is not what today’s research on antisemitism in the West can offer. Which is why much of scholarly and journalistic commentary really does not go beyond the ’Oh, Putin does not think that Jews are real Russians…Xenophobia and antisemitism are on the rise in Russia…well, no wonder, given Russia’s antisemitic record, no wonder that Jews are leaving”. Quite a bit needs to change in today’s scholarship of antisemitism if it wants to remain useful (or become useful, as some of its severe critics maintain). Better understanding of the meaning of a tremendous political transition in Russia for antisemitism is one such thing.
All this leads to the last question, the question that was asked in the beginning and that remains unanswered still. If not rising antisemitism, what drives Russian Jews out of Russia? It is, I maintain, a fundamental, perhaps revolutionary, change in global politics and the uncertainty that it brings. Year 2022 became an iconic year of international politics, a watershed year, what statisticians call a ‘change point’. Andrii Baumeister, an eminent Ukrainian philosopher maintaining a Russian-speaking YouTube channel, chose to highlight this fact through three ‘signature departures’ that took place in 2022. Among other, three human lives ended in year 2022: Queen Elizabeth the Second, Mikhail Gorbachev and Madeleine Albright. Each departure signifies a departure of an order associated with the given personality. Queen Elizabeth – the British Empire, Mikhail Gorbachev – the Soviet Empire, of which he was the last ruler, Madeleine Albright – the NATO expansion and the real or imagined post Cold War international unipolarity. There is a new era of international politics, marked by the appearance of new players and new ideologies.
While the outline of the old world, whether hated or loved, is known well, the outline of the new one is highly uncertain. Some aspects of this uncertainty do not promise well to Jews and ethnic Russians alike. In particular, it looks like Russia is becoming more isolated from the West. That development follows many years, more than a generation, of total openness and freedom of movement and communication. And, as Russia and the West become more belligerent, the conflict may expand. Also, the economic situation in Russia, while relatively stable now, may deteriorate. A stronger social conservative agenda may arise as a response to the conflict with the West, as an attempt to foster and sharpen a new identity. Indeed, a new version of antisemitism may arise in Russia, in response to new rivalries with the West and Ukraine. None of these scenarios need to materialize but they are not unreasonable to ponder. The main thing: the old and well-understood world is gone while the emerging dimensions of the new one are threatening in their uncertainty, at the very least.
The situation, arguably, is no different in essentials, though not in every single detail, from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then too, geopolitical situation changed dramatically and rapidly. And then too, Jews and, in fact, other ethnicities in Russia with links to ethnic communities abroad, chose to leave. Migration of the Russian Germans and Russian Greeks towards Germany and Greece, respectively, during the 1990s, is less known. Yet it happened. It is equally not very well known outside Israel and ‘Jewish migration’ out of Russia today towards Israel is currently numerically dominated by non-Jews, those people who are members of Jewish families and descendants of Jews to whom the Israeli Law of Return still applies. Now again, a major geopolitical realignment is on the cards, and Russia is a central figure in the picture. The future will be interesting. Most of us prefer to watch interesting developments in the proverbial God’s playground from the safe spot outside. Russian Jews and non-Jews of Jews descent are no different. That is why they are leaving.
(peer-reviewed material)